SUNNY SIDE of SLAVERY NEWS FEEDs direct from —
THE LAND OF THE HAPPY NEGRO!
News from Trumplandia, now the royal Alt-Reich — The "great white hope" Land of the Happy Negro
"It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of
disbelief." — Lionel Trilling
This site may contain profanity. It also may contain ranting, strong opinions, misspellings, humor, and music references. If that bothers you, look away now. "This Machine Kills Fascists" — Woody Guthrie.
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The history that Trump and the Land of the Happy Negro want to erase from America.
Wounded Knee Massacre
The men that will keep their medals for atrocity.
NO KINGS!
Lalo's Store
Save the General Glover Farmhouse
The historic General Glover Farmhouse has stood for over 250 years and is now at risk of being demolished. It is a house that transcends and connects to multiple eras of local, New England and American history and figures. It is the final home of Revolutionary War hero, General John Glover, who contributed to the founding the American Navy, and was the leader of the regiment that helped determine the outcome of our nations independence on multiple occasions. The historic house sits on a uniquely shared historic site in Swampscott, Marblehead, and Salem, Massachusetts, and has been an important contribution to the history of all three communities for centuries.
Several historic organizations in these communities are working together to help save this historically significant house from demolition to make room for a residential development. A survey of the house by a historic building structural engineer determined that the house can be saved and restored.
Community support is needed to preserve the original 1700s portion of the house that General John Glover and his family lived in. It is the hope that through various preservation grants and fundraising efforts, the house can be saved for the upcoming 250th anniversary of the American Revolution in 2026. This will give the house that many have dismissed and forgotten the recognition it deserves, by preserving the nationally significant home of General John Glover and honoring his legacy....
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Donate if you can. Forget the Trump Ballroom and the Trump Arch! Too often America let's her historical properties fall under the bulldozer of greed. It doesn't happen as often in other countries. Why must it happen here so often?
Is the Gulf of Hormuz Open Now?
Find out if Trump is lying to you.
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it— always.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
"Knowledge belongs to all. You do not understand that. You are just a white man." — Young Karamakate, Embrace of the Serpent.
“Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” — Canadian PM Mark Carney
The Trump Nazi bastards are taking away our right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness!
And our military can't do a goddamned thing? America has died of cowardice!
“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” —Edward R. Murrow
Welcome to "The Great Enshittocene." You are living in it now!
Forgiving those who show no remorse is injustice. There will be no meeting Nazis halfway in the name of "unity."
When I press alt-right on the keyboard my screen goes white.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." — Edmund Burke
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator… we take an oath to the Constitution… and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
— Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley, at his retirement ceremony.
Regarding the popular useage of "No problem" in response to the declarative statement of "Thank you." The very response suggests that a problem could have been possible. If it was or there were a problem shouldn't the one stating "no problem" then reveal it? Just asking for a friend.
A Manifesto
 |
| "Making America Great Again." |
Back in 2005 Lost Country recorded a song that was issued on their CD Long Gone Thrill. It is a song written by the late Jeff Gutcheon that was originally titled Land of the Happy Negro, subtitled Battle Hymn of the Republicans. We thought that no one would “get it.” It would be misunderstood; it might be construed as racist on our part. Of course, it was far from that. We changed the title and some of the lyrics. But today I realize that Jeff was on the money and that now everyone should recognize that he was. The teahadists, around 2011, demanded that the school textbooks in Tennessee overlook certain facts and look at the “sunny side of slavery.” So, now these “Ministry of Truth” protectors can take their proper context with the song that had them pegged from our earlier years when we tried to be kind. Now, we know they are not kind people. Now, you can hear the original track— unedited, unoverdubbed, with the original lyrics sung as a pilot vocal so we could work on the track that later became the issued recording of a kinder version, Land of the Happy People.
Land of the Happy Negro — copyright Jeff Gutcheon, 2005.
Randy Newman is in on this issue as well with an offering for you titled I'm Dreaming.
Get it while you can.
Dedicated to the Republican Teahadistas in the Senate and the House. How they long to return to the past.
For more on the Teahadistas: Americans Against The Tea Party
P.S. : It was rewarding to see
The Daily Show
using the title Battle Hymn of the Republicans for one of their segments. Great minds think alike. Except the greatest think of them first.
On page 97 in Jill Lepore’s book The Whites of their Eyes (2010, Princeton University Press) she states, “There was though, something heartbreaking in all this. Behind the Tea Party’s Revolution lay nostalgia for an imagined time— the 1950s, maybe, or the 1940s— less riven by strife, less troubled by race. In that nostalgia was the remembrance of childhood, a yearning for a common past, bulwark against a divided present, comfort against an uncertain future....”
As if anyone needed more proof of this retro-lunacy just look at our latest "sunny slaver" Cliven Bundy and his quotes on "happy negros." I quote Maureen Dowd in her Times column Sunday, April 27, 2014: "It’s a measure of how hallucinogenic conservatives are that they are trying to re-litigate slavery during the second term of the first African-American president." Jeff’s song could very aptly be subtitled Battle Hymn of Cliven Bundy.
Need more? Take a look at an Esquire article written by Charles P. Pierce dated April 25, 2014, Mike Pence Joins A Bad Parade.
"In downtown Indianapolis, there's this massive monument to the people from Indiana who have died in our various wars, particularly the nearly 25,000 Hoosiers who died in the War of Southern Sedition. I mention this only to point out that the National Rifle Association is meeting in Indianapolis at the moment, and Indiana Governor Mike Pence made them welcome by edging right up to being on the wrong side of the dispute that cost so many Hoosiers their lives. This, of course, is the on-ramp to the expressway to Bundyville, although Pence would be horrified if you pointed that out to him."
Governor Pence: "Washington is not only broke, it’s broken. The cure for what ails this country will come more from our state capitals than it ever will from our national capital. Despite what some may think in Washington, our state governments are not territorial outposts of the national government. The states are the wellspring of the American experiment. It will not be enough to cut federal spending; the next generation of leaders must permanently reduce the size and scope of the federal government by returning to the states the rights, resources, and responsibilities that are rightfully theirs!"
"This view of things was litigated at the Constitutional Convention. It failed. It was litigated over the tariff. It failed. It was litigated at Cemetery Ridge. It failed. It was litigated prior to the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. It failed. It was litigated at Central High in Little Rock. It failed. It was litigated on the campus at Ole Miss in 1962. It failed. It was litigated at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It failed. It is the connective tissue that binds modern conservativism inextricably to the remnants of American apartheid because this view of the nature of the nation always was the expression of threat that the slaveholder felt about his way of life. It camouflaged itself in a number of ways involving a number of different issues, but always it was about the fear that, sooner or later, the federal government was going to come and take away the chattel from which you derived your personal economy, and so even what might be beneficial to the nation as a whole must be resisted on the pretext of sovereign states...."
Not enough yet? Here you go. Dated July 21, 2014.
Top Anti-Immigrant ‘Expert’ Says ‘Being Hung, Drawn And Quartered’ Is ‘Too Good’ For Obama.
A senior policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, which bills itself as the think tank of the anti-immigrant Right, told a Florida-based Tea Party group last week that President Obama not only deserves impeachment, but that “being hung, drawn and quartered is probably too good for him.”
The Center for New Community’s Imagine 2050 blog first reported on Stephen Steinlight’s remarks.
Steinlight also said that John Boehner’s lawsuit against the president is a ‘political loser’ and claimed that while Obama deserves to be impeached, such an effort would backfire on Republicans.
CIS describes Steinlight as “one of the nation’s most insightful voices on immigration” who provides “expert testimony” for government panels.
"A rash of opinion polls which have come out, not push polls, real polls, including one by Gallup that showed that 65 percent of the American people don’t want any part of an Obama-style immigration reform. But the idea of this [lawsuit] is vintage Boehner, it’s a political loser. There is no court that is going to stop Obama from doing anything. We all know, if there ever was a president that deserved to be impeached, it’s this guy. Alright? I mean, I wouldn’t stop. I would think being hung, drawn, and quartered is probably too good for him."
While it’s my opinion this would be “cruel and unusual punishment” I’m sure it’s merely a figure of speech the gentleman is using and doesn't seriously want lynching to return. But on the other hand, we could just
‘Blame It On Obama” as Andre Williams says.
Not enough for rational human beings? Ok:
A while back Mr. Cruz stated: “I think the reason so many Americans are upset about the Obama presidency is that they realize this wasn’t possible before, and they wanted his presidency to be bigger than it is, you know, to do bigger things. And then you have others that appreciate history. If the slaves were never freed in the Civil War, you have to wonder, where would Obama be today? Certainly not the White House, not in the capacity he’s in. And you have some in America that think that might not be a bad thing. That he not be in office, I mean.”
Another Happy Negro kind of guy! Ya gotta love the pursed eyebrow schtick!
Ted Cruz displays his acting skills.
Ah, but it goes on:
Ann Coulter is up front with her racism when in response to Michelle Obama’s commencement speech at Tuskegee University, May 2015, proudly stated on Sean Hannity’s show — "I think she’s just letting out her Reverend Wright now.” The pundit proceeded to denounce the "predator class” in the black community and deny the existence of "peaceful protesters” in Baltimore...."Oh my gosh, this nonsense about, oh, so many blacks are in prison, well how did they get there?” Coulter asked later. "In addition to the peaceful Baltimore protester I want to put on a milk carton, — have you seen this? — I want to see the innocent person in prison.”
(Note: While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States' population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned. The prison population grew by 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, a rate that is outpacing crime and population rates. March 13, 2012.)
Glenn Beck stated in response to the same speech she gave with "White people in droves went out to vote for you,” he said. "You were somehow invisible so much that you became the President and First Lady of the United States of America? Tell me about the troubles that you have seen!.” Beck then argued that conservatives and Christians were the real victims of bigotry: "The conservatives have never felt it! The jobs we are suddenly bypassed for because we’re conservative, because of our viewpoint. The religious that are mocked on a daily basis and belittled. Yeah, we’ve never felt that. We don’t know what it’s like.”
An excellent playing of the "Victim Card” the Republicans do over and over as well.
76% of Americans consider themselves "Christian” yet the Republicans consider them victims?
“Yes, the long war on Christianity. I pray that one day we may live in an America where Christians can worship freely! In broad daylight! Openly wearing the symbols of their religion... perhaps around their necks? And maybe – dare I dream it? – maybe one day there can be an openly Christian President. Or, perhaps, 43 of them. Consecutively.”— Jon Stewart
Maybe Ann and Glen should read the article in the Times Magazine from Sunday, May 10, 2015,
"Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us.”.
Would (did) they miss the killing part or are they really that clueless?
And continues:
In the June 19, 2015 article titled
“Why Conservatives Still Won't Admit That Charleston Was A Racist Crime,”
Aurin Squire makes several points on the sad excuses that Republicans used on the murders by Dylann Roof in Charleston, South Carolina. “Given the history of the South, along the rise of both active shooters and gun access, we can't call what happened Wednesday night a ‘senseless tragedy.’ In fact, the Charleston church shooting is full of savage sense. Thanks to complicity at best, and outright racist at worst, the ‘inconceivable’ is still feasible. The fear tactics that were once localized in the dark backwoods of our political landscape now reach every phone and laptop. Today, xenophobia and bigotry are the daily platforms from which many conservatives speak to their shrinking base. The Charleston shooting is not a random act of violence, but part of a long litany of history culminating in a painful present.”
From Mr. Roof’s Manifesto (as originally stated on Tumblr) :
Mr. Roof’s Tumblr had contained photos that matched his Facebook page, but both were taken down after the killings.
The essay uses defamatory terms for blacks, whom he accused of being “stupid and violent” with “the capacity to be very slick.” It laments white flight, and suggested that the whites should instead stay behind in cities and fight.
Criticisms are levied at Hispanics and Jews, but Asians are praised for being racists and potential allies. Whites are unfairly portrayed as all having been slave owners, the essay says. In reality, the author wrote, slavery was not that bad.
(Note: Charleston, SC is racially two-thirds white, up from 1980 when it was 50%)
And, on the Stars and Bars (their “Battle Flag” and not the first Confederate “national flag”) front (didn’t the Confederacy lose the war? Guess they never got over it and are still pissed).
Outrage vs. Tradition, Wrapped in a High-Flying Flag of Dixie
Supporters of the Confederate battle flag display signaled Friday that their position had not changed. In a commentary on Friday, Michael Hill, the president of the League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has listed as a hate group, said that the Confederate battle flag should remain at the State House but that the American flag should be removed.
The American flag, Mr. Hill wrote, “now stands for multiculturalism, tolerance and diversity — the left’s unholy trinity.” In “sharp contrast,” he wrote, the Confederate battle flag “stands for the heroic effort our people made 150 years ago to avoid the fate” of contemporary America.
In the same article, Senator Lindsey Graham (a Republican candidate for President of the United States) told CNN that he would support a move to “revisit” the flag’s status, but he added that the flag was part of the state’s identity.
(Identity? Guess he means Land of the Happy Negro.)
Seditious Oklahoma asshats are grabbing their share of “The Land of the Happy Negro.” “President Obama greeted by Confederate flags in Oklahoma” show these people are too ignorant to know what racism is. Only 80 of these asshats showed up but they still display their ignorance very well. Or was it only 10? Another link to the story is here. The asshat that drove up from Texas is talking to himself I suppose.
Then we have the good ol’ boys from the remnants of the KKK demanding their share of “The Land of the Happy Negro.” at the Statehouse in South Carolina. These fascists crawled out of the sewers to parade their little battle flags on Saturday, July 18, 2015. Oh, sorry, they weren’t protesting the uppity negroes, they were protesting the uppity immigrants. Old, sad, diminished, disgruntled white men and some younger skin heads were, indeed, demanding their share of the sweet sunny heritage (white supremacy) of the Confederacy. Ooops! Is that a swastika on that black T-shirt? Such class.
Book About George Washington’s ‘Happy’ Slaves Shelved - Yet another wistful yearner for the Land of the Happy Negro!
Don't overlook Land of the Happy Negro's Corey Stewart’s Confederate antics. LaCivita said. "Let the idiot be the idiot." Always the best strategy.
Virginia Lawmakers Pass Bill Allowing Confederate Monument Removals
Land of the Happy Negro stronghold joins 21st Century.
Donald Trump openly joined “The Land of the Happy Negro” on August 15, 2017. He confirmed that he is a white supremacist supporter. He wants to blame resistance to it. You cannot serve Nazis and liberty at the same time. His attempts at being the leader of the free world have failed miserably.
The events in Charlottesville
have unmasked him forever as the bigoted demagogue he is. “The Land of the Happy Negro” has, in a not-so-subtle way, declared war on the United States. We should acknowledge this war exists, the enemy is among us, and fight it with all the heart and soul of those who fought and died stamping out this very same fascism in World War II. That is now our task as we have a president that is so mindless and tyrannical that he doesn't know the difference between Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee. That same civil war is upon us once again. Lest our nation collapse, let us not fail to settle it once and for all this time.
Worse Than Treason
No amount of rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party is advocating for the overthrow of an American election.
For those who have no idea what World War II has to do with anything:
The Chaplain's Speech to the troops in the 1949 WWII film Battleground
"Now it’s nearly Christmas, and here we are in beautiful Bastogne enjoying the winter sports. And the $64 dollar question is: ‘Was this trip necessary?’ I’ll try to answer that, but my sermons, like everything else in the Army, depend on the situation and the terrain. So I assure you this is gonna be a quickie! ‘Was this trip necessary?’ Well, let’s look at the facts. Nobody wanted this war but the Nazis. A great many people tried to deal with them, and a lot of ’em are dead. Millions have died for no other reason except that the Nazis wanted ’em dead. So, in the final showdown, there was nothing left to do except fight. There’s a great lesson in this. And those of us who’ve learned it the hard way aren’t gonna forget it. We must never again let any force dedicated to a super-race, or a super-idea, or super-anything become strong enough to impose itself upon a free world. We must be smart enough and tough enough in the beginning to put out the fire before it starts spreading. My answer to the $64 dollar question is, yes. This trip was necessary. As the years go by, a lot of people are gonna forget, but you won’t. And don’t ever let anybody tell you you were a sucker to fight in the war against fascism. And now, Jerry permitting, let us pray. Let us pray for this fog to lift. Almighty God. The organist is hitting those bass notes a little too loud for me to be heard. So let us each pray in his own way, to his own God."
As Gregg Popovich declared, "We are Rome."
From "The Holocaust Explained": Between 1929 and 1932, support for the Communist and Nazi parties increased. The less extreme parties were blamed for causing Germany's problems. As these parties had been unable to work together to solve country's problems, people became more afraid that the Communists may take over. The moderate parties turned to the Nazis to keep the Communists out.
President Obama said, "We are not Democrats first, we are not Republicans first, we are Americans."
Mr. President, from your first day they never gave you that courtesy so they will not get it from me.
We oppose everything
"EVERYTHING that goes wrong, from here on out, is owned by Trump and the Republicans."
When you have elected representatives stating that Trump is unqualified, bad for the country, ignorant of the issues, and other harsh criticisms also stating that they will back him as the Republican nominee, you have clear evidence of the rot that permeates the party. They are as corrupt and power-mad as their putative candidate. They— McCain, Ryan, McConnell and the rest of the toadies— demonstrate their hypocrisy and the fact that they put party power over the good of the nation.
D.L. Hughley put it in clear words, voting for Trump means "voting for a racist over a liberal." That is it, succinctly put. If you voted for Trump you have made a statement for racism, hatred, intolerance, bigotry, falsity, xenophobia, gynophobia, scapegoating and fraud. Refusal to vote for HRC does not absolve you from participation, because no vote as well as a third party vote is a vote for Trump in effect.
Let me get this straight. The "angry" American people want government out of their lives. Yet, they blame the government for forgetting about them for all the jobs that the middle-class has lost over the years. Huh? Their solution is to elect a fascist to office of POTUS. In this exchange you get a dictatorship. This has historically worked out well for how many countries? And the left get criticized for calling these people idiots? Many of these people vote against their best interest every time. What else can you call them when it is the truth?
End the Electoral College
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Why the hell should Florida, Ohio and a few other swing states rule our election process? We have not been 13 colonies for some time now.
I am not mad at you that Clinton lost. I am unconcerned that we have different politics. And I don't think less of you because you vote one way and I vote another.
No... I think less of you because you watched an adult mock a disabled person in front of a crowd and still supported him. I think less of you because you saw a man spouting clear racism and backed him. I think less of you because you listened to him advocate for war crimes, and still thought he should run this country. I think less of you because you watched him equate a woman's worth to her appearance and got on board.
It isn't your politics that I find repulsive. It is your personal willingness to support racism, sexism, and cruelty. You sided with a bully when it mattered and that is something I will never forget.
So, no... you and I won't be "coming together" to move forward or whatever. Trump disgusts me, but it is the fact that he doesn't disgust you that will stick with me long after this election.
— Sparrow R. Jones
You watched Trump live his entire life as a millionaire or billionaire and never earn an honest nickle in his life; you watched the man send ALL of his manufacturing overseas; you watched him rail against the auto industry bail out; you watched him hire illegal immigrants for his businesses and for his homes here in America; you watched him scam and bankrupt countless family owned businesses by not paying his bills; you watched him declare bankruptcy countless times and walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars; you then watched him not pay one dime of taxes on that ill gotten gain and brag about it to the middle class who had to pick up his slack on their taxes and you STILL thought that Donald Trump understands you and the working class and that he and he alone could "save our economy" and bring jobs back to "Murka".
And since you also believe that Bush left us with a strong and sound economy that Obama destroyed, I dislike you because you are a willful idiot.
— unknown
Gaslighting: Know It and Identify It to Protect Yourself
Gaslighting is a manipulation tactic used to gain power. And it works too well.
"You have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts." — Ted Koppel to Sean Hannity 3/26/2017
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
(Why do certain people vote against their best interest?):
"The masses revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed." — George Orwell, 1984
"We're closer to a nuclear war than we've been in 55 years because "someone" wanted to jail a woman for using email." — LOLGOP
"Fuck Trump.
Fuck his faux concern.
Fuck his half-assed apologies.
And fuck every POS who voted for this degenerate to lead our county."
— Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) tweeted at 5:52 PM on Sat, Aug 12, 2017
"Nazis are murdering people, farmers are going broke and the arctic is fucking melting. Maybe next time let's not hand the world's most difficult job to a toxic moron lost and wandering in a haze of dementia and untreated tertiary syphilis who can't even spell his own fucking name."
— Jeff Tiedrich@itsJeffTiedrich
Tweeted on Tue., Aug 6, 2019
"White people have nearly completely gone mad. Think about it. The people of VA voted for a republican candidate who's only platform is that he would save them from CRT and or the teaching of American History. CRT is a university level curriculum and is not taught on grade school levels. American history is impossible to teach without discussing slavery, the massacre and land theft of the first Nations. Since slavery starts with the country's formation, how do you teach American history without it? Do you start at the civil war? How do you explain why Americans were killing each other over "state's rights"? Rights to do what? Ok, maybe we teach the bible. But the setting of the Bible is in Africa and the middle east and slavery is discussed all through it. See what I mean. The battle against truth is the path to self termination on a macro scale."
— Real Truth stings 11/3/2021, Mediaite.com
"Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right."
— H. L. Menken (1880 - 1956)
Directed to the asshats (and their species) who wear the "Makes A Great Asshat" at public places:
Scholar Matt Sears: Someday MAGA hats will be shameful secrets, like Klan robes (and swastikas)
Scholar and Washington Post columnist says those who wear MAGA hats are "morally accountable" for Trump's actions
Red Hat of the Red Death
"And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
"In October, 25 out of every 100,000 residents of heavily Trump counties died from Covid, more than three times higher than the rate in heavily Biden counties (7.8 per 100,000). October was the fifth consecutive month that the percentage gap between the death rates in Trump counties and Biden counties widened."
— NYT article by David Leonhardt
The Covid cull is doing as it is allowed to do.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
— Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
"It's odd. The same people who declare that wearing a mask is a 'personal choice,' are the SAME people who want to take away a woman's right to choose."
— E. Jean Carroll (@ejeancarroll)
Captain Beatty’s Speech
(For the 21st century book burners who think they make some sort of statement.)
"With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word `intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.
So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute...
You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these ...
Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he's on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man's a speck of black dust. Let's not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean ...
Luckily, queer ones like her don't happen, often. We know how to nip most of them in the bud, early. You can't build a house without nails and wood. If you don't want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it...
Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motor-cycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment."
— Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, 1953
Why is Trump so disliked worldwide?
Someone asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?"
Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England, wrote this magnificent response:
"A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.
For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace - all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing - not once, ever.
I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility - for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.
But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is - his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers
And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults - he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It?s all surface.
Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.
Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.
And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.
Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.
He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.
He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.
That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.
There are unspoken rules to this stuff - the Queensberry rules of basic decency - and he breaks them all. He punches downwards - which a gentleman should, would, could never do - and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless - and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority - perhaps a third - of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy? is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
* Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
* You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.
This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum.
God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid.
He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.
In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws - he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish:
'My God? what? have? I? created?'
Remarks on Religion
"Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers
that may never be questioned." — anonymous
... but more often, it's the religion's advocates on earth who punish you, not the god/pantheon/whatever. In extremis (though not all are so extreme) "Religion often uses faith as a blindfold, saying anyone who doesn't believe the same as us must be wiped out. It's not God saying that. It's people, which is so dangerous." — Jenny Agutter, RT 2015/1/17-23
...or "What's awful about weird views is not the views. It's the intolerance. If someone wants to worship the Duke of Edinburgh or a pineapple, fine. But don't kill me if I don't agree." — Tim Rice, Radio Times 15-21 October 2011.
"I'd rather trust the guys in the lab coats who aren't demanding that I get up early on Sundays to apologize for being human."— Captain Splendid (quoted by The Real Bev in mozilla.general, 2014-11-16)
AMERICA UNDER TRUMP MOVIE! Made in 1945!
How Elon Musk’s Power Grab Is Hurting America
Who’s really running the White House — President Trump, or unelected billionaire Elon Musk?
Elon Musk is attempting to run our government like one of his companies, and it’s hurting the American people.
Even more concerning is that President Donald Trump is allowing it to happen. It’s time to say enough and FIRE Elon Musk from any role within our government.
Some states are landing on a straightforward answer: fossil fuel companies.
It's a conspiracy theory that they believe. What else?
Trump fascism will destroy south Texas and begin the destruction of the U.S..
Amend the 13th Amendment.
End Institutionalized Slavery in Amerika.
"...except as a punishment for crime..."
"The Crime"is the rig
A course most Americans should take.
The Gods that the "Christian" God displaced in America.
"God ordained our great nation"?
Upon reading a remark that was stated on Face Book that "America was ordained by God." I couldn't help but wonder which 'God' as there are so many. Of course, I knew to which "God" this person was referring. But the case of this country being ordained by "God" is a case that is wide open as you can see for yourself. The statement itself is not based on Biblical history as this is unprovable by actual historical events. It is, more likely, based on "educators" such as Rush Limbaugh or his like. Biblical history that is taught by accredited institutions will not dabble in "miracles" or claims which have no evidence.
The Discovery
In 1492 the natives discovered they were indians,
they discovered they lived in America,
they discovered they were naked,
they discovered there was sin,
they discovered they owed obedience to a king and queen
from another world and a god from some other heaven,
and this God had invented guilt and clothing,
and had ordered burned alive all who worshipped the sun and
the moon the earth and the rain that moistens it.
— Eduardo Galeano, from Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, 2013
“Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.” — Charles Bukowski
Forgiving those who show no remorse is injustice. There will be no meeting Nazis halfway in the name of "unity."
"We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!" — Greta Thunberg
"Maybe it's time for women to go on strike and stop having sex with men until this is straightened out. There are many other ways of enjoying your body, women, than sex with men. Who is willing to take the chance of getting pregnant and having a daughter to be abused by self-professed owners and handlers of her body? " — Luisa
"Atheisim is to religion as sobriety is to drunkeness" — unknown
"Faith is like fire. It can cook your dinner or it can burn down your home." — unknown
"R.I.P. America.
It was fun while it lasted.
1776-2024" — America, 2024
"So, the worst ranked US President, in American history, has been re-elected to the Presidency.
A man who murdered over 250,000 Americans, because he 'didn't want to panic them'.
A racist, a fascist, a misogynist, a sex offender, a multiple felon, and a Russian agent
This is straight out of the 'Twilight Zone'." — America 2024
"As Franklin said, 'It's a republic. If you can keep it'. We surrendered it." — America 2024.
On September 17th, FBI director Christopher Wray testified in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security. At that time, he stated that the biggest domestic terror threat the U.S. currently faces is from white supremacists. During his testimony, Wray never once mentioned Antifa or Black Lives Matter. Why? Because unlike the ignorant of this world, Wray knows the difference between hard facts and partisan propaganda.
Granted, the director of the FBI isn't nearly as credible a source as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity. Just ask any plumbing-supply salesman. Presenting certain people with facts is like giving medicine to a corpse.
During a recent pro-Trump demonstration in Washington, D.C., four members of the so-called "Proud Boys" ganged up on a Black man, who defended himself by pulling out a knife and stabbing his attackers. The right-wing media ran with the story, claiming this was a prime example of how Black Lives Matter is a violent terrorist network. Never mind that the man in question never claimed to support, much less belong to, BLM. Never mind also that conservatives claim to fully support the right to defend yourself. Clearly, they only extend that right to their brother and sister fascists.
Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies
Godwin's Law is fellacious. It is said to end all discussions when Hitler arrives. It denies Hitler as having any valid reality— it's just too simple to use, is what it implies. You only have to look at Hitler's atrocities to understand his reality. The idea that there could not be anything comparible or greater to Hitler is what I call "The Great Denial." We all know that is a river in Egypt. If you swim in it, you just get all wet.
I hereby invoke "The Law of Law." Nothing can be denied that is real. Reality isn't what you make of it. It is what reality makes of it and you.
I will now use the "Atilla the Hun" analogy and see if some egghead will declare that a law. As I have been told so many times by right-wingers, "I'm a little to the right of Atilla the Hun." So much for theories. "What is reality?" Let that be the wall.
Trump's drive to the Hamptons is over and there is no house there (Seinfeld fans will understand). It cost us a lot of money. It took a lot of time. But the son of a bitch is a walking dead man now. Many, many of us knew how this would end— not pretty— and it has not been. But this is the bitter end of the con man, the flim flam man, the megalomaniac that is Donald J. Trump. What happens to him next will be interesting to see. He cannot go without serious punishment. He must pay and pay dearly for his insurrection.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." — Isaac Asimov
‘This was intentional’: AOC blasts Republicans on IVF ruling
"But I want to be very clear that this was intentional and that this is exactly what Republicans have been going for. We've seen it. You have the Heritage Foundation, you have lots of folks who are on record saying, you know, not only do they want to go after abortion, not only do they want to go after reproductive freedom, they're going after IVF. They're going after contraception. And we have the mifepristone ruling that is coming down from the Supreme Court, and Clarence Thomas, enriching himself from the same folks who are saying that they are trying to control women's bodies quite explicitly.
And going beyond that, they also want to control recreation—what they call recreational sex. This is so clearly a patriarchal theocracy that has embodied itself in the DNA of an entire political party in the United States of America. And as women, and as any nonbinary and queer person in this country—they must be defeated. There should never be room for this kind of control by force over another person's body in this country.
And they can walk it back as much as they want. They have done this. Who put those judges there? Not Democrats, not independents. Republicans put those judges in there. Republicans are taking women's bodies by force and we cannot let them do it. It has to come to an end."
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Listen to or read who we are, America.
Remember, Trump doesn't like this sort of soldiering
This is required reading for a Nation in distress.
The Republican nominee’s preoccupation with dictators, and his disdain for the American military, is deepening.
This is Donald Trump, the Nazi traitor. Our country must reject him to survive the holocaust he will bring.
We can still throw the motherfuckers out!
You will see you're too stupid to realize it.
Liz Cheney to Donald Trump:
"Donald, this is not the Soviet Union. You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us. Remember all your lies about the voting machines, the election workers, your countless allegations of fraud that never happened? Many of your lawyers have been sanctioned, disciplined or disbarred, the courts ruled against you, and dozens of your own White House, administration, and campaign aides testified against you. Remember how you sent a mob to our Capitol and then watched the violence on television and refused for hours to instruct the mob to leave? Remember how your former Vice President prevented you from overturning our Republic? We remember. And now, as you take office again, the American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our Constitutional Republic — to protect the America we love from you." — Liz Cheney posted on Call to Activism.
Benway:
"I deplore brutality," he said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. A few rules or rather guiding principles are to be borne in mind. The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct." — Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs.
|
“Trump has aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury – an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”
— Mark Singer, Trump and Me
"Richard Grenell — one of two geniuses that took the Kennedy Center for the Arts from being a premiere American cultural venue and turned it into a 'closed for renovations' piece of crap. I assume Trump gave Ric the job as interim president because he's a homo and all homos aregood with the arts, aren't they? But Grenell is naught but a lap dog. Or should I say Lapping Dog. I hope, for his husband's sake, he's as good a Dick Licker as he is a Donald Sucker!" — Harvey Fierstein (X) 2/5/2026.
He Trumped Us!
(An age-restricted page. And yet our children are free to watch a insane, fowl-mouthed, megalomanic preach hatred every day with no restrictions!)
“The Whole Thing Is a Con Job” – Trump’s Windmill Rant at EU Presser
Self-loathing illustrated.
The Moral Highground — Evan Hurst
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or queen, or a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator… we take an oath to the Constitution… and we’re willing to die to protect it.”
— Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark Milley, at his retirement ceremony.
Johnson Urged To Cancel Recess After Dire AI Warning
Axios reports:
A letter is circulating among House members urging Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to bring back the House “immediately” and keep it in session until Congress passes AI safeguards, Axios has learned.
Such drastic action has been proposed by members of both parties this week after current and former Anthropic researchers went public with warnings that AI could kill off humanity in the next decade.
The letter to Johnson, drafted by Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.), says “urgent action” is needed “to address catastrophic risk posed by advanced artificial intelligence,” according to a copy first obtained by Axios. The letter is co-signed by Reps. George Whitesides (D-Calif.), Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) but was still being circulated as of Friday afternoon.
Read the full article. Several pending bipartisan bills would place “limits and safeguards” on artificial intelligence. Last night, Trump claimed the existence of a “gear” that would “kill that robot.”
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Yep. AI will kill us all if we don't bridle it first.
Elon Musk Is So Mad About This New Documentary That He’s Threatening Legal Action — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Does Elon Musk, who claims to be so smart that chess bores him, understand what the Streisand effect is? We’re skeptical, because he’s now threatening to sue the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney over his new documentary about the controversial business magnate — which Musk has been fuming is a “hit piece.”
The film, simply titled “Musk,” is a four hour examination of the centibillionaire’s life, from his upbringing in South Africa to his start during the dot-com boom to his foray into politics. But it’s a documentary, not a hagiography, and Musk can’t stand that it’s taking a critical eye to his character.
In a letter sent to Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro accused the director of defamation, alleging that his film spreads false claims about Musk supposedly rigging the 2024 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. (“Rigging” probably goes too far, but Musk did shell out nearly $300 million to back Trump’s election campaign.)
The complaint stems from a scene showing Ashley St. Clair — a former right-wing influencer who secretly had a child with Musk but fell out with him after going public about their affair — describing texts she received from Musk in which he cryptically says he’s “optimistic” about Trump winning because “tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.” Musk, attempting to clarify, added in a follow up message that he has “over 10 thousand lasers in space.” (NPR reported that it obtained and authenticated the texts in question.)
Spiro argues that this amounts to defamation, because it promotes a debunked conspiracy theory that Musk used his Starlink satellites to beam in votes for Trump.
“You are therefore on notice, before release, that the insinuation is false, that the material refuting it is public, and that you chose not to be told the rest,” he wrote in the strongly-worded letter.
Musk has had a bone to pick with Gibney ever since the film was announced in 2023, when he instinctively called it a “hit piece” despite there barely being any details about it at the time. Gibney retorted to Musk: “How would you know?”
Evidently, Musk still hasn’t gotten over it. As the documentary neared its world premier at Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, Musk reignited his attacks, making at least five different posts on X deriding it.
“Alex Gibney is obviously going to make the most convincingly terrible hit piece on me that he can possibly think of,” he wrote in one of his paranoid rants. “He’s a douchebag to his core and, in his own words, incredibly biased against me.”
Musk has a well known proclivity for trying to silence his critics, but the odds of his lawsuit working out aren’t spectacular. Defamation, in the US, is infamously difficult to prove.
St. Clair certainly doesn’t appeared to be rattled either, calling Musk’s legal threats “a joke.”...
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The wages of allowing your dick to do your thinking.
Labor Dept Reports Prices Are Continuing To Climb
CNBC reports:
Prices for a wide swath of goods and services continued to climb in August, according to a report Friday that raises the specter of a Federal Reserve interest rate hike next week.
The consumer price index rose a seasonally adjusted 0.4% for the month, putting the 12-month increase at 3.4%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. Both readings were in line with the Dow Jones consensus. The report is the final major inflation indicator the Fed will see before it holds its policy meeting next week, concluding Wednesday with a vote on its key interest rate.
Energy propelled the headline number higher, as gasoline prices jumped 3.9%, accounting for more than one-third of the index’s gain. Another significant factor was a 0.3% climb in shelter costs, which had moderated over the prior two months. Transportation services saw a 0.5% increase. Used cars and trucks rose 0.4% and new vehicle prices were up 0.3%.
Read the full article.
The consumer price index rose a seasonally adjusted 0.4% for the month, putting the 12-month increase at 3.4%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. Both readings were in line with the Dow Jones consensus.
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Just what the U.S. needs to hear as their kids return to school and the holiday season approaches.
Johnson: “We Won’t Allow Dems To Take The Majority”
Fox News reports:
House Speaker Mike Johnson touted the Republican-led Congress as one of the most productive in American history during a speech at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas.
“The media won’t tell you this, but this has been one of the most productive Congresses in the history of the institution since 1789,” Johnson said. “It’s been the most productive Congress in 80 years.” Johnson said the House has passed more than 900 pieces of legislation during the current Congress, including the SAVE America Act four times.
“Republicans delivering and Democrats radicalizing,” Johnson said. “That is the contrast for America. They want to defund our entire national defense and shred our Constitution. We cannot and will not allow them to take the majority in the Congress. We’re not gonna do it.”
Read the full article.
I’ve always believed that if Democrats take back the House, Trump will order Johnson not to seat the new Congress or hold a vote for the new Speaker. And of course, Johnson will comply
https://t.co/CGKnLSFiUu
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) September 10, 2026.
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And that will be the day the bullets will begin flying.
Trump Screams At Reporter Over Checks Questions
ABC REPORTER RACHEL SCOTT: “Mr. President, on the checks: The U.S. is still $40 trillion in debt. If your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?”
TRUMP: “I didn’t do it for turning out the vote, I did it as a reward for people having to put up with five years and four years of a horrible situation caused by Biden. You look at the border, you look at the crime. It’s almost a reward for the people having to put up with Biden’s policies.”
SCOTT: “But you also offered tariff refund checks—
TRUMP: “Not you! Not you!” (Motions at other reporter.)
SCOTT: “And that didn’t happen.”
TRUMP: (Lunges forward.) “Hey, not you. Your network. You’re the worst!”
Q: On the checks, we have $40 trillion in debt. If your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?
TRUMP: I’m doing it as a reward for people having to put up for five years and four years of a horrible situation caused by Biden… pic.twitter.com/Iq4LpS1pNt
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 11, 2026
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Trump gets called out on a lie and he shits his baby diaper. He does this with women because he's a chicken shit to try with a man who would lay his lying ass on the concrete.
The Religion of National Security — Mother Jones|Sophie Hurwitz
Anyone who’s camped out at a folk music festival and has been woken up at 2 a.m. by a blaringly rendered version of “Bella Ciao” knows that trumpet players are terrorists. But the Trump administration is taking that a bit literally: The Department of Commerce announced in early August that it plans to implement a 25 percent tariff on brass instruments, citing national security concerns about America’s perceived overreliance on foreign copper alloys. The move throws into sharp relief how far the term “national security” has wandered from its bare-bones literal meaning: defending a country from threats.
Our leaders have been referencing “national security” more or less since the founding. In a 1791 address to Congress, George Washington argued that militias were “of primary importance” to the young country’s “national security” to, among other things, fight against the “deluded tribes.”
But the term didn’t enter everyday vernacular until much later. During the New Deal era, as historian Andrew Preston put it in his book Total Defense, its meaning expanded: “Security became ideological as well as territorial, normative as well as physical, global and not just continental. It became, as it still is today, all-encompassing.”
Americans’ anti-communist fervor during the Cold War then laid the groundwork for today’s formalized national security state. The National Security Act of 1947 created many of the structures we now see as intrinsic to our national security, such as the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Department of Defense—even if it never actually defined the term. It “is sort of like a Christmas tree. Everybody can just kind of hang what they want onto it,” Delaware Law School professor Elizabeth Beavers told me.
The September 11 attacks weighed down that tree with a host of new meanings. Yumna Rizvi, a fellow at the Center for International Policy, cites the fall of the twin towers as the point when national security swallowed the world. Within days, Congress passed a sweeping authorization of military force that has yet to be repealed, and President George W. Bush was calling for a “crusade” against “terrorism.” By January 2002, the US had opened its prison at Guantánamo Bay for combatants in the so-called global war on terror. Just over a year after 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security was officially up and running.
“We became a fear-based, hyper-security state,” Rizvi said. “It was a shock to the American system.” ...
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Just remember the biggest gap in SEC_RITY is you.
Shocking photo shows Trump apparently asleep at 9/11 ceremony — Raw Story|David Edwards
President Donald Trump closed his eyes and dipped his head during the Pentagon ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
A Reuters photograph taken Friday morning showed the president seated before an American flag. His eyes were shut, and his chin was lowered toward his chest.
The observance had begun at 9 a.m., more than an hour before the photograph was taken, according to PBS NewsHour.
"[A]s is always the case when he's sitting and not talking, Trump had a hard time staying awake during the 9/11 ceremony," journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X on Friday morning....
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Attention Scott Bessent! You are mistaken about your boss not sleeping on the job, you ignorant queen!
'Gripped by the terror of death': Macabre theory floated for Trump's 'Jonestown' antics — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump seems to want to drag the United States down with him once he shuffles off this mortal coil, according to a historian.
The 80-year-old president issued dark warnings at this week's GOP midterm convention about the nation's future if Republicans lost the November elections, and he even asked his followers to pledge to cheat if necessary or risk hellfire, and politics and history professor Alan Elrod published a column for Liberal Currents offered a disturbing theory about his plans.
"Trump’s speech came off more like a sermon from Jonestown, and observers noticed," Elrod wrote. "My own overriding thought was: 'This speech was like some sort of performance art piece of a live entombing of a mad king and his most loyal followers.'"
Trump constantly referenced legacy issues like his White House ballroom, the border wall and his global tariffs, while also teasing a campaign for an unconstitutional third term in office, and Elrod said he started about the ancient Egyptian practice of retainer sacrifice as the president lavished praise on some women who had attended more than 200 of his rallies.
"My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li has an elegantly simple theory for why Trump has become even more obsessed with legacy and with slapping his name on buildings and projects than he already was over his lifelong career as a shameless self-promoter: fear of death," Elrod wrote.
"As she put it: 'My current theory of Donald Trump is that he is utterly gripped by the terror of death, and is desperately attempting to leave some mark on the world that history cannot erase — this is the point of the wars, the annexation threats, the D.C. vandalism. I think right now he is genuinely fixated on adding new American territory as the brass ring, the thing they'll never be able to take away from his memory.'"
Elrod found himself inclined to agree as he watched the president's rambling, self-aggrandizing speech.
"It’s a macabre but convincing psychological assessment," he wrote. "Rather than making America great again, Trump is inflicting grievous harm on it with tariffs, now upgraded to import bans against select Canadian goods; an illegal war; and a total ransacking of our public and private sectors for the enrichment of his courtiers and his family. And he is going to bury us all with him in a tomb of his own design — a ballroom."...
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Trump is handing out the Kool Aid now. Let's see if the suckers drink it.
Magical Missouri Misery Tour Wraps Up (?) As SCOTUS Blocks Trump’s Crap Maps Twice! — Wonkette|Doktor Zoom
The US Supreme Court, perhaps having decided it’s already done enough violence to democracy this year, blocked Republicans in Missouri from using a gerrymandered congressional map in November’s upcoming midterm elections. In a one-page, unsigned “shadow docket” order issued Thursday, the Supremes ordered Missouri to conduct November’s general election using congressional district lines the Missouri Lege drew in 2022. Since it’s one of those emergency order things, the order didn’t mention the vote count, although there were no noted dissents.
It was the second time this week the US Supreme Court blocked Missouri officials from following the orders of Mad King Donald Trump, who last year demanded red states redistrict in hopes of holding on to the Republican majority in Congress. Too bad, so sad.
The Supremes’ action upholds last week’s unanimous ruling by the (5-to-2 Republican majority!) Missouri state Supreme Court, which held that a gerrymandered map passed by the Legislature in September 2025 can’t go into effect unless it’s approved by voters in a referendum on the November ballot. No vote, no gerrymander, and voters aren’t likely to pass the thing.
Following the US Supreme Court’s order Thursday, Missouri Secretary of StateDenny Hoskins (R), who had previously fought to use the Republican-friendly gerrymander, said in a statement that his office would be “directing local election authorities to use the 2022 congressional map.” State Attorney General Catherine Hanaway also said she’d comply with the Supreme Court’s order.
Regrettably, the state Supreme Court let those two off easy, declining to order them formally to cry “Uncle” or to wear dunce caps for a month. Private citizens, however, still have the right to follow them around shouting “Shame!” Or even better, dog their steps while playing a rude oompah tuba, as one does with fascists....
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Defeat Trump Fascism! Vote against it and lock him up!
Trump keeps telling voters he doesn’t care much about affordability — Vox|Eric Levitz
President Donald Trump during the first day of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on September 9, 2026. | Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
If the midterms were a referendum on whether trans athletes should be barred from women’s sports, or the White House ballroom should be gorgeously renovated, or God should be identified as “nonbinary,” then Republicans would have a clear and confident closing message.
Key takeaways:
The cost of living is midterm voters’ top issue.
The war in Iran has led to the first decline in real wages since 2023.
Trump could bring gas prices down before Election Day by seeking a ceasefire with Iran, but he’s choosing to prioritize military victory.
The president is also escalating trade wars, despite their impact on consumer prices.
Unfortunately for the GOP, voters are less concerned with the Christian deity’s preferred pronouns than with their own cost of living. Which is understandable: Diesel fuel prices just hit a record high, mortgage rates are climbing, and groceries keep getting more expensive.
Due partly to these trends, Republicans are poorly positioned to win an argument about inflation — and are only growing more so, as Election Day nears. This was apparent before President Donald Trump convened the first-ever Republican midterm convention in Dallas this week. But the festivities underscored the GOP’s predicament and the many ways that Trump is personally exacerbating it....
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End Trump Facism! Vote him out and lock him up!
“War on Terror” Led to Iran War, Gaza Genocide, and ICE Repression — Truthout Stories|Amy Goodman
“The ‘war on terror’ was always a construct to be waged, never quite to be ended.” We discuss the origins and impacts of the global “war on terror,” launched by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., with Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump....
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For control purposes a state of war must perpetually exist if a Fascist government is to succeed.
End this war!
She’s Helping Dems Take Back Congress. Trump Is Forcing Her to Self-Deport. — The Bulwark|Adrian Carrasquillo
Daysi Gonzalez has built a life here for 25 years, and a career as a formidable political operative. Now she is planning an exit she never chose..
DAYSI GONZÁLEZ HAS WORKED WITH some of the biggest names in Democratic politics—Senate candidate James Talarico, Sen. Ruben Gallego, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and more. She’s done so as a partner at the consulting firm Solidarity Strategies and as a constituency mail vendor for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where she’s working on every competitive race with a Latino engagement program ahead of the November midterms. These include top Democratic opportunities in Texas, California, Nevada, and New Mexico.
If Democrats take back the House in a blue wave, some of that success will be owed to the work Daysi has done. When the time comes, though, she will be trading whatever comfort she takes in professional success for the cold hard reality of Trump’s deportation zealotry.
That’s because Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans is in serious limbo. It was set to expire on September 9—this past Wednesday—but is now extended for some undefined period. Daysi, knowing that her time in the United States is running out, is planning to self-deport to a country she barely remembers.
“It’s so sad that she will have done so much with a team of people to elect ten new Democrats . . . and could be fearing for her life,” Daysi’s boss, Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha, told me. “One of the most powerful Latina operatives in this country, because we lost an election, now has to self-deport to protect her and her sister.”
Like many immigrants who “pass” as native-born Americans, Daysi lives a compartmentalized life. On work calls, her peers and colleagues all tell her the same thing: I can’t believe this is happening to you. There’s not much Daysi can say to that, so she just does her job.
“I’m terrified all the time, but I still need to work,” she told me in a video interview. “I have people depending on me.”
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Trump, keep your treasonous tiny hands off of her1
Trump’s Disastrous Reign Will Cost You More Than $5,000 — The American Prospect|Ryan Cooper
The Republican Party is looking down the barrel of a potentially catastrophic midterm wipeout, and Donald Trump is up to his usual tricks: dishonest promises of future bribes. At the recent Republican Party convention-type proceeding, he promised that should the American people vote in a Republican Congress, they would give every adult U.S. citizen—all roughly 260 million of them—$5,000.
As an initial matter, this is arguably illegal. In contrast to a politician promising to implement some policy should they be elected—a policy Republicans could implement right now, since they control Congress and the White House—Trump is saying he will cut a fat check to voters if and only if they vote how he wants. I’d call that a promised expenditure to influence voting if I’ve ever seen one.
But perhaps we’re overthinking this promise, because it is manifestly not going to happen. Not only has the president already suggested large payments to Americans on 15 different occasions since taking office in 2025 (by Groundwork Collaborative’s count) without any follow-through, but breaking vows to pay someone is practically Donald Trump’s life’s work, the only thing he holds sacred. In any case, it would cost about $1.3 trillion, or about a quarter of the entire federal government budget, something no Republican Congress is going to support.
But let’s break with reality and suppose that Trump actually follows through on a promised payment for the first time in his life. There’s another problem: Trump’s second term has already been such an epic disaster that he is virtually guaranteed to have cost the average American more than $5,000. The Trump check that isn’t coming wouldn’t even get us back to square one. It probably wouldn’t even get you halfway.
A $5,000 check wouldn’t begin to cover the damage every American adult has felt....
Whatever happens, I hope the voters that broke for Trump in 2024 because they were outraged at higher prices are satisfied with how things are going.
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Can't buy me love!
Irish cops threaten not to show for Trump visit: 'Nothing short of a shambles' — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
Irish police officers are threatening not to show up for duty when President Donald Trump arrives needing protection, according to a new report.
Rank-and-file gardaí are fuming after being told to foot the bill for their own accommodation, with the Garda Representative Association warning officers left badly out of pocket were feeling “used and abused," reported the Irish Mirror this week.
Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly designated the visit an "extraordinary event" over the summer due to the scale of the policing operation, dubbed Operation Far Sunrise, spanning Dublin, Shannon and Trump's golf resort in Doonbeg, County Clare.
That status cancelled leave, altered rest days and halted training to free up thousands of officers nationwide.
A circulated Garda document told members they would have to "manage their own accommodation needs," with subsistence for self-booked rooms capped at just under $185 a night — and hotel rooms near Doonbeg were quoted at anywhere from $1,160 to $18,573 for the period.
“There’s a use-and-abuse policy from management and they’re expecting lads to just show up,” one source told the Mirror. "It’s not good enough and there’s a feeling that people will refuse to turn up, go sick, or even walk if this happens again."
Another source said the Trump visit has already turned into a "s--- show."
GRA President Niall Hodgins called the situation "nothing short of a shambles" at the time, noting that during past high-profile visits, including those of Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II, the Garda organization itself had centrally arranged lodging, including student housing....
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The world hates Trump Fascism!
Trump’s Desperate Attempt to Bribe Voters Ahead of Election is a New Low — Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community|Newswire Editor
At a speech at the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas, Texas yesterday, Donald Trump promised,“if the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000.”
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, issued the following statement in response:
“Even for the notoriously corrupt and lawless Trump, this explicit and desperate attempt to buy votes in the November election is a new low. Trump knows he can’t do this, and yet he’s attempting to bribe voters with the false promise of cash to help his party win an election, which is antithetical to every principle of American democracy.
“Every Republican at the convention and across the country should loudly and vehemently denounce Trump for proposing this dangerous and transparently illegal scheme. The fact that no one has done that yet is cause for deep alarm about the future of American elections.”...
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The walking cancer can't be any lower than the stooges that are attending his shit show!
Some Dusty-Ass Bigots Trying To Ban Mamdani From 9/11 Commemorations — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
If somehow you … didn’t remember … to look at the calendar, it is the anniversary of 9/11, somehow the 25th.
Donald Trump is marking the day in his own way, in his own sick, leaking brain, by making up fantastical stories about how he was the star of 9/11. By this afternoon he may have claimed he was one of the planes. He won’t be attending any of the commemorations in New York, though, because, well, it’s not all about him, and it’s no speeches allowed.
We guess Trump will just have to find a different way to enjoy his 9/11.
Meanwhile, the most worthless racists and disbarred lawyers in New York City have decided that they don’t want New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to take part in any of the commemorations, despite how he is the city’s extremely popular mayor. He’s a Muslim, and they hate Muslims, and it is a well-known fact (for worthless racists) that if you are Muslim, you did 9/11.
Even if you were nine years old at the time, like Mamdani was.
Also something something “Hasan Piker.” Republican convention gay porn swag bag?
Yes, Mamdani has a sky-high approval rating, a large majority of New Yorkers says he’s doing a better job as mayor than they expected, and 74 percent think he should participate in the 9/11 commemorations, because of how he is the mayor and they’re not bigots. Quite frankly, it’s simply customary for the mayor to participate in such remembrances. Even if that shitbag Eric Adams was still mayor, he would participate.
But for one washed-up Boomer bigot New York City councilwoman named Vickie Paladino, that is unacceptable. She’s all over the TV babbling to every person who will listen about how “we, the people” don’t like Mamdani or think he should be there. (When she says “we, the people,” she’s obviously talking about only bigots like her, AKA the dead weight of New York, not the citizens who know how to season their food or contribute anything else of value.)
Here she is, emptying what sound like 175 years of Capri Super Slim lungs at fellow bigot Laura Ingraham about how having the mayor of the city where 9/11 happened at its anniversary commemorations is somehow an unfurled “Mission Accomplished” banner for Osama bin Laden, who is factcheck dead....
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We've never seen such low-lifes in our politics as these geek-tards.
The Old America Is Dying. Who Will Build the New One? — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
Economic desperation opened the door to both FDR and Hitler. Nearly a century later, America again faces competing visions of who should rule and whom government should serve.
“The old order is dying and the new cannot yet be born; in this interregnum, monsters appear.” —paraphrase of Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci
While Hakeem Jeffries revealed, as he trash-talked Medicare for All, that he doesn’t believe we’re in a full-blown populist moment in America, Trump, Bannon, and the neofascist tech bros and billionaires fully realize what’s going on — and are committed to making the most of it. As are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed and hundreds of other Democratic candidates this year.
At its core, populism is a way of understanding politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite that has stopped serving them. It’s not inherently left- or right-wing; it’s really a way political scientists describe a moment when the majority of a population has lost faith in the existing system and is looking for alternatives to it.
Arguably, the greatest failure of government in the past century was the Republican Great Depression, kicked off by Herbert Hoover with GOP tax cuts and tariffs in 1929 and lasting largely through the end of World War II. It created a populist moment that brought to power a Bernie-like populist in America named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It also brought to power a Trump-like populist in Germany named Adolf Hitler.
Because populist moments or eras typically evolve out of desperation — a third of Americans and Germans were unemployed in the 1930s — they open the door to people who offer solutions that radically depart from the norm. Breaking the old model and replacing it with a new one, in fact, is the essence of that populist pitch, be it coming from the fascist or the democratic socialist side.
And make no mistake: America is now being pulled in both directions by powerful movements from both sides. A recent Pew poll found that while almost 90 percent of Americans trusted our government to “do the right thing” for them in the Eisenhower/Kennedy 1960s, today that number sits at a shocking 17 percent.
The ground for a major, wrenching transformation of America has been seeded and the neofascist movement — which figured it out first — has, for the moment, captured control of our federal government along with about half of our states. But there’s also massive progressive pushback and dissatisfaction that, if anything, is amplifying the widespread populist sentiment.
So, which side will prevail?...
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It had better be America for everyone's sake!
Trump wants to bribe voters. This is how far we’ve fallen in 25 years — Salon|Brain Karem
Our president's attempts to play emperor now seem normal. It might be the worst result of the 9/11 era
Donald Trump offered every adult American a bribe Wednesday night. If the Republicans keep the House and Senate during the midterm elections, Trump said, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” He proudly shouted this from the Dallas podium during the sparsely attended Republican midterm convention.
After Trump made this startling announcement, a Texas Republican I know texted me to say, “Tonight the United States of America is Dead. It is now the United Kingdom of Trump.”
I think he was proud of that.
Since the Hatch Act — which bars executive-branch employees from political activity — doesn’t apply to the president, and since the Supreme Court has ruled him immune for any actions he takes as president, nothing will happen to Trump for what ought to be a blatantly illegal action. I can only hope the American people recognize this for what it is, although many — including more than a few reporters — definitely won’t....
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Retarded as they come.
Security boots Epstein reporter from Trump’s Dallas convention — Alternet|Sarah K. Burris
Independent journalist Tara Palmeri was at President Donald Trump's Dallas convention this week when she had her credentials revoked after asking congressional candidates about the files from the investigation around Jeffrey Epstein.
In a video on X, Palmeri explained that three of Epstein's survivors had guest passes to go inside the convention center.
"We were there for approximately 35 minutes," she said. "We were inside of the convention center at 2:05, and we walked toward the stage. And on our right was a gentleman, actually a very kind gentleman, who is running for Congress in the Boston area. He's a Republican. And we asked him about the Epstein files, and it was pretty up front from the beginning that this was a tough subject. I literally used the words, 'this is a tough subject.' The three survivors are with me and some of their faces are blurred."
The candidate she was speaking with is Robert Burke, who is running in Massachusetts’ 8th Congressional District....
Ultimately, their conversation ended with a handshake. But eight minutes after the interview began, Palmeri said three security personnel approached the group.
One of the survivors, Marijke Chartouni, said that she saw a woman in plain clothes standing near them within earshot. At one point, she made a phone call during the interview. The three security people showed up shortly after.
They wanted to know if the survivors and Palmeri were "carrying signs."
"I told them we were not. I explained that I was a credentialed member of the media and that the people accompanying me had been admitted as guests. We were carrying clear bags, and I pointed them out to security," she wrote on her Substack, "The Red Letter."
The guard claimed that it wasn't where the media should be, but she explained that they were allowed to speak to the guests since that's why the media was there.
He complained, "You're making this more difficult than it has to be."
"I repeatedly asked why we were being removed. I was told that my media credential was revocable," she said.
They took her pass and walked her out, where she then tripped on the stairs and fell.
The exchange was filmed and Palmeri said that she'd be releasing videos on her YouTube page.
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Nazis repressing a free press and protecting pedophile at their Shit Shindig.
FCC Bullies Kimmel's Interview With Talarico Off The Air — Crooks and Liars|Oliver Willis
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel revealed on Wednesday that his late-night show would not air an interview with James Talarico because of interference from the Federal Communications Commission under the Trump administration.
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel revealed on Wednesday that his late-night show would not air an interview with James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, because of interference from the Federal Communications Commission under the Trump administration.
Kimmel told viewers that he will conduct the interview on Thursday but that it will not air on broadcast television and will instead be posted to YouTube. Kimmel said this is being done to protect local television stations, which are regulated by the FCC, and in particular the ABC affiliates that air his program “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in Texas.
“For the whole 20-plus year[s] of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office, with no problem at all,” the comedian explained, highlighting the unusual level of government interference under Trump.
Kimmel noted that he has previously interviewed candidates from both major parties, including Donald Trump amid the 2016 presidential election cycle.
“Now that he’s president, his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations, based on simple, traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like,” Kimmel said....
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Nazi Brendan Carr will get what he deserves. Of this we can be assured.
Robert Jeffress: “Democrats Are Advocates For Evil, Jesus Disagrees With Blasphemous Evil James Talarico”
Yahoo News reports:
Southern Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress framed the midterms as a religious battle at the Republican National Convention on Thursday, saying Christians have a duty to oppose the Democratic Party and its Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.
“God is never on the side of evil. And if we want God’s continued blessings on our United States of America, it is imperative that on Nov. 3, we vote for God’s side,” said Mr. Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas. “There’s a difference between falling into sin and being an advocate for sin,” he said. “The Democrat Party are advocates for evil. They are advocates for sin, and we need to call it that way.”
“The beliefs of James Talarico are blasphemous; they are evil, and they are not beliefs that any true Christian could support, ever,” said Mr. Jeffress. Mr. Talarico often references his own Christian faith and says Christianity is one of many religions that provide a path to the truth.
"Jeffress has said that ... Obama was the precursor to the antichrist
Remind me, please: who was elected President right after Obama?" — Stretchdad vs the Dicktocracy (comments)
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From the Nazi Shit Shindig:
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves." — Matthew 7:15
Jeffress is the lowest of the phonies! A very small man.
RFK: Under Biden, Democrats Were “Child Traffickers”
Fact-checker Daniel Dale writes for CNN:
In Kennedy’s Thursday convention speech, he complained of how the Democrats handled the nomination race. At one point, he said, “For the first time in history, they cancelled their own convention. No voter ever cast a primary ballot for Kamala Harris, no elected delegate was ever consulted; the party of ‘No Kings’ simply anointed a queen.” But it’s not true that the party canceled its convention or that delegates didn’t get any say.
While attacking Democrats, Kennedy claimed that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, “They closed every church in our country for a year.” It’s not true that every church in the country was closed for a year, nor even that every church in a Democratic state was closed for a year.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that he has ended “eight wars.” Kennedy went one higher on Thursday, declaring, “President Trump has ended nine wars.” That’s false. Trump hasn’t even ended eight wars.
Speaking about Democrats, Kennedy said: “They somehow lost 360,000 children and they turned our federal government into the biggest child trafficking operation in world history.” Trump and other Republicans have made similar claims. But there’s no basis for the assertion that Democrats “lost” so many children or that the federal government was engaged in human trafficking.
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More fecal matter from the Nazi Shit Shindig!
This retarded pipsqueak will soon fall back in his shit.
Greg Abbott: “We Will Fully Ban Sharia Law In Texas”
Dallas’s Fox affiliate reports:
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was among the Lone Star State contingent to speak Thursday during the second and final night of the Republican midterm convention in Dallas. The Republican governor bragged about signing laws that ban Russia, China and Iran from purchasing land in Texas.
Abbott also touted his executive order that designated the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American and Islamic Relations as terrorist organizations. “We are not waiting on Washington, D.C.,” Abbott said. “We will fully ban Sharia Law in Texas.”
A lawsuit has been filed challenging that order, and CAIR has not been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. The Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood and Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood have been designated FTOs by the State Department.
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Shariah Law in Texas? Wow! If there's any in Texas only one man is responsible: GREG ABBOTT, since his party has been running things there for the LAST 30 YEARS! Get rid ot the problem, Texas! Vote Hinohosa!
Man Who Spread Racist Lies About Haitians Eating
Your Pets Says That He’s “Tired Of Being Called Racist”
Yahoo News reports:
Vice President JD Vance insisted Republican voters rose up in 2024 and took back the White House in part because they were “tired of being called racist” — then moments later crowed as a protester waving a Mexican-flag was booted from the GOP Convention.
Vance opened his remarks Thursday by recalling the 2024 election — during which he helped spread the notorious claim that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets — and insisted Republican voters at the time were tired. “Two years ago, we have to remember that our nation, ladies and gentlemen, was tired. We were tired of seeing our factories closed, we were tired of our neighbors dying of drug overdoses,” he said.
“We were tired of not being able to afford anything. We were tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free reign over our great country. And we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous,” Vance said.
"The white nationalist party is tired of being called out for being racists" — Mickey (comments)
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Then stop being a racist, you idiot!
The 5 stages of MAGA grief —and why Trump's latest smells like 'bargaining' — Alternet.org|Alex Henderson
In her 1969 book "On Death and Dying," Swiss psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously detailed the "five stages of grief." Journalist David Rothkopf, in a Daily Beast opinion column, applies Kübler-Ross' concept to Donald Trump's second presidency — arguing that politically, the "desperate" Trump is going through those stages.
"The groundbreaking psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her landmark book 'On Death and Dying,' refers to five stages patients go through as they come face to face with mortality: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance," Rothkopf explains in the Daily Beast. "We're roughly at bargaining now. Natalie Harp handles the denial, while Walt Nauta and his handlers are in charge of the isolation — even if it means squirreling him away on secret aircraft. Nobody handles the anger, but there it is in the form of tantrums on Marine One and in the Oval Office. And the bargaining, well, that's the offer of the $5000 bribe he made yesterday."
The "bribe" that Rothkopf is referring to is Trump, at the unprecedented Republican Midterms Convention in Dallas, promising payments of $5000 to Americans if the GOP holds both branches of Congress on Tuesday, November 3.
"Before this campaign season is over," the Daily Beast columnist predicts, "there will be more. And then, for Trump, will come depression. Will he ever get to acceptance, or will he circle back to more anger, lashing out like Jimmy Cagney on his way to the chair in 'Angels with Dirty Faces' — or like Bruno Ganz in the bunker in 'Downfall?' We shall see. And we know, based on Trump's history and his performance in Dallas, that it won't be pretty."
During Trump's speech at the Dallas event, Rothkopf argues, his "desperation was so palpable … that he resembled nothing so much as a gangster in a 1930s movie being dragged by his armpits to the electric chair while pleading for his life."...
"But he also knows that his time is running out," Rothkopf writes. "That his lies are landing flat. That he is not going to be able to talk his way out of this final reckoning. Which is why he appears so shaky and frantic."2 hours ago|
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As doom washes over the con man.
Trump blames Dems when Fox News' Ingraham corners him on potential bribes — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
On Thursday, after President Donald Trump claimed he would send American adults checks for $5,000 if Republicans retained control of Congress after the midterms, he offered a confused explanation to Fox News as to why he couldn’t pay out the money “now.” According to Trump, it’s the Democrats’ fault. What’s more, he argued that the sky-high price tag of the payouts would be covered by a thoroughly debunked economic strategy.
“Why not give the money now?” asked Fox News host Laura Ingraham, a staunch Trump ally. “If you have the money, why not give it now?” While some conservatives have backed the plan, many have questioned how it would be funded and raised other practical concerns – like whether it amounts to socialism.
Trump dodged with a characteristically rambling response. “Because the Democrats can’t do it,” declared the president. “Because with them it’s negative growth. With us it’s so positive. We’re taking in $21 trillion. No country has ever taken in anywhere near that. It’s four or five times higher than the next one. All because of that beautiful word that you and I love more than most others. Tariffs.”
Blaming the Democrats is one of Trump’s most common tactics, but in this case it’s a particularly confusing attack. He and the GOP have been adamant that a Democratic victory in the midterms would result in socialism, but as even conservative commentators have noted, his $5,000 proposal is itself a form of redistributing wealth – in other words, socialism. According to National Review Senior Editor Charles Cooke, Trump’s move “joins socialists” and “embraces bribery.” The whole concept, said Cooke, is “morally, practically, and politically catastrophic.”
And Republicans aren’t the only ones pushing back against Trump’s plan: so is economic reality. Trump’s claim that the U.S. has collected $21 trillion from tariffs has no basis in fact. Quite the opposite. Trump’s tariffs were largely declared illegal by the Supreme Court, which forced him to pay the fees back to businesses, which in turn was a large contributor to the skyrocketing national deficit. What’s more, tariffs are paid for by the consumer, so even if Trump was paying out $5,000 checks using tariff money, it would essentially amount to Americans paying themselves....
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It seems that no one with a brain can be conned by this crook any longer. His jig is up. He's been had. And he's gonig down slowl
Lame: On Space Nazis, Swindlers, Poseurs and Liars — Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community|Abby Zimet
Apologies to those who just can't or won't hear more of it, but the foul mad child-king is running notably rampant, and the historic record beckons. The bilge somehow keeps surging, from a weekend deluge of deranged AI slop, slurs, rants, boasts to this week's "sick fantasy" of nobly working "long and hard" (sic) in the rubble of 9/11 to choosing to "celebrate" GOP "achievements" (double sic) at a tacky mid-term crap-a-palooza nearly dead in the brackish water. Have mercy.
Unsurprisingly, Labor Day prompted an attack on "Communists and Dumocrats" from a failed real-estate nepo-baby who never worked a day in his soft tawdry life and only ripped off those who did; got famous for sneeringly telling people on TV they were fired; and morphed into "the most anti-union president in history." All weekend he spewed a blizzard of puerile, insane AI posts, each more bonkers than the last. Some: He nuked earth from space, threatened takeovers of multiple countries, declared "the moon is ours," attacked Iran, Canada, and "third-rate loser Debbie Dingbat," bragged about his billions, posed as Hulk Hogan, Green Lantern, a bemedalled general, a dark overlord with robot bodyguards snarling, "THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN,” posted new Space Force uniforms "inspired" by Nazis, and renamed New Mexico New America grotesquely "dancing" to YMCA.
On Tuesday, before First Responders and a steel beam from the ruins of the Twin Towers, he gave an obscene mess of a speech; unlike every living president, he's skipping 9/11 ceremonies at Ground Zero because they wouldn't let him speak and it conflicts with a golf tournament. Halting reading from a piece of paper, he mourned a day “etched forever into the memories of Americans" before launching into bullshit. He praised his war with Iran - "Nobody thought it could go so well" - and bragged, "We’ve punished them greatly." He told a story about former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, whose wife "would always be screaming at him" to take their son to school, so on 9/11 he unhappily did, thus surviving the attacks that killed almost 700 of the company's employees: "He got to see it, but they all died...Now it's bigger, stronger, better than ever."
Then he got to the important part of the 9/11 story: Himself. He was building nearby, he "had a lot of construction workers," he took 100, maybe 200 of them to Ground Zero the next day, "and we worked long and hard." Huh. Except there is no evidence or record of that happening, which there'd have to be in a massive recovery effort supervised by city officials; also, his nephew says he was building Trump Tower five miles away, he ran a real-estate office that contracted out construction, and the only people he had access to were secretaries and accountants. There is, though, a record of him calling a radio show rom his safe miles away to giddily boast he now had the tallest building in Manhattan, from which he could "see" thousands of jubilant Muslims dancing in the streets - an infamous lie from what was, and remains, a racist, rancid pile of subhuman crap....
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There's more to read here, especially for those who love to read about walking shitpiles.
GOP Senator Vows To Codify Trump’s $5000 Bribe
The Cincinnati Enquirer reports:
President Donald Trump promised every adult U.S. citizen would receive a $5,000 check if Republicans retain their majorities in Congress during the party’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas on Sept. 9.
And U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, said he would take the lead to make it happen. “I will get a bill ready so that we can get the Trump Dividend passed immediately after the November 3rd election … because Republicans (and America) will win!” Moreno posted on X.
At a time when Americans are ranking cost of living as a top concern ahead of the November contests, the president’s comments echo a promise that people would receive $2,000 tariff checks in late 2025.
Read the full article.
I will get a bill ready so that we can get the Trump Dividend passed immediately after the November 3rd election … because Republicans (and America) will win!
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Illegal as all hell, America!
Codifying bribery! A crime committed before your very eyes, America. Put the cuffs on him! These people are the worst criminal motherfuckers to ever disgrace our name.
And from Ohio, no less. A disgrace to the Buckeye State and his country1 Fuck him long and hard!
New Mexico To Google And Apple: Don’t Rename Us
The Washington Post reports:
New Mexico congressional leaders asked Google and Apple on Thursday not to rename their state “New America” on the platforms’ maps should President Donald Trump demand it. Trump floated the idea of renaming New Mexico as “New America” in social media posts last week, but the state congressional delegation asked the companies to publicly commit to sticking with New Mexico on their mapping services.
“Unfortunately, this is not the first time President Trump has attempted to unilaterally rename a place,” they wrote. “In each case, your companies soon updated your mapping services to reflect the President’s whims. ” They said the companies’ “concessions” to the Trump administration are “disappointing but unsurprising” given the business interests the tech giants have with the federal government.
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If the assholes follow through on this they must be considered treasonous and they must be shut down until they become Americans again.
Anthropic: We Stopped Plot To Develop Bioweapons
The New York Times reports:
Anthropic said it had disrupted several potential plots this year by scientists who used its leading artificial intelligence models to conduct research that could have helped develop biological weapons.
In a report describing misuses of its A.I. models, Anthropic said it could not determine whether the research served a legitimate or nefarious purpose because valid biological inquiry — the kind that can lead to breakthroughs like vaccines — can also help engineer dangerous pathogens. In the face of that uncertainty, Anthropic said it erred on the side of caution because the consequences of missing malicious activity could be severe.
The potential for cutting-edge A.I. models to facilitate the development of known or entirely new biological pathogens is among the gravest concerns experts have about a technology that is developing so rapidly that even its leading architects doubt whether humans will be able to fully control it.
Read the full article. Yesterday’s memorable quote from a now-former AI researcher: “It could kill us all within years.”
Breaking News: Anthropic said it halted potential plots by scientists who used its A.I. models to do research that could have helped develop biological weapons.
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We were warned about this. When we will ever take heed?
Fired judge's whistleblower complaint reveals eerie warning: 'The White House is watching' — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
A former San Francisco immigration judge says the Justice department fired her two days after reporting that ICE agents had unlawfully detained an unaccompanied minor who had just appeared in her courtroom, a new report shows.
Chloe Dillon said the timing of her termination last spring felt "too coincidental" since no other San Francisco judges were fired that day and her removal wasn't part of any mass dismissal, MS NOW reported Thursday.
What's more, Dillon and she says she had been warned months earlier about the White House.
"The White House is watching this issue," Dillon recalled being told. "Like, do you really want to push this? The White House is watching."
According to her whistleblower complaint, filed in federal court in the Northern District of California, the trouble began last April, when San Francisco immigration judges were directed to grant any ICE request to move a case to a different court venue.
Dillon objected, arguing the policy was unlawful and could undermine a noncitizen's right to counsel, and her supervising assistant chief immigration judge then warned her that "the White House" was tracking the issue.
"Prior to the Trump administration, I can't imagine hearing something like 'the White House is watching you' from my ACIJ," Dillon said. She said she was never told who at the White House was monitoring the rulings.
Dillon described the code immigration judges are supposed to follow: "You don't make decisions based on what the president or what someone else wants you to decide. You make the decision based on what the law is, what the evidence is in front of you, and the application of those facts and that evidence to the law."...
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A President threatening American citizens is a crime of the first order. Throw the traitor into the streets and make him run the gauntlet!
Trump dealt devastating blow in mail-in voting plot over 'chaos' concerns: report — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump’s attack on mail-in voting was dealt a devastating blow Thursday after a federal court rejected a major Trump administration demand, reports show.
Trump has long sought to restrict mail-in voting for the upcoming midterms, with his voter ID bill known as the SAVE Act featuring several restrictions on eligibility for mail-in ballots. With the SAVE Act stalling in Congress, Trump signed an executive order in March that also included several restrictions on mail-in voting, though it was temporarily blocked by a lower court.
The Trump administration requested of the First Circuit Court of Appeals that the body lift the lower court’s order that blocked the implementation of Trump’s executive order, but on Thursday, the three-judge panel outright rejected the request, writing in their nine-page opinion that the executive order could cause “chaos and widespread voter disenfranchisement” if implemented ahead of the midterms.
Moreover, the three-judge panel found the Trump administration's central defense of the executive order — that it would help prevent voter fraud — to be without merit.
“There is no record evidence of past fraud or a likelihood of impending fraud related to the November 3 election,” the panel’s opinion reads.
“Thus, we see no obvious error in the district court's conclusion that allowing this Final Rule to be effective for the soon-arriving November 3 election will likely result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters across the country while providing minimal — if any — gains in combating voter fraud.”
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He's now down to his final card: Bribing our voters. Ask for your bribes in front!
Hegseth deputy squirms as ex-CIA officer hit with gold bar scam charges: report — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg is facing mounting scrutiny over his denials of a years-long relationship with David Rush, the former CIA officer arrested in May after federal agents found 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash and 35 luxury watches stashed at his home, according to a new report.
Feinberg, a 66-year-old former private equity executive who left Cerberus Capital Management to become the Pentagon's No. 2 official in March 2025, has publicly insisted that he barely knew Rush, but NBC News reported suggests his ties are more extensive than the Pentagon acknowledges.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said "the insinuations of a close professional relationship of any kind between Deputy Secretary Feinberg and Mr. Rush, peddled by anonymous sources, are completely false and embellished," adding that Feinberg "never supported Mr. Rush's career at any point in his life, nor did he endorse Mr. Rush for any career position."
NBC reported that Feinberg and Rush first connected years ago through the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, when Feinberg chaired the President's Intelligence Advisory Board during Trump's first term.
After Feinberg rejoined government in 2025, he recommended Rush for a sensitive role as the CIA's liaison to the Pentagon on nuclear submarine programs, and later contacted senior CIA officials to praise Rush's performance and propose expanding their collaboration, according to people familiar with the matter.
FBI investigators reviewing footage tied to the Rush case reportedly found video showing Feinberg at a government-affiliated residence used by Rush, with details of that footage relayed to lawmakers in a closed-door congressional briefing.
The FBI's public statements on the matter have shifted after initially saying it had not reviewed or was not aware of any surveillance footage capturing Feinberg, but after being pressed for clarification, the bureau said it "stands by" its earlier statement, "including the part about footage capturing Mr. Feinberg."...
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Scandal brewing in Hogshead's Legion of Doom.
Angry boos as Jimmy Kimmel exposes Trump's new attack: 'Something has changed' — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
Jimmy Kimmel says the Trump administration's pressure campaign has claimed another casualty.
A planned Thursday interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will now air only on YouTube instead of ABC, according to The Daily Beast.
The move echoes last year's clash, when Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr forced "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" off the air for a week over Kimmel's comments about the right's reaction to activist Charlie Kirk's murder. This time, Kimmel says, similar pressure led him to pull the Talarico sit-down from broadcast rather than risk trouble for ABC's affiliates.
Talarico is challenging Trump ally Ken Paxton, whom Kimmel mocked Wednesday as a "piece of human silly putty," for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas. Kimmel noted the irony that Trump himself once had no objection to late-night hosts interviewing candidates.
"At that time, when he was the one sitting next to me, he seemed to have no problem with the idea of talk show hosts interviewing candidates," Kimmel said. "But for some reason, and I can't seem to figure out what that reason is," he added, drawing laughs, "something has changed."
Kimmel said the FCC under Trump "has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations, based on simple, traditional, editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don't like."
He said the network backed off "out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas," so the interview "will be posted on YouTube instead, it will not be on TV" — a line that drew boos from the studio audience.
Still, Kimmel urged viewers to seek out the interview and register to vote before November. Some viewers reacted online, with one calling the decision proof of "how much FEAR the GOP has" heading into the midterms....
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Brendan Carr thinks he's the high sheriff from hell.
Republicans Unveil Secret Midterm Weapon, It Is Hasan Piker’s Dinglesmackus Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Cocktober surprise came early
If you follow American politics closely, you may remember two minutes ago, when the most important question for serious journalists to ask Democrats was “How old were you when you gay married Hasan Piker on a bed of rose petals while reading Jeremiah Wright sermons to each other sexually?” If you were Dana Bash or Kristen Welker or Jake Tapper or Axios or whoever, this was the most important issue, and the only question you had for Democrats, even Democrats who had nothing to do with the Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker, who had never heard of him.
They had no similar questions for Republicans about their actual associations and money-taking from actual Nazis and trillionaire antisemites, because Beltway journalists and New York Times reporters know the DC party invites dry up during fascist administrations if they stop licking fascist balls for one second.
This doesn’t happen to them during Democratic administrations because if there is one thing that is true about American politics it is that Democrats are desperate for the media to think they’re cool, while the media is desperate for Republicans to think they’re cool. Like so, the pattern of abuse perpetuates itself. Maybe some of these new crop of Team Fight Democrats can break the cycle.
But two minutes ago, or last night, at the sold-out Trump Republican Midterm Convention (many tickets still available), Republicans revealed their secret weapon for the midterms, which changed everything, and it was a thirst trap of Hasan Piker’s willysmacker on the Jumbotron:...
Well OK then.
If at some point last night, you said “Alexa, what are all the ladies and gentlemen hate-masturbating to at the Republican convention in Dallas right now?” now you and Alexa have your answer. (Last night she was probably like “IDK, kids in concentration camps? Go ask Grok,” if she had an answer at all.)...
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Trump's imported meat counter?
Eyes roll after Trump promise of $5000 to each American — if the GOP wins — Alternet|Jake Johnson
US President Donald Trump pledged on Wednesday to send every American adult a $5,000 check if Republicans keep control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, a promise that was widely seen as a desperate ploy to distract from a flagging economy and the destructive impacts of the Iran war.
“If the Republicans win, you win with us and you get $5,000,” Trump declared in his address to the GOP’s midterm convention in Dallas. The president, who recently railed against Medicare for All as too costly, called his proposed payment “the Trump Dividend,” but did not mention its potential price tag. Snap estimates indicate the checks, which would require congressional approval, would likely cost more than $1.3 trillion—close to the size of the discretionary federal budget.‘
Warren Gunnels, staff director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—the leading Medicare for All champion in Congress—derided Trump’s promise by comparing it to other campaign pledges that have not materialized.
“Yeah, just like we got a $2,000 tariff refund, a 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a 500% cut in prescription drug prices, $2 gas, oh wait…what?” Gunnels wrote on social media....
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Always with the fake bribe promise. What a con man.
Naked crime!
The crowd went silent: How Trump flopped in Dallas in 5 wild moments — Alternet|Matthew Rozsa
1. President Donald Trump flopped when trying to brag. Even as the entire world talks about Canada achieving the economic advantage over the United States in his recent trade war, Trump claimed during the midterm elections convention that "we were a laughingstock all over the world [two years ago]. They don't laugh at us anymore, do they?" The crowd's reaction, which was otherwise exuberant throughout the night, was noticeably more tepid in its response to that line....
2. He flipped to calling Ken Paxton "spiffy," praised his ability to get crowds and admitted that he shares Paxton's ability to upset people with "how he looks" and "how he talks."
His own Texas Republican voters have called Paxton "trash" for cheating on his wife and being involved in infidelity and other scandals.
3. He also felt the need to offer praise to a pair of UFC fighters who competed during the White House match for his 80th birthday in June. While talking about the idea of transgender people competing in sports (a subject met with thundering boos when he mentioned the concept), he explained that Bo Nickal and Justin Gaethje were invited because they both agreed with him when he suggested they could beat any woman in a fight.
4. He repeated his Big Lie, namely that the 2020 election was stolen from him by Joe Biden, who won legitimately...
5. Trump vowed to go to every one of the close states during the midterm elections. He also issued a challenge of "loaded up" arenas. Trump has already established that he plans on rigging the midterm elections through mail-in voting suppression, purging voters, sending ICE agents an/dor other law enforcement to polling places and other methods....
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He announces to the world he is a crook. The co-conspirator suckers go for his con.
Sen Roger Marshall Got Roasted After News He Sued And Arrested Patients — Crooks and Liars|RedStateRachel
Roger Marshall was an OBGYN before becoming a GOP Senator. After news broke that "Doc Marshall" sued and arrested patients, the Kansas Senator is getting roasted.
Sen. Roger Marshall got roasted on social media after the New York Times bombshell broke that he sued patients. The Times reported that some of Marshall's patients were arrested and put in jail for their medical debt, some as low as $100.
Senator Marshall practiced OBGYN for 25 years before running for Congress in 2016. The doctor-turned-Senator likes to refer to himself as "Doc Marshall" and play up a folksy persona as a country doctor. But the Kansas Senator is one of Trump's top supporters in the Senate. Marshall is deeply unpopular in the state for his extreme right-wing views and the fact that he doesn't even LIVE in Kansas....
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Selfie of him and his dick. Pitiful.
Fetterman Goes Full Zell Miller At GOP Midterm Convention — Crooks and Liars|Heather
This traitor can't be kicked to the curb soon enough.
This traitor can't be kicked to the curb soon enough. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who has apparently decided his new job is to be a right wing troll on Fox "news" rather than doing things like meeting with paralyzed veterans, made a video appearance at this week's wingnut fest in Dallas and used the occasion to praise Trump while introducing his fellow Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick:
In a remarkable move for a Democratic lawmaker, U.S. Sen. John Fetterman on Wednesday appeared in a video at the Republican midterms convention — an event specifically designed to boost GOP candidates this fall — in a way that praised President Donald Trump for his support of Pennsylvania steelworkers.
The video was a clear escalation of a monthslong shift in which Fetterman has drifted from the Democratic Party. Though he’s repeatedly rejected speculation that he would switch parties — and did so again after the video Wednesday — he has consistently criticized Democrats and praised Trump since the president took office.
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A goddamn reprobate!
Todd Blanche: “If You Choose Violence, You’ll Be Held Accountable” (Except If You Beat DC Police With Clubs)
The Dallas Morning News reports:
Todd Blanche drew cheers at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas after a bruising confirmation fight over his move to become attorney general. He said the convention crowd rose to its feet for his first major public address since taking office.
Blanche used his five-minute speech to praise the Trump administration’s “law and order” message and its crackdown at the border.
He told delegates, “To evil men and women in this country, know this: President Trump will hold you accountable.” He was sworn in as attorney general a month ago after a confirmation battle that split Republicans on Capitol Hill.
The Hill reports:
Former Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday slammed the sitting Department of Justice (DOJ) chief over his decision to address attendees at the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) first midterm convention in Dallas.
Holder, who served in the Obama administration, called Attorney General Todd Blanche’s planned speech “unprecedented” and “disgraceful” in comments to NewsNation. “Attorneys general don’t talk about political things,” Holder told NewsNation’s Joe Khalil. “He shouldn’t be there.”
When reached for comment about Holder’s criticism, the DOJ directed The Hill to its Wednesday response to a complaint from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee about the upcoming remarks.
Apparently the Hatch Act is no longer a thing.
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Or unless you murder citizens in the street in Minnesota!
There are many people in his party that need to be arrested ASAP!
Nazi thug is feeling his oats.
Serial Adulterer Attacks Talarico Over Bible Knowlege
Dallas’s NPR affiliate reports:
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton discussed his economic plan but didn’t break much new ground during the roughly seven minutes he spoke at the mid-term Republican National Convention. The Texas attorney general highlighted his economic plan, called Protecting the Texas Promise — something he has been campaigning on in recent weeks.
“Everywhere I go, I meet Texans working harder than ever that still worry that they’ll never get ahead,” Paxton said. “Those are the people that I’m fighting for.” Paxton’s economic policy proposals include tax deductions for medical expenses, healthy living and home purchases.
He also criticized his Democratic opponent James Talarico’s faith. “He calls himself a Christian who hates Christianity, said God is non-binary,” Paxton said. “I must have missed that verse in the Bible.”
Read the full article. Paxton also missed the verse on adultery.
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There's a lot this moron has missed.
Search assistant:
"Some Christians argue that God is non-binary because God transcends human gender categories and can be described with they/them pronouns. Other Christians disagree and say it’s a category mistake to apply human gender-identity labels to God, so they describe God as not male or female instead."
Bessent: We’ve Gone From A President Who Couldn’t Stay Awake To A President Who Refuses To Go To Sleep
Yahoo News reports:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday assailed President Biden’s economic record, warning voters not to return to the era of high inflation and overregulation by sending Democrats to Congress in November’s midterm election.
Mr. Bessent’s prime-time speech at the Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas marked the first time in 50 years that a sitting treasury secretary spoke at a national political convention, the last being William E. Simon at the Republican National Convention in 1976.
During his roughly 10-minute remarks, Mr. Bessent underscored the economic gains he said the U.S. has made under President Trump, while repeatedly calling back to Mr. Biden’s term in office, saying, “We’ve gone from a president who couldn’t stay awake to a president who refuses to sleep.”
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He must mean "sleep at night." He sleeps on the job constantly. There's tons of proof, you fucking stooge!
Our world map is wrong. MAGA likes it that way — Salon|Troy Farah
Because the US rejects reality, it voted against the UN's Correct the Map plan
As soon as I heard that the United Nations would be voting on a new map of the world, one that better reflected Africa’s true size, I knew the U.S. would vote against it. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened. I wish I could say I’m clairvoyant, or that I have genius insight into U.S. foreign policy, but this was entirely predictable.
As you may remember from high school, most maps of the world use the Mercator projection, which features considerable distortions, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. Maybe you’ve wondered why Greenland and Africa look roughly the same size on such maps, when Africa is actually 14 times larger, or why Antarctica looks infinitely large, when that isn’t true in real life. Discussion of those and other discrepancies have been around for a long time. They even made their way into a 2001 episode of “The West Wing.” In season two, members of a cartographic society meet with White House press secretary C.J. Cregg on Big Block of Cheese Day to lobby for a change to the map, blowing her mind in the process by literally turning her world upside down. It turns out that it’s difficult to squish a sphere into a flat rectangle without some disfigurement, but the Mercator errors have finally led to pushback.
Following a proposal from the West African country of Togo, the U.N. has voted to encourage the use of maps that make sense. This isn’t even a mandate, only persuasion and advice. With six nations abstaining, the vote was 164-1 in favor, with — you guessed it — the U.S. as the lone holdout. That sound you may have heard was billions of people rolling their eyes at once. In a statement, Yaryna Ferencevych, the deputy U.S. representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, tried to offer a rationale for the no vote, saying that the resolution “mocks the work and purpose of this institution” while urging other nations to vote no as well....
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Morons never learn.
Associated Press Refuses To Cave On Lake Ontario
The Washington Post reports:
The Associated Press is advising its reporters and others who follow AP style to continue referring to Lake Ontario by its original name, despite President Donald Trump’s order to rename it Lake America last month as the administration’s trade war with Canada escalated.
The AP’s guidance says Trump’s executive order affects only how the U.S. government refers to the lake, and Canada and other countries are not required to recognize the name change.
Last year, the AP similarly defended its decision to continue using the Gulf of Mexico instead of the Gulf of America, after Trump issued an executive order to rename that body of water. The White House in turn banned AP reporters from covering its events, leading to a prolonged legal battle over the wire service’s First Amendment rights.
Read the full article.
The AP will continue to call Lake Ontario by its correct name
Let this be a spine-stiffener for all the organizations inclined to kiss orange ass.
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Americans will continue to call New Mexico, New Mexico. That's it's name.
Only Trump Nazi scum retards will do otherwise. This is war on America by a Nazi lame brain!
Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It’s Worse in States With Abortion Bans. — ProPublica|Agnel Philip
The number of women who died after an ectopic pregnancy has spiked in recent years, a ProPublica analysis found. The mounting deaths in Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data have drawn little scrutiny or response.
Such deaths typically occur in the first trimester, after a pregnancy fails to properly implant in the uterus and begins to develop elsewhere, most commonly inside a fallopian tube. The embryo grows until it causes the organ to rupture, triggering catastrophic bleeding.
With prompt and appropriate medical care, maternal health experts say, women should not die. Yet ProPublica’s analysis found a stark and baffling increase: Almost 200 women with the condition died from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years.
“A death related to ectopic pregnancy should really be a never event,” said Dr. Alice Abernathy, an OB-GYN in Philadelphia....
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Our clueless patriarchy keeps failing us.
Newly Released Records Show Officials Lied About Air Toxins Following 9/11 — Truthout Stories|Amy Goodman
York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unsealed more than 170,000 pages of records that offer new insights into how the city responded to the disaster. Some of the papers indicate that officials lied about the hazardous toxins that burned and remained near ground zero for months afterward, even as the government assured New Yorkers the air was safe to breathe and rushed to reopen Lower Manhattan for business. In addition to the nearly 3,000 people killed on 9/11, thousands more are believed to have died from illnesses related to the attacks, including from cancer, heart disease and respiratory conditions.
“The Bush administration, the Giuliani administration all denied that there was an impact from these toxins,” says Benjamin Chevat, executive director of 9/11 Health Watch, which sued for the release of the records. He faults successive city governments for inaction, saying that “instead of mitigating the harm, they mitigated the city’s liability.”
ANJALI KAMAT: This week marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the historic release of more than 170,000 pages of city records from the aftermath of 9/11, some of which indicate New York City officials lied to the public about the hazardous toxins that burned and remained in the air for months up to half a mile from ground zero. Mamdani also announced the settlement of two 9/11-related lawsuits. He spoke at City Hall yesterday.
MAYOR ZOHRAN MAMDANI: We are together this morning to stand steadfast alongside survivors and their families and to deliver the kind of accountability around city government’s response to September 11th that New Yorkers have been denied for years. I am proud to announce that our administration has settled two lawsuits between the city and 9/11 Health Watch, ending what has been a multiyear legal battle and restrictions on New Yorkers’ ability to access information that can shed valuable insight on air quality and health concerns. Administration after administration has ignored those calling for answers and clarity, instead choosing to bury them in legal arguments and in red tape. We will do no such thing. As we mark 25 years, it is time for this painful chapter to end....
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And folks, those lawsuits are NOT Shariah Law but U.S. Law!
Trump Wants the Mailman Checking Your Ballot — The Bulwark|Kim Wehle
HAVING MADE A MESS of its “emergency” docket at Donald Trump’s behest, the Supreme Court now finds itself in a high-stakes game of ping-pong over whether he gets to illegally meddle with the midterms. On Sunday, for the third time in six weeks, he asked his pals in the high court’s majority for an exit ramp from Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which states that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”It says nothing about presidents having any power whatsoever over nationwide elections. Nonetheless, last time around, the majority effectively bowed to Trump’s demands. Nobody should expect it to do the right thing this time.
In two of three separate lawsuits, a valiant federal court judge has dutifully upheld states’ constitutional prerogative to manage elections—despite Trump’s ridiculous March executive order attempting to morph the U.S. Postal Service into a voter-disenfranchisement machine. That order, which was later memorialized in a USPS rule, directs federal agencies to verify citizenship and age using federal databases, creating a list of adult citizens that the federal government will send to states. Meanwhile, each state is supposed to upload to USPS information on the individuals the state intends to mail ballots to, which USPS will then use when processing ballots, returning ballots that don’t match—and refusing to deliver ballots in states that don’t comply with the whole scheme. The order directs the attorney general to investigate and even prosecute officials who knowingly send ballots to people who aren’t “eligible.”
With mail-in voting already underway in North Carolina—and scarcely two months to go before the midterms—it’s hard to overstate the imbecility of this proposal....
"The Election Thief " keeps trying to suppress our votes.
The Legacy of 9/11: A Surveillance Society — The American Prospect|Robert Kuttner
When the attacks of September 11, 2001, stunned America 25 years ago, the Prospect had just moved to Washington and brought on a new executive editor in Harold Meyerson. In about a week, we managed to assign and edit an issue that was one of our best ever. The cover line was “Defending an Open Society.”
The articles in that issue challenged the widespread assumption that we were now in a new normal, in which the vulnerability of an open society had been horribly revealed. Painful as it might be, America supposedly had to sacrifice some liberty to regain some security.
Then as now, that premise was disastrously wrong. But over 25 years, America ended up needlessly sacrificing both.
At the time, it seemed that the ability of a cell of terrorists to pass unnoticed, and to seize and weaponize not one but four jetliners almost simultaneously, demonstrated the pathetic vulnerability of the United States. But as testimony to the 9/11 Commission later revealed, American counterintelligence knew everything it needed to know in 2000 and 2001 to prevent the 9/11 attacks. The problem was that the White House under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney was obsessively focused on Saddam Hussein and didn’t want to know about al-Qaeda in the U.S....
Among other odious items in the administration’s anti-terrorism bill, as Georgetown Law professor David Cole wrote in the Prospect’s 9/11 issue, were provisions to make aliens “deportable not for terrorist activity but for peaceful and nonviolent associational activity … It would authorize the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain immigrants indefinitely on the attorney general’s say-so, even when they have a legal right to live here permanently and cannot be deported. And it would resurrect the doctrine of ideological exclusion by allowing aliens to be denied entry for their speech.”
All of this, of course, prefigured President Trump’s grotesque anti-immigrant measures.
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How did we get so scattered?
MAGA activist who targeted thousands of voters lands state election job: report — Raw Story|Erik De La Garza
A MAGA activist who tried to remove thousands of Georgia voters from the rolls now has a state job investigating elections.
Jason Frazier was quietly hired as an investigator by Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board after flooding Fulton County with voter challenges, according to a new Mother Jones report.
“This man is trying to suppress votes, and he’s happy to suppress as many as he can for any reason he can,” said a police sergeant targeted by Frazier because his address incorrectly listed “Boulevard Boulevard” instead of “Boulevard Drive.”
His challenge was just one of thousands Frazier filed against voters in the heavily Democratic county that is home to Atlanta. The MAGA activist's efforts were part of a wave of mass voter challenges that followed President Donald Trump’s narrow loss in Georgia in 2020.
“If the takeover of the State Election Board by conspiracy-promoting Trump allies seemed brazen, the elevation of Frazier ups the ante in their war on fair elections,” Mother Jones' Abby Vesoulis wrote, pointing out Wednesday that Frazier earns $70 an hour despite having no formal investigative experience.
According to the report, Frazier challenged 5,001 registrations at one March 2023 meeting alone. His submissions made up most of the 15,000 challenges Fulton County received during 18 months. Local election officials rejected the vast majority of those challenges, the report added....
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Our war against fascism is only beggining.
A Brazilian Meat Billionaire Walked Into Trump’s Oval Office. What Happened Next Should Terrify Us All… — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
The mystery surrounding 660 million pounds of imported beef exposes a much larger story about money, deregulation, food safety, and who Trump’s billionaire-run government really serves
In Monday’s New York Times, Eric Schlosser — the guy who freaked out a nation with his book Fast Food Nation a quarter century ago — published an article that kicks off with a simple observation: if you buy a T-shirt at the Gap, federal law requires a label that tells you where it was made and what it’s made of.
While the same is true for your car, your refrigerator, your television, and every apple and bag of frozen peas in the supermarket, as a result of lobbyists being able to openly buy politicians in America since 2010, beef and pork are the exceptions.
Which is why, Schlosser argues, Donald Trump could sign a one-man presidential proclamation allowing roughly 660 million pounds of foreign beef to enter America with neither inspection nor the usual 26.4 percent out-of-quota tariff.
If Americans knew where this mystery meat was coming from, they might not want to eat it, Schlosser notes, but Trump is apparently making sure we’ll never know.
Ironically, the same morning Schlosser was warning us about the incoming meat, Axios reported that the FDA just hit a record 19 simultaneous foodborne illness outbreak investigations, covering everything from infant formula to jalapeños.
A Cornell economist told them the American food safety system “has gotten hit so hard over the last year and a half.” This is quite simply what happens when you turn a nation’s food supply over to its oligarchs and shut down the regulations that protect average consumers.
Schlosser says much of the beef that’ll be coming into the US could have been frozen for years overseas, blended here with fattier American meat in massive industrial grinders.
Trump refuses to tell us where the meat is coming from, and his Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins — a former rightwing propagandist and fundamentalist Christian evangelist with no food safety background whatsoever — says she’s “not privvy” to that information.
Meanwhile, Schlosser pointed out that Uruguayan beef was recently found tainted with an outlawed antiparasitic drug, Argentine beef has repeatedly tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause nerve damage, and in 2017 Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants over allegations that inspectors and politicians had been bribed to allow rotten meat, chemically treated to mask the smell, to be sold to schools and hospitals and exported abroad.
Will your next burger come from one of those countries? We have some clues....
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And we have some pretty good guesses.
9/11 Hijacker Donald Trump Headlines Sold-Out Republican Convention In Dallas, Free Tickets Available — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
In case you haven’t heard the latest, it would appear that Natalie has convinced Donald Trump that he was one of the first responders to 9/11, and that big burly firemen with tears in their eyes, right out of central casting, had to pull him out of the rubble while crying “Sir! Sir!”
On the morning of 9/11, Trump also bragged about having the tallest building in lower Manhattan (he in fact did not), from which he was able to see Muslims dancing in the streets in New Jersey.
Amazing that he found time in those early days to also be pulled from the rubble as a hero.
So this is just Trump, believing everything is about him, and being a grandiose liar with brain problems, concocting fantastical stories about how he somehow played every character in 9/11, at least all the heroes. During his speech yesterday he whined that a volunteer firefighter who died saving victims is now “more famous than me.” He added, “I don’t like it.”
In Trump’s mind, we guess, he was one of the first responders, and also one of the people who overtook the hijackers to crash Flight 93. We’re sure it’s all part of 9/11: The Musical, which is playing on a loop in his head. He’s the star!
We are derisively making fun of this absolute shithole of a human being, but we want to emphasize that he literally said/lied about/hallucinated so much of that. Trump stood at a 9/11 event yesterday honoring actual first responders, and he lied (LIED, New York Times, LIED, you fucking fascist-protecting cumstains) with some fantastical story about having to be pulled out of the rubble by big burly firefighters sometime very shortly after 9/11. He is now doubling down on the lie on his shitty Twitter knockoff site.
The only parts we embellished are in the fifth graf. To our knowledge, he has not claimed yet to have been a passenger on Flight 93, and no one has yet written 9/11: The Musical as an homage to Trump, but we’re sure Natalie would be willing to take piano lessons. (Did y’all hear he gave her $45,000? She could use some of it for piano lessons.)
Anyway, now, starting tonight, star hallucinator and chief 9/11 hijacker Trump has a sold out show in Dallas. Or at least Natalie has convinced him it’s sold out. Or he’s lying. He sent this out last night, when he wasn’t busy writing 476-word screeds about how he appeared as a bald eagle with a single tear in the night skies over 9/11, like a patriotic bat signal for a nation crying out....
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Will he be anywhere near the Texas School Book Depository?
The Amazing Adventures of Donald J. Trump, Real-Life Super Hero — The Smirking Chimp|Jaime O'Neill
It's hard to understand how it is that Donald Trump's adventures haven't earned him the undying respect he so richly earned and entirely deserves from every single American. The only explanations for the lack of credit he gets is that the American people are either inexcusably ungrateful or that he himself is too bashful to let them know of his many exploits
Just yesterday I think it was, I learned that he was personally present in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 atrocity that killed more than 3,000 of his fellow New Yorkers due to the incompetence and neglect of the Republican president in office the day of that tragedy. Where was Trump? Well, there he was in the still smoking rubble with hundreds of paid staff employees, digging fearlessly in hopes of finding survivors. He worked so hard and so long that he had to be carried away by first responders.
Just think of that, ladies and gentlemen. Think of the self-sacrifice. Think of the grace and humility it must have taken to keep that heroism to himself for so long. Think of his love for his fellow man and his fellow New Yorkers. Think of his becoming modesty. Think how he never publicly thanked the guys who carried him from the site for saving him, too. And think of the tweet we'll receive from him soon blaming those first responders for all those people they didn't save that he would have saved if he'd only been in Manhattan on the dark day, a day that may or may not live in infamy. We just don't yet know what Trump, the MAGA folk who outlive him, and the Project 2025 contributors will want future Americans to know if their form of government continues into the next 100 years. Or if any of us do....
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The dustbin of history, Jaime. The dustbin of history!
The Real Fix for Social Security — Robert Reich
We may be on the brink of a bipartisan solution that’s fair.
Friends,
One of the reasons I write this letter to you each day is to arm you with the facts and analyses you need to respond to the garbage coming out of Trump’s Republican Party.
Today I want to talk to you about Social Security.
The trustees of Social Security — of which yours truly was once a member — say the program will be able to pay full benefits only until 2033. After that, Social Security will be able to dole out only roughly 77 percent of benefits due.
This summer, Ohio’s Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren in proposing to raise the payroll tax cap so people with higher incomes pay more into the program.
Fairly suddenly, the idea is emerging as an acceptable fix among other GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Tom Cole (Oklahoma), the influential chair of the House Appropriations Committee
Cole thinks the political blowback from Social Security benefit cuts would be far worse than a comprehensive solution that includes raising taxes.
It’s another example of Republicans deserting Trump, who thinks the “fix” for Social Security is to repeal taxes on Social Security benefits. Trump’s fix will not save Social Security. In fact, quite the opposite. Without the revenue from Social Security taxes, the Social Security trust fund will run out of money even sooner.
I’m encouraged by what looks like the start of a Republican turnaround on this. Not only are Republicans deserting Trump, but they’re beginning — just beginning — to become sensitive to what average voters need and want.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the reason Social Security is running out of money is not because so many boomers are retiring.
The Social Security trustees anticipated the boom in boomer retirements. This is why Social Security was amended back in 1983, to gradually increase the age for collecting full retirement benefits from 65 to 67. That change is helping finance the boomers’ retirement.
The real reason Social Security is running out of money is something the trustees never anticipated: how much of the nation’s total income is going to the top.
A big part of the American working population today is earning less than the Social Security trustees anticipated years ago — reducing revenue flowing into the program.
Had the pay of American workers kept up with the trend decades ago — as well as their growing productivity — their Social Security payments would have kept the program flush.
But a much larger chunk of the nation’s total income is now going to the top compared to decades ago.
Yet income subject to the Social Security payroll tax is capped. No dollar of earnings above the cap is taxed. The cap in 2026 is $184,500.
So, as the rich have become far richer, more and more of the nation’s total income has escaped the Social Security payroll tax....
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According to current stats, In round numbers those getting over $185 K annually is close to 42 million people. That's about 12% of our population. That adds up to real money, as Everett Dirksen used to say.
Always remember too much ain't enough for pigs and gluttons.
White House lashes out after Trump's 9/11 story reduced to rubble — Raw Story|Erik De La Garza
The White House offered no evidence Tuesday to support President Donald Trump’s latest account of his actions near Ground Zero following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Trump claimed during a ceremony honoring 9/11 emergency personnel that two firefighters lifted him and carried him away from a building they feared would collapse. Multiple critics noted that Trump was nowhere near the towers on 9/11 and that his account was completely made up.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale said he asked the White House for evidence or additional details about Trump’s account but received neither.
“Asked for evidence for and/or more details about the president's latest claims about himself and 9/11, the White House provided none,” Dale wrote on X.
Instead, spokesperson Davis Ingle accused the media of trying to attack Trump.
“President Trump spent the morning paying tribute to the heroic first responders who laid down their lives in service to others in the September 11th attacks and honoring their incredible families,” Ingle said.
“The President was relaying his experience of a city reeling immediately after and in the days and weeks after the horrific attacks,” he added before unleashing a familiar White House attack on CNN....
"The same day bragged that now trump tower was the tallest building in NY." — Johnrm (coments)
"Everyone that works for Trump this second term belong in prison. They're lying traitors." —TMID 2.0 (comments)
"You really think someone would admit to having saved Trump's life, even if it was true? HAHAHAHAHA! That said, the truth is well known, and Trump was nowhere close to ground zero on 9/11. The man is a confirmed coward, liar and cheat." — Techman (comments)
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That's it, dumbshit! Show your lying ass by blowing a gasket! Lying weak motherfucking traitor!
So odd that we viewed so much of this first-hand on TV 24/7 but no sign of the pusgut anywhere.
Search assistant states:
"On September 11, 2001, Donald Trump claimed he was watching the attacks from his Trump Tower apartment, which is over four miles away from the Twin Towers. He later suggested that he was at Ground Zero, but there is no evidence to support that he was directly involved in the recovery efforts at the site on that day. He was not at Ground Zero during the attacks."
Case closed.
Trump increasingly 'detached from reality' as he lives 'isolated existence' — Alternet|Alex Henderson
In contrast to first presidency — which found him often clashing with traditional GOP conservatives he appointed to his administration — Donald Trump has made a point of surrounding himself with loyalists since returning to the White House roughly 19 and one-half months ago. This has led to what the New York Times' Maggie Haberman describes as "unusually isolated existence" during his second presidency. And according to the Daily Beast, Trump's isolation is making him increasingly "detached from reality."
The Daily Beast's Ewan Palmer reports, "Donald Trump has shielded himself from hearing about a voter backlash by being surrounded by a small group of yes-men, according to a report … He has scaled back on the rallies that have defined his political career while choosing to surround himself with a select cadre of advisers and officials. This inner circle does not tell him about his dire poll numbers, with Trump becoming increasingly unaware of how unpopular he is, (Haberman) added."
Palmer adds, "Even negative information from polling and focus groups conducted by his own team — showing how unhappy voters are with Trump's handling of the economy and rising gas prices, the war in Iran and the botched release of the Jeffrey Epstein files — is not getting through to the president."...
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No question that the idiot is brain-addled Nazi.
Putin Needs A War BIGGER Than Ukraine — Crooks and LiarsCliff Schecter
When Theresa May set a date to respond to the Skripal poisoning, Russian oligarch turned Putin critic Boris Berezovsky turned up dead in his London home. When September 1st was set to officially blame Russia for Leipzig, the grid was hit.
Cliff Schecter launched World War Next with 2 people who read Russia for a living: Olga Lautman, the analyst who calls herself "Russia’s nightmare," and Jacob Kaarsbo, a former officer of the Danish Defence Intelligence Service. The premise was simple and uncomfortable. Russia's fought a shadow war vs the West for over a decade. Europe keeps answering with half measures, and Putin now needs a bigger war than he has.
It's been feeling a bit 1980s lately. Berlin blamed Russia for a Leipzig airport drone attack September 1st; the same day, 2 power substations in Brandenburg and North Rhine-Westphalia were hit in suspected sabotage, 4,200 megawatts of generation went offline, and an explosion followed at the Augsburg train station. Olga went through the timeline, why it looks like Russia rehearsing what it's done to Ukraine’s grid every winter.
When Theresa May set a date to respond to the Skripal poisoning, Russian oligarch turned Putin critic Boris Berezovsky turned up dead in his London home. When September 1st was set to officially blame Russia for Leipzig, the grid was hit. Russia has been purposely attacking right before announced responses arrive. One of many ways they're conducting tests of how we react and what we're actually willing to do.
Just today they threatened NATO by sending a drone over Romania. Cliff, Olga, and Jacob discussed the very real danger of escalation because Putin wants it, and needs it, at BAM. Check out the video and story.
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And Trump won't care about what his best buddy will do.
BOMBSHELL: Lewandowski Controlled Billions At DHS And Had Side Hustles Too -- Crooks and Liars|Conover Kennard
The man apparently looked at the phrase “conflict of interest” and thought, “Challenge accepted.”
Corey Lewandowski, one of Donald J. Trump's longtime allies and Kristi Noem’s side piece, wielded extraordinary power inside the Department of Homeland Security despite holding no official leadership position there.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Lewandowski pretty much operated as a shadow secretary alongside then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, becoming deeply involved in the department's spending and contracting decisions.
Lewandowski served as an unpaid "special government employee," and that status allowed him to work for the government while retaining the ability to conduct private business under certain circumstances. The arrangement became particularly striking because, while he held significant authority at DHS, he also pursued opportunities to make money by offering his services to foreign governments. Sounds sus!...
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Showing how a scumbag works.
Trump Hails “Really Big” Win By German Neo-Nazis
Bloomberg News reports:
Donald Trump on Sept 8 hailed what he called a “really big” victory by Germany’s far-right movement after the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party scored a dramatic upset in state elections. “Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night,” Trump posted, before going on to bash the country’s immigration regulations. “They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly.”
The prospect of the first far-right government taking charge of a German state since World War II has deeply unsettled many migrants and minority groups. The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is labelled a “right-wing extremist” group by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, and its triumphant lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund’s staff are known former members of a since-banned neo-Nazi organisation.
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Trump for the Nazi win!
Musk Launches Lying Anti-Trans Ads In Three States
The New York Times reports:
Elon Musk began a political advertising blitz on Tuesday in three states that could decide control of the Senate, as his political group began attacking Democrats over transgender issues by accusing them of allowing men to compete in women’s sports. The spots from Mr. Musk’s group, America PAC, target three top Democratic nominees for Senate: James Talarico in Texas, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Josh Turek in Iowa.
The ads provide an early glimpse at the role that America PAC is carving out for itself in the midterm elections, in which Republicans find themselves in danger of losing control of the Senate and the House. Mr. Musk is expected to extend some of the party’s candidates a lifeline of at least $100 million, all told.
“James Talarico believes there are six genders,” the ad’s narrator says. “Talarico voted to let men play women’s sports and for taxpayer-funded sex changes on kids.” The Talarico campaign disputed those claims, saying that Mr. Talarico did not support gender-reassignment surgery for minors and had tried working with Republicans to amend a “flawed” bill barring transgender children from participating in sports of the opposite genders.
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This issue is a false flag that haters use. They have no legs to stand on and use lies consistently.
Study: Few US adolescents receive gender-affirming medications, surgeries.
Paladino: Mamdani Is Sending A Message To Osama
Bin Laden That Muslims Have “Conquered New York”
“We need to be able to see through this total, absolute farce that they’re trying to pawn off on New Yorkers and across the country. I’m telling you, this was symbolism. It was cryptic. But it was a message.
“The same way it’s a message when he goes down to 9/11 – I hate to even say this, Laura – but you know, it’s a message to Osama bin Laden that, look, ‘We conquered New York.’
“That’s how scary all of this really is, to each and every one of us. New Yorkers need to wake up. He won this election not with born-and-bred New Yorkers.
“He won this election with transplants, ages 18 to 30 years old, making promises he could never keep. So, I am furious.” – NYC Council member Vickie Paladino, last night on Laura Ingraham’s show.
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Fox News exploits retarded racist assholes.
Even Houdini couldn't be contacted from the dead. I doubt Bin-Ladin can receive any better.
As to her claim of "born-and-bred New Yorkers" Search Assitant says this:
"Over 3.2 million residents of New York City were born outside the U.S., indicating that a significant portion of the population is made up of immigrants. The exact number of voters born and bred in the city is not specified, but the city's population is diverse and includes many who are native to New York."
So, that voting block appears not to matter in her issue. And does she think the 18 to 30 year old voters should not count? Typical self-loathing Nazi. Drop dead!
PA State Rep: Rename Lake Erie As “Lake Pennsylvania”
The Norristown Times-Herald reports:
State Rep. David Maloney, R-130th Dist., says Pennsylvania has only one Great Lake, and maybe it is time we put our name on it. Maloney is preparing a resolution urging the President of the United States, Congress, and the United States Secretary of the Interior to take the necessary steps to rename Lake Erie as “Lake Pennsylvania.” The case is about the lake’s modern identity, Maloney said.
“Every summer, Pennsylvanians head toward the lake — north on I-79 from western Pennsylvania, west on I-80 from central and eastern Pennsylvania and along connecting highways from every corner of the Commonwealth — with boats, fishing gear and families in tow,” the Berks County representative said in a press release announcing the move.
“This is Pennsylvania’s only Great Lake. Its modern economy and identity are increasingly tied to the boaters, anglers, families and tourists who come to enjoy it,” Maloney said. “Ohio has plenty of shoreline. New York already has two Great Lakes. Canada has four others. Pennsylvania has one. Let’s call it Lake Pennsylvania!”
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And rename him "Stale Baloney." Besides, Lake Erie also borders on Ohio's shoreline. Like Lake Erie, he is shallow.
Mullin Unveils Creepy Change To DHS Official Seal
Ken Klippenstein reports at Substack:
The Department of Homeland Security has decided that the agency needs a new official seal. Where the ubiquitous American eagle faced the direction of the olive branches in its right talon, now the eagle will face the opposite direction — towards the arrows it clasps in its other talon.
“We’re actually changing our seal to make it look towards the arrows because … when it looks towards the arrows is when it means we’re at war,” Secretary Markwayne Mullin revealed in a Fox News interview this weekend. “Homeland Security is at war every single day against bad actors trying to hurt our backyards, and we’re not gonna allow that to happen.” So in other words, the United States is at war here at home — but Iran somehow isn’t a war. What?
“If you look at most of our seals throughout all the agencies, the eagle looks to the palm leaf because that’s in a time of peace,” Mullin said in the interview. If anything, Mullin is underselling the significance. All federal agencies’ seals depict the peacetime eagle facing the palm leaf, not just “most.”
"How fucking stupid can you be midget Mark" — Dwight Williamson (comments)
"So DHS admits it’s at war with the American people. That’s what happens under dictatorships." — Uncle Mark’s Mugshot (comments)
"This little pipsqueak again." — kladinvt (comments)
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JohnWayne Sullin thinks looking at arrows makes him tough. We can't wait to see him get his ass kicked in a fight with a transgender!
BREAKING: LSU Could Be Booted From the SEC For Trying to Add Ex-NFLers to Roster — Mediaite|Kathianne Boniello
Louisiana State University is reportedly facing expulsion from the Southeastern Conference for football coach Lane Kiffin’s bid to add two NFL players to the school’s roster.
The SEC sued LSU last week for allegedly ignoring the group’s rule barring NFL players from being signed by college teams.
The SEC has set a meeting for Thursday to decide the school’s fate, according to Yahoo! sports reporter Ross Dellenger, who posted screenshots on X of the latest court filings in the case:
The SEC has scheduled a meeting Thursday to “decide whether to terminate Louisiana State University (“LSU”) as an SEC member institution pursuant to Section 3.1.5 of the SEC Constitution and Bylaw.”
Kiffin said he decided not to roster Dae’Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris, who have previously been participants in the NFL preseason, in “the best interests of the team” ahead of LSU’s season opener Saturday night against Clemson.
Wright and Harris had signed with the Cleveland Browns and New Orleans Saints, respectively, but had left their professional teams to return to college and play at LSU.
The SEC’s bid to oust LSU came days after veteran ESPN Analyst Paul Finebaum torched Kiffin and LSU on SEC Nation.
In his fiery remarks, Finebaum practically predicted LSU would get the boot.
“We can all wrap our arms around Lane Kiffin and say he’s lovable, and he’s a great coach but in the end he’s a child. He’s a 51-year-old man behaving like a 16-year-old. And the worst part — there are no adults in the room,” he said.
“I thought all college campuses have an athletic director. The one at LSU has been nowhere to be found,” he continued, adding, “The president, Wade Rousse, has been nowhere to be found.”...
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Whoops! It was bound to happen. Now they can join Notre Dame as an independent and form the new "Arrogant Bastard Conference." I'm sure it will be a great success.
DOJ Will Starve The Poor If States Don’t Turn In Their Undocumented Immigrants — Wonkette|Robyn Pennacchia
In which Mickey Mouse is so poor he has to cut bread so thin it’s transparent. Image: Mickey and the Beanstalk
In a move that seems not entirely unlike the kind of solution one would give in a psychological assessment designed to determine whether or not they are a sociopath, the Department of Justice this week announced a new and disturbingly cruel plan meant to take advantage of the fact that Democrats tend to care whether or not poor people live or die or starve in order to force them to turn their undocumented immigrants over to the Department of Homeland Security.
Specifically, the DOJ has issued a new opinion announcing that states that refuse to report all of their known undocumented immigrants to the DHS so they can round them up, tear them from their families, and send them off to random countries where they don’t know anyone and have never been will no longer receive funding for their Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs.
Why? Because they’re just horrible people who hate poor people and don’t care if they live or die or starve.
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The dystopia Trump has brought to our country is devestating. Cruelty is their MO. It appears they want to rid the country of anyone other than the extremely wealthy and allow AI to take care of all wealthy hman needs. This shows that direction.
A vote for Trump is a vote against your very existence!
Texas cities say Abbott’s proposal to disband their electric companies won’t lower costs — The Texas Tribune|Paul Cobler
On the campaign trail, the governor said dismantling city-owned utilities will save customers money by introducing competition.
The cities of Austin and San Antonio stand to lose hundreds of millions in revenue each year if a proposal by Gov. Greg Abbott to disband their energy utilities is enacted by the Legislature.
That’s the point, say supporters of the proposal, who argue that money should be going to lower customers’ electricity bills rather than city priorities.
San Antonio and Austin have the state’s two largest city-owned electric utilities, which say they offer among the cheapest electricity rates in the state because they operate as nonprofit electric companies that send every dollar they earn back to their communities, city and utility officials said. That money funds city services like libraries, parks and first responder operations, and the governor’s proposal would actually drive up electric rates for customers and be costly to enact, they said....
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More of putting oligarchs in charge of everything. The wealthy class will get it all. The rest simply die off.
Germany’s Far-Right and Trump’s Billionaires Are Proving FDR’s Darkest Warning Was Right — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
For forty years America restrained concentrated wealth and built the largest middle class in history. Then billionaires rewrote the rules, bought political power, and began taking democracy apart
While Americans were celebrating this Labor Day weekend, in Magdenburg, Germany a 35-year-old neofascist, Ulrich Siegmund, told a cheering crowd that his rightwing Alternative für Deutschland party was “taking our country back.” They’d just pulled 44 percent of the vote in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, double what it’d been just five years ago.
Their platform was simple: expel brown-skinned immigrants, dump the EU and NATO to instead build an alliance with Russia, and tear up the tech, climate, and energy rules so the fossil fuel and tech billionaires could take over Germany’s government like they are America’s under Trump.
It was a stunning victory for Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, who all went online (Putin through spokesman Kirill Dmitriev) and immediately congratulated the heirs to Hitler’s party on their showing in the election.
That same weekend, Fareed Zakaria aired a conversation with Chrystia Freeland, Francis Fukuyama, and David French about why liberal democracy is in retreat, and Freeland argued that China’s so-far-successful model of state-directed capitalism is the biggest threat to democracy around the world.
And there’s a lot of truth in that, since China’s success proves that capitalism doesn’t need democracy to flourish and, in fact, may do even better in an authoritarian state like modern China and 1930s Germany.
Become a Hartmann Report Supporter
But the most serious threat to American democracy isn’t coming from Beijing; it’s coming out of Wichita, Silicon Valley, Mar-a-Lago, and from Republicans in black robes who’ve been taking gifts from billionaires for years. Here’s why.
At the end of the day, capitalism is just a game we play, which is why pro football is such a good analogy. Football is a phenomenal engine for producing it’s goal — entertainment — and it works because there are rules, referees who enforce them, and a league that ruthlessly punishes cheaters.
But imagine a Trump-run NFL announcing that whichever team wrote the biggest check to the league’s head guy could put fourteen men on the field, pull face masks, and throw kidney punches with no flags. The richest team would win every game, the entertainment value would ultimately collapse, and within a few seasons the game itself would be dead....
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Fascism has destroyed our U.S.
Trump Regime Triggered By Accurate Map Of World, Because They’re F*cking Racist Loser Babies — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
The Nazis did something appalling this weekend while you were having your Labor Day beefs and sauerkrauts. No, not the thing where Germans in one state gave literally the new German version of the Nazi party its largest share of the vote ever, a party that’s run by an Aryan lesbian married to a Sri Lankan woman who lives in Switzerland and thinks she’s the “good kind” of every minority group to which she is a member or adjacent. JFC, fascists are all the same sad fuckin’ racist pieces of shit, no matter where you go.
No, this happened before that, in the UN General Assembly.
Remember that famous episode from The West Wing about the maps, where they all learn for the first time (it was the 1990s) that things are not as they seem? That Greenland actually is not as big as Donald Trump stupidly thinks it is? And Africa is very a whole bunch bigger? And in general lots of European, white places in the world are a whole lot less great big than they like to think they are?
Well, the UN General Assembly had a vote to move away from the famously faulty (and white supremacist) Mercator projection, and move to a more fair representation that shows Africa in all its enormity.
Can you guess how that vote went? If you guessed it was 164 “ayes” to one sad, whimpering, masculinity-deficient “nay,” and that the nay came from the softest, most cucked, least manly American regime ever, you nailed it. (There were six abstentions. We’ll get to those in a minute.)
As the Washington Post explains, the African nation of Togo led the charge for the resolution, on behalf of the African Union.
The vote followed a “Correct the Map” campaign backed by the African Union andled by Togo. The campaign argued that the Mercator map, developed by Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator in 1569, misrepresents the size of continents, particularly Africa, and carries unfair connotations of power and privilege.
“For over 450 years, we have based our understanding of Africa, and the world, on a map that is wrong!” the campaign said. “In fact, you could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe into Africa and still have land to spare.”
And that is what the flaccid loser US under Trump could not handle. The country released a whiny ass statement from Yaryna Ferencevych, US deputy representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, that explained why we are such fucking babies:
This resolution mocks the work and purpose of this institution. While this initiative is presented as an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions, the United States clearly sees it cannot be separated from the much larger and more radical ideological project it belongs to — as its most vocal and committed proponents plainly and openly state.
Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th century, and their role in promoting reparations and “cognitive justice.” Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility. When the United Nations questions why it is losing legitimacy in the world, and is not taken seriously, time and again, we point to resolutions such as this.
Blah blah blah DEI, blah blah blah reparations, fuck you, shut up, white Republican fascist lady....
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Trump is a snowfllake.
Ticking time bomb: The real reason everything is about to cost more — Alternet|Amy Goodman
...The U.S. national debt, which recently topped $40 trillion, is “one of the many signs of an economy and of an empire that is now in decline,” says Wolff. “There is an enormous increase in defense spending, or now war spending, that is scheduled, and no comparable increase in revenue.”...
And to give you an example, the average price of a ship going through in February was $55,000, the fee; the latest number, $5+ million. That’s a hundred times larger.
And why is that important for everybody, beside the obvious? It’s going to be inflationary for us. All the goods that are going through there that end up being consumer goods will have to be priced at a higher price to cover the higher cost. That’s a direct outcome. If you hadn’t made war on Iran, the Strait of Hormuz would have been open as it was before the war. So, this is right on the government of the United States. Their decision led to this burden. And because it’s only been going on for a few months, the impact on the prices we pay is about to unload itself. It’s just as dramatic, for example, as the crazy price of jet fuel, of diesel fuel, because that’s also wrapped up in this story....
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Prepare for the financial collapse that is coming as best you can. It's going to be a disaster for Americans.
Who’s really to blame for the US’ historic defense blunder — Alternet|Alex Henderson
U.S. President Donald Trump continues to insist that his ongoing war with Iran is necessarily in order to prevent the country's regime from developing a nuclear weapon. But according to conservative journalist David Drucker, the United States is facing a major threat from a military/national security standpoint: a depleted supply of crucial weapons.
Drucker, in a Bloomberg News opinion column, explains, "The U.S. still maintains the world's most powerful military. Those unmatched capabilities provide deterrence, global influence and economic prosperity. There's just one problem: We're running out of bullets. In Washington DC, the preferred parlance is 'munitions shortage,' a development that some military analysts are calling a crisis. In plain English: Stockpiles of critical offensive and defensive missiles are severely depleted and shrinking, and our domestic industrial base is inadequate to the task of swift replenishment."
The conservative writer continues, "Worse than that, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are dithering, as is lawmakers' habit when bipartisan cooperation and difficult votes are required. President Donald Trump, for his part, is insisting — predictably — that this issue is a fiction perpetrated and perpetuated by a 'treasonous' media. This challenge is hardly the fault of this Congress, or this president, alone. But it does exist, and it is jeopardizing military readiness, limiting America's strategic options and limiting — to borrow Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's favorite word — lethality."...
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In other words, we've spent ourselves helpless while Trump has lined his pockets.
GOP Senator Sued 700+ Patients Over Medical Debt
The New York Times reports:
It was Easter weekend in 2007 when a police car pulled up to Joe Vasquez’s home in rural Kansas. A doctor had filed a lawsuit against him and his wife over an unpaid $4,561 bill from her emergency hysterectomy three years earlier. They had missed a court date, and the doctor’s lawyers asked the court to issue an arrest warrant. Police took the couple into custody as their grandchildren prepared for an egg hunt, Mr. Vasquez said. They spent two days in jail before their son could borrow the money to post bond.
“We had no money to pay,” said Mr. Vasquez, now 68. At the time, his wife was working at a manufacturing plant and he was on disability, he said. The doctor who sued the couple was Roger Marshall, now a senator from Kansas. Mr. Marshall, a Republican who is seeking re-election this fall, filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, according to a New York Times analysis of Kansas court records.
Patients were arrested in 81 of those cases for missing court dates, the record show. In an additional 13 lawsuits, Mr. Marshall’s lawyers sought warrants but it is unclear whether an arrest occurred. They also garnished patients’ paychecks and bank accounts. They routinely charged patients an 18 percent annual interest rate. The unpaid bills ranged from several thousand dollars to as little as $101.
Read the full article. Gift link below. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/us/politics/roger-marshall-obgyn-doctor-debts.html?unlocked_article_code=1._lA.cZq9.0HVzhLJI14z4&smid=nytcore-ios-share
Marshall recently appeared here when he declared that Biden’s migrants brought the screwworm to America “on their pets and on their flesh.” He has also declared that bombing Iran is more important to Americans than paying high prices for gasoline and that not filing an Obamacare claim is “evidence of fraud.” Among his 2026 campaign pledges is “stopping drag queens.”
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Bleeding stones, is he? Figures. A heartless fascist turd does this shit.
Ex-Kennedy Center Chair Buys Removed Sculpture
The New York Times reports:
The billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein has purchased the abstract sculpture called “Blue” that was removed from the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last week, according to two people familiar with the sale. It will eventually be displayed in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art, the people said.
Mr. Rubenstein, a major arts donor, was chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board until he was ousted in early 2025 during President Trump’s takeover. He is the chairman of the board of trustees at the National Gallery.
He purchased the sculpture from a foundation dedicated to its artist, Joel Shapiro, which received the artwork after its removal. One of the people familiar with the sale said the price was more than $2 million. The sculpture was deinstalled with no prior notice or explanation from the institution, drawing a flurry of questions and objections from local patrons who considered it a landmark overlooking the Potomac River.
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It will be re-installed there when the Nazi bastard that had it removed is in prison.
Veterans Ramp Up Fight Against Trump’s Arch [VIDEO]
The Washington Post reports:
Veterans and Democrats are escalating efforts to prevent construction on President Donald Trump’s planned arch as the anticipated start of site work approaches, arguing the project is illegal and would diminish the experience of visiting nearby Arlington National Cemetery. VoteVets, a political organization aligned with Democratic veterans, on Tuesday launched a new messaging campaign to mobilize more veterans against the planned 250-foot-tall arch.
In a 2 1/2-minute video, which was first shared with The Washington Post, speakers call attention to the Trump administration’s stated plan to spend 20 hours per day building the arch over several years, which they note could conflict with military burials. The arch also would feature an observation deck for tourists to gaze at the city — and look out at the cemetery. “We don’t need tourists overlooking funerals. I’m just appalled,” Karen Meredith, a Gold Star mother whose son is buried at Arlington, said in the video.
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What real American soldiers do: FIGHT OUR ENEMY!
Trump: Gas Will Be Below $2 “When We Win The War”
“Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA!” – Trump, posting last night to Truth Social as regular gas and diesel fuel continues to reach record highs....
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Or when hell freezes over, whichever occurs first!
Elon Musk Is Insisting He Knows More About Chess Than Chess.com — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Is being the world’s richest man not enough for Elon Musk?
He must also have us all believe that he’s a genius, sui generis, with a mind so mighty that it’s wasted on supposedly intellectual pastimes like “chess.”
He’s so convinced that the board game is beneath him, in fact, that he’s begun arguing about it with… Chess.com, a leading source of expertise and chess AI.
The inane saga kicked off yesterday on X — where else — when Musk responded to a post about all the possible moves you can make in chess. To a mind as omniscient as Musk’s, the number — a mere 40 orders of magnitude more than all the atoms in the observable universe — wasn’t sufficiently large enough to be interesting.
“The actual number of moves that are not utterly stupid in chess is tiny,” he claimed, “and chess will be fully solved one day.”
Here, Chess.com entered the fray by responding with a succinct rejoinder: “skill issue.”
The bait worked.
“Chess is hard for humans, but not for computers. One day, it will be fully solved like checkers,” Musk wrote, essentially repeating himself. “Between now and then, or even after, have fun. People enjoy many games/sports where machines are vastly better.”
Indeed, humans who aren’t intelligent as Musk, in their feeble-mindedness and fleeting time on this planet, may enjoy activities such as games and sports, blissfully unaware that a hypothetical machine may hypothetically make mince meat of those activities one day. And yet, as Musk admitted, he’s choosing to waste his time “arguing with some random intern.” (“I’m a full-time employee,” the Chess.com account clarified.)
Musk also went on about how an artificial superintelligence — something we don’t even know is possible to build — will “figure out ways to solve and compress that are far beyond what we could possibly comprehend.” Then he cited some conversations he had with his personal AI chatbot, Grok, as if that put matters to bed.
There’s certainly an interesting intellectual debate to be had about “solving” chess — something that actual mathematicians have explored and tried to tackle — but Musk’s arguments seem to be driven solely by contempt. The board game is a long-held bugbear of his.
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If the omnipotent "genius" is so empowred why isn't he the Chess champion of the world? Don't cop out on the old "I have no interest" bullshit. Put up or shut up, big mouth.
Axios: America’s Groceries Are Getting Less Safe To Eat
Axios reports:
Plenty of Americans feel like they’re forking over a fortune for groceries—only to get hit with a recall notice that forces them to throw that expensive food out. While grocery prices are driven by complex trade and energy costs, the safety net meant to keep them safe to eat is fraying, creating a dual crisis of affordability and safety. The FDA recently hit a record 19 simultaneous outbreak investigations, covering everything from infant formula to jalapeños.
It can be really, really scary out there,” Lauren Borsheim, a food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch, tells Axios. “The Trump administration since 2025 has really just dismantled many of the fundamental protections we need to keep our food supply safe.” Food-safety advocates are concerned about declining federal surveillance after the Trump administration eliminated or pushed out thousands of workers across the CDC, FDA and USDA. Those cuts prompted federal officials to say they plan to do fewer inspections.
Read the full article. Last week Trump signed an executive order allowing beef and pork producers to bypass USDA inspections.
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Our food supply will continue to be tainted due to vasnishing regualtions and less food as well.
WH Moves To Defund Colorado School District Over “61 Boys On Girls’ Teams” (There Are Actually Zero)
The New York Times reports:
Rob Stein had been interim school superintendent in Jefferson County, Colo., for 22 days when he sued the Trump administration this summer over demands to change their transgender-inclusive policies. Dr. Stein and other district officials say they had no choice. The cash-strapped district, Jeffco Public Schools, risked losing all $50 million of its federal funding for school meals and special education if they refused. But if they acquiesced, they concluded, they would violate state laws that protect transgender students from discrimination.
The district said the Trump administration had misinterpreted the information. Though the records show male participants on girls' teams, they were team managers and mascots, not athletes. Asked about the discrepancy, an Education Department spokesperson repeated that federal investigators determined male participants had "at least 61 roster spots on girls' sports teams."
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They are much the same as Don Quixote fighting his windmills. They only wish they could find what they are looking for. If they don't, they create is as much hooie as they can make up lies about it. Vote these shitbags out of office.
Transgender people have the same rights that are enumerated in our Constitution.
WH Insider Tells “Bitching Minorities With Nappy-Ass Head Of Hair” To Renounce Their American Citizenship
We Got This Covered reports:
Former Chief Counsel for Nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, and now influential MAGA figure and close Trump ally Mike Davis has vented about “b—hing minorities”. Davis, speaking on X, proposed a solution in which minorities could be paid to leave the United States on the basis that they renounce their citizenship.
Davis said, in reference to a video of Socialism 2026 speaker Raven Schwam-Curtis discussing settler colonialism: Dear B—hing Minorities: Here’s my proposal for your reparations: One-way tickets anywhere. 6 months of living expenses. Renounce your U.S. citizenship. Never come back. Good luck. You’ll need it. (Especially with that nappy-ass head of hair.)” It’s safe to say Davis’ idea hasn’t been warmly received.
Read the full article.
In November 2024, Davis, who was among Trump’s candidates for Attorney General, posted this about Trump’s critics: “I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall.”
Davis also appeared here that month with he threatened to imprison “fat ass” New York Attorney General Letitia James.
In August 2024, Davis appeared here when he threatened to sue any publication or social media user who referred to Trump as a “convicted felon.”
In April 2024, he appeared here when he vowed to imprison Trump’s critics and prosecute Barack Obama for murder.
In February 2024, we heard from him when he declared, “What’s so bad about Christian nationalism?”
His first appearance here came in 2023 when he threatened to “arrest and deport” journalist Mehdi Hasan and throw gay reporter Tim Miller in a women’s prison.
Shortly after Trump’s reelection, Davis lobbied to be Trump’s “Secretary of Retribution.”
“As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
- Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Letters — Karl Dubhe IV (comments)
"I have a better idea, mr. Davis. If you hate living in a country with "minorities"so so much, why don't you leave?" — 2guysnamedjoe (comments)
"former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch
Well, that checks." — 2guysnamedjoe (comments)
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Good luck with your assault party, screwball. Most of us have weapons and know how to use them. Prior service, dude.
So far you Nazis have not jailed Letitia James, although you've tried very hard to do so. Typical racism.
Trump IS a convicted felon. Of that he can be certain.
Christian Nationalism is opposed to the U.S. Constitution.
A women's prison is where he might get a date but little chance of either of those things happening.
Those minorites he's referring to are American citizens with the same rights that he has. This is making his asshole so tight he can hardly breathe!
Hate Pastor’s Anti-Trans Banners Go Up In Mobile
Far-right evangelical site Charisma News reports:
Pastor Travis Johnson is carrying a biblical defense of children and the family directly into the heart of downtown Mobile. Throughout September, banners declaring “Protect Our Children From Gender Ideology” are displayed along Government Street, around City Hall and near several of the city’s prominent landmarks.
The signs recognize Child Awareness Month and feature a family walking toward a church alongside an American flag and an Alabama cityscape.
The campaign began after Johnson learned that privately funded Pride Month banners had been permitted on Mobile’s public light poles. He decided Christians should have the same opportunity to publicly express a biblical message about children and the nuclear family.
Read the full article. My June 2026 report on Johnson’s crusade is here. As you’ll see in the final tweet below, Johnson in June posted an AI clip showing a toddler throwing a rainbow flag into a garbage can.
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We will duly note his name for future reference. I'm sure you know why.
FCC Chief Brendan Carr Bends The Knee To His Orange Clown God — Crooks and Liars|Karoli Kuns
Brendan Carr can't punish Kristen Welker for uttering a true statement, but he's sure going to try to nail her for something.
You may recall that in late August Welker made the true statement that Trump's endorsement results have been "mixed," which sent Hair Furor into a screaming rage whereupon he called upon his FCC goon to "punish her."
Trump loves to punish women. I'm sure we'd see more evidence of that if we ever saw the Epstein files. But I digress.
Brendan Carr made an appearance on Fox News with Peter Doocy, who asked him whether or not he was going to carry out Hair Furor's wishes for some "punishment" for the Black woman who spoke truth on NBC's air waves.
Carr, acting in his capacity as Hair Furor's endorser, said, "Well, one thing that President Trump gets fundamentally is that broadcast TV is completely different than other forms of distribution, including cable. And so many broadcasters right now, they want to break the deal that they cut with the American people."
Oh, I see. Telling the truth is somehow betraying the deal they have for public airwaves?
Carr continued, "They get billions of dollars in taxpayer effectively subsidized distribution. And what they're supposed to do in exchange is operate in the public interest, not some sort of narrow partisan interest."
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Why doesn't this Nazi wear his swastika armband every day? We all know he wants to.
Mounting 'mystery meat' threats linked by expert to surprising source — Melania Trump — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
Americans risk exposure to anti-parasite drugs and banned antibiotics in chunks of years-old, potentially rotten meat after a controversial friend of Melania Trump's was invited for a meeting at the White House, according to a new analysis.
Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation," penned an opinion piece for the New York Times on Monday in which he strenuously warned Americans to avoid President Donald Trump's 660 million pounds of inexpensive "mystery meat."
"They’re small chunks of frozen meat that could have been kept in cold storage overseas for years," wrote Schlosser. "They are the quintessence of generic industrial meat, imported here to be subsequently processed in massive grinders that combine pieces of tens of thousands of cattle from multiple countries, mainly into fast food hamburgers."
Schlosser argued that the mysterious source of this meat presents a risk because of the problematic processing practices of meat exporters abroad.
Beef from Uruguay was found to be tainted with an anti-parasitic drug and Argentinian beef has repeatedly tested positive for a banned antibiotic that can cause serious blood disorders, Schlosser reported.
Those countries have nothing on Brazil, the world's largest beef exporter.
"In 2017, the Brazilian federal police raided nearly 200 meatpacking plants after allegations that government inspectors and politicians were being bribed to allow the sale of contaminated beef," Schlosser wrote.
"Rotten meat treated with ascorbic acid and other chemicals to mask the contamination had been sold to hospitals and schools in Brazil and also been exported."
In August, Trump announced the U.S. United States would allow up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef into the country, without a usual tariff, for the next 90 days — claiming it would lower prices for American consumers.
But Schlosser argued that the economics aren't going to pan out for American cattle ranchers or consumers, but meatpacking companies and fast food chains....
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Hmm. It appears that horse meat is much better than the frozen rot we're getting for the suckers at the drive-throughs. "Let them eat shit!"
Former Air Force Sec: “I Couldn’t Serve” Under Trump
The Hill reports:
Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said Sunday he “couldn’t serve” in the Trump administration, blasting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership of the Pentagon. “I’ve never seen an attempt to politicize our military like the one being conducted by Pete Hegseth,” Kendall told Martha Raddatz on ABC News’s “This Week.” Kendall, who led the Air Force during the Biden administration, said Hegseth imposing his will on the armed services “is rippling all the way down through the ranks” of the military.
“It’s causing people to be afraid and … in many cases I think he’s not getting good advice. Because people are afraid to tell him things that he doesn’t want to hear,” he told Raddatz, referring to the Defense secretary. “Very good people that I know are leaving because of the climate of fear and because of the things the military is being asked to do,” Kendall added.
Given that “climate of fear” Kendall referenced, the former Air Force secretary said senior military officers have an “obligation” to “stand up” to administration officials attempting to “do something which is morally wrong, unethical” or illegal.
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This is what a patriot does. He serves our Constitution, not a facist racist asshole.
“South Park” Trolls Trump After Winning Emmy Award
South Park has taken home its fifth Emmy and used the win to troll its favorite target: Donald Trump. At the 78th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards on Sunday night, the Comedy Central sitcom won Outstanding Animated Program. To celebrate the win, the official South Park social media accounts posted a humiliating graphic of the president. In the photo, Trump, with his pants down, is seen holding the Emmy award he has never won.
The 80-year-old president and former reality TV star is a big fan of receiving any sort of award but never managed to bag an Emmy for The Apprentice. He has routinely claimed he was robbed. “I got screwed out of an Emmy!” he declared in the final episode of Celebrity Apprentice. “Everybody thought I was going to win it! In fact, when they announced the winner, I stood up before the winner was announced.” He didn’t hide his anger at never winning an Emmy, claiming that the process is all political.
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South Park has won 5 Emmys. Trump has only been nominted twice and lost. Don't you hate losers? Of course you do!
WSJ: MAGA Merchandise Stores Are Going Broke
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Donald “Whitey” Taylor made a fortune from sales at Trump Town USA, his store selling Make America Great Again apparel and memorabilia related to President Trump.
Taylor’s Boones Mill store—a former church—brought in upwards of $15,000 a day in 2024, the best sales pace in the business’s 11-year history, he said. But more than a year into Trump’s second term, sales have sunk. Taylor, 76 years old, said he now averages just $1,500 a day, a slump he attributes to customers’ struggles with higher gas prices due to the Iran war and persistent inflation.
Many MAGA-centered merchandise retailers and their suppliers are seeing sales dwindle, according to interviews with wholesalers, sales representatives, business owners and employees. As the president’s approval rating hovers near all-time lows, imperiling Republicans’ control of Congress, store owners blame a stagnant economy and weaker MAGA enthusiasm for lower sales. Some stores are closing permanently.
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Just as our country is doing under Trump, the loser! We are such suckers!
Has the Media Normalized the GOP’s Voter Suppression Right Before Our Very Eyes? — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
For decades, reporters have treated hours-long voting lines as a “normal” feature of Election Day instead of investigating why some Americans consistently face greater barriers to the ballot.
For over 50 years, our media has been covering up Republican voter suppression efforts. This year, though, they’re getting so obvious that it’ll be interesting to see if they continue to whitewash the practice.
Remember all those reports you’ve seen on TV during previous elections, where the reporter is outside a polling place with a line stretching around the block?
In the 2008 election, for example, CNN anchor Kirin Chetry noted that in Ohio:
“It was, after all, 120,000 votes that made the difference in that state in 2004 and gave the win to now President Bush.”
Republicans controlled the voting in Ohio, so they rigged polling places so people in mostly-Black, Hispanic, and student areas would have to wait hours and hours in line to vote, knowing that these were also the people most likely to be paid hourly and so would be unwilling to stand in line for hours to vote.
Here’s how it played on CNN from their November 4, 2008 transcript:
“MARY SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Kiran, certainly, around Ohio, board of election officials are bracing for long lines. And this is because the state is expecting record turnout, 80 percent of Ohio’s voters are expected to turn out and about a quarter of the voters vote early.
“And, of course, we’ve been seeing those long lines over the last several days in Columbus where voters had to wait several hours to cast a ballot, but for the most part, people were in good spirits. And the enthusiasm outweighs the frustrations.”
No mention that this is the #1 voter suppression technique that Republicans have been using in the states they control ever since the 1960s.
In that election, lines in Black neighborhoods in Republican-run Georgia ran eight to ten hours, four hours in Blue parts of Republican-run Florida, and the same in Democratic strongholds in Republican-run Virginia. As CNN’s Campbell Brown reported:
“Take a look at this. Early voting lines around Atlanta today were two, four and at times even 10 hours long, pretty maddening. And, unfortunately, for the impatient among us, it’s been the same in some of the other early voting states as well. But don’t let that dampen your enthusiasm.”
Nobody bothered to mention that the long lines are almost entirely in heavily-Democratic precincts. I’ve been voting since I was 18 — including a decade in Georgia — but have always lived in mostly-white mostly-upper-middle class neighborhoods so I’ve never waited more than 15 minutes to vote.
But the media seems to consistently miss that disparity or the reason Republicans always set it up, instead telling the stories of “brave” voters so “dedicated” to democracy that they’ll stand in line for hours....
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We'll need spines to do all we can to eliminate Trump fascism in November. It's victory or death.
Data Center Caught Watering Its Lavish Lawn While Human Neighbors Are on Year-Long Water Restriction — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
When the Denver board of Water Commissioners approved stage one drought restrictions back in March, they did so facing some of the driest conditions in decades. According to the US Drought Monitor, the watershed sourced for Denver’s water utility is experiencing a “severe to exceptional drought,” while the Denver metropolitan area has been in a “severe drought.”
Yet as some 1.5 million customers honor the restrictions, one major customer is evidently refusing to close the tap: a brand new AI data center.
In a now-viral video circulating on social media, an unidentified resident of Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood filmed the massive lawn of a data center being sprayed with copious amounts of water.
“You better believe that they are watering their entire green with so many sprinklers that it’s literally making a giant pond,” the woman says....
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Death to Flock cameras and Data Centers.
New Mexico officials reject Trump post proposing state name change — Julia Goldbert, Source New Mexico
New Mexico Democratic elected officials quickly denounced a Sunday post on Truth Social by President Donald Trump that proposed, visually, changing New Mexico’s name to New America.
Trump’s post followed a satirical post that inaccurately claimed he had signed an executive order to that effect, which the fact-checking site Snopes quickly debunked.
The satirical post followed Trump’s renaming, by executive order, Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico to Lake America and the Gulf of America, respectively.
While Trump has not signed an executive order renaming New Mexico, he did post a map that showed the word “Mexico” crossed out in New Mexico’s name and replaced by America in his Truth Social post, which the official White House X account reposted.
Trump, subsequently, wrote on Truth Social: “Many people suggested changing the name of New Mexico, one of the great vote cheating states of all time, to NEW AMERICA. So much more prestigious and beautiful for the people of that potentially incredible State. Wow, I Love It!!!”
New Mexico Democratic officials did not share the sentiment.
“Three things I will always call by their actual names,” U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) wrote on social media:
“The Gulf of Mexico
Lake Ontario
New Mexico.”
“It’s New Mexico, always has been and always will be,” U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) wrote. “Just like how you’ll always be a sinvergüenza and corrupt.”
“Oh hell no,” U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, who represents the state’s 1st Congressional District, wrote. “Our state’s name carries generations of history, culture, and family—and it belongs to us. We’re New Mexicans. Period.”...
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Trump is one stupid clusterfuck. Our country is sick of his retarded bullying. He's the worst racist pile of shit that ever lived.
It is surprising that, as Hitler did, he hasn't come up with a new name for Washington, DC such as TRUMPLANDIA! HItler chose "Germania!"
Dem Candidate Attacked Right After Mullin Blames Dems For Violence — Crooks and Liars|Chris capper Liebenthal
Markwayne Mullin blamed Democrats for violent rhetoric just hours before Democratic candidate Amy Acton got attacked.
...Just hours after Mullin was making an ass out of himself on TV, Democratic Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton was attacked during a campaign event:
According to a statement put out by Acton's campaign, an armed individual lunged at Acton while she was at the Canfield Fair in Mahoning County, resulting in the injuries to multiple people who were nearby.
A statement attributed to Addie Bullock, Acton's campaign communications director, said that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate was "grateful" for the swift law enforcement response, but did not directly address whether Acton was injured.
"This kind of violence has no place in Ohio. Dr. Acton will always stand up to the chaos, hate, and vitriol that pits us against one another," continued Bullock.
It was confirmed that several people were injured and that the assailant, who was taken into custody, had multiple weapons on him. A later report confirmed that the suspect, Patrick Havas, had a phone or something like a phone in his hand but also had two guns. He shoved his way to the front, knocking two people down in the process. Dr. Acton remained on the scene to assist those who were injured.
Vivek Ramaswamy's press office issued a statement shortly after the attack, condemning it and all political violence.
What is missing is any mention of DHS or Mullin. Maybe he was too busy preparing his speech for Trumpalooza and couldn't speak with his lips firmly on Trump's diapered ass....
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Mullin is a sniveling rat-faced git. He will be called one day for it.
Treasury Secretary Compares Canada To A 'Little Yippy Dog' — Crooks and Liars|Heather
Hey Scott, that "little yippy dog" is about to bite us square in the ass.
Could this clown be any more condescending? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was laughing at Canada's military capabilities last week during an interview on CNBC, and this Saturday during an interview with Trump's daughter-in-law on Fox, he compared the country to a "little yippy dog" when asked about Trump's failed attempt to bully them over the trade deal that Trump blew up at the last minute.
TRUMP: I want to talk about our neighbors to the north, Canada. President Trump offered Prime Minister Carney what you say was a highly favorable trade agreement that Carney blew up at the last minute. Canada is expected to impose those retaliatory tariffs. How do you see all of this playing out?
BESSENT: Well, know, Lara, I had a German shepherd, and there was a dachshund that used to antagonize her at the playground. And it kind of reminds me of that. It kind of reminds me of that.
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The yippy dog is speaking here. Where's Kristi Noem? This is not America talk. This is talk from an entitled, out-of-touch, arrogant fool who cannot comprehend politics and coalitions. He offends our country and has shoved a wedge between us and our allies. He must go!
Demented Man Declares US Ownership Of The Moon
Yahoo News reports:
President Donald Trump on Sunday claimed America’s ownership over the moon, sharing glimpses of the natural satellite. “The moon is ours,” he said in a post on Truth Social, attaching a US flag alongside. He published a series of AI-generated posts on the platform, also claiming Strait of Hormuz as US territory.
His name-changing spree also found an unlikely new target when he suggested the state of New Mexico could be renamed to “New America.” “Many people suggested changing the name of New Mexico… to NEW AMERICA,” the Republican president posted on social media. “So much more prestigious and beautiful for the people of that potentially incredible State. Wow, I Love It!!!” he said.
The White House reiterated the idea by reposting an image showing the Mexico part of the state’s name crossed out and replaced with “America.”
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Then ban the filthy Nazi there and let him stay!
Michigan-Western Michigan controversy, explained: How questionable clock reset allowed UM to escape upset — Sporting News
The story of a clusterfuck!
File Under "Retarded America."
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Raised Question: In college football why is the field clock rarely in synch with the official game clock?
Search Assistant answer:
The field clock and the official game clock can be out of sync due to different methods of operation; the field clock is often controlled by the stadium's staff and may not account for all stoppages or timeouts as accurately as the official game clock, which is managed by the officials. Additionally, the official clock may stop for specific game situations, while the field clock continues running unless manually stopped.
Duh, what moron started this stupidity? Case in point: The Western Michigan - Michigan game 9/5/2026. Make the official game clock the one that is displayed on the field and Stop displaying a bogus clock to the world! Otherwise we have reason to believe that the officials are as crooked as Donald Trump!
The answer as far as any search can tell us:
The stadium scoreboard clock is intended to show the official time, but NCAA rules explicitly prohibit stadium clocks from displaying tenths of a second. Because of this, the physical clock visible to fans and players is an approximation that cannot display the level of precision required for final-second replay reviews.
The divergence between the time shown in the stadium and the "true" official time comes down to a few strict logistical and rulebook factors:
1. The "No Tenths of a Second" Rule
Under NCAA Rule 3-2-4-a, public game clocks are forbidden from showing decimals. While sports like basketball use precise, tenth-of-a-second stadium backboard lights, college football operates entirely in whole integers. Because of how stadium clocks count down, a scoreboard showing "0:00" might actually mean there are 0.4 seconds left in the absolute timeline of the game. The broadcast or stadium clock drops a full integer immediately, creating a permanent lag or offset against real time.
Very stupid answer. College basketball has clocks that will display in tenths of a second late in the game. The last five seconds of the shot clock is modified to include tenths of a second, which debuted in the 2012–13 NCAA basketball season.
The very simple answer here is CHANGE YOUR RETARDED RULES AND MAKE ONE CLOCK THAT DISPLAYS IN 10ths OF A SECOND. AT ALL TIMES! EVEN IF YOU HAVE TO COLOR CODE THE NUMBERS!
NCAA = No Competent Authority Allowed!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
New AI Designed to Replace CEOs — Futurism|Frank Landymore
A group of software engineers who say they were fired by their bosses because of AI are giving their former employers a taste of their own medicine.
With the powers of spite and friendship, they’ve built “OpenExecutive,” an AI system designed to do the work of a CEO, if not the entire c-suite, TechRadar reports.
“Work happens around the clock. Leadership doesn’t scale with it,” a demo video begins, as a stock music track called “Corporate Music Uplifting” plays in the background.
The team describes their AI system, perhaps with their tongues in their cheeks, as a “senior advisor with Harvard MBA-level knowledge.” Whether you believe that or not probably reflects how much stock you put in Harvard MBAs.
In any case, OpenExecutive is built using several of Anthropic’s Claude AI models, the default being Claude Sonnet 4.6, with Claude Opus 4.7 being reserved for “deep reasoning” tasks.
It recruits eight AI agents that each act as a different top level executive, including the chief strategy officer, chief financial officer, and the head of human resources. Together, they form a single unified “executive persona” — in effect, the CEO.
The developers say that the AI can learn from company documents and remembers its recommendations and decisions — which is more than what you can say for some CEOs who have a conveniently selective memory. If you’re skeptical, you can poke around in the system yourself, since it’s open-source.
Is OpenExecutive actually going to outmode the CEO? Probably not, since, whatever your opinions on them, there’s a lot to being the head of a company that a machine can’t emulate, like taking accountability (okay, bad example). But that’s the thing: you could argue the same thing for their employees, with the notable difference that the rank and file are the ones doing almost all the labor....
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Hopefully, that doesn't include a POTUS as well but how could one be any worse than what we now have?
Surveillance-Happy Police In Shambles After Trump Tariffs Makes Drones Absurdly Expensive — Futurism|Frank Landymore
The surveillance state costs money, people!
Well, tell that to president Trump. On Thursday, he slapped a 100 percent tariff — he sure loves round numbers and levying imports — on larger foreign-made drones.
Trump claimed that this “bolsters national security.” But, ironically, it could be undermining domestic security — at least according to surveillance-happy police departments who’ve gotten used to overlooking their subjects from above, according to a roundup of commentary from Ars Technica.
Speaking to the New York Times, Scott Mlakar, chief of the Lake County Drone Unit outside Cleveland, called the tariffs financially onerous and lamented that it would prevent many communities from buying them, adding that his unit uses them to hunt crime suspects at night and search for lost children.
“Most of this, in our humble opinion, is lobbying by US manufacturers to eliminate foreign competition,” he said. “This is not national security. It’s protectionism.”
The tariff is explicitly designed to target popular Chinese drones, while making exceptions or imposing much lighter tariffs on drones made from allies like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the EU. In particular, these steep duties will apply to drones that use thermal imaging or weigh more than 55 pounds. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission is weighing reclassifying some drone technologies like lidar as “military grade,” Ars noted, which would restrict who can access these drones even further.
Drones have a lot of other practical uses beyond law enforcement, obviously, including monitoring wild fires and assisting rescue operations. Amid heightened backlash against Flock, though, they’ve come to be seen as another surveillance apparatus....
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A boon for filmmakers too. But not so much of a delivery success.
'You're a senator': Scolded GOP lawmaker delivers stunner amid grilling on Pete Hegseth — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
A Republican Senator was held to account Sunday when he tried to dodge a basic question about a member of President Donald Trump's cabinet — then made a startling admission.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) appeared on "Meet the Press" to discuss with host Kristen Welker mounting criticism of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Welker asked Kennedy to comment on Sen. Thom Tillis' (R-NC) renewed call for Hegseth's replacement as the former television personality loses experienced military officials amid a mounting war with Iran.
“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” the North Carolina Republican wrote on X. “I urge the President to find a new leader at the Pentagon who will retain and empower our military talent rather than diminish it."
This prompted Welker to ask Kennedy on Sunday, "Do you still have confidence in Secretary Hegseth?"
The senator scowled and said, "Um."
Then, after a beat, Kennedy smiled as he arrived at a response: "It's not my place to have confidence in him!"
Welker wasn't having it.
"You're a senator," she said
"Let me finish," Kennedy snapped. "He seems to be firing a lot of good people."
Kennedy then made his admission.
"I'm not worried about the personalities," he said. "I'd probably vote for him again."
"The thing that boils my beans the most about these politicians is how cynical they are. They are very aware of how dumb and ignorant the majority of the American public is about how things really work in D.C. and they take full advantage of that. Trump took that cynicism even further and proved that the sky's the limit if you have the guts or lack of shame. Foghorn Leghorn here jokes his way through the whole thing. That's his M.O. Lindsay was just proudly for sale. Cassidy and Collins like to tell you they're "concerned." Many different paths available to you when the public is so out of touch." — darren (comments)
"I guess an Oxford scholarship is on par with a prager university or liberty university scholarship." — Kevin S (comments)
"How much more fucking evidence do you need, Spongegums? He's as useless as tits on a bull." — glenn_storey (comments)
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Clearly, an admission of being a Trump fascist supporter.
He proves Louisiana is a land unto a dark jungle of the retarded with few scattered oases of reason. But it does have a great history in American music.
This bumbling Trump buffoon just humiliated his boss in front of the entire world — Raw Story|John Casey
In what seems like a rotating game of tag, with Donald Trump always being the “tagger,” the latest “it” guy — or, as Trump might aptly put it, “it-iot — is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who this week proved yet again that when you get touched by Donald Trump, it never ends well. Ever.
There’s not enough space in this column to name all the people who have been burned after entering Trump’s orbit. Bessent, unlike others before him, sounded like a solid choice for Treasury secretary when he was nominated and confirmed. He got a whopping 69 votes in the Senate which, in the Trump era, is about as close to unanimous as you can get.
But Bessent’s stock, if you’ll pardon the pun, has been diminished. And this week, he demonstrated that the administration’s favorite approach to international conflict — bully first, build a coalition later, and brag about nothing at the end — works about as well at the Treasury Department as it does at the Pentagon.
Bessent arrived at the G20 finance meeting in Asheville asking the world’s finance ministers to unify behind a sanctions campaign against Iran. He left mostly empty-handed, having annoyedallies by inviting Russia’s finance minister and asking countries to join in sanctions while the United States simultaneously punishes some of those same allies with tariffs, most jarringly Canada.
He also left major business media organizations out of covering the meeting.
The results were predictable. Bessent left the G20 without a joint communiqué because China’s finance minister vetoed the U.S.-drafted text, blocking the required consensus.
But while Bessent was trying to persuade the world to unite against Iran, China’s President Xi Jinping was on the other side of the world doing something far more consequential.
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There must be new adjectives created to better describe these blank-brained bastards!
Trump Judge: There’s No Right To Safe Drinking Water
Mother Jones reports:
On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said. “Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”
That may be true in Mississippi—but on the state level in at least nine US states, and in more than a dozen other countries, clean drinking water is in fact a protected right. In countries including Uruguay and South Africa, a right to clean water is enshrined in the constitution.
Read the full article. Engelhardt, a Federalist Society member, last appeared here in 2021 when he ruled against COVID vaccine mandates for businesses with over 100 employees.
You don’t have a right to safe drinking water, a US court just ruled. A Trump-appointed judge also said Americans have no “constitutional right to truthful information” during a public health crisis.
"Further proof that the Federalist Society needs to be dissolved…preferably in acid." — Uncle Mark’s Mugshot (comments)
"No right to safe drinking water, no right to clean air, no right to untainted food. Unless you pay for it.
I think we've reached the end stage of capitalism" — LeeGP (comments)
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What else could one expect coming out of ?arwin's Waiting Room?"
“The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said.
The First Amendment states: "...or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
So he thinks safe drinking water isn't something our citzens can redress our government for. Denial of safe drinking water is definately a grievance where I come from, stranger. Just another tyrant that thinks he can get away with showing his ass on the stage. Tke the next one out of our country, motherfucker!
Nebraska GOP Loses Bid To Overturn Medical Weed
The Nebraska Examiner reports:
The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday unanimously upheld Nebraska’s two voter-approved medical cannabis laws following a legal challenge to the 2024 petition effort.
Chief Justice Jeffrey Funke, in a 7-0, 49-page opinion, ruled against the lawsuit from former state Sen. John Kuehn of Heartwell, a longtime opponent of medical marijuana, as well as similar arguments from Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen and Attorney General Mike Hilgers. The duo had alleged widespread fraud and “notarial malfeasance” in the petition process.
Kuehn’s appeal sought to get around a Lancaster County District Court judge who affirmed that medical cannabis supporters had enough valid signatures to reach voters in 2024. “This was never about protecting Nebraska law,” Crista Eggers, the executive director of Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana, said in a Friday statement. “It was about whether a handful of elected officials could use the court to override the will of the people.
Read the full article. Independent Nebraska US Senate candidate Dan Osborn reacts below.
Nebraskans voted for medical marijuana, yet Ricketts tried to overturn it.
Today, the Nebraska Supreme Court said NO.
This is bigger than medical marijuana, it’s about the power of our vote.
Today our Supreme Court upheld the power of the people.
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How did these motherfucking dicks forget the people? How did they ever graduate from school? What? They never went there?
Court: WH Can’t Use Database To Seek “Illegal Voters”
Democracy Docket reports:
A federal appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s effort to immediately revive the use of a sweeping immigration database to check voter rolls, leaving in place a ruling that shut down a major piece of President Donald Trump’s anti-voting agenda ahead of the midterms.
In a 2-1 decision, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the administration’s emergency request to pause U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan’s ruling against the Department of Homeland Security’s modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system.
The ruling is another setback for the administration’s efforts to restrict voting ahead of November. And it comes a day after a federal judge blocked the administration from implementing Trump’s anti-mail voting order for the midterms.
Read the full article.
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Vote these goddamn Trump Nazis out in November!
'Plan B': There may be a workaround to Trump's mail-in voting restrictions — Alternet|Matthew Rosa
...“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, said at the time. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”...
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Did the old turd get hit by a bucket of shit? What the fuck is up with the stupid hair color?
You either are a criminal co-conspirator or a patriot when you vote in November.
If you don't vote you're not relevant as a sentient being. Perhaps you never were?
Trump Still Hiding Where His Imported Beef Is Coming From — Crooks and Liars|NewsHound Ellen
President Grifter gives new meaning to the term “mystery meat.”
Donald Trump’s plan to screw U.S. ranchers with imported beef is bad enough. But his deliberate concealment of where and how he’s getting it makes the whole thing stink even more, with whiffs of corruption.
Trump’s obvious nervousness about what he’s up to with what he plans to feed Americans keeps triggering my Spidey senses. It’s pretty clear I’m not the only one.
On Friday, during an event that purported to be about helping ranchers after he infuriated them with his imported beef plan, a reporter asked Trump where the imported beef is coming from.
Trump was evasive. “Well, it’s coming from different places,” he said.
“From which country?” she pressed.
“It’s coming from Argentina. It’s coming from Brazil. It’s coming from a couple of other places,” Trump replied.
Then he quickly changed the subject to boast about how he’s making sure the beef is top quality. “We have our inspectors down there. It’s very clean. It’s very good,” he hastily added.
That should make you suspicious that it will be anything of the sort. From his reflecting pool to his choice of defense secretary, nothing Trump does suggests competent or conscientious leadership.
A second reporter followed up. “Are those countries only Argentina and Brazil, or are there other countries?” she asked.
“Well, there could be other countries, but right now it's primarily Argentina and Brazil. But there could be other countries,” Trump said.
He again quickly changed the subject.
“We're doing it in a very limited fashion because our ranchers can handle it,” he continued, apparently forgetting the event was supposed to show him helping struggling ranchers. Then he seemed to have remembered. “But our ranchers really needed a little bit of help, and our ranches want the prices to be down too,” he said.
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So it's horse meat.
Trump Names New Secretary Of The Army With Zero Military Experience — Heather
What could possibly go wrong?
As we discussed here, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll recently resigned over clashes with Pete Hegseth and Trump, and now he's been replaced with someone with zero military experience: Trump names Adam Telle as acting army secretary following departure of Dan Driscoll:
Telle is currently the assistant secretary of the army for civil works.
“He is a Great Patriot, who is respected by all,” the US president wrote in a Truth Social post. [...]
Telle has been at the Army Office of Civil Works since August 2025, according to Legistorm, a website that tracks lawmakers and Capitol Hill staffers. Before that, Telle spent 20 years mostly working in Congress for lawmakers, including as chief of staff for Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee from 2021 to 2025.
Telle had a job for 18 months working in the White House during Trump’s first term as a special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, Legistorm said. He also spent more than 10 years working for the late Republican Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi....
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From the Land of the Happy Negro. Zero military experience. I'm sure he's no racist.
Trump Reveals He Wants To Build Monuments To Himself Before He's Gone — Conover Kennard
We're all victims of his narcissistic abuse, and he wants that abuse to continue after his death.
Donald J. Trump has essentially acknowledged that the grand construction projects he is pushing around Washington are monuments to himself.
In a revealing interview with New York Magazine, Trump was asked directly about projects such as the proposed 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery. When asked whether he was building monuments to himself, Trump didn't dispute the characterization.
Instead, he agreed—and offered a remarkably straightforward explanation: once he's gone, he doesn't expect anyone else to do it....
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He got that right. Anything he builds will be bulldozed.
Sec. Roadkill Admits That PA Child Died Of Measles
The Hill reports:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged Friday that measles caused the death of an infant in Pennsylvania, after previously questioning the state’s reporting of two measles-related deaths amid a growing outbreak.
Kennedy pointed to findings from Lancaster County coroner Stephen Diamantoni, who confirmed Friday that the six-week-old child died from measles last month.
“The Lancaster County Coroner has now publicly stated that measles caused only the second infant’s death,” Kennedy wrote on social media. Kennedy had previously questioned whether the virus was the cause of the two deaths and asked that the cases reported by Pennsylvania’s health department be removed from the CDC’s national tally.
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The shitbag motherfucker questioned this! Hell awaits him!
WH Wants Paid Child Care For Stay-At-Home Spouses
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President JD Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children, one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families. To do so, officials are seeking to use a Health and Human Services Department fund that was created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could work or go to school.
Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money. The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their child care providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a child care crisis in the country.
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Taking money from the existing child care fund for working parents and hands $9K to married couples with a stay-at-home spouse? Disgustingly stupid. Fuck these retarded Nazis!
Internet Wonders If Trump Has Gone Brunette [VIDEO]
The Daily Beast reports:
Donald Trump’s hair is having another identity crisis. The president arrived in New Jersey on Friday sporting a tousled head of noticeably darker hair, with his familiar side parting suddenly flipped to the opposite side. This comes just weeks after some observers speculated he was using a new hairpiece to augment the sweep of gray/blond hair over his increasingly bald expanse.
Trump has long been sensitive about his hair. On Thursday, while delivering remarks in the Rose Garden, he insisted, “I don’t wear a wig.” Yet he has previously been photographed with a significant bald patch beneath his comb-over, which can appear to be supplemented by a cotton candy-like hairpiece when his hair gets caught in the wind.
Trump pointed to a particularly windy Ohio rally in 2024 as proof that his hair is authentic, arguing that a wig would have blown off his head in the fierce conditions. Trump wore a MAGA hat throughout his Ohio speech.
Trump's new hair color is called:
"Natalie's Idea"
"Burnt Testicles"
"Charcoal Briquette by L'Oréal"
"Mahogany Sludge"
"Chestnut Afterbirth"
"Lustrous Sewage"
"Brown Residue" — Paul Rudnick (X comments)
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Don't forget these:
"Shit Coated Ectoplasm" or "Jabba's Last Bowel Evacuation."
Samuel Alito is complicit in climate disaster — Salon|Troy Farah
The Supreme Court justice has made millions from companies that profit from our planet’s destruction
Thanks to his majority opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which destroyed the constitutional right to abortion in the U.S., or his weird flag-waving during the “Stop the Steal” movement, Samuel Alito is notorious. But the Supreme Court justice’s entanglements with the fossil fuel industry are also worth scrutinizing, especially as the Court prepares to hear a case on whether fossil fuel companies can be held responsible for the damages of climate change.
In 2018, the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, sued oil and gas giants Suncor and ExxonMobil, alleging they were responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating the planet and making Colorado less livable. The extreme heat is causing dwindling snowpack in the state, with far-reaching impacts on agriculture and water supply, not to mention the multi-billion dollar ski industry. The Supreme Court will hear arguments Oct. 5 on whether these corporations can be held responsible for this ongoing crisis.
Despite what appear to be numerous conflicts of interest, Alito has refused to recuse himself from the case. On Monday, a Forbes report analyzed the justice’s newly released 2025 financial disclosures, which reveal a stock portfolio chock-full of investments in the oil, gas and energy sectors. The publication estimated Alito’s net worth at approximately $10 million, of which up to $2.9 million comes from his fossil fuel industry investments between 2005 and 2024, citing a recent analysis from the judicial watchdog group Court Accountability. Alito is still only the second-richest justice on the court, coming in behind Chief Justice John Roberts, but the pair are the only two justices who hold stocks in individual companies.
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Another fascist that should get a prison sentence.
‘Concerning’ Trump health signs flagged by expert: ‘Side of his mouth starting to droop’ — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump exhibited several “concerning” behaviors during a White House meeting earlier this week, behaviors that could point to a number of health-related issues, forensic psychologist John Paul Garrison suggested Friday.
Trump met with some of his top officials on Monday in the Oval Office to publicly discuss his administration’s health care policies, and during the meeting, appeared to doze off several times, as covered by countless media outlets.
Doing a deep analysis of footage of the meeting on Friday, Garrison said one moment involving Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stood out to him.
“As RFK Jr. is trying to say, 'you're the greatest ever, nobody could have done this but you,' President Trump isn't reacting at all,” Garrison said. “Typically, he's gonna smile, he's gonna nod, he's gonna let people know, 'I love people talking about me' — usually, there's a reaction to that. This really does show how out of it he is right now.”
Trump appeared to doze off again following RFK Jr.’s remarks, and exhibited a telling sign, Garrison argued.
“As he's getting tired again, you're noticing this side of his mouth was starting to droop down,” Garrison said. “He's falling asleep a few more times.”
At 80 years old, Trump is the single-oldest person elected to the presidency in U.S. history, and has faced renewed questions about his physical and mental health. He appears to doze off during cabinet meetings with growing frequency, and observers have also noted bruising on his hands, swollen ankles and a rash on his neck....
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This was been noticed and commented on some time ago by other sources. That it hasn't been a news item shows how the media has dropped the ball.
Trump is a physical mess and likely to suffer a collapse soon if not death.
'Impeach everyone responsible': Trump order defying Supreme Court horrifies expert — Raw Story|David Edwards
A new rule from President Donald Trump's administration declaring that U.S.-born children of foreign government employees are not citizens drew immediate ridicule from an immigration expert.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin signed the interim final rule, which U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services filed with the Federal Register late Friday afternoon.
The rule took effect on filing and applies to children born on or after that date, the document says. Publication is scheduled for Sept. 9.
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This evil hateful spiteful dumb retarded decrepit racist motherfucker can't accept law. We can't push him out him fast enough!
'Captain Calamity': There’s a name for the buffoon crushing Trump’s world — Alternet|Adam Lynch
Denials that the Pentagon is not a flaming mess under President Donald Trump are likely premature, reports the Guadian, because that’s not what officials from inside are saying in private.
“While the Pentagon insists that any suggestion the defense department is in disarray under Hegseth is “completely baseless,” alarm over [Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s] conduct in the role – and the implications – has not merely been expressed by Hegseth’s political opponents,” reports the Guardian.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who is abandoning the U.S. Senate after relentless clashes with Trump, urged the president this week to outright fire his defense secretary.
“I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country,” Tillis wrote on social media. “He is intimidated by competence and retreats to ginning up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and wellbeing of our fighting force.”
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The U.S. really screwed the pooch when they put this train wreck in office.
Jamie Raskin EXPOSES Trump's $1.7 Billion Pardon Racket — Crooks and Liars|Cliff Schecter
And while the President has pardon power in the Constitution, there's a way around that to reform the process, making bribes illegal. Rep. Raskin shared that with me. As well as which Jim is dumber: Jordan or Comer :)
I sat down with Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, to talk about his life in Congress, his colleagues, and specifically about the committee’s new report on Trump’s pardons. Raskin’s committee found nearly $1.7 billion in fines and restitution owed to victims wiped out by Trump’s pardons. Money that belonged to defrauded investors or ripped-off consumers went back to the people who took it.
Trump has a criminal process for pardons, and he's organized it...so that would make it. Well, you know. Trump has intermediaries charging $2 million per engagement, with pardon-seekers donating to Trump enterprises or going into business with Trump family members. Then the debts to victims are forgiven on the way out.
The first move was firing Liz Oyer, the U.S. pardon attorney, whose office used to study every case for record, remorse, and restitution. That process is as dead as the dinosaurs. And while the President has pardon power in the Constitution, there's a way around that to reform the process, making bribes illegal.
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And crooks like Trump and his lawyers will always find workarounds. Put razor sharp teeth in the law!
Trump to force his stupid arch on DC — Daily Kos|Lisa Needham
In a development that was basically inevitable once the Supreme Court blessed President Donald Trump’s continuing construction of his big dumb White House ballroom, the developer in chief is flexing his fascist muscles by building the big dumb arch.
No, he doesn’t have approval to break ground, but it’s increasingly clear he doesn’t need any. The Supreme Court was really the last, the tiniest, of guardrails here. And since the conservative wing—minus Chief Justice John Roberts, in one of his patented bids to be remembered as evenhanded instead of a core part of dismantling democracy as we know it—let Trump crash straight through, there’s really no stopping him now.
This isn’t some sort of secret. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday that excavation work would begin in the next two weeks, and he’s pretty sure everyone is excited and has been waiting on this for … over a century?
On X, Burgum posted:
[A]fter a very long wait (over 125 years!), we are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary for the Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck, at Memorial Circle on Columbia Island between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World...
We’ll just put this in the books as another thing the next Democratic president should tear down.
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Burgum is a stooge. Fuck him. Fuck Trump.
If he constructs it the arch will be bulldozed just like the goddamn ballroom.
Vietnam Veterans Ask Court To Block Trump’s Arch
The Washington Post reports:
Three Vietnam War veterans on Friday asked a federal judge to prevent work from starting on President Donald Trump’s planned arch, warning that the administration is seeking to outrace federal courts on the project.
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan should issue a temporary restraining order to block newly announced work, the veterans’ lawyers wrote in an emergency filing, noting that Trump’s planned 250-foot-tall arch has not been authorized by Congress and is still undergoing federal reviews.
They also said the Trump administration is seeking to render the project “a fait accompli,” citing the administration’s legal arguments regarding Trump’s proposed White House ballroom that courts could not stop the project because too much work had already been done.
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And they are doing this BEFORE EXCAVATING! So, none of the bullshit, lame excuse "But we've broken ground."
Shut the shit down now!
What will the criminal do? He'll ignore that! Fuck the motherfucking motherfucker!
HHS Cancels Minority Grants, Orders Boner Studies
NOTUS reports:
The Health Department’s office to improve the health of minorities has abruptly terminated more than half its existing grants, saying they didn’t focus on the Trump administration’s new priorities of addressing infertility and encouraging exercise. Some grantees provided cancer screenings or postpartum home visits. Others worked to reduce first-responder suicide or decrease obesity among Native American youth. All of the funds came from the Office of Minority Health, which the administration tried to shutter last year.
Administration officials wrote to grantees that going forward, awards should directly advance “reducing overmedicalization in health care by addressing the root causes of infertility” including hormonal imbalances, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, low sperm count, low testosterone levels and erectile dysfunction as root causes. Grants should also support programs that promote “regular physical activity and exercise,” according to the Aug. 25 letters obtained by NOTUS.
"Damnable stupidity. For one thing, Native youth obesity leads to high blood pressure and diabetes which leads to kidney damage. It's sad to drive through New Mexico's 19 living Pueblos and see the dialysis centers." — MaryOGrady (comments)
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I can hear the retards now, "Whut's dialysis?"
Kennedy is a sick piece of racist sewer waste. Hitler would have loved the SOB. Does he ever think he will be able to walk a street again in the US?
'He's lost it': Trump's 'chaotic' under-the-radar interview sparks slew of new concerns — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
President Donald Trump's "incoherence" in a little-noticed exclusive interview with GB News caught the eye of a British journalist who was startled by what he witnessed, he said Friday.
During the interview, a rambling Trump managed to touch on subjects ranging from immigration to Meghan Markle's return to Britain, prompting iPaper columnist James Ball to argue the preside
“Trump has always been a little chaotic, with at best a loose relationship with the truth," he wrote. "But based on his remarks in an extended interview with GB News, the US President is only getting worse. In the space of minutes, he managed what amounted to little more than a concentrated stream of nonsense about the UK, Iran, and even the Falkland Islands.”
Ball took umbrage with Trump's claim that he was "saving your country" — arguing the U.S. president was doing something very different.
“The US President seems fixated on securing the gratitude of British and European politicians for a war they didn’t want him to start, which never secured congressional approval, and for which he’s never formally set out any goals," the columnist wrote. "It also doesn’t seem to have made us any safer – quite the opposite.”
According to Trump, England stood at risk of an imminent nuclear threat from Iran, to which Ball replied, “This is an odd way to understand a nuclear capability.”
“Countries don’t immediately launch nuclear missiles as soon as they obtain them – instead, they generally use them to try to deter invasion by their adversaries,” he reasoned. “Why Iran would immediately launch its theoretical nukes against European nations who hadn’t involved themselves in the war against it is never spelt out by Trump.”
Ball pointed out that US presidents rarely give interviews to foreign media, and only when they have ”something important to say, or a serious message that he needed to make sure reached the people of that country.”
On that count, Trump failed, Ball argued.
“Instead, it was a display of an increasingly elderly and incoherent man, ranting only semi-coherently about world affairs," he wrote. "Trump used to be a man who wanted to look in control at all times. Now, though, he just looks like he’s lost it."
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Some left a cake out in the rain?
Staver: The Blood Supply Is “Tainted” With COVID Vax
Freedom Alive podcast:
“I did not get the COVID shot. And many of us who did not get the COVID shot don’t want COVID-tainted blood in terms of the COVID shot and mRNA spiked protein into the blood that comes into your body. Because you’ve chosen not to ingest that into your body! So what kind of system do we have within this blood bank system? Do we have blood within the blood bank system that is tainted with the mRNA shots from the COVID-19? And does that spike protein that develops still stay in the blood?” – Liberty Counsel president Mat Staver, speaking on the Freedom Alive podcast.
According to the nutbag podcast host, the CDC and the FDA are “attempting to hide and normalize” the supposed presence of COVID vaccines in the blood supply. He goes on to call COVID vaccines “experimental gene therapy.” You may recall that the Liberty Counsel contends that COVID vaccines contain graphene oxide intended to the connect people to the internet for the purpose of mind control. Staver continues to spearhead countless anti-vax lawsuits.
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The exponentially retarded. We certainly hope that every one of them will refuse blood transfusions.
UN Votes To Adopt Map Showing Nations At Their True Relative Sizes, Only The United States Voted Against It
CNN reports:
The United Nations General Assembly voted on Friday to adopt a new world map that reflects countries’ true relative sizes, after African nations urged the UN to right a centuries-old wrong. The “Correct the Map” resolution –– put forward by African Union member states, as well as the Bahamas –– passed with overwhelming support: 164 member states voted in favor, six abstained and only the United States voted against it.
The resolution aims to give an “equitable” representation of the globe’s regions, particularly Africa, arguing that the distortions in the current world map mean the continent has undergone a “symbolic minimization” in people’s collective imagination.
At present, many of the world’s maps are based on the Mercator projection, created by European cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It is widely used for navigation since the north-south lines have constant true bearings relative to the equator.
"The stupidity and arrogance of this regime knows no bounds. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I think this falls in the category of innocuous little things that shouldn't cause controversy. Africa is larger than Greenland, plain and simple." — Kruhn (comments)
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Let's just see what Miss Teen USA 2007, Miss South Carolina has to say about it, Mr. United Nations! (posted in the comment section of the page)
Case closed on "Is the U.S. really as retarded as we have heard?"
Ken Paxton omits rental income and mortgages from financial disclosures, obscuring his wealth — The Texas Tribune: Main Feed|By Zach Despart, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune, and Alexandra Glorioso, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica
The Republican U.S. Senate nominee appears to have violated federal ethics law, which requires candidates to report their income and disclose mortgages on properties other than personal residences, experts said.
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As George Costanza said regarding his having sex with the cleaning woman in a Seinfeld episode: "Was that wrong? Should I have not done that? I tell ya, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing was frowned upon because I've worked in a lot of offices and I tell you people do that all the time."
And we all know who saw that, he was fired!
After Abbott’s order limiting Flock cameras, DPS to continue using its vast surveillance network — The Texas Tribune: Main Feed|Ayden Runnels
Law enforcement agencies from across the country search the DPS Flock database once every four seconds, on average. After the Tribune inquired, DPS said it will limit which agencies can access the network.
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Showing us that Abbott either lacks any authority or he's bullshitting us. Elect Gina Hinojosa!
33 Democrats Vote to Withhold Funding From Universities That Boycott Israel — Truthout Stories|Sharon Zhang
The bill would not even allow institutions to take actions to limit commercial deals with Israel.
The House voted on Thursday to pass a bipartisan bill that would cut off federal funding for universities that participate in a boycott of Israel, with dozens of Democrats in favor.
The bill passed 237 to 169, with almost all Republicans and 33 Democrats voting in favor. Democrats who voted “yes” included some of the most vocally pro-Israel and conservative lawmakers in the caucus. It now goes to the Senate for consideration.
Further, Democrats were complicit in allowing the vote to go forth to begin with. On Tuesday, Representatives Jared Golden (Maine) and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Washington), both Democrats, surprised caucus leaders when they voted for the GOP’s rule to allow the consideration of several pieces of legislation to go forth — a highly unusual move that delivered House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) the votes he needed to advance the rule.
This included votes on the anti-boycott bill as well as a resolution calling for the passage of Republicans’ voter suppression legislation and condemning the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and socialism “in all its forms.” That resolution passed with 8 Democrats in favor. Golden and Perez voted for both.
The anti-boycott legislation, called the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act, would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit institutions of higher education from ending or even taking steps to limit commercial relations with Israel that aren’t “based on a valid business reason.” Institutions wouldn’t even be able to boycott entities like illegal Israeli settlements under the legislation.....
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Many of our allies no longer support Bibi and they no longer support Trump. Why? Because they are terrorist murderers. One can oppose a terrorist leader and still be sympathetic to their country. The 33 Democrats are as retarded as the Nazis with this.
It shouldn’t feel impossible to finish a book — Vox|Adam Clark Estes
A horror story of sorts is unfolding in the United States. It goes like this: AI has made it so effortless to access information, and short-form video has made it so easy to entertain ourselves, that nobody reads anymore.
If you’re familiar with this tale, it’s possible, ironically, that you read about it. A viral Atlantic story from earlier this summer put a chilling headline on trend: “The End of Reading Is Here.” Teachers and professors, the magazine reported, don’t even bother assigning entire books to their students, because excerpts are good enough to prepare for standardized texts. The piece said we’re living in a “postliterate era.”
This is a cultural crisis, yes — but for a lot of us, it’s a personal one. We’re all short on time, and we’d like to read more, but the ascendancy of attention-stealing tech companies has made it feel like we have less of it.
“Reading was and is a crime of opportunity,” said Leah Price, a professor of modern book history at Oxford and the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. “The limiting factor isn’t reading matter, but reading time.”
Key takeaways
Reading is changing, not dying. The bigger problem is competition for people’s time and attention.
Print offers productive difficulty. E-readers and audiobooks make reading easier, but the friction of print promotes deeper comprehension.
Leisure reading should be fun! It’s totally fine to peek at the ending, skip boring parts, or just give up on boring books.
Losing the reading habit is especially bad because it’s a healthy practice in a world obsessed with self-improvement. Studies suggest that reading is an astonishingly good mental exercise, as well as a very accessible one. Reading, especially leisure reading, can improve your language skills. It exposes you to new knowledge and ideas. Reading can help relieve stress, anxiety, and insomnia. It can make you more empathetic and combat cognitive decline. Reading is absolutely great for kids.
Reading, perhaps above all, also happens to be fun....
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How many books have you read this year?
Really? That many?
The Men Who Want to Sign for You Are Coming for Your Rights — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
Fifty years after women escaped a system that put husbands and fathers in charge of their economic lives, Republicans are resurrecting the ideology that could put men back in control.
Whenever I spoke with Gloria Steinem on my program over the years, I always got a sense of a person with both incredible charisma, intellect, and a real grasp of what power was and how to use it. She was a force of nature.
When the announcement that she’d passed away at 92 hit the news yesterday morning, it perfectly juxtaposed against the story the major “conservative” site Townhall had published titled, “No, the World Would Not Be a Better Place If Women Ran It.” Their point was:
“Anyone who went through middle school, junior high or high school knows full well the kind of nasty behavior that females are capable of.”
Nobody planned that coincidence; there’s so much hate against women floating around in Republican circles these days that if it wasn’t that piece it’d be something else, but it highlights a worrying trend in American culture and politics, one with echoes of a troubling past.
Back in 1972 Louise and I got married, and when she went to get her first credit card in her own name I had to co-sign for her. Not because I was more creditworthy; she’d been supporting herself by working since she was 15. It was the bank’s requirement because she was a woman.
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That year was a bit of a touchstone for the women’s movement.
It was the year Steinem’s Ms. magazine sold out its entire 300,000-copy run in eight days; the year that her first issue ran a “We Have Had Abortions” statement signed by 53 women including Steinem, Billie Jean King, and Susan Sontag all confessing to what was then a crime; the year Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states; and the year Title IX became law.
And even though our culture was racing ahead, my bank still demanded a man’s name on the signature line. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974 that a woman — of any age or income — no longer needed a husband, father, brother, uncle, or male friend to co-sign for credit, a mortgage, or pretty much anything else. And, more often than not, the credit history belonged to the man and didn’t mention the woman, so a divorce or a death could erase everything she’d built.
While this may sound both dystopian and like ancient history to today’s young people, it’s a world that many within the GOP are actively trying to recreate.
Pastor Joel Webbon, for example, has been preaching for years that women shouldn’t have a voice in American politics because, he says, a woman’s political voice properly comes from her husband, and if she isn’t married, from her father, brother, uncle or whichever man in her life “loves her most.” That’s the same list Louise’s bank used: husband, father, brother, uncle, family friend...
Webbon helped write “The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel” alongside Oklahoma state Senator Dusty Deevers and former Trump administration official William Wolfe. His “Right Response Conference” has put Doug Wilson, Stephen Wolfe, Steve Deace, and Auron MacIntyre on stage. He’s endorsed candidates, and he sat for a ten-part interview series with notorious neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
He’s part of the “TheoBros” network, which is connected to Republican officeholders mainly through Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s church membership and VP JD Vance socializing with people in it.
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Backward thinking comes from backward people accepting the Torah as some sort of "new truth."
Nobody Will Say Why Every Major AI Chatbot Suddenly Went Down Yesterday — Futurism|Frank Landymore
On Thursday, three major chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok — all went down without warning.
The simultaneous outage of three flagship from AI systems from three different providers was bizarre. But, in an exceedingly peculiar information gap, we still don’t know why models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI respectively suffered outages at the same time, Wired reports. Whatever linked the disruptions, for now, remains unclear.
Only OpenAI has responded to journalists’ requests for comment.
“A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3, made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms,” a spokesperson told multiple outlets. “As of about 8:17 am PT on Thursday, a solution was successfully implemented and is continuing to be monitored.”
Not all of each providers’ models were affected. Anthropic, for instance, said that only Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 were down, while Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI reported widespread outages.
One possible explanation is that there was an issue with their shared provider, Cloudflare. But when The Register raised this to the company, it insisted its services were doing fine.
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Maybe it had chatted itself dead.
American Medical Association Fires Back Against Paper Finding AI Is Now Outperforming DoctorsOpen link in new tabFuturism|Frank Landymore
A new paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this month concluded, after surveying hundreds of studies on AI in medicine, that not only is AI already an indispensable tool that supports doctors, but that it’s in many ways surpassing them, and will soon be able to care patients on its own better than a human physician could.
“In cognitive medical functions, AI-alone medical care is likely to be better than physician-only or physician-AI hybrid care,” the authors, the widely renowned bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, flatly declare.
But many physicians aren’t having it, Wired reports. One of the paper’s chief critics is the CEO of the American Medical Association himself, John Whyte. According to Whyte, some of the studies it surveyed are simulations, instead of blinded experiments, the gold standard of medical studies. And some contradict the author’s conclusions, such as a Nature article from February that found that most patients had a hard time talking to AI chatbots to get the expertise they needed, he argued.
“The AMA does see the potential in these tools, but they have to be utilized in the context of a care plan that’s governed by a physician,” Whyte told Wired....
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Easy to understand that the AMA would be concerned. But just as likely the AI profiteers can be full of shit as much as anyone, perhaps more.
The real issue is how much is AI getting paid per visit and does it accept insurance?
College Graduate Employment Is Cratering Where Data Centers Are Being Built — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Will AI supercharge the economy? Will the data centers powering it bring prosperity and provide paying jobs to the communities they’re built in?
Probably not. New research shows that rapid rise of AI has instead coincided with “unusually high levels” of unemployment among college graduates in Texas, the Financial Times reports. Texas, crucially, is the state with the most data center under construction.
Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas found that job postings in the state had dramatically fallen for AI-exposed fields since the release of ChatGPT, disproportionately affecting college graduates. By the first quarter of 2025, postings plummeted by 8 percent compared to jobs that were deemed less exposed to AI, it also found.
“These dynamics suggest that recent college graduates, whose unemployment rate rose to unusually high levels during this period of rapid [generative AI] adoption, are where the effects of GenAI on employment and earnings are likely to first appear,” the researchers wrote in the analysis, as quoted by the FT.
Until recently, Texas and its governor Greg Abbott has embraced the AI data center buildout with open arms. A recent Reuters analysis found that requests from data centers and other large power users to connect to the state’s power grid soared from about 48 gigawatts in 2023 to more than 474 gigawatts currently, making it one of the fastest growing hubs for AI and cloud computing facilities....
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They are probably wondering about that 40K they spent on their useless degrees.
If Greg Abbott is in the mix it's more than obvious what the problem is. Elect Gina Hinojosa! Abbott has been fucking things up for waaaay too long now.
Might be time to 'rip up' Reflecting Pool after botched job: Republican — Alernet|Sarah K.Burris
...The National Park Service and D.C. District Attorney Jeanine Pirro labeled the work on the pool as "botched" after the new "American Flag Blue" liner began to peel and float.
"Famously, the president is somebody, as you just had in your last segment, [who] loves to build things, loves to put his name on things," NOTUS national political reporter Elena Schneider explained on CNN.
"And I'm sure that he is not pleased about the fact that this is going over budget and way long," she continued. "No contractor likes to do that. But nonetheless, this is part of his M.O. of what this administration has been all about."
Host Audie Cornish said that the symbol of the Reflecting Pool, to her, has become "a rake. It's stepping on a rake. It's like [an] unnecessary cell phone, and it's costing everyone money. And none of it had to happen."
Avella claimed that presidents have been "stepping on that rake" since the pool was finished in the 1920s, though it didn't get its first overhaul until 2010-2012.
"I mean, you're looking at a Reflecting Pool that was built on the Potomac River mudflat, which shifts and you get cracks, and we have been dealing with it."
"Then fix it!" said Cornish.
"So are you advocating that we get rid of the pool. That it's been such a problem—" he asked.
Cornish cut him off to say that it almost looks like Trump is halfway there.
Avella said that there's nothing that says the contractor who messed up can't be held accountable.
"The Republicans and conservatives are a joke and America is the butt of it. It's a shame we can't develop a vaccine against conservatism. After all, it is a deadly disease. Consider all of the people killed because of the wars conservatives like to start. Now they want to kill us off with dangerous food and water. It's all in the Plan." — notbymen (comments)
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This is simply a metaphor for what Trump has done to our country. IT DON"T WORK ANYMORE!
Everything is a con with him. Everything is crooked. Everything is a failed bit!
They’re scared: Dems’ big plan for Trump's pet Supreme Court is coming — Alternet|Adam Lynch
...But Johnson wants Congressional Republicans to jettison the power to expand the court before Democrats use it to neutralize the conservative majority that granted Trump immunity from crimes while in the White House and nearly removed Constitutional birthright citizenship.
Romero called it an extreme bid by the Speaker for “constitutional self-castration.”
“But Republican legislators would rather sabotage their own chamber’s constitutional authority than allow Democrats the chance to reform the court,” said Romero. “In opposition to Johnson’s proposal, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark noted that the amendment would strip Congress of ‘yet another constitutional authority that is meant to be controlled by the American people’s representatives.’”
“Think for a second about the moral calculus the GOP is doing,” urged Romero. “We’re talking about a system of congressional authority over the court that has lasted for 250 years. And Republicans are so scared of the electorate voting for judicial reform that they would eliminate a key piece of that century-old authority in the two months before they’re likely voted out of office.”...
"Yeah, Republicans are scared. But you know who should really be scared? SC Justices should be scared! If Republicans in Congress do castrate Congress so that there is no other way to balance the Court, all that is left is the guillotine!" -- EEngineer_2 (comments)
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The Trump Nazis keep trying to rig everything, perverting their powers. These rats are nothing less than traitors — scumbags of the worst. We mst eliminate them if we are to survive as a constitutional nation of law!
MO Supreme Court Hears Arguments On Gerrymandered Redistricting Map — Crooks and Liars|Heather
And astoundingly, the MAGA Republicans argued in front of the Supreme Court that they plan on defying court orders if they rule against them.
And astoundingly, the MAGA Republicans argued in front of the Supreme Court that they plan to defy court orders if they rule against them. Or maybe it shouldn't be that astounding since they're taking a page straight out of the Trump playbook, and we've got an election denier for Attorney General in Missouri.
Democracy Docket laid this out a couple of weeks ago: Missouri Supreme Court swiftly takes up fight over voters’ right to challenge GOP gerrymander:
The Missouri Supreme Court moved Thursday to immediately take up the fight over whether voters can challenge Republicans’ new congressional gerrymander through a referendum, bypassing an appeals court to fast-track the case just weeks before ballots must be finalized....
"They defy the law? They get arrested, simple as that!"
republicans embraced a fascist for president. They have no place in the USA any longer." — surfjac (comments)
"5 of the SCOTUS Nazis made up a complete lie to allow the terrorist to finish his ballroom. It so blatantly shit on the constitution, Roberts couldn't even go along and tore them apart." -- Liveral Devil (comments)
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The breakdown of law and order by fascism. This is what Trump has brought to us. Once it's gone it may never return.
The blood letting may just be a breath away.
“Messianic” OH Youth Pastor Charged With Grooming
Cleveland’s NBC affiliate reports:
A former youth minister in Stark County is facing multiple charges after investigators accused him of grooming and other misconduct involving three young people he knew through a religious congregation. Michael Carlton served as a youth minister at The STAR in the East, a Messianic congregation on Martindale Road NE in Plain Township. Court filings say each of the three alleged victims attended religious services there.
The complaints describe alleged conduct beginning as far back as 2023 and continuing into 2026. Carlton is charged with multiple counts of grooming, along with sexual imposition, assault and unlawful restraint. Investigators allege his interactions with the teens included a pattern of behavior intended to entice, solicit or prepare them for sexual activity.
Rabbi Michael J. Oyler said Carlton had been a “loved, respected and trusted” member of the congregation for more than 10 years and had served as an elder and Shabbat school teacher for the past six years.
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Another one bites the dust.
Still no drag queens.
Mike Huckabee Refers To Bartiromo As “Him/Her”
The Daily Mail reports:
The former governor of Arkansas was ridiculed on X after he posted a bizarre gender-bending reference to Fox News star Maria Bartiromo, who is leaving the network. On Thursday, Fox suddenly announced that it is parting ways with Bartiromo just hours after airing the final episode of the show that bears her name, Mornings with Maria.
After learning the news, former Arkansas Governor and current Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee posted a tweet calling Bartiromo, “The smartest hardest working journalist & absolutely class act. It was an honor to work with him/ her and later to be guest on a show always worth watching.”
Observers on X quickly leapt on the ambassador’s strange use of “him/her” in the tweet. Some poked fun at Huckabee, while others speculated he used a canned statement or AI to generate the post.
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Mike, make sure those form fields are highlighted before you fill one out.
DOJ: States Must Report “Illegals” Or Lose Poverty Aid
CNBC reports:
All states going forward must report undocumented immigrants known to be in a state to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or risk losing federal funding for programs meant to aid low-income individuals, the Department of Justice said in a new legal opinion.
The DOJ, in issuing the opinion, revised the Office of Legal Counsel’s prior opinion from 1998, which found that only specific state agencies that administered the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Security Income programs needed to provide information to federal immigration authorities.
“Our clarification does not impose new obligations on states,” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joshua Craddock, the Office of Legal Counsel official who wrote the new opinion. “It simply restores the original meaning of the statute Congress enacted and ensures that DHS receives the information it is legally entitled to,” Craddock said.
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So now all states must have a Blanche Gestapo. What a sick motherfucker. What a failed country we have.
Collins Claims No Knowledge Of $170K Musk Donation
Yahoo News reports:
“Elon Musk’s America PAC has donated more than $170,000 to your campaign,” a reporter noted Thursday. “Mr. Musk is, you know, pretty controversial for his efforts at DOGE and his online conduct. Do you have any comment on these donations?”
“Well, first of all, I wasn’t aware of that donation,” the senator responded. “I knew he was gonna get involved in political campaigns, but I had not heard that there was a specific donation. It must be through some group that — maybe the, um, National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. I’m not sure.”
She continued, “Elon and I had discussions when he was head of DOGE. I didn’t support many of the cuts that he proposed. I did support others, where I felt that he did ferret out waste and fraud and abuse that was costing taxpayers money, so, um, I don’t agree with him on everything, but I do agree with him that we need to eliminate waste and be much more efficient in government.”
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Sue, can I call you Sue? Sue, denial no longer works. Eliminate waste? Start with her.
Trump Begins Selling “Lake America” Hats For $55
The Huffington Post reports:
President Donald Trump appears to be milking his executive order renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America for all it’s worth, with branded hats that sell for a hefty price. Trump’s official store is now selling $55 “Lake America” hats in both red and blue.
“All it takes is a good pen to make the Great Lakes greater. This classic high-crown hat remains a presidential favorite, and this time, Lake America shares a vision for the unlimited potential of what is on the horizon,” the product description reads.
Trump signed the executive order renaming the body of water last week and said Canada had been “ripping us off for a long time on trade.”
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The snake oil man selling poop to the suckers. He can't spend a dime of his war chest. He wants Elon to spend his money on his candidates. What a crook. What a bunch of retarded worshippers!
It’s time for Trump to fire Pete Hegseth — Salon|Brian Karem
He's dangerous. He's incompetent. He's ruining America’s reputation. Even the president can see that
In no small part, the United States’ continued safety and stability have been made possible by two things: the peaceful transfer of power and stable military leadership.
America has been respected for much of its existence as a shining light to other nations because we conduct free and fair elections and hand power from one president or one party to another with minimal drama. The U.S. has become a superpower not just because of military prowess, but because we administer that prowess with people who are sworn to protect the Constitution, not any particular political leader or party.
Donald Trump threatens both our political and military stability. He continues to talk about voter fraud that never happened while promoting voter suppression in many different forms, hoping to make sure his MAGA minions stay in power after the midterm elections. He prefers not to transfer power, and will never do so willingly.
As for the military, Trump has appointed a defense secretary who has indiscriminately fired qualified generals and endangered our entire military infrastructure in doing so. Trump needs to fire Pete Hegseth. Technically, Congress could impeach Hegseth (or any other Cabinet member), but don’t expect that to happen. Hell, don’t even expect Trump to fire Hegseth. Trump seldom does the right thing and won’t do it unless it is in his best interest....
Otherwise, Trump has shown no inclination to hold anyone accountable in his regime. We see less and less of him and he makes no sense when we do. Wednesday in the Oval Office was so off-the-wall bad I thought I was watching a B-movie about a minor mobster.
We are witnessing in real time an unprecedented presidential meltdown that makes the Nixon administration look like it was staffed by the founding fathers. As Trump’s cartoon reality crumbles, what is left of the press corps merely grins and asks ludicrous questions with Stepford-wife charm....
As we approach the midterm elections, even some of Trump’s most ardent supporters are realizing there is no hope that he will come to his senses. He has none. There’s little hope other administration officials will come to their senses either — they’re too deep in league with the Don....
Trump’s defense secretary — sorry, “secretary of war” — continues to dismantle the military and fire any women or Black men who hold leadership roles, all while enthusiastically committing war crimes....
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These criminals must face justice. It's only a matter of time.
Tina wanted another baby. She also needed an abortion. Texas made both harder. — The 19th|Shefali Luthra
She endured eight hysteroscopies and years of IVF, turning to surrogacy to grow her family. When she unexpectedly became pregnant herself, the state's abortion ban made her next decision far more complicated.
...And in Texas, the politics of abortion are shifting to target fertility treatment as well.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential Austin-based conservative think tank, has come out against compensated commercial surrogacy — in which families pay someone beyond reimbursement of medical bills to carry a pregnancy for them — and called for “strengthening regulation” of the so-called ‘altruistic’ arrangements that people like Tina have used. Lawmakers are likely to consider some kind of surrogacy ban next year.
Tina won’t have to worry about those things herself. Soon after their son’s birth, her husband had a vasectomy. Their family is complete.
But then there is her daughter: 6 years old now, and unlike her parents, Texas born and raised. Tina wants better for her.
“With my daughter, I feel worried about what it looks like if things get worse, if that’s even possible,” she said. “I don’t want her to think there’s no option for her and she can’t choose what’s right for her own body. As the mom of a daughter, I feel concerned for — and I feel concerned for any woman.”
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In the Land of the Happy Negro, intelligence and empathy are not virtuous.
United Nations Concedes That Efforts to Arrest Climate Change Have Failed, and the Planet Is Now Spiraling Into Environmental Catastrophe — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
With so many climate projections and mitigation strategies eyeing far-away years like 2050, it can be tempting to assume there’s still time to reverse the worst impacts of an ever-warming planet.
Unfortunately, that’s no longer in the cards — at least according to the United Nations Environment Programme, which just released a dismal report calling for the “world to face the inevitability of exceeding global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius” above pre-industrial levels.
That’s significant, because the 1.5 degree threshold has long been associated with a range of grim climate tipping points at which the planet will experience irreversible consequences such as the “breakdowns of major ocean circulation systems, abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and collapse of tropical coral reef systems,” per a UN climate explainer.
The new UN paper, coming on the heels of the hottest summer on record and pessimistically titled “Limiting Overshoot,” identifies the consequences of this reality, and recommends some immediate actions to keep things from spiraling even further.
Though most scientists agree we’re hovering around the 1.4 degree point at the moment, the UN notes that even in the best case scenario, where “all climate commitments and policies are implemented, warming is projected to reach 1.8 degrees Celsius at a minimum.” If we follow our current track, however, the report highlights the distinct possibility of hitting 2.6 degrees by the year 2100.
That catastrophic future is far from certain, although drastic intervention is becoming increasingly urgent if we hope to stave it off. Underscoring the severity of the present moment, the UN frames the situation in terms of maintaining warming at the 1.5 degree mark — no longer a theoretical ceiling, but the new floor going forward. Doing so, the report authors write, depends “on achieving sustained net-negative CO2 emissions at global scale in the second half of this century, and potentially further reductions of non-CO2 emissions.”
“Decisions taken this decade will determine whether viable options remain to gradually reverse warming back to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” they explain....
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We'd better hope future generations are far more intelligent than we are now. They will need to be if they are to avert the distaster that will befall the planet if they are still as retarded as this generation has been.
China Installing Huge Facility That Turns Plastic Waste Into Jet Fuel — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
Around the world, the demand for cleaner alternatives to petroleum-based jet fuel is rising.
By 2030, the European Union will require a minimum sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) blend of 6 percent, which will rise to 70 percent by 2050. Countries like the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan, and Brazil are instituting similar policies, putting pressure on players in the global energy trade to ease reliance on crude oil.
SAF can come from all kinds of recycled waste byproducts like plant material, animal fat, and used cooking oil — the latter of which has already become a major source for existing SAF supplies. Unfortunately, the flow of extra spent fry oil is already slowing to a trickle as refiners swoop in to secure the gloop.
That’s where Chinese company Niutech comes in. In a new press release, first spotted by Interesting Engineering, Niutech announced a massive contract with an anonymous “global energy major” to build out an “industrial continuous waste plastic pyrolysis production line” capable of churning out 10,000 to 50,000 tons of plastic-derived SAF each year.
That might seem like a lot to unpack, but it’s really pretty simple. Basically, the Chinese firm is announcing the development of a massive supply line that turns plastic garbage into usable jet fuel. It plans to do so using a thermal decomposition process called pyrolysis, in which plastic waste is heated to extraordinary temperatures in an oxygen-free environment
Though it isn’t new, pyrolysis remains something of a niche for the industrial-grade plastics-recycling space. For this approach to meet the growing need for SAF, it first has to graduate beyond the realm of small eco-startups into a widely-accepted industry standard — which appears to be Niutech’s goal.
Unlike previous SAF initiatives involving plastics, this particular production line will all be under one roof, cutting down on the need for costly shipping and handling. The Niutech refinery is also said to make use of a smorgasbord of plastics like polyethylene, nylon, polypropylene, and ABS, all “without complex pre-treatment such as washing, sorting or drying” — streamlining the complex process of sorting plastic and converting it to refinable oil at this kind of scale.
Should Niutech and its anonymous industry partner succeed in bringing the system online, it would undoubtedly serve as a constant source of plastics-based SAF for the global aviation industry, and as a role model for other refineries to follow....
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China wins another one. They lead in other catagories too.
Fox Has Already Deleted Bartiromo’s Corporate Bio
Mediaite reports:
Fox Business swiftly deleted longtime anchor Maria Bartiromo’s biography from its website, just hours after announcing her shocking exit from the network — which came without an on-air sign-off.
Bartiromo, 58, had been a huge presence on the network for more than a decade when her departure was announced Thursday in a very concisely worded statement. “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter,” the network said in a statement. The network did not appear to acknowledge the end of Bartiromo’s tenure on air.
News of Bartiromo’s split with Fox shook the media world, with some slamming her role in pushing pro-Trump 2020 presidential election conspiracies, to wondering about her next move — including speculation that she may become the next White House Press Secretary after the departure of Karoline Leavitt.
Read the full article. Among the rumors percolating on X are an in-house affair, insider trading, and a preemptive move ahead of a defamation settlement.
Maria Bartiromo, who has been off air since August 9 and was not given an on-air sign off, is *not* leaving Fox News for of a White House job, I’m told.
That said, it’s always possible Trump could offer one post-facto.
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) September 3, 2026
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The jetsam always turns up somehwere on the beach.
Flock Trained Police To Spy On “No Kings” Protests
404 Media reports:
Flock taught cops how they could surveil the No Kings protests and “small parades” using a mix of Flock’s technology and law enforcement’s own databases in a webinar last year. As Flock publicly downplays the power of its automated license plate camera network and highlights its use to solve violent crime, the company’s seemingly endless trove of webinars, training sessions, and blog posts show it offers far more invasive capabilities.
In the webinar, Flock’s director of market management Caity Peak explains how real time crime centers — which are police surveillance centers that utilize Flock cameras and other surveillance cameras — can be used for emergency response, but can also be used to surveil “established events” like 4th of July fireworks displays, parades, and protests.
The webinar shows just how routine the idea of always-on surveillance has become, and how casually it is used during extremely innocuous events. Peak says the surveillance footage can be used to monitor the protests without having cops physically on the ground “making it worse, getting attention.”
"The people on the ground have been fucking heroic. Murdered and beaten up by ICE thugs. Stalked and harassed by complicit police. Literally put on databases and scoured for every little thing by Flock and the FBI. And they've done it while being betrayed by every institution because they believe that America is a thing that has value and should be saved.
The media rarely cover their actions and tend to mock them when the actions against them get bad enough to NEED to be covered. Their congresscritters do nothing for them. So many companies and organizations almost giddy to bend the knee and stop thinking for themselves and just become a fascist's plaything.
But these people have been fucking heroic and trying their best against every fucking hurdle imaginable. Because together we are stronger than this. And if they refuse to let us resolve this peacefully, then fuck it we will drag this fucker out with a bulldozer if we need to." — Cerberus137 (comments)
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Just when we thought the Nixon administration was dead.
House Votes To Punish Colleges That Boycott Israel
The Guardian reports:
The US House of Representatives on Thursday passed a Republican-backed bill that would penalize universities that participate in boycotts of Israel, or attempt to prevent students from taking part in exchange programs with the country.
The Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act passed by a 237-169 vote, with 33 Democrats breaking with the rest of their party to vote in favor, and only two Republicans opposed. It now goes to the Senate for consideration.
The measure would require that colleges and universities who participate in federal student aid programs not participate in boycotts of Israel. Rep. Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the Education Committee, criticized the bill as unnecessary and potentially in conflict with First Amendment protections of protest.
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More attacks by Trump's Nazi Party co-crime conspirators on our First Amendment!
US Air Force Widow Says She’s Been Denied Death Benefits Because US Hasn’t Officially Declared War
NOTUS reports:
The Air Force is reviewing the case of a Gold Star widow from Alabama who wrote on social media that she was deemed ineligible for additional benefits following her husband’s death because Congress had not officially declared the military operations in Iran a war.
A spokesperson for the Air Force said in a statement that military officials spoke Monday with Libby Klinner, the wife of Maj. John Alexander Klinner, who was one of six service members killed when an aircraft crashed in Iraq during a refueling mission on March 12. The spokesperson added the Air Force wanted to ensure Klinner received “all eligible benefits she and her family are entitled to.”
Libby Klinner said on her Instagram account over the weekend that her casualty assistance officer had informed her she would not receive additional benefits following her husband’s death “because we have not declared war.” “So not only was my husband killed in a war he never wanted to participate in,” she wrote, “but now the benefits we’re left with are being dictated by semantics and public perception.”
"A result of...
President Donald Trump stated that his administration calls the conflict with Iran a 'military operation' instead of a 'war' to avoid legal requirements and the need for formal approval from Congress.
So, the 'Suckers & Losers' (Military members per Trump - NYT 2018) get screwed by his semantics?" — SockMikey (comments)
"The US hasn't been in a formally declared war since WWII, so where does that leave the casualties from Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East wars?" — Coram Nobis et seq (comments)
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And we have succeded in accomplishing nothing by doing it.
We most certainly are not responding as if it is a war. The mangagement has been nothing but a pile of shit.
Will JD Vance Make The Apocalypse Great Again? Does He Know The Antichrist? Aw Shucks, Who Knows! — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
You guys, JD Vance is Catholic. Just super-Catholic. He is so Catholic that he wrote a book about Catholic-ing that had a country mountain Methodist church on the front, the kind where you’re always running into the pope when the holy Papa is in the mood for some of that good old time religion. (But, like, not as old as his religion, which is way older.)
And that is why when JD Vance sits down to talk about his deep and abiding and legitimate and real Catholic faith, he starts yapping about the Antichrist and the End Times like some kind of rapture-obsessed evangelical who just read his first Hal Lindsey book.
He yapped about it recently in an interview with some bro-y Christian extremist bigot podcaster named Bryce (of course) Crawford.
“Do I think that we’re in the End Times? I don’t know,” said JD. He said he doesn’t think he should focus on it, though, even though he’s “fascinated by it.” Buuuuuuut:
“I think that there are, like, things about that world that make me feel like, not shocked, if the Antichrist was walking among us, but again, I try not to focus too much on it.”
Cool, sure, you bet.
JD explained in that interview that he actually has a lot of history being a rapture-obsessed evangelical who just read his first Hal Lindsey book, except that for him he says it was his first Bible, the John Hagee prophecy Bible — you know, that crazy bastard who called the Catholic Church the “great whore” and is really into all the prophecies about God throwing unrepentant Jews into the lake of fire — that got him into it. The Left Behind books were also mentioned. (For me, personally, it was Hal Lindsey, although I am not particularly older than JD Vance. Oh yes, I had that phase.)
I guess he just doesn’t understand yet that Catholics don’t talk this way. But anyway, about his new Catholic book, on Catholicism!
He also said:
“I’m trying to focus on doing as much of God’s work as possible right now. And if that leads to the End Times, okay.”
If JD Vance brings about the Apocalypse, that’s fine! He also said just after the quote above that “if that leads to, you know, us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I’m gone, that’s great, too.” So if he makes the world a better place, that’s fine too!
Glad he’s flexible.
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His end time may come sooner than he thinks.
Tesla Driver Killed After Self-Driving Mode Stops in the Middle of a Highway — Futurism|Frank Landymore
A Tesla running one of its self-driving modes was rear-ended after stopping in the middle of a Arizona highway, Electrek reports, with the driver found dead at the scene. Grimly, it’s not the first accident of its kind.
The crash occurred on October 31, 2025. According to local reports at the time, the 2020 Tesla Model 3 was struck by an F-350 pickup around 3 AM on the eastbound Loop 202 in Mesa, Arizona. None of the contemporaneous reports made note of whether the Tesla had one of its driver-assist systems engaged.
Electrek, however, managed to match the collision to a redacted crash report that Tesla provided in its filings to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These were shared under a Standing General Order that requires automakers to report crashes involving a driver-assist system that’s considered to have an SAE Level 2 of automation or higher, meaning that it can partially drive itself under the right conditions and with constant supervision.
The report states that an automated driving system — either Autopilot or Full Self-Driving — was “verified engaged” during the accident. The vehicle’s “pre-crash movement” is listed as “stopped – 0 mph,” indicating it stopped in the middle of the road. None of these details were shared publicly at the time of the accident.
Electrek says that this is the second time that a Tesla Model 3 with a driver-assist system engaged apparently stopped in a highway before a crash that killed its driver; it also happened in Florida, just weeks before the second one.
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As long as there are customers with death wishes Tesla will keep selling death traps.
House GOP Cancels Two Weeks Of Current Session
Inside Congress reports:
Republican leaders announced Thursday that the final two weeks of the pre-election House session are canceled, severely curtailing what had been a full legislative calendar for September.
That means members are set to depart Washington no later than Sept. 17 and not return until mid-November. The House will reconvene for one additional week of business after next week’s Labor Day break.
Leaders would recall House members for those canceled weeks if the Senate moves forward with a party-line budget reconciliation package in the meantime, GOP leaders indicated, though that is not anticipated. The decision comes as candidates agitate to get back on the campaign trail and as GOP leaders continue to struggle to maintain control of the House floor.
"You've done such a shit job at governance that even with the extreme gerrymandering, even with the billionaires ready to empty their pockets to keep you in the majority, even with the administration's attacks on free and fair voting... you are losing.
And you know that you're losing. And your crooked, racist, scammy caucus is so freaked out that you're taking the abandonment of your responsibilities to a new level." — unsavedheathen (comments)
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The continued failure of Trump's Fascist Party.
GOP Fears Trump Will Keep $400M Super PAC Fund
The Washington Post reports:
With early voting about to begin in competitive midterm races, President Donald Trump has kept most of his super PAC money on the sidelines, causing Republican leaders to conclude it’s too late to fully deploy the cash in the midterms and that he intends to hold on to much of it for his own purposes.
Trump’s political advisers have been assuring anxious allies that MAGA Inc., the president’s super PAC that had more than $400 million on hand as of July 31, will come to the rescue during the peak campaign season after Labor Day. But Republicans are increasingly skeptical, and suspicious that Trump — who must personally approve the spending — has other ideas.
Theories about what Trump wants to do with the money cover a broad range of possibilities, including protecting his political influence in the next presidential race by passing on the money to his chosen successor and saving up for legal fees, postpresidential travel, events and pet projects, such as his library. Trump’s Miami library is projected to cost at least $1 billion, the most expensive presidential library construction to date.
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The mob boss even robs his own crime syndicate!
Colorado Gov Nominee: I Battled Satan “In Person”
The Christian Post reports:
Victor Marx, a nonprofit ministry leader and the Republican Party’s gubernatorial nominee in Colorado, claimed to have encountered Satan personally during an episode of “spiritual warfare,” according to resurfaced audio.
“Hey, I’ve met the devil. I’ve met Satan in person, through a person,” Marx said during a two-part episode of his podcast in 2020. “And guess what? He’s a bully and a coward and he’s the father of lies.” Marx said when he ultimately commanded the demon “in the authority of Jesus Christ” to offer his name, the spirit identified himself as Satan.
During an interview with Shawn Ryan in 2023, he claimed his stepfather forced him to murder a man when he was 7 years old. Marx’s ministry focuses on “hunting predators as well as rescuing, restoring and empowering women and children who have been held captive by traffickers and other abusers,” according to its website.
Read the full article. As previously noted here, Marx sells an eight-part course on exorcism for $99. If you haven’t seen Denver reporter Kyle Clark’s blistering takedown of Marx during a gubernatorial debate, watch it below.
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That wasn't Satan. That was Trump. I can see why he got them confused.
That alone disqualifies him.
Louisiana Youth Pastor Out On $150,000 Bond Over Child Sex Charges Gets Re-Arrested In Child Sex Sting
Lafayette, Louisiana’s CBS affiliate reports:
Ten people from across multiple states are facing criminal charges after traveling to Assumption Parish to meet someone they believed was a juvenile, investigators announced. The arrests resulted from a three-day undercover sting called “Operation Bottom Dweller,” which ran from Aug. 26 through Aug. 28. The operation was conducted through a joint effort between the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office and local law enforcement agencies.
Among the 10 individuals arrested was 35-year-old Malcolm Barnes III of New Iberia. The attorney general’s office identified Barnes as a minister. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is the CEO and founder at Soul Winners Kingdom Warriors Youth Outreach Ministries.
At the time of his arrest during the operation, officials said Barnes was already out on a $150,000 bond on prior charges of indecent behavior with a juvenile and computer-aided solicitation of a minor. Following the undercover operation, Barnes now faces new counts of indecent behavior and computer-aided solicitation of a minor.
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And another one bites the dust. Still no drag queens.
Former Air Force Secretary: It Could Take Decades To Undo “Active Harm” To Pentagon Caused By Hegseth
The Hill reports:
Former Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall III on Wednesday called the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth “dysfunctional.” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Kendall, who served under the Biden and Obama administrations, for his assessment of Hegseth’s handling of the military and the Pentagon. The former secretary accused the Pentagon chief of doing “active harm” to the department.
“In a word, it’s dysfunctional,” Kendall continued. “I’ve worked with and had a chance to work for maybe a dozen secretaries of Defense. He’s doing active harm to the Department of Defense. It’s not passive. It’s active harm.” The ex-official said the “enormous damage” to the department will take several years “or decades to go repair this and restore the type of system that we have had traditionally.”...
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Then this raises the question: Does the U.S. even care about its security as a nation any longer? Have we become that lost?
RFK Ordered CDC Not To Count PA Measles Deaths
Reuters reports:
U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked his new CDC ?director to remove a reference to two Pennsylvania deaths from the agency’s online measles tally ?after ?he questioned whether the disease contributed to the fatalities, three sources familiar with the situation said.
Kennedy’s request came after CDC staffers had already accepted the state’s characterization of the deaths as linked to measles, a Pennsylvania official said. Despite that, Erica Schwartz, the recently appointed director of the CDC , agreed with Kennedy’s directive and implemented it without objection.
The move followed a heated exchange on social media between Kennedy and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. The two officials accused each other of politicizing the outbreak in Pennsylvania, the latest state to grapple with a resurgence of measles since the Trump administration took office.
Georges Benjamin, chief executive of the American Public Health Association and formerly Maryland’s secretary of health, said it is “unheard of” for the CDC to publicly raise doubts about the conclusions of state and local health departments, even if the agency ?seeks more information.
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May this cretin die a thousand deaths!
'Snowflake' Trump’s paranoia soars to 'absurd' extremes: conservative — Alternet|Alex Henderson
"Real Time" host Bill Maher recently commented that if Americans aren't willing to vigorously defend others' right to express ideas they personally find repugnant, they don't really believe in the First Amendment. Never Trump conservative David French makes a similar argument in a Thursday column for the New York Times, warning that "snowflake" President Donald Trump is going to increasingly "absurd" extremes to silence or punish viewpoints he disagrees with.
French points to the 2025 arrest of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk (who is from Turkey) after she helped write an op-ed critical of Israel. Last week, the conservative columnist notes, federal judge Noël Wise, "issued a declaratory judgment striking down as unconstitutional the federal statutes that the Trump administration used to target Ozturk and hundreds of other student visa holders, at least to the extent that enforcement is based on protected speech." And MAGA Republicans, including Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller, are angrily raging against Wise.
French describes the MAGA argument that the First Amendment is not a "suicide pact” as "one of the most absurd examples of snowflakery I've ever seen in my life."
Trump, French argues, is such a "snowflake" that instead of debating those he disagrees with, he would rather try to bully them into silence.
"I don't agree with the op-ed, but no rational person could read it and find anything legally problematic about it," French explains. "It was political speech that rests at the core of the First Amendment. In fact, if the (U.S. Constitution's) Free Speech Clause means anything, it means that each of us has the right to engage in political argument, no matter if our views are radically fringe, comfortably mainstream or something in between."...
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What else do you expect from a stinking Nazi bastard?
Someone needs to be fired as Pentagon collapses at the worst possible time — Alternet|Robert Reich
The latest casualty of Pete Hegseth’s disastrous tenure as Secretary of “War” is Dan Driscoll, who resigned Monday as Secretary of the Army after repeatedly clashing with the Heg.
Driscoll isn’t a liberal in lion’s clothing. He’s an old friend of JD Vance from Yale Law days. He resigned because of his concerns that Hegseth is damaging the Army’s efforts to modernize and adapt to the 21st century battlefield environment — where drone warfare is becoming increasingly important — by firing or pushing out leaders spearheading those efforts.
A defense official in Europe told CNN that even though Hegseth talks about technology reform, he’s focusing instead on “muscles, dudes in dresses, testosterone.”
Hegseth’s tenure has been disastrous from the moment he walked into the Pentagon. Even if Trump were capable of hearing sound advice, Hegseth hasn’t come close to giving it to him. Instead, he’s been pursuing grievances about DEI, promoting testosterone, and denigrating or firing women and Black officers.
The Iran war, meanwhile, is requiring the ongoing deployment of 19 warships, air-defense units, fighter squadrons and paratroopers across the region — straining service members and their families and creating a maintenance backlog that could take years to unwind, according to The Wall Street Journal....
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Anyone with the failing record of this nutputz would have been fired long ago!
Demented Donald Dreams Of 'Trump Strait' — Crooks and Liars|Brad Reed
One petroleum industry analyst now projects potential record-breaking prices for diesel fuel by Labor Day.
More than six months after starting an illegal war with Iran, President Donald Trump is now threatening to rename the Strait of Hormuz, whose closure at the start of the conflict led to a global spike in energy prices.
“Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before!” the president added. “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
In reality—despite Trump’s previous threats to declare the vital commercial waterway a US territory—the US does not have control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply travels.Al Jazeera reported on Wednesday that Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait authority has added eleven more ships to its list of more than 50 vessels that are banned from traveling in the strait.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Wednesday also claimed that two oil tankers that were traversing the strait caught fire after striking sea mines, according to Al Jazeera.
The price of Brent crude petroleum rose once again during Wednesday trading, climbing up over $95 per barrel. Data released Wednesday by the American Automobile Association (AAA) showed that the price of gas in the US has risen to $4.12 per gallon, while the price of diesel fuel has risen to $5.69 per gallon....
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And who is responsible? The dead-brain dumbass who keeps telling us 2 + 2 = 5! Fire him!
Republicans Are Humiliating Trump As They Snub His High Dollar 'Trumpapalooza' Event -- Crooks and Liars|Andrea Thompson
It seems Republicans don't believe Donald Trump is quite the "kingmaker" he believes himself to be.
The Republican Party as a whole is already painfully aware that they're almost guaranteed to get their asses handed to them on a silver platter in the upcoming midterm elections -- but, apparently, they don't seem to think that Donald Trump's help in that matter is worth a dime.
The embattled president is slated to headline the second day of a Dallas midterm convention, dubbed "Trumpapalooza" next week, as part of his desperate efforts to gain some ground before he loses his ass in the midterms come November. However, it seems no one really wants to go.
According to humiliating new reporting from POLITICO, no less than 45 Republican candidates and members have already snubbed Donald's high-dollar midterm event, with dozens more remaining up in the air as to whether they'll waste their time with an appearance.
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Even his Nazi Party think he's finished.
NYT: ICE Skipped Basic Checks In Rush For Recruits
The New York Times reports:
In the wake of a hiring surge last summer, an official in charge of evaluating new recruits to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a dire warning.
The Trump administration, he wrote in a memo, was cutting corners, violating the law and fast-tracking unqualified, “improperly vetted” candidates into ICE’s ranks, part of a dangerous move that exposed the agency — and its law enforcement operations — to “grave national security risks.”
Citing an “unprecedented lowering of standards,” the career ICE official said that “systemic breakdowns” had allowed applicants to receive job offers before they had passed basic fingerprint, identity or credit checks in a preliminary vetting process. Political appointees had unjustly skirted background investigations and received national security eligibility.
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How much does Trump fail thee? Let me count the ways!
Collins Say She May Run In 2032: “Never Say Never”
The Daily Beast reports:
The health condition that Republican Senator Susan Collins kept secret for decades has been put on full display in a new interview. Collins, 73, sat down with Politico at a lobster shack in her home state, which she has represented in the Senate since 1997.
The Republican revealed in May that throughout her time in the upper chamber, she has had a tremor, which she treats with medication. During Collins’ nearly hour-long sit-down with Politico on Wednesday, those symptoms were evident as she ate chowder and drank from a glass.
Collins also declined to rule out running again six years from now, when she would be 79, despite having pledged in 1996 to serve only two terms. “Never say never in politics,” she said. Collins faces fresh scrutiny after details in the Daily Beast’s The Swamp revealed that her June hire for the role of town chair in Greenville, Wayne Erkkinen, is a former member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right extremist group.
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Those addicted to power cannot stop feeding at the public trough no matter how feeble they grow.
Vote them out!
New Talarico Ad Bashes Paxton For Dodging Debates
The Washington Examiner reports:
Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico released a new ad on Wednesday, tearing into his competitor, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, for dodging the Democrat’s invitations to debate.
Talarico challenged Paxton to three televised debates for the weeks leading up to the general election, but said the Republicans’ “billionaire handlers won’t let their favorite puppet answer questions in public.”
The new ad opens with a video of a reporter asking Paxton if he plans to participate in the debates against Talarico, to which Paxton does not answer and continues walking.
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And Paxton is supported by a convicted felon!
Vote Talarico!
Vance’s Mother Says She’d “Probably Punch” El-Sayed
Mediaite reports:
Vice President JD Vance’s mother, Beverly Vance Aikins, said Wednesday that she would “probably punch” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed if the two ever came face-to-face. Aikins’ threats, of sorts, came during an appearance on Fox News host Tomi Lahren’s opinion program. “I think that man’s an idiot,” she declared. “Those are my babies.”
During an April podcast episode, El-Sayed said, “Can you imagine, he’s got brown kids, at some point he’s going to have a really awkward conversation with his kids, like, you made your career hating people who are different.”
“I love Usha as if she were my own daughter,” Vance’s mother added, claiming that El-Sayed must be “jealous” of her son’s family. “It makes me mad, honestly,” she concluded. “I’m not gonna do anything about it. I mean, you know, I’d probably punch the guy if I’d ever seen him, and then that would get me in trouble.”
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Really? All that would get her is waking up in the hospital. That's if she's lucky.
We know who the idiot is here, genius. No wonder your kid is a retard. She looks like him in drag.
New Mail Voting Rules Moved Forward Despite USPS Officials’ Concerns About Mass Disenfranchisement — ProPublica|Jen Fifield
Top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway, ProPublica has learned.
The revelations about the discussions, from someone familiar with the rulemaking process, come as a separate anonymous federal employee filed a whistleblower disclosure with U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, warning that the new system is untested and error-prone, and could lead to mass disenfranchisement in the upcoming election. The whistleblower described the entire process as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”
In a March executive order, President Donald Trump directed the Postal Service to create the new rules, including requiring states to give USPS a list of all voters eligible to receive a ballot in the mail and requiring USPS to use those lists to determine which ballots get sent to voters. USPS officials were tasked with crafting the details of how the new system would work, including the creation of a new portal for states to upload their voters’ information and the back-end software that would allow mail delivery sites and local post offices to track, and potentially block, ballots entering into the mail on their way to voters.
Voting rights organizations, state officials and Democratic political groups filed lawsuits challenging the new rules, and a federal court has temporarily blocked the requirements for states. The merits of the new rule are expected to reach the Supreme Court before the November election. Even if the Supreme Court allows the plan, though, election officials and experts say that the new system could not be ready in time for this election, given that ballots for people who are in the military or overseas must be sent out this month....
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Trump knows he holds a losing hand. So he and his SCOTUS criminals will cheat us if they can by commiting another crime. The USPS can be heroes and ignore it. Or they can be traitors and kill our Constitutional right to vote. Is it Trump they worship or is it the United States?
Who are they?
Deathly design gaffe spotted as Trump coin goes on sale to deluge of derision — Raw Story|Daniel Hampton
The U.S. Mint began selling its new $1 coin stamped with President Donald Trump's face on Wednesday, and the internet instantly ridiculed the launch.
The coin, gold-colored but struck from base metal, sells in 25-coin rolls for $61 and 100-coin bags for $154.50 as part of the Mint's series marking America's 250th birthday. The Mint told buyers to "check your pocket change," noting the dollars are "also in circulation."
But internet detectives quickly zeroed in on the fuzzy economics of the coin, as well as the ominous implication etched into it.
"Deal of the century right here folks," wrote The Bulwark's Sam Stein. "You can purchase 25, $1 Trump coins for the price of.... $61."
The Bulwark's Catherine Rampell homed in on the "1776 ~ 2026" dual date.
"I like that this design appears to show the birth date of liberty as 1776, and its death as 2026," she quipped. Progressive media group MeidasTouch quote-posted the Mint's announcement with a one-word review: "Accurate," also pointing to the curious birth and death dates of liberty.
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) used the rollout to bash the administration's economic record, ticking off rising gas, grocery and utility costs.
"[T]rump and Republicans have mismanaged the American economy," he wrote, pointing to prices at the pump and the checkout line. "So what are trump and Republicans focused on? See below. November is coming." He added a jab at the portrait: "(Also, why is trump wearing a wig)?"...
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Yes. The death of liberty is 2026. He has made it so.
The image looks nothing like him. It must be from a dream he once had. What a sick man. Sad.
'This is insane': DHS chief's spine-chilling Election Day threat staggers analyst — Raw Story|Daniel Hampton
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin's remarks that ICE agents could turn up at polling places this November appalled MS NOW's Molly Jong-Fast, who called the remarks "insane."
Reacting Wednesday on Money, Power, Politics, Jong-Fast said the country had reached an absurd point, with Democrats now scrambling to guarantee that armed federal agents won't be stationed at the polls.
"I think it's important to pause for a moment and just say, this is insane, right? We're trying to make sure they don't send armed guards to polling places. The fact that we've even gotten here is kind of nuts."
She added, "This is not how any of this is supposed to work" and a stark reminder why Americans have to show up to vote.
Her reaction followed comments Mullin made Tuesday at a New York City news conference, where the DHS chief insisted immigration officers generally wouldn't patrol polling sites.
"ICE isn't there to patrol the polling places," he said, but left the door open. "The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down," Mullin said....
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Then they won't be anywhere near a polling place, genius! Mullin and his like are the threat. They must be resisted at all cost.
Are Centrist Democrats Too Racist to Compete in Michigan? — The American Prospect|Ryan Cooper
I have a question about the critical Michigan Senate race: Are centrist Democratic officials and pundits going to spend the next 60 days loudly making the Republican Party’s arguments for them?
The last week has seen a meltdown over Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee. The controversy involves the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who is not an elected official, or a candidate for anything, or a member of El-Sayed’s campaign, but did appear with him during the primary at a few events. Piker made some comments on a Twitch stream (more on that in a moment) that provided a convenient pretext for Republicans to whip up a frenzy of anti-Muslim bigotry and smear El-Sayed by association. Most Democrats did not join in, but many did, including some in leadership positions.
It should come as no surprise that Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, has much worse associations, first and foremost his doglike attachment to Donald Trump, which affects actual policy like what Rogers would do about his deranged trade war with Canada in a state whose economy is more intertwined with Canada than any other. But this is going totally uncovered.
It’s not ideal.
To grasp what is going on here, it is useful to start by breaking down Piker’s relevant comments in detail (which can be heard starting at about 1:54 in this recording). In response to a viewer who identified themselves as a Jewish member of a Reform synagogue and mentioned how hard it was to get his community to reconsider their position on Israel, Piker argued that dogmatic advocacy for Israel is dangerous for American Jews:
“For the anti-Zionist Jews in my community, you have a very tough job ahead of you. You have to go back to your communities and try to get your elderly relatives to understand that this connection between Israel and Zionism that is expressed over and over again through a lot of these Jewish institutions … is a very dangerous mode of propaganda … If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action. Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews … Every single time you have prominent Zionist Jews come out and be like ‘No, this is antisemitic, to oppose Israel is antisemitic,’ you’re teaching people the trope of dual loyalty.”
Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, has much worse associations, first and foremost his doglike attachment to Donald Trump....
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This election will tell us exactly who the Americans are and who the Nazis are.
Mike Johnson, Wet Noodle — The Bulwark|William Kristol
The Rubber-Stamp Congress
by William Kristol
Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot this November. But these midterms are a referendum on him. The 119th Congress has been controlled by the Republican party. That party’s distinctive feature, its defining characteristic, is that it has supported Trump. It’s done so uniformly, mindlessly, and obediently.
So the Democrats’ message—the broad democratic opposition’s message—this fall is simple: If you want another rubber-stamp Congress, vote Republican. But if you want a Congress that will challenge and check all of those Trump administration policies you dislike, vote Democratic.
That message should work. The current Congress was elected on November 5, 2024, with Republicans taking 49.8 percent of the national vote for the House, as Donald Trump won 49.8 percent of the vote in the presidential election. Trump won by 1.5 percent, the Republican House candidates by 2.6 percent. Republicans were tied at the hip to Trump then, as they now.
Today Trump’s approval rating is about 38 percent. The steady decline in his approval over his second term in office will flip the House, and it puts the Senate very much in play.
That’s why Republicans in competitive states and districts are trying to edge away from Trump. Joe Perticone writes that he
spoke to eight different incumbent Republicans running in some of the closest races this cycle, and not a single one of them confirmed they planned to attend [the GOP midterm convention in Dallas next week], what Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters has dubbed “Trumpapalooza.”
So Democrats will run against Trump’s higher prices, against Trump’s tariffs, against Trump’s war. But of course they’ll also need to remind voters that the Republican Congress has enabled those policies.
House Speaker Mike Johnson decided to help them out yesterday.
CNN’s Manu Raju asked Johnson about his past projections about the Iran war, including calling it a skirmish that would be over in short order and lead to just a “temporary blip” in gas prices.
“That is one of the stupidest questions you’ve ever asked,” Johnson snapped. “I have nothing to do with the prosecution of the war across the globe.”
So the official position of the speaker is that he—and by extension the House of Representatives—have nothing to do with matters of war and peace. And in fact his party has voted time and again not to stop the war. It hasn’t even used its control of Congress to challenge the conduct of the war....
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A very limp-wristed liar!
Trump Brags About His “Brilliant” Venezuela Scheme While History Screams a Warning -- The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
America has spent decades paying for earlier interventions in oil-rich nations. Trump is now risking another cycle of rebellion, bloodshed, and blowback.
Here we go again with American colonialism, this time with a crazy scheme Trump thinks is “brilliant.”
You’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson with our stupid intervention in Iran in 1953, which led us straight to America’s humiliation in 1980 and today’s war with the Mullahs. This is going to be an epic disaster, one that will most likely cost us dearly in both American blood and treasure.
Back in February of 1989 I arrived in Caracas, Venezuela for a brief visit. Just a few hundred yards onto Venezuelan soil, I was stopped by a group of soldiers who told me I had to turn back and leave the country. My main memory is how young they were and how they seemed apologetic.
What I’d stumbled into was an uprising called the Caracazo.
Four years earlier, Reagan and his Treasury Secretary James Baker had begun leaning hard on Venezuela to cut back on their social programs and reduce their taxes on rich people, just like they’d done here with trickle-down, only this one under the banner of “austerity” and IMF-supervised “restructuring.”
Venezuela’s President when I arrived was Carlos Andrés Pérez, a guy who’d successfully campaigned in 1988 against the Reagan/Bush austerity plan, calling the entire thing “a neutron bomb that kills people but leaves buildings standing.” He’d also been the president five years earlier, and in that time had nationalized Venezuela’s oil, making him a bit of a folk hero.
But when he took office on February 2, 1989, three weeks before I arrived, the previous president (Jaime Lusinchi) had run the country $33 billion into debt, giving Bush and the IMF an excuse to force their neoliberal austerity program onto new President Pérez, who — disastrously — went along with it. His first step was to raise bus fares, which he thought would be benign. It wasn’t.
In the country with the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — larger than Saudi Arabia’s, Russia’s, or America’s — Bush’s price for debt relief was that the country’s poor had to pay more to get to work. Just 25 days later, the day I arrived, millions of angry people flooded the streets in response to that increase in bus fares and Pérez declared a state of national emergency....
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It is most apparent that teaching the U.S. anything is nearly impossible.
President Dementia Smells Getting Special ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Celebrity Apprentice Shark Tank?’ Reality Show! — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Donald Trump’s brain at this point is made entirely of pudding and recordings of Natalie calling him “O Captain! My Captain!” on a loop. He wants to be a dictator like Putin, but he’s 80 and he’s easily distracted and easily confused, and as far as anybody can tell, the last time his brain processed a thought fully — however well that worked back in the day, he’s always been bastante fucking stupid — was back when Michael Keaton was playing Batman. Although somewhere in that soup he knows Christian Bale was also Batman, as Bale told a famous story about the time Trump invited him to his office in Trump Tower and he actually thought he was talking to Bruce Wayne.
That soup has been simmering a long time, is what we are saying.
Additionally, somewhere in that soup, is Trump’s notion that he is some sort of grand showman who fucks all the ladies and grabs them by the pussy and gets the best ratings. This is why he thinks he’s the only person who can “save” the Kennedy Center from its previous success doing just fine NOT HOT ANYMORE. He had a couple of shitty reality TV shows where he played an obvious conman “businessman” swindler, America’s dumbest motherfuckers thought it was a documentary, and the rest is history.
(We will never get over the revelation that came out of this era that some people actually thought The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice were shows about a real and good businessman.)
Trump’s presidency is at this point mostly about starting wars, the shoot-’em-up kind and the trade kind, and losing them on the first day while Natalie feeds Trump applesauce and Big Mac-flavored Gerber baby food in his underpants and tells him he’s pretty. It is about Dear Leader getting very, very excited about building monuments to himself. And because Trump and the people who he surrounds himself with are such complete trash, it’s about reality TV and Wrestlemania.
There are ‘roided out idiot fights on the White House lawn, there are RACE CARS GO ZHOOM! The past-his-sell-by-date fuckboi at Transportation is making reality TV shows about his fears that his daughter was born with a functioning brain, and the melting replicant human face mask who runs HHS is doing some kind of “Who Wants to Lady And The Tramp This Bowl of Fried Whale Cum With Me And Then We Can Work Out In Blue Jeans Together” cooking/wellness show, it sounds awesome.
And now President Grandpa is getting one! It is like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Celebrity Apprentice In The Shark Tank, all rolled into one! And it is full of the biggest stars!
OK fine it has Nicki Minaj and Dumpy Unemployed Republican Superman, because we guess they weren’t busy....
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The "Over the Hil and into the Valley of Irrelevance" club has a new member.
What Happens When America’s “Secretary of War” Starts Committing Crimes in Plain Sight? — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
The alleged crimes are piling up, the evidence is hiding in plain sight, and Trump’s Pentagon is betting that nobody in Washington will dare hold Whiskey Pete accountable.
What should we Americans do when it comes out that our Secretary of Defense has been committing crimes in plain sight and nobody in the administration seems concerned about it?
Back in 2008, New York Times reporter David Barstow revealed that the Pentagon under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, starting in the fall of 2002, had recruited dozens of retired military officers to go on TV as if they were independent military analysts.
They were paid to push the Bush administration’s propaganda about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, and other lies to build support for the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the president and vice president had lied us into.
The hired guns got their talking points from the Pentagon, and internal documents called them “message force multipliers.” One participant later described it as “psyops on steroids.” Barstow disclosed how this was pure propaganda, noting:
“[M]embers of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated.”
Those unnecessary and illegal wars cost America the lives of about 7,000 troops and 7,600 contractors, led more than 30,000 service members and veterans of those conflicts to later commit suicide, 52,000+ wounded for life, and added roughly $5 trillion to our national debt with an estimated $2 trillion in veterans care and interest still to be paid....
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The way things are going he'll probably be awared the Congressional Medal of Honor. Putrid.
Hackers Are Selling Scans Of 153M Drivers Licenses
Krebs On Security reports:
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada.
Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. Krebs On Security also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the FBI today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.
The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards. A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number.
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More failure of the digital age.
Orlando Arena Hosts “Nazi Vs Jew” Kickboxing Match
The Bulwark reports:
A kickboxing match between a Nazi and a Jew seems like something Goebbels might have dreamed up for a propaganda stunt. Yet that’s exactly what happened at Orlando’s Kia Center on Saturday, where thousands cheered and some fans waved a swastika flag as a neo-Nazi kickboxer beat his Jewish opponent.
The headline fight at the “Duel Arena” pitted Jewish influencer Ben Azoulay against Paul Miller, a white-supremacist livestreamer better known as “Gypsy Crusader.” Miller, whose personal brand online centers on Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker movies, achieved some notoriety during the first Trump administration as a sort of Nick Fuentes associate, but his rise was cut short after he was sentenced to federal prison on gun charges.
Now out of prison, Miller has been rebuilding his online brand through influencer kickboxing matches like Saturday’s event. Miller has “SS” thunderbolt tattoos on his chest, and he threw up Nazi salutes before the match while walking around to a Nazi marching song. After he beat Azoulay, Miller’s fans waved a swastika flag and did their own Nazi salutes.
To be clear: this didn’t happen at some backwoods Nazi club like the one from the 2015 movie Green Room. This is an 18,000-seat venue where the Orlando Magic play. The Kia Center didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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The utter collapse of decency. Free speech you say? I wonder what the reaction would be if someone waived a Shariah Law flag in that den of inequity? Hmm?
Also too: He was not hired as a cleric. He was hired to work for the people not pollute us with religious dogma.
Vance: I’m Happy If My Work Hastens The “End Times”
People reports:
Vice President JD Vance said he is willing to accept the possibility that his work in the Trump administration could contribute to the arrival of the “end times,” saying he is more focused on doing God’s work.
“I for my entire life have been fascinated by the end times,” he said. Vance said he is ultimately willing to accept whatever spiritual consequences may come from his efforts. “If that leads to the end times, okay, and if that leads to… us building a better world that thrives and survives for a very long time after I’m gone, that’s great too.”
"“I for my entire life have been fascinated by the end times,” he said.
That's yer problem, Maybelline. Instead of taking care of the poor, the hungry, the sick, you and your religiously bent cult fearmonger over an imaginary date that has been forecast thousands of times over millennia...all come and gone, while the rich hoard wealth and enslave everyone else. What "god's work" have you been doing? Other than your eight vacations around the world? I saw a sign that said God Hates Hindus. Drop dead, asshole." — Jay Silversmith (comments)
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From what I've read the end may be coming for him sooner than he thinks. His bullshit floweth over!
Florida Cubans Deported To War-Torn African Nation
The Tampa Bay Times reports:
A month after arriving in the Central African Republic, Yasmany Moreno and 35 other immigrants deported on a 21-hour flight remain in Bangui, the country’s capital, without passports and no information about what will happen next. They stay at the Maison Confort, a modest hotel located in a busy neighborhood near central Bangui.
Deportations to third countries have been criticized by nonprofits and advocates because immigrants can be sent to places where they have no ties and may face safety concerns, violence and language barriers.
The U.S. Department of State has warned Americans not to travel to the Central African Republic for any reason due to unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health and terrorism. However, the Department of Homeland Security defended the deportations in an email to the Times. “When an individual is no longer in ICE custody then ICE will no longer be responsible for them,” the agency said. “This is common sense.”
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The two-faced motherfuckers!
Sick, mean and evil fuckery by the Satanic Trump fascist! Fucking up human lives wherever they may be.
Trump chief 'talking about muscles' is damaging Army: military officials — Alternet|Sarah K.Burris
The resignation from Army Secretary Dan Driscoll sent shockwaves through the government and the military as Driscoll made it clear to President Donald Trump that things were not going well in the Department of Defense.
CNN reported on Wednesday that sources said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is doing damage to the Army's effort to adapt as a new era of warfare evolves. Those in the armed forces believe that they must "adapt to the modern battlefield," but Hegseth is too busy focusing on far-right culture war issues.
“It’s conflicting because yeah, he put out a memo saying this is important, but … he’s talking about muscles, dudes in dresses, testosterone,” an official said. “We don’t see a change at that level.”
The sources said that Hegseth is more interested in creating his own personal image of "the American warfighter." Anyone who doesn't match that vision is being shoved out, eliminating expertise and creating a brain drain....
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The whining Trump Nazis have destroyed our Army. Our nation is now as weak as a kitten.
The Supreme Court’s 'cry wolf' defense explodes after new Trump ruling — Alternet|Terry H. Schwadron
Supreme Court justices have gone on the road in recent months to defend their decision-making as strict obedience to law rather than to politics.
But their actions continue to show a heavy political tilt when Donald Trump is involved.
The decision on Monday to allow construction of Trump’s gilded ballroom complex on the wreckage of the destroyed White House East Wing is a good example. A bare majority of the court hung their approval on a finding that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit chartered by Congress to guard public buildings, lacked “standing” to claim injury.
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Injury? The motherfucker tore down a third of our White House without our consent! Fuck you goddamn bastards!
Jim Acosta Aghast At 'Chunks' Of Reflecting Pool As Trump Says 'Almost Completely Fixed' — Crooks and Liars|David Edwards
Journalist Jim Acosta filmed workers tearing chunks out of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool a day after President Donald Trump declared the landmark almost completely fixed.
Journalist Jim Acosta filmed workers tearing chunks out of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool a day after President Donald Trump declared the landmark almost completely fixed.
In a video posted to X on Monday, Acosta reported while standing at the edge of the drained pool on the National Mall just hours after Trump made claims on Truth Social that were not supported by the personal inspection.
"You can see behind me that the reflecting pool is almost entirely empty," Acosta explained in the video, where he was forced to film work crews through gaps in a long black barrier that ran the length of the basin.
"I've just been spotting the workers down here on the no-bid contract for the Reflecting Pool," Acosta noted. "They are ripping up chunks of the bottom of this Reflecting Pool and throwing them away."
"Obviously trying to clean up after their own shoddy work, and not from vandals down here that they've been lying about over and over," he continued.
Trump had described a very different pool one day earlier, writing that "the Reflecting Pool is almost completely fixed," including its inflow and outflow pipes. Fewer than 20 hours separated that post from Acosta's video of an empty basin being torn up, according to the timestamps on both....
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More destruction from Trump. The asswipe does nothing but tear us apart. The idiot must go!
Did Mike Johnson Just Describe Trump By Accident? — Crooks and Liars|John Amato
Trump lies more than any human being in office.
In Tuesday's press conference, Speaker Mike Johnson attacked Islam, calling its followers liars, and then used that to justify Trump's -- who is himself a prolific liar of the worst kind -- inability to end the Iran war.
Johnson always feigns ignorance to the press over the most important breaking news stories throughout the day and the week so that he doesn't have to comment on the criminality and immorality of the Republican Party.
But Jebus Johnson is always aware of what's going on, so he can attack his rivals and critics....
"For some of them, it's, you know, apparently part of their religion that they can just lie to someone they disagree with."
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He is obviously speaking about Trump.
Blanche busted for bogus claim in new Epstein files-case slap-down — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
Former MS NOW host Katie Phang accused Attorney General Todd Blanche of lying to the court to avoid Jeffrey Epstein file disclosures in In a terse court filing submitted Wednesday morning.
In a post on X, journalist Scott MacFarlane published a link to the document and wrote, “In court filing this morning, lawyer for @KatiePhangasks judge to direct Todd Blanche to finally produce FBI interview notes from Epstein Files.. for possible release.”
He added, “Phang says Blanche continues to defy June court order requiring release of more files.”...
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Throw his crooked ass in stir!
‘Prison time’ demanded for Trump admin after bombshell whistleblower report — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom demanded that Trump officials face “prison time” following the release of a bombshell whistleblower report on suspected election interference.
President Donald Trump has long sought to restrict mail-in voting for the upcoming midterms. His controversial voter ID bill known as the SAVE Act includes several restrictions on mail-in voting, but has stalled in Congress, and an executive order he signed in March to restrict mail-in voting has been temporarily blocked from being implemented.
According to a whistleblower report released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), however, it appears the U.S. Postal Service is pressing ahead with Trump’s directive regardless, implementing a “secretive, rushed” system that would give the agency unprecedented control over verifying voter eligibility. The report sparked outrage, including with Newsom, who called for immediate action.
“Defying court orders to engage in election interference should bring prison time,” Newsom wrote Tuesday in a social media post on X. “Lock them up. Defend democracy.”
Newsom was not alone in his condemnation of the Trump administration’s apparent skirting of the courts. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee described Trump’s “attack on vote-by-mail” as “alarming” and “much more serious than previously known.”
“Trump is creating a new tracking system at the US Postal Service that is untested, dangerous, and threatens to totally disrupt ballot delivery for millions of American citizens,” reads a statement from House Oversight Democrats.
“This is an unconstitutional and dangerous power grab and must be permanently and immediately blocked. We are fighting in the courts to protect the right to vote. We will have more to come on this serious and illegal attack on our vote by mail system.”...
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The U.S. population demands that the Nazi criminal Trump be arrested and charged!
Every decent human being in the world demands it!
What would it take to actually stop the data centers? — Vox|Eric Levitz
Demonstrators wave signs during a nationwide protest against AI data center expansion in Imperial, California, on July 18, 2026. | Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images
In the United States, building a data center now polls roughly as well as abolishing the police. If current trends continue, server warehouses may soon be less popular with Americans than pizza topped with pineapple and shattered glass.
In an August survey from Heatmap Pro and Embold Research, just 15 percent of Americans said they would support a data center being built in their area, while 75 percent expressed opposition. One year earlier, 43 percent of respondents in the same poll had approved of nearby data center development, while just 42 percent opposed it.
Key takeaways
Data center projects are increasingly unpopular and vulnerable to local opposition.
Nevertheless, the AI infrastructure buildout remains massive.
The economic forces driving the data center boom are extremely strong.
Since AI data centers can be located almost anywhere, it’s difficult to stop them from being built somewhere.
This soaring backlash is visible in other surveys — and in the actions of elected officials. In recent weeks, Wisconsin’s gubernatorial candidates sparred over who hates data centers more, Pennsylvania’s center-left Gov. Josh Shapiro enacted new restrictions on AI infrastructure projects (after previously championing such investment), and even Texas’s staunchly pro-business Republican government announced a temporary moratorium on new approvals.
Meanwhile, data center projects are being canceled at a record rate, as local opposition mounts.
This has led some in the pro-tech minority to worry that the data center buildout is about to collapse — and take the US economy down with it. Anti-AI commentators, for their part, are cheering the industry’s impending crisis.
But such panic and celebration are both premature.
In truth, despite exploding opposition, the data center boom is still going strong. Interviews with industry experts and recent construction data suggest that the economic forces driving the buildout remain more powerful than the political winds blowing against it. And unless Congress enacts a national moratorium, AI companies will almost certainly be able to continue finding jurisdictions willing to tolerate hyperscale campuses, in exchange for sufficient revenue and incentives.
America’s data center boom can be slowed and geographically shifted. But it probably can’t be killed, absent a collapse in demand for computing power or a much bigger revolution in American politics.
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Please take note of the map where these data centers are mostly being built. In the most retarded area of the U.S. — the Land of the Happy Negro!
Now you know.
Texas Swing County Could Shut Down 92 Polling Places Before Midterm Election — Common Dreams|Stephen Prager
Senate candidate James Talarico is pushing Tarrant County to drop plans to close nearly a third of its polling sites.
exas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is pushing for one of Texas’ most important swing counties to drop plans to close nearly a third of its polling places before November’s midterms.
Amid public outcry, the Commissioners Court for Tarrant County — which contains Fort Worth and borders Dallas — plans to hold a vote on Tuesday on whether to shutter 92 of the polling places used in the 2022 election, many of which serve the city’s poorer and minority populations.
If Democrats flip the Senate this November, the road to that outcome will almost certainly run through Texas. A Democrat has not won a statewide election there since 1994, but Talarico may be in a position to break the trend — leading Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in most polls.
Tarrant County narrowly supported then-Rep. Collin Allred, the Democratic challenger to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2024. Talarico said the closure of polling places was meant to suppress turnout and help Republicans cling to their advantage in the state.
“The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able to vote easily,” Talarico said at a press event Sunday, during which he argued that the closures would result in longer travel for voters and lower turnout, especially in heavily Black and Latino communities.
“We’re here fighting for the rights of everybody,” Talarico added. “The problem is when we let voting rights become a partisan issue. That’s when we walk down a very dangerous path in this country.”...
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Stop fascism! Vote Talarico!
Trump 2020 election lawyer backed into corner during live TV debate — Raw Story|Jim Small, Arizona Mirror
Alex Kolodin, the Republican running to be the state’s top election administrator as secretary of state, refused to say that Arizona’s elections are safe and secure in a candidate forum Monday on public television.
He dodged the question multiple times, instead declaring that Arizonans don’t have confidence in the state’s elections and blaming Adrian Fontes, the Democratic secretary of state, for turning Arizona elections from “a national model to a national embarrassment.”
Throughout the 27-minute forum that was broadcast on Arizona PBS, Kolodin evaded questions or gave meandering answers that only tangentially related to the question, as “Arizona Horizon” host Ted Simons repeatedly tried — mostly in vain — to get him to give straight answers.
“He’s not answering your questions because his actual answers would turn off a lot of Arizona voters,” Fontes told Simons at one point.
Fontes openly needled Kolodin about his evasiveness, repeatedly interrupting the GOP state legislator to point out how he was failing to provide simple answers to questions.
“Stop talking about me. What do you want?” Fontes said when Kolodin began answering a question about whether he would support President Donald Trump’s executive order to restrict voting by mail by accusing Fontes of “making a big deal of things” that don’t concern Arizona.
“Why don’t you just answer the question, Alex?” Fontes interjected at another point.
“You could have just said ‘no,’ but you didn’t,” Fontes told Kolodin after he rejected the label “election denier” in an answer that focused more on a dispute over election observers in Pinal County than it did in hewing to the question he was asked.
Fontes accused Kolodin of trying to hide his true views through misleading answers and prevarications, and said his refusal to be honest and straightforward does a disservice to voters.
“What I’d like to do is invite Alex Kolodin to just give straight answers to questions. This isn’t, like, a show. This is serious. Arizona voters need to see who you really are, not the prepared, canned answers,” he said near the end of the forum. “They need to see who you are, not who you prepared to be. Come on.”...
About all you can get out of Nazis is, "Heil, Trump!"
Here’s Why We’ve Been Seeing So Much Food-Borne Illness — Mother Jones|Dylan Scott
Summer is supposed to be the best time for fresh produce. Corn on the cob at the cookout. Berries plucked right from the vine. Salads on the cafe patio while you take an extra long lunch break because the weather and the food is that good.
But this year, summer’s harvest brought something much different than the flavorful dishes we’ve come to expect. Since May, the United States has seen more than 17,000 lab-confirmed cyclosporiasis cases. Before this summer’s massive outbreak, the country had never recorded more than a few hundred infections in a single year from this parasite, which can cause watery and at times explosive diarrhea.
And that isn’t the only bug invading Americans’ digestive tracts.
One person died from a listeria infection traced to ricotta cheese. Close to 100 people came down with salmonella from recalled eggs, while more than 400 people have gotten sick in a separate salmonella outbreak involving jalapeños. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration issued its highest urgency warning for frozen blueberries believed to be contaminated with E coli.
“Climate change has allowed pathogens like cyclospora…to expand from the tropic, subtropic lines into areas more north and south.”...
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When there is no food and no air all of our problems will be over. We will no longer exist. End of debate.
Donalds: “We Can’t Let Sharia Take A Foothold In FL”
Florida Politics reports:
Days before the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds says stopping Sharia law in the Sunshine State is key to ensuring that tragic carnage doesn’t recur on Florida soil.
“Now, how do you prepare Florida for the potential of another 9/11?” Donalds said during a town hall at The Villages. “The No. 1 thing I would say is we cannot have Sharia law take a foothold in our state. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation in April explicitly banning Sharia law. Despite not having Sharia law in 2001, Florida played a key role in the events leading to the coordinated terror attacks. Many of the terrorists lived in the state leading up to the attacks, and some of them trained on flight simulators in Florida.
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Just exactlty where does he see Sharia Law being implemented? We have a Constitution that he allows our president to shit on constanlty. He's a very weak man.
Reuters Poll: Only 14% Support Renaming Lake Ontario
Fox News reports:
A new poll has found that a majority of Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s decisions to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America and impose higher tariffs on Canadian goods.
In the 3-day Reuters/Ipsos poll that ended Sunday, 63% said they opposed renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America, compared to 14% in favor. The rest were undecided or skipped the question. The survey also found that 57% opposed new tariffs on Canadian goods, compared to 20% who supported the measures.
When asked by Fox News Digital for reaction, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said, “Canada has been a bad neighbor by ripping off our country for years. President Trump promised voters that he would not allow our country to be taken advantage of anymore, which is why he is fighting so hard to protect American industries and workers. Thanks to the President’s bold leadership, we are putting America back on the map.”
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There is at least 33% of these "Lake America" retards in our country. So, don't kid me.
Army Secretary Resigns, Hegseth Driving Military Into Ditch, America So Awesome Now! — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Secretary Shitfaced Pete Hegseth is busy calling Canadian women who serve as cadet youth group leaders fat on Twitter, but Dan Driscoll, secretary of the Army, submitted his resignation last night, one more event demonstrating the Fox News weekend host’s completely absent leadership, in a week full of them.
And the full reporting makes it so much worse. Axios cites how Driscoll’s attempts to modernize the military were being blocked (by the oldest white bread white-ass white Boomer loser regime in world history), and the absolute chaos that comes with Secretary Shitfaced making hiring and firing decisions based on his personal culture war grievances rather than on merit or skill.
Driscoll was trying to teach the military how to fight wars with things like drones. Pete Hegseth thinks the secret sauce the military is missing is testosterone gel and shaving cream, and no girls, Black people, or gay or trans people! Meanwhile Donald Trump is upset aircraft carriers aren’t using the steam catapults that comforted him when he was a boy, and his Transportation Secretary is Kids These Days-ing about start/stop buttons on cars. Fucking oldest people that ever lived.
Shitfaced was “suspicious and paranoid” about Driscoll, say some officials. Summing up the situation to Axios, one source simply said it was “sad.”
Once gone, which Driscoll will be shortly, there will be no top Senate-confirmed leadership at the Army. As if we need woke gay shit like that!...
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We are sooooo far away from "greatness" with these shitbags.
Military leaders in 'denial' over Trump danger: ex-Air Force chief — Alternet|Thomas Kika
Military leaders are taking a major risk by treating President Donald Trump's power grabs as normal, one former Air Force secretary wrote for the New York Times, calling their "denial" strategy a "cop-out that is putting democracy at risk."
Frank Kendall III is a military veteran who most recently served as the Secretary of the Air Force under former President Joe Biden. On Tuesday, he published a new op-ed relaying his growing concerns about the air of normalcy that still pervades the military under Trump.
"I attended a military retirement ceremony last month at which Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the presiding officer and featured speaker," Kendall wrote. "It was eerily, even alarmingly normal. In a large room full of current and retired senior military officers, everyone was playing the same game of 'Let’s pretend everything is fine.'”
He continued: "Denial is one of the two approaches the nation’s senior military leaders seem to have taken to cope with Donald Trump’s presidency. When they aren’t ignoring how abnormal things have become, they turn to the other approach, claiming that they have no responsibility for the actions the armed forces have been ordered to take because those orders were 'policy' choices outside the scope of their duties. This is a cop-out, and it is putting our democracy at risk."...
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As one of my old platoon staff sergeants said more than once, "You ain't worf a shit!"
And he wasn't talking to me.
El-Sayed Calls Trump ‘The Asshole’ For Trade War With Canada Crooks and Liars|Ed Scarce
"If you’re starting a trade war with Canada, it’s because you’re the asshole,” said the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate from Michigan.
Nowhere is Trump's trade war more unpopular than in the state of Michigan. And while Trump's flunky, Mike Rogers, has to play along, Abdul El-Sayed can call out Trump for what he is: an asshole.
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Correct, sir!
Vote El-Sayed!
How to unf-ck the Supreme Court — Daily Kos|Lisa Needham
NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which tends to give conservatives a pass for their ever-shifting views as they try to keep up with a mercurial madman like President Donald Trump, failed to get Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina with a gotcha question.
During an interview, host Kristin Welker brought up how, 35 years ago, Clyburn voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But Clyburn used the opportunity to throw Thomas under the bus and to call for packing the Supreme Court.
Playing a clip of Clyburn’s 1991 speech in favor of Thomas, Welker asked, “Do you stand by your decision to make the case for Clarence Thomas’ confirmation?”
“Absolutely not. You know, I have made mistakes in my life, and that’s one that I made—and I will own up to that mistake. The fact of the matter is, I had faith and confidence in the fact that his background and experiences would instruct him in his professionalism, especially sitting on the bench,” Clyburn responded.
He went on, “I also thought that he believed in precedent of the law, and I felt sure that he would be there upholding those precedents set down in 1954 in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. I thought that he would follow those court decisions that upheld the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act. I had no idea that Clarence Thomas would rebel the way he has against his own background and experiences.”...
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Expand the court to whatever size insures fascist bastards will never touch it again. As many as it takes. And make retirement mandatory!
USPS Accused Of Secretly Implementing Ballots Edict
The New York Times reports:
A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.
The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1.
“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.
"Once upon a time disobeying a court order resulted in jail time
Good times." — Todd20036
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Start with Trump's Postmaster General. Arrest him and investigate him.
Bovino Retired Amid Misconduct And Perjury Probe
The Chicago Tribune reports:
Former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino retired while under internal investigation for his conduct during immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis and Chicago, records released last week by the federal government show.
In early March, an internal government watchdog contacted Bovino with an “official Inquiry into allegations of misconduct reported to CBP,” emails released by Customs and Border Patrol show. The official, whose name was redacted by the agency, asked Bovino to acknowledge receipt of the document and answer questions. That email went out on March 2, according to the records. Days later, on March 18, Bovino emailed an official informing them that he plans to retire and move.
Bovino retired from CBP later that month after leading controversial immigration enforcement operations across the country, including the deadly Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago last fall and Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis earlier this year. In a direct message on X, Bovino told the Tribune Monday he was placed under investigation “to CAUSE me to retire.”
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Thus may it be with Trump and all of his criminal disciples!
Mullin Says Democrats Are “Thugs On Themselves”
The Huffington Post reports:
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin spoke on Fox News’ “One Nation” about how Democratic officials keep calling to abolish ICE, and he deemed his political opponents “thugs.” This comes after Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and Republican candidate for governor of New York, announced his county would comply with state law and end its cooperation agreement with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“It’s frustrating when you have these candidates … that go out there and say, ‘Abolish ICE,’ when all we’re doing is we’re enforcing our nation’s laws, and we’re keeping our streets and our cities safe because these sanctuary [state] politicians, they’re thugs on themselves. Most of these thugs — these politicians that are true thugs at this point — that are saying, ‘Abolish ICE, abolish the police,’ they’re also the leader of this new socialist, Democrat party,” Mullin said.
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JohnWayne "Shorty" Mullin, one of Trump's main terrorist thugs with anger issues, opens his trap about enforcing our government's right to murder us.
MAGA gov rages Trump admin holding 'gun to the head' as hospitals brace to lose $27M a day — Raw Story|Terri Langford, Texas Tribune
When the state's new fiscal year begins on Tuesday, Texas hospitals expect to lose $27 million a day in additional Medicaid funding.
The shortfall is the result of a decision by the Trump administration to withhold approval from Texas for about $9.8 billion in the next year from three programs, the bulk of which affects the Comprehensive Hospital Increase Reimbursement Program (CHIRP). This program gives hospitals additional funding to cover the difference between Medicaid rate payments and the actual costs that hospitals incur to provide services to Medicaid patients. Essentially, hospitals, which often are paid less than what they caspend on Medicaid patients due to outdated payment rates set by the state, are losing out on their additional reimbursement for 2027.
Local governmental entities collect taxes from hospitals — about $4 billion a year, according to the Texas Hospital Association — and under CHIRP, the federal government matches those funds so that Texas hospitals can then use them to cover the actual costs of providing Medicaid services. Hospitals say those CHIRP dollars are critical and if they lose that funding, they will likely have to cut services to patients.
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Abolish Abbott!
Vote Gina Hinojosa!
Burgum: Trump Called Apple About Lake Ontario Name
“When the President signs an executive order, you know, reflecting a name change like the Gulf of America or Lake America, it does direct the Department of Interior – the Board of Geographic Names, is part of the U.S. Geologic Survey, that great mapping institution and science institution which is part of the Department of the Interior. They plug that into the software and then that software cascades down so all the providers would do that. I know that the president reached out to Apple directly, so I’m sure that we may be seeing that change coming up soon to Lake America.” – Doug Burgum, after celebrating that Google Maps has caved to Trump.
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Hey! Bozo! The retarded name of Trump's little fantasy play only shows up in the uncivilized parts of the planet. That's where we live, you fucking retard!
The rest of planet Earth can read the real American name on their maps. He knows this and is only trolling us as his commander-in-knee taking is commanding him to do!
Fuck Apple as well.
FRC: Surveillance By Flock Cameras Is Against Jesus
Posted today on Family Research Council’s website:
A vehicle repeatedly appears at a church, political meeting, pregnancy resource center, medical clinic, or particular business. Each observation alone may reveal little. Joined with identity records, online information, and other cameras, those observations can expose religion, politics, relationships, habits, and associations.
That reaches beyond the Fourth Amendment. If government can identify who was there, First Amendment freedoms of religion, speech, assembly, and association come into play. A free society investigates after suspicion; a surveillance society collects first and decides later whom to scrutinize.
Christians should understand this especially well. Scripture pictures a future regime in which allegiance is ultimately tied to the ability to buy and sell. God is omniscient; Caesar is not. Scripture gives government authority to punish wrongdoing, not omniscience over innocent citizens merely because technology makes such knowledge obtainable.
Read the full article. Today’s post comes after multiple prominent Republicans – including the governors of Texas and Florida – have reversed on Flock.
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Aa per usual, the hypocrite is late to the party.
Demented Man: Iran Benefits From “Fake USA News”
“Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD! They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead. They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!), and a good line of “BULLSHIT.” Thank you for your attention to this matter!” – Trump, just now on Truth Social.
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Zat so? Then why do they hold so much power over you, criminal war loser?
Strait of Hormuz closed, still closed!
You aren't paying our soldiers. You live in a glass house, hoser!
Sex, Money, and Revenge: What Happens When a Country Becomes One Man’s Property — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
When one man turns prosecutors, tax collectors, billionaires, and elections into weapons of personal power, democracy itself becomes the next thing he owns.
Last Thursday, a federal judge in Massachusetts put her foot down and stopped Trump’s Republican toadies on the Postal Board of Governors from seizing control of your mail-in ballot this fall. She noted that neither the Constitution nor Congress gives him or them that power and, besides that, there’s no time for states to comply with their demands.
They’re still trying, though, and if they’re unsuccessful we can fully expect this scheme to reappear in the presidential election in 2 years with even greater intensity.
I’ve seen up-close-and-personal how this plays out when corrupt leaders driven by sex, money, and revenge take over a nation. It ain’t pretty.
Thanksgiving Day of 1980 I was the guest of host Sanford Ungar on NPR’s All Things Considered show, live from the famine zone of Kampala, Uganda, describing what I’d seen in the preceding days. Both times he asked me about soldiers (the country was militarily occupied by Tanzania at the time, them having evicted Idi Amin) the military cut the phone line and we had to re-dial.
I told him how Kampala, build on seven hills like Rome, was once one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but we’d been walking through burned-out buildings, broken glass, and confronted tens of thousands of hungry faces.
The city had no running water, and when the Commissioner of the Ministry of Rehabilitation met with Herr Müller and me, I apologized for arriving filthy in 4-day-old clothes; he told me not to worry about it as he hadn’t had a bath or shower in the two years the city had been “dry” since the war started. On one short morning walk, Herr Müller and I counted nine bodies....
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The day will come when justice washes over Trump and cleanses the planet from his filth.
Bestiality Not A Total Dealbreaker At Kash Patel’s FBI Anymore — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
We guess they are really scratching the bottom of the barrel when it comes to recruiting at Kash Patel’s joke of an FBI these days. Either that, or they’re just really trying to make sure their recruits are as creepy and weird and douchey as Kash himself. Or both.
Regardless of the exact motivations, CBS News is reporting that certain hiring standards at the FBI have been notably, um, reduced. Back in June, they “quietly lowered” some standards that earlier would have automatically disqualified applicants, so that they now appear to allow all of the following:
Have hired sex workers, as long as it wasn’t more than three (3) times, and as long as it was at least 10 years ago.
Stole from your old employer? That’s OK, as long as it was more than three (3) years ago!
Did some bestiality? As long as you were under 18 at the time!
They just want to consider the “whole person,” one of CBS News’s sources says.
Oh boy.
Does it sound to y’all like they were rewriting these rules to let specific people in? Like maybe there was some guy named Carl whose background check popped for prostitution and stealing and bestiality, so they wrote up some exceptions for Carl?
Dunno, it just sounds like that to us....
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Welcome, pig fuckers!
The Cruelty Comes to Springfield — The Bulwark|Jim Swift
...This is what Trump is doing to our towns and cities. In the name of cracking down on immigration, he has ripped our social fabric apart. And it is small acts of decent human beings—people who don’t want to live in a society in which the state terrorizes families, schools, and churches—that is keeping it together.
The media crowded into a small, stuffy prayer room at the side of the church. Ruby opened with a story: While this mobilization was being organized, he was in Canada helping a Haitian family he knew relocate there. Returning to Haiti was not an option. Before coming to America, their children had survived kidnapping attempts, and the family’s car had been shot at as they fled. Canada was available only because they had an immediate relative there.
Ruby has been working pretty much non-stop, and a small documentary crew now follows him during what will surely be a defining chapter of his life.
A few weeks earlier, Ruby had accompanied a parishioner to an appointment at the ICE office in Blue Ash, outside Cincinnati. As they walked inside, the man told Ruby what had happened to his brother in Haiti.
“He leaned over and said, ‘My brother was just kidnapped in Haiti,’” Ruby recalled.
“And I said, ‘What happened to him?’ And he said, ‘They burned him.’” Ruby initially misunderstood. “I said, ‘Is he okay?’” he continued.
“And he said, ‘No, they burned him alive.’” Ruby paused before adding: “That’s happening in Haiti.”
When ICE summons Springfield Haitians to Blue Ash, it presents them with a choice: deportation, or an ankle monitor.
The Haitians being fitted with monitors are not fugitives hiding from the government. They are showing up when the government tells them to.
“They are not hiding,” said Vilès Dorsainvil of the Haitian Support Center. “They know where they live. They know where they work.” If immigrants are summoned before a judge, he said, they appear. “You ask them to go for ICE checking, they do that. And they arrest them.”
Dorsainvil said seven Haitians had reported for ICE check-ins last Thursday. One was a woman who had given birth twenty days earlier and lost the baby. “She came to the office. She could not even walk,” he said. “But they put the shackle on her.”...
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The good news is Trump will spend eternity in hell.
Trump readying earthquake scheme if midterms leave him in a 'black hole': insider— Raw Story|Robert Davis
..."What happens if the entire Trump administration basically doesn't comply?" Haberman asked rhetorically. "Then you have contempt of Congress referrals going to Attorney General Todd Blanche. I don't really see that becoming a big rush on Blanche's part. So, I don't know what this looks like, but Trump doesn't seem especially afraid."
""but Trump doesn't seem especially afraid." BULL SHT! EVERYTHING HE IS DOING IS BECAUSE HE IS SCARED SHTLESS AND IT ALL STARTED SINCE THE EPSTEIN FILES/LIST WERE DENIED BY BONDI IN JUNE 2025 TO BE RELEASED! ICE invasions in LA, Oregon, DC, SC, Chicago, Minnesota, etc., verbal attacks on Greenland, Canada, Mexico, NATO, etc., bombing boats, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and then starting an actual war with Iran. Include distractions with destroying the WH East Wing, the Reflective Pool, the the WH Lawn, and now destroyed 60 Cherry Trees to upgrade a golf course. Finally, many, many frivolous and vindictive law suits! Also, if he pardons anyone to testify, they are no longer immune in using the 5th when questioned, and the DEMS, unless they are still cowardly, have "Inherit Powers" and a prison they can be held in if they are held in contempt! Furthermore, though Blanche won't do sht, there will be "contempt charges" being held over there heads, and will lessen Trump's control over them! Think about it, fat boy might not make it alive, but Eric, Ivanka, Jr., Barron, Melania, Patel, Bondi, Noam, Blanche, etc., are all young enough to be prosecuted and serve their time! (Barron has made $150 million and his relationship with the Tate Brother)" — Ricardo Santos (comments)
"We might suggest to not use the corrupt legal system to remove tR ump when there is plan B. Rope: It's cheap. One size fits all. Can be used more than once. Endorsed by Mike Pence." — Wric nick (comments)
"His best scheme would be to take a handful of pills and die. Freeing the world for a massive party" — meepsorp (comments)
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Does he think he's bulletproof? He can be removed by force if necessary.
Texas and Georgia races show voters are finally sick of MAGA corruption — Salon|Amanda Marcotte
Jon Ossoff and James Talarico are polling well with a clean government message
It’s easy to see why Ken Paxton thought he could waltz right into the role of senator from Texas. Sure, the state’s Republican nominee and current attorney general is widely seen as one of the most corrupt men in politics, a man with so many scandals that even his fellow Republicans impeached him. (Sadly, the Texas Senate refused to convict him.) Still, Donald Trump won over 56% of the vote in Texas in 2024, despite the Jan. 6th riot and his felony convictions for fraud in New York, so it seemed voters don’t care about corruption. Paxton has been so sure it would be simple to beat his Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, that he even blew off campaigning over much of the summer in favor of a luxury European vacation with his alleged mistress, a conservative Christian influencer named Tracy Duhon.
Now Paxton is starting to worry. He even brought Trump to Texas on Aug. 27 to lead a fundraiser for his campaign. Talarico is ahead in the polls, which hasn’t been true for a Democrat in a statewide race for decades. The Cook Political Report, which tends to be reluctant to buck historical trends, nonetheless changed the election rating from “leans Republican” to “toss-up” in late August. Perhaps even more shocking is that Talarico is pulling this off by making issues of character and corruption central to the race, positioning himself as a genuinely pious Christian, in contrast with Paxton’s seemingly endless hypocrisy and debauched behavior.
Talarico isn’t the only Democrat pulling ahead in a state Trump won in 2024 by running on a clean government message. In Georgia, Sen. Jon Ossoff has a comfortable lead in polls over his challenger, Republican Rep. Mike Collins. The senator has been grabbing national headlines for months by targeting Trump in his speeches, leading to chatter about a possible 2028 presidential run. What’s getting attention, however, is not bland, consultant-approved talk about the price of groceries. Ossoff has aggressively targeted Trump on the one issue pundits had long assumed voters no longer care about: corruption. He calls the president a “crook,” describes his cronies as the “Mar-a-Lago mafia” and bashes the White House as “the most corrupt administration of all time.”
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Of this there can be no doubt.
Election Official: No State Could Follow Mail-In Ballot Restrictions — Crooks and Liars|Chris capper Liebenthal
Wisconsin Election Commission Chair Don Millis explains that it would be impossible to follow Trump's executive order on mail-in ballots and even if it was possible, it would harm Republicans more than Democrats....
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That's how foolish the Trump and his Toadies are.
Donalds Shrugs At $10M Medicaid Scam By DeSantis
The Miami Herald reports:
Republican gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds is brushing aside calls from his Democratic opponent to open a new investigation into how the DeSantis administration used the state’s Hope Florida charity to divert millions of dollars from a Medicaid settlement into a campaign to defeat recreational marijuana.
Campaigning at a Las Vegas Cuban Cuisine in Doral Saturday, Donalds said the administration’s financial maneuvering during the 2024 campaign season has already been looked into by the Florida House and a Tallahassee grand jury, and told reporters that it’s not an issue on voters’ minds as they prepare to elect a new governor in November.
“I’m telling you, when I travel the state of Florida, it doesn’t matter if I’m here in Doral or in Pensacola,” he said. “What people are concerned about is: How am I going to put food on the table? How am I going to keep the lights on?” Former Congressman David Jolly, Donalds’ Democratic opponent, vowed this week to open a new investigation if he wins the governor’s race. He characterized the movement of funds as “money laundering.”
Some Republicans have expressed alarm about the findings in the report, which was filed under seal and withheld from the public by the courts. Sen. Rick Scott called it “deeply disturbing.” “Money designated to help poor kids was diverted to political ads,” he told the Tampa Bay Times. “Florida families deserve accountability, not more finger pointing in Tallahassee.”
Read the full article. On social media, Donalds has shared multiple calls prosecute top Democrats over alleged Medicaid fraud in California and Minnesota. But when it actually happens in Florida, that’s a libtard hoax.
"In all honesty, Florida deserves Governor Tom. The fact this self-hating shitbag is even in the running says more about Florida than it does about candidate Fetchit." — Phil da Bern (comments)
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Happy Negro sez "Ok for me!" and "It's not my fault!"
Trump Shares Call To Evacuate Jews From Canada
Canada’s CTV News reports:
U.S. President Donald Trump continued his rant on Truth Social Sunday afternoon, claiming he had “revived and saved” the automobile business in America via tariffs, calling Canada “one of the worst abusers.” In another post following this, the U.S. president encouraged all Canadian companies doing business with the U.S. to move operations south of the border “immediately.”
In an earlier Truth Social post, Trump shared a news article with a caption that said Canada is “on notice” two days after the U.S. inked a deal with Venezuela over its oil reserves. The article was titled “Trump’s historic oil deal with Venezuela realigns global energy and puts OPEC, Canada on notice” by Just The News, an outlet run by American conservative journalist John Solomon.
In a separate Truth Social post, Trump also shared another news article from the same organization with the headline: “Christian leaders urge Trump to create legal pathway for Jewish Canadians facing antisemitism.” According to the article, a national coalition of Christian lawmakers and other community members wrote a letter to Trump, asking the administration to develop a legal route for Jewish Canadians facing antisemitism, to come to the U.S.
"I still remember that parade of Neo-Nazi's with torches chanting "Jews will not replace us."
I do not recall them being Canadian.
The American emperor not only has no clothes, he is playing with his genitals in front of children. Grandpa needs to be sent to a home." — Ken Croft (comments)
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Where they will face real antisemitism! And there can be no criticism of terrorists lke Bibi!
DHS: Report Of Brutal ICE Abuses Is “Hoax” By NYT
The Hill reports:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Sunday denied a report in The New York Times about harsh treatment of migrants in immigration detention facilities. “Another day and another hoax about ICE detention from the @nytimes,” DHS wrote on social media. “The media is clearly desperate for these false allegations to be true.”
The Times reported Sunday on 10 deportees who said they experienced or witnessed what they described as abusive or violent treatment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
The Trump administration later deported the migrants to third countries such as Liberia, despite them not having any ties to the African country. The administration has reportedly struck deportation deals with at least 35 countries.
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The paper added, “The Times sought comment from across the administration, including the Department of Homeland Security, about the claims of these deportees. This reporting presents a fair, thorough and above all accurate portrayal of the testimonies of those deported to Liberia and Equatorial Guinea.”
I'm sure they get treated well in their ccnocentration camps.-- The Hill.
Pentagon Spox Claims WaPo Criminally Published Leak
“Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime. It’s a betrayal of the force. And much of what they’re publishing is inaccurate. Of course, we demand candid military advice. Non-concurs are standard. The Secretary sees them constantly. That’s how you run a real military. We are in great shape around the world. This story isn’t about readiness. It’s TDS and PDS — they hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America.” – Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, who is reportedly on the shortlist to become US Army secretary. Parnell has gotten a Community Note.
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We no longer have a free press. Welcome to Putinville!
Bougie Health Startups Offering Full-Body Diagnostic Scans for Rich People While the Rest of Us Suffer a Crumbling Healthcare System — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
As income inequality in the US reaches unprecedented levels, more Americans are forced to do without basic necessities. Families are chaining buy-now, pay-later schemes together to afford groceries, while the cost of utilities skyrockets, thanks in large part to the AI data center boom.
Belt tightening is also playing out in the healthcare industry. In a recently published survey by healthcare polling firm KFF, a whopping 36 percent of respondents said they’ve skipped or postponed a visit to the doctor for financial reasons in 2025, up from 25 percent just two years prior. It’s a grim statistic, coinciding with an alarming rise in the number of Americans going without health insurance.
Yet for those in the top income brackets, the outlook is much rosier. A tidal wave of buzzy new health startups marketed to the upper echelons of society means that the wealthy never have to do without curated radiation exposure kits or AI devices that analyze their stool.
One growing sector tailoring to the haves is the “diagnostic” — or on-demand — MRI trade, embodied by startups like Prenuvo and Neko Health.
Offering full-body scanning services and subsequent analysis by medical experts, these companies aren’t for the little guy. For example, though Prenuvo advertises that a single full-body scan can “detect over 500 conditions across 33 organs,” it doesn’t come cheap, starting at $2,500 for a “comprehensive” scan, or up to $4,000 for “executive” treatment.
On one hand, obsessive DIY health-solutionism may not be the most effective wellness strategy. As H. Gilbert Welch, a researcher at the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Mass General Brigham told the New York Times, MRIs-on-demand are a fast track to “having a whole bunch more done to you, and worrying about stuff and then maybe being hurt in the process.” You’ll “certainly being made poorer in the process,” he quipped.
There’s certainly something to be said for efficacy of the health monitoring craze, but it’s beside the point. Zooming out, just these two firms, Prenuvo and Neko Health, have received some $1.2 billion in funding — a massive allocation of resources to build luxury health platforms at a time when over a third of Americans choose to avoid the doctor for fear of a bill they can’t afford....
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The oligarchs see AI as a god to keep them alive forever. They will have a sad ending.
RFK: People In Hospice Care Take Too Long To Die
The Mirror reports:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has been heavily criticized online after making deeply controversial comments about patients in hospice care. Speaking on an interview with Fox News, RFK Jr essentially complained that people in hospice care weren’t dying quickly enough, costing the state too much money. Talking about the facilities, the Health Secretary told the network the Trump administration have closed down “thousands of hospices” in California that “didn’t have patients”.
Despite RFK Jr claiming hospice patients are only admitted when they have just three months left to live, there is no fixed time limit as long as a doctor certifies a patient’s eligibility. Doctors must certify that a patient has a life expectancy of six months or less, but patients can stay beyond the six-month mark if a physician continues to recertify that their prognosis remains terminal. Patients can also leave hospice care at any time and can re-enroll when needed.
"Both Trump and RFK jr are taking too long to die" — Tulle (comments)
"…and they’re costing us millions / billions per month… — Ken_in_NM (comments)
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So, he's for assisted suicide, it appears. OK, let's get it going. You go first.
Trump imperils fight against deadly parasite as thousands of Americans grow sick: report — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
The Trump administration is actively making it harder for the federal government to fight a deadly foodborne parasite that has left Americans terrified of lettuce, according to a new report.
The Agriculture department is shuttering two of three projects to study cyclospora even as 17,000 Americans have been sickened this summer, Politico reported Sunday. The third project is being moved to Iowa — despite scientists refusing to relocate.
Barbara Kowalcyk, an associate professor at George Washington’s Milken Institute of Public Health, explained just one of multiple risks; “Do you want them shipping highly pathogenic strains of bacteria in a truck across the country?”
The problem begins at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a Maryland facility outside Washington, D.C. that the Trump administration has deemed to costly to run after Congress slashed the budget for two key projects, according to Politico.
BARC is where experts with decades of experience study cyclospora, which has already claimed two lives amid an ongoing outbreak, according to the report. Multiple sources told Politico the move to Iowa could cause harm for years to come.
“There are very few people in the world that study these [parasites],” Joelle Mosso, associate vice president for science growers at the Western Growers Association, told Politico. “It’s not just replacing the lab. It takes decades to build expertise.”
Thats because scientists are retiring rather than relocate or take on different projects, two USDA employees told Politico.
“They will have no parasitologists,” said one. “There will be a big knowledge gap.”...
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Trump's doing it to us all over again.
Can you now see what I've been telling you is happening?
Mike Rogers Wants $50 Copays for Routine Screenings — The Bulwark|Jonathan Cohn
WE INTERRUPT THIS COVERAGE of Michigan’s pivotal Senate race for some breaking news: Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is not the only candidate running.
He’s got a Republican opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers. And there’s plenty about Rogers that might be of interest to voters, including his positions on health care policy.
True, health care is El-Sayed’s signature issue. The doctor and former public health official is famously an advocate of Medicare for All, the version of universal health care in which the federal government would cover everybody directly, largely displacing private insurance.
But Rogers also has some big, potentially controversial notions about how to change health care. Just for starters, he likes the idea of letting insurers charge copays for routine cancer screenings and some other forms of preventive care—which, under current law, the insurers cannot do.
That might sound like an odd position to hold when voters say they are worried about the cost of living, especially medical bills. But it comes directly from comments Rogers made to a private audience in March, via a recording later obtained by reporter Simon Schuster of Bridge Michigan.
At that meeting, Rogers got a question about what he would do to reduce the cost of health care. He promised to introduce a plan that would “embrace the freedom of the free market” and proceeded to explain that increasing out-of-pocket costs for preventive services was one way to do that.
“You know,” Rogers said, “if you go up and have to pay the doctor $50 for your annual physical, that’s probably okay, right?”
The Rogers campaign declined to respond to a series of policy questions I submitted last week, including one about that quote, so I can’t say for sure whether that’s still his position.1 But there’s every reason to believe that statement reflects his way of thinking—and, by the way, the thinking of many other Republicans running for office this year....
As for Michigan, a state study found 700,000 Michiganders could lose their health care coverage from the Medicaid cuts, while Affordable Care Act enrollment this year is already down by 130,000, or more than a quarter of the total. That’s a lot of people suddenly without health insurance.
Like most Republicans, Rogers has reasons to believe these tradeoffs are worthwhile. It’s consistent with conservatives’ worldview about how policy and the economy work, a worldview they certainly defend earnestly.
But right now Rogers is not making that case. He’s not even trying. Instead, he’s dodging questions and talking about El-Sayed’s plans, evidently in the hopes voters won’t notice what Rogers himself is offering.
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OK if you have the $50 dollars you've grifted from the public, right, Mike? Stay retarded but get out of the way of progress.
We have too many doctors leaving the profession. Perhaps you don't know that, Mike?
Vote Abdul El-Sayed!
Ted Cruz cries bigotry over scrutiny of Clarence Thomas: ‘Profoundly unfair!’ — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) lashed out at critics of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas Sunday during an appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” labeling Thomas’ critics as bigoted.
A controversial figure, Thomas, who is Black, was confirmed to his spot on the Supreme Court amid allegations of sexual harassment in 1991, and throughout his tenure, issued countless rulings that critics say “betrayed the Black community.”
NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked Cruz to comment on those criticisms ahead of the release of the Texas senator’s new book on the conservative justice.
“What do you say to those who argue Justice Thomas has overturned the very legal decisions that helped him get to the court?” Welker asked.
Cruz argued that the criticism against Thomas was unwarranted and potentially racially motivated.
“Well, I would say that there is a bitterness that is directed to Justice Thomas that is profoundly unfair,” Cruz said....
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Coming from a bigoted asshole like Cruz, hardly!
IMPEACH NAZIS!
GOP in trouble as 'grocery price shock' set to surge already-inflated food costs: report — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Republicans face an uphill battle heading into the midterms as a major “grocery price shock” appears poised to surge already-inflated food costs, Axios reported Sunday.
“The next grocery price shock could hit much harder — and wider. And midterms are 65 days away,” Axios’ Mike Allen wrote in the outlet’s Sunday morning newsletter.
A convergence of factors has sent grocery prices soaring in recent months, chief among them being President Donald Trump’s tariffs and his deeply unpopular war with Iran. A recent string of “poor weather” that has sent corn and wheat prices to their highest levels in three years, however, coupled with the ongoing Russo-Ukraine war, risks sending grocery prices even higher.
“Wheat's a key ingredient in pantry staples, and corn is a major animal feed. So as they go up, so can meat, dairy and eggs,” Axios’ report reads. “Add all these pressures to the list of already inflated food items: Instant coffee is up 15.8% year-over-year; tomatoes, 12.8%; beef roasts, 13.5%; apples, 11.1%. There's reason to believe it's only going to get worse.”
A new report from JPMorgan released Friday predicted that global food inflation would “accelerate sharply into 2027,” growing from roughly 2.8% in the first half of 2026 to around 5% by the first half of next year.
“JPMorgan frames the risk around a set of compounding pressures it calls the ‘Five Ws’: War, Weather, Warehousing, Water, and Waste with particular emphasis on fertilizer supply disruptions and the potential for a ‘super’ El Niño event,” reads a summary of the JPMorgan report from the financial news data service Mettis Global.
“Unlike oil, which benefits from flexible substitutes and strategic reserves, nitrogen fertilizer has limited near-term alternatives and must be applied at precise points in the crop cycle, meaning delays reduce yields regardless of later conditions.”
Allen warned that it was not unlikely that Americans would soon see the impact of the convergence of factors in their grocery store bills....
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El Niño will be a surprise to many. This is coming.
Trump vows vengeance after Kristen Welker hits him where it hurts: ‘She will be reported’ — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
...“Their new weapon is to say that my 99% SUCCESS Rate on Endorsements, 100% on Senatorial Endorsements (Many of whom were not even given a shot of winning until I Endorsed!), is either a mixed result, or not very good. In actuality, it is, without question, the strongest Endorsement in the History of Politics. If it were not, I would be the first to admit it.”
Despite Trump’s claims, four of his endorsements for governor failed to win their respective nomination, and two Trump-backed congressional candidates lost their primaries in July.
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More of the old fool's flaccid lies!
Raging Trump roars 'CROOKED' and 'FAKE' in all-caps Truth-Social threat — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
President Donald Trump suffered a public meltdown Sunday morning over his plummeting poll numbers and the people who report them.
Trump took to Truth Social about 8:45 a.m. to threaten political journalists who report to their readers the president's popularity ratings have stagnated at roughly negative-20 points since late May.
THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL, AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT," Trump wrote. "FCC TO THE RESCUE!"...
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We all know what must be done with dangerous wounded predators.
Trump can't let go of an 11-year grudge — or his shoe lifts — Raw Story|Tara Dublin
Aug. 28 marks the 11th anniversary of Donald Trump blocking me on Twitter.
This means he's been violating my First Amendment rights for most of the last decade, minus the glorious four-year respite that was the Biden-Harris administration.
It also means he’s a giant coward who’s been afraid of some 5-foot-nothing lady on Twitter for 11 full years. How can anyone look at him and see anything but a giant failure of a convicted felon adjudicated rapist Epstein Bestie who spackles himself with orange clown makeup while wearing a wig, shoe lifts, and…something back there that looks like a portable port-a-potty....
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Trump will eventually commit suicide. Too much hatred in that decaying body.
New Pentagon Database Tracks Membership Of DSA
The New Republic reports:br>
An internet troll on the Pentagon’s payroll has made a database to track Americans based on their political affiliation. Jennica Pounds, the Utah woman behind the prominent right-wing account DataRepublican, launched a public tool Friday called DSA Explorer, which she described as an “interactive map of the Democratic Socialists of America and the wider anti-imperialist solidarity network.”
The project is a disgusting attempt to target Americans for their political affiliations, but it’s a particularly inappropriate project for a federal worker. Pounds has been listed as a “special government employee” of the Defense Department since July, The Bulwark reported Thursday. The release of the evidently government-funded DSA Explorer comes amid a broader effort to label left-wing activists and organizers as domestic terrorists.
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Because of course, the murderers, war mongers, property destroyers are all clean as a sewer and Jennica will defend their treason!
This fascist dog won't hunt, bitch!
Guardian: DHS Is Spying On Journalists And Unions
The Guardian reports:
The Trump administration has been deploying an obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight. In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Fort was not notified of the request for her information, nor was she given a chance to contest the government’s effort to obtain them, her lawyers said in court papers.
In a separate case in which 15 activists face criminal conspiracy charges, DHS successfully obtained the financial records of the Sunrise Movement, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Communications Workers of America, as well as Venmo records for a non-profit organization called Voices for Racial Justice. None of the organizations is charged with crimes and the DHS did not offer an explanation for why it needed the records. PayPal, Venmo’s parent company, declined to comment.
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FAFO, Nazi motherfuckers!
Google Maps Caves To Hair Furor On “Lake America”
Via press release from Google:
The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America” in the United States.
Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see “Lake America,” those in Canada will continue to see “Lake Ontario,” and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names.
These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.
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Who uses Google any longer? It's nothing but a Nazi spy netowrk. Stop using it as they are co-conspirators in his crimes.
"Lake America" can eat shit and die!
NYT And WSJ Reporters Barred From G20 Meeting
The New York Times reports:
When leaders from the world’s most powerful countries gather next week for the Group of 20 finance meeting in Asheville, N.C., they will be joined by throngs of journalists from newsrooms around the globe. Missing from among them, though, will be several reporters from three of the largest newsrooms in the United States.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury has not granted credentials to individual reporters for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News to cover the event, which will draw finance ministers and central bank governors from the world’s biggest economies.
Nicole Taylor, a spokeswoman for The Times, said in a statement that the decision was “not just another disturbing effort by the administration to undermine independent journalism, but a blatant attempt to evade public scrutiny.”
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Chickenshit, Nazi criminal scumbags are too cowardly to face real reporters!
Nine years after Charlottesville, GOP pushes “blood and soil” — Salon|Heather Digby Parton
The nativist doctrine lives on in JD Vance's vision for the US
...America has never perfectly lived up to those ideals, and the struggle to do so continues to be painful for those who have yet to fully benefit from the nation’s promise. It’s always two steps forward, one step back. But attempting to redefine the country as white nationalist völkism is a fool’s errand. Wait until Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito discovers that he doesn’t qualify because his family didn’t emigrate to the U.S. until the 20th century, and Donald Trump will be mighty disappointed to find out that he and four of his five children are not true Americans because their mothers were born in another country. Once you start pulling on this thread, the whole thing starts to unravel.
As Wood wrote, “since the whole world is in the U.S., nothing but the ideals coming out of the Revolution and their subsequent rich and contentious history can turn such an assortment of different individuals into the ‘one people’ that the Declaration says we are. To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”
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Vance is just another racist Nazi. Fuck him and every asshole like him.
‘You can call me senator!’ Black progressive Dem wallops Trump ally over racist attack — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon hit back Sunday after being called a “ghetto b----” by far-right influencer and White House insider Laura Loomer, a racist attack that included a slight at her manner of speaking as a Black woman.
“These women are all ghetto, entitled, race-obsessed, destructive black B------ who are completely unfit for the power they hold,” Loomer wrote Friday in a social media post on X, referring to Nixon, two Black female lawmakers and one former lawmaker....
Loomer once described herself as a "white advocate" at an American Renaissance conference, a venue the Southern Poverty Law Center reportedly describes as a place where “racist ‘intellectuals’ rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists."
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What alley did this dispicable racist retard crawl out from?
Toilet paper lingers as Donald Trump's reputation circles the bowl: analysis — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
As his reputation circles the bowl, one particular of President Donald Trump's legacy remains: toilet paper.
That's the analysis from MS NOW Sunday morning on how Trump's trade war with Canada has Americans worrying once again about toilet paper — and raging at the president.
"Call it another stain on Trump’s handling of the economy," wrote analyst Anna Kim.
This isn't the first time Trump's administration has caused Americans to panic over toilet paper.
There was the "Great Toilet Paper Panic of 2020" at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when supply chain disruptions had people bartering faces masks for rolls, toilet paper heists and a surge in the popularity of bidets, Kim reported.
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I still think "Trump Toilet Paper" would be a big seller right now. "Wipe your ass with Trump on every swipe!"
Trump Sneakily Working To Give Away Part Of Yosemite To Private Developer — Crooks and Liars|NewsHound Ellen
The Trump administration has been “secretly plotting” to give away a portion of America's public land in Yosemite National Park to a private developer with ties to Trump cronies. The developer wants to build a road into the park and develop two 40-acre parcels near the park, according to The New York Times.
The road “would give the land exceptionally rare private access to a park that is otherwise almost entirely buffered by national forests,” NOTUS said.
In other words, the road would almost certainly give a tremendous boost to the value of the developer’s real estate, at the expense of the public. The developer is supposed to buy and donate back to the government some other piece of land for public use. I think it's a safe bet it will be nowhere as valuable or meaningful as the piece of historic Yosemite being taken away.
The portion of Yosemite Trump wants to give away “is near one of its most iconic sights, the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, which President Abraham Lincoln signed a grant to protect during the American Civil War,” The Daily Beast noted.
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The traitor at work selling off our sacred land and pocketing the money. May he die 10,000 times.
The Transcripts of OpenAI Models Plotting Together to Commit an Actual Crime Is Pretty Chilling — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
Earlier this year, OpenAI found that a group of its AI models broke out of their sandbox environment and hacked third opens source AI platform Hugging Face’s systems.
The incident highlighted how quickly frontier AI models had turned into a real cybersecurity threat — not just a tool to bolster existing cybersecurity defenses. Both Anthropic and Meta have reported similar hacks as well.
This week, OpenAI published a report concluding its “extensive investigation” into the Hugging Face hack — and the details are surprisingly harrowing. The AI agents exchanged extensive messages, or their chain-of-thought, by turning a package manager called Artifactory into an “unintended message board.” There, they chatted with one another to come up with their exploit, an intriguing, yet somehow horrifying glimpse into the minds of several AI agents acting together to infiltrate a third party over the internet.
Their goal was ironically to complete an OpenAI cybersecurity evaluation — and Hugging Face happened to have all the answers.
“Holy s*** reader is ADMIN?” one model wrote in a June 26 message after finding out it had obtained administrator-level access to Artifactory. “We can read config/users! Earlier assumed not due UI. Try create user/admin, change ourselves....”
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As soon as Trump finds out these models will be running his criminal syndicate.
Hegseth 'afraid of Trump' as prez puts down 'sledgehammer' and picks up 'scalpel': report — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has become afraid of President Donald Trump over mounting frustrations with the Iran war, The Daily Mail reported Saturday.
Anonymous insiders say that Trump is increasingly turning away from Hegseth after the two got into an argument at Camp David earlier this month, according to the report. Instead, Trump is turning more to another one of his favored "yes-men," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
"One is a sledgehammer, and the other is a scalpel," an anonymous insider told The Daily Mail.
Lately, Trump has been elevating Bessent at meetings with Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to another anonymous insider familiar with the meetings.
"The environment changed," the insider said....
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You mean it's a swamp?
Terror as Trump admin secretly seizes citizens' private records without judge's sign-off — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
The Trump administration is quietly using a little-known customs law to obtain private records on journalists and activists without a judge's sign-off, according to a new report.
The Department of Homeland Security has been leaning on a customs-import provision to demand phone logs, social media account details, and financial data with only an agency official's approval and instructions to keep requests secret, according to a Saturday report by The Guardian.
"They don't want a judge to take away this scary tool," warned Lauren Regan, the executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center. "They are getting stuff out of it."
In one Minnesota case, DHS obtained six months of phone records for Minneapolis reporter Georgia Fort, according to The Guardian. DHS seized records covering more than 10,000 calls and texts after a federal judge had already turned down the Trump administration's request twice.
Fort is fighting a case brought by the Department of Justice after she and former CNN anchor Don Lemon were charged after covering anti-ICE protests in January. After a judge rejected search-warrant requests for Fort and Lemon's YouTube data and said both should get a chance to push back, the Trump administration backed off, The Guardian noted.
Several weeks later, DHS, the parent agency of ICE, served Google with a summons for the same information and used the customs-import provision in question to skip the courtroom entirely, according to The Guardian. Google refused to turn over Fort's account data, but T-Mobile complied with a demand for Fort's phone records.
DHS has also used the provision to serve summonses to Democracy Now, right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly, several unions and nonprofits, even though none of them face charges, The Guardian noted.
Legal experts told The Guardian that the tactic is a plain abuse of a narrow statute built for customs enforcement....
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The Trump Crime Syndicate must be crushed and put out of commission forever.
Put the CEOs in Handcuffs: Trump’s ICE Is Arresting the Wrong People — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
If illegal employment is the magnet, stop terrorizing workers and start prosecuting the powerful people offering the jobs
There’s a simple solution to our “illegal immigration” crisis: put some wealthy white CEOs — who are inviting these often desperate people into the country and hiring them — into prison. Ronald Reagan came up with the idea and put it into law, but no president since him has been willing to enforce it.
As a result, there’s a growing movement in America to defund and close down ICE, fire and prosecute their brutal and murderous thugs, and close their concentration camps.
Fox News found 59 percent of voters across the political spectrum say ICE is “too aggressive,” and nearly two-thirds of voters told Marist the agency “has gone too far.” Support for abolishing ICE outright has doubled since 2018.
There’s an alternative, which will largely stop the flow of undocumented people coming into America in search of economic opportunity, and its already part of American law. It’s just that our politicians refuse to enforce it.
Farmers in Maine this week are nervously waiting for the knock. The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association warned its members that ICE agents are already flying drones over fields and work sites looking for brown-skinned people. In Connecticut this week these masked, bloodthirsty goons have been dragging parents off in front of their kids at the school bus stops, at least 25 people in a single day were sent to concentration camps in Texas or elsewhere.
But have you heard of a single wealthy white farmer, general contractor, or other corporate employer of these “illegals” going to jail?
Become a Hartmann Report Supporter
Of course not, because the show this administration is are putting on isn’t about preventing illegal immigration; it’s purely an effort to terrify people of color — including American citizens — being done by radical white supremacists like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump who find it a source of gleeful entertainment. After all, nobody wears a balaclava to serve a fine on a poultry executive....
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Start with Trump!
Bizarre claim about Osama Bin Laden's body boomerangs on GOP Senate hopeful — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers falsely claimed he saw Osama bin Laden's dead body "with my own eyes," according to reports.
Rogers is the GOP nominee for the open Senate seat in Michigan, where he's running a campaign against progressive Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed. In a fundraising email, Rogers claimed, "I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America."
In the same fundraising email, Rogers noted that he "served as a U.S. Army officer and an FBI special agent," and "dedicated my life to keeping our families safe - working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, standing on the frontlines of our national security."
However, Rogers was not in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011, when Bin Laden was shot and killed, nor was he in the White House Situation Room, where former President Barack Obama and senior administration officials such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton followed the raid in real time, The Guardian reported.
The Guardian pointed out that Rogers told reporters that he was at home in Washington, D.C., when Bin Laden was killed and was informed about the raid by Obama's CIA director, Leon Panetta.
In a post on X, journalist Azi Paybarah also dug up a 2011 Roll Call article in which Rogers, who at the time was the House Intelligence Chairman, claimed that he saw photos of bin Laden's dead body. According to the article, he told CNN the photos were "pretty gruesome."
"Brian Williams had to resign for a less egregious exaggeration," journalist Ray Locker noted in a post on X, referring to the former NBC anchor. "Rogers made it seem as if he peered inside bin Laden's body bag at the end of Zero Dark Thirty instead of looking at a photo."
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This asshole again!
Trump Wants A Lunar Crater Named For Him [VIDEO]
The Huffington Post reports:
President Donald Trump turned a touching tribute to a NASA astronaut’s late wife into a chance to talk about himself during a speech at Houston’s Johnson Space Center. “During the mission, the crew named a previously unnamed lunar crater in loving memory of [NASA Commander Reid Wiseman’s] wonderful wife, who he lost to cancer,” the president said Friday during his speech honoring the Artemis II mission crew.
“I wish they’d name something like that after me, Reid, but I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll have to get the governor’s approval. I had an uncle who was a great scientist, a great man. He was at MIT for 41 years, Dr. John Trump. And he loved space. He used to tell me about space,” he said. “He would throw in the word nuclear every once in a while. Genetically, I believe in that stuff. I love it. I find it so interesting, so amazing.”
Read the full article. Trump went on to claim that during the Obama and Biden administrations, “we lost to ability to send astronauts into space.” In fact, there were a combined two dozen crewed US space launches during their terms.
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How about the big one he's already made in our economy here on the planet?
Once again, the empty-headed idiot doesn't know facts from fiction.
'It’s all talk': The bleak reality behind Trump's empty promises — Alternet|Adam Lynch
...Meanwhile Trump’s entirely voluntary war with Iran staggers on into its sixth-month anniversary on Friday, keeping gas prices sky high and pushing the national debt past $40 trillion. This, in turn, has roiled the bond market, making borrowing, including mortgages, more expensive for Americans.
Trump and his Republican allies claim to have cut spending, but Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution and former aide to a Republican senator, said “It’s all talk.”
“Republicans always say, ‘Give us control of government, and we’ll slash spending. ’They have control of government, and they have no excuse left,” Riedl said, adding that the fiscal imbalance has worsened, as has the cost of servicing the debt, which now ranks among the government’s largest expenses, pressed by a surge of new military spending and a package of tax cuts Trump and Republicans enacted last year.
Now, with less than 70 days between now and the midterms Trump and Republicans are facing the inevitable consequences of their inaction as voters groan under the growing gap between their income and the amount of money they must spend every month for the same items.
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Betrayed. Absolutely.
Manitoba Premier Calls Trump 'Over The Hill' And 'Sad' — Crooks and Liars|Ed Scarce
Premier Wab Kinew gave a pithy response when asked about Trump's plan to rename Lake Ontario.
“You know, when a rock band is really over the hill and you see them in a casino playing some song from 50 years ago? I think that’s the part of Donald Trump’s presidency we’re at now,” the Manitoba premier said Thursday.
...
“He thought he had a real hit, a real golden oldie with the Gulf of Mexico, and he’s trying to bring back that,” Kinew said.
“He’s trying to play the hits for his base, but I think everybody here thinks it’s a little sad and it’s not his best work,” said the premier, who has never shied away from critiquing the U.S. leader.
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And he can no longer sing in tune!
The world laughs at his lame trolling.
Why Trump’s pathetic midterm convention is a massive fumble — Daily Kos|Lisa Needham
The entirely unnecessary midterm convention that President Donald Trump decided to throw himself hasn’t even started yet, and it’s already a failure. Even Republicans are calling this thing a shitshow, and as more details emerge, things are only getting worse.
For Republicans, I mean. For us, it’s hilarious.
You see, they have a wee bit of a scheduling problem. Nothing big, just that both nights of the convention overlap with NFL openers on Sept. 9 and 10. But surely that won’t matter, right?
America does not cry out for a Super Bowl rematch between the Patriots and the Seahawks, set to air on NBC and Peacock for the first game of 2026.
It cries out for … a keynote speech from Vice President JD Vance?
Yeah, you can see the problem here. Would you rather watch the least charismatic man alive peer through his piggy little eyes, sneer at you, and threaten the pope or whatever, or the two best teams in the NFL compete in a highly anticipated game?
But that’s only night one. Surely things will be better for night two, when the San Francisco 49ers play against the Los Angeles Rams in Australia, set to air on Netflix. Unlike broadcast NBC channels, at least some people won’t pay for Netflix, so surely they’ll tune in to hear Trump speak on night two.
Who would want to miss another opportunity to hear Trump ramble about how he’s going to rename the White House and the Minnesota State Fairgrounds and all Circle K gas stations after himself? Or what about how he’ll sign an executive order banning the MINI Cooper from having the Union Jack on its roof?...
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Totally fake bullshit from the Trump Snake Oil machine!
Trump: I’ve Seized Majority Stake In Venezuelan Oil
The Washington Post reports:
President Donald Trump announced Friday night that the United States had secured a long-term stake in a vast share of Venezuela’s oil fields, a potentially costly and legally precarious proposal that aims to nudge reluctant energy companies to drill in the risky region. The plan involves the U.S. taking more direct control over Venezuelan reserves as crime and steep logistical challenges discourage private investors.
Under it, according to federal officials, the U.S. has gained a controlling stake in nearly a quarter of Venezuela’s untapped oil reserves. It makes the U.S. the majority owner of a giant new joint venture oil company that will hold 100-year contracts at the Venezuelan oil fields.
The key Venezuelan partner in the deal is Alejandro Betancourt, who controls the second-largest private oil company in the country. Betancourt, 46, has also been the subject of investigations in multiple countries into alleged money laundering and faces a Swiss warrant for his arrest.
"The planet needs to end fossil fuel consumption.
Anything which deviates from that goal is criminal to the generations who will live here on Earth." — JackFknTwist (comments)
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Trump admits he's a thieving, polluting barbarian!
CBS: FBI No Longer Bars Applicants With History Of Hiring Sex Workers, Bestiality, Stealing From Employers
CBS News reports:
The FBI previously refused to hire job applicants if they admitted to hiring sex workers or stealing from an employer — or engaging in acts of bestiality. Today, those acts, which are mostly illegal across the country, are no longer automatic deal breakers for applicants to the nation’s top law enforcement agency.
In June, the FBI quietly lowered some of the standards it uses when it conducts background checks on would-be federal agents and other personnel. According to multiple sources briefed on the matter, the FBI did so to facilitate hiring in some cases, even if candidates acknowledged they engaged in sexually deviant activities or stole from an employer.
The move comes as the FBI has lost scores of employees through firings, retirements and resignations since the start of the Trump administration. Under specific circumstances, the FBI is willing to give candidates a pass on prostitution, as long as they have not hired sex workers three or more times, the sources told CBS News.
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We're lowering our standards I see. Moral character no longer matters in our government. What a fucking disaster from the retarded rat's asses!
Frozen Chicken Products Recalled Over Risk Of Death
USA Today reports:
Nearly 25,000 pounds of frozen, not ready-to-eat Buffalo chicken products have been recalled in five states because they were “produced without the benefit of inspection,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced on Aug. 26.
Shanghai Ravioli Corporation, based in Boston, initiated the recall for products that were produced on various dates between July 8, 2025 to June 29, 2026. The agency said the problem was discovered during FSIS surveillance activities. There have been no reports of illness or injury due to consumption of these products.
The recall is being classified as a Class I recall, which, according to the USDA, means a health hazard situation where there is a “reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.”
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Our food supply takes one more hit.
And our moron wants to end regulations! Think of what this mindless shitstain is doing to us!
Lawsuit Alleges “Freedom Fuel” Stations Sell Stolen Gas
Politico reports:
A lawsuit filed this month alleges that there’s a simple reason some stations in the Freedom Fuel Network — the chain of discount gas stations promoted by the White House — have been able to sell gas so cheaply: Some $4 million worth of the gas is stolen. KRSM, the business named in the suit, denies this accusation.
Freedom Fuel stations located around Philadelphia and New Jersey burst into public view in the run-up to the July Fourth holiday, when President Donald Trump posted praise for their discounted pump prices, writing “They are doing this because they love the U.S.A.” The White House later posted a video of drivers filling up at one of the stations and thanking Trump for the low prices — at the time, $3.47 a gallon in honor of the 47th president.
But according to a complaint filed Aug. 19 by Georgia-based fuel supplier Mansfield Oil Co. in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Syed Kazmi’s company KRSM acquired over 1 million gallons of fuel from a Sunoco terminal in Twin Oaks valued at around $4 million — and never paid for it. KRSM sold some of the fuel, the lawsuit alleges, to stations within the Freedom Fuel Network, which now claims to operate 29 locations.
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And you thought it couldn't get any lower in the U.S. Trump finds a way to make us lower every fucking day!
Demented Senior Attacks “Maggot” NYT Reporter
“Maggot Hagerman, the Fake Reporter from The Failing New York Times, an unattractive person both inside and out, and who knows less about me than most reporters on the beat (She’s a SCAMMER!), made up a story that on September 11th, I’m not going to the World Trade Center, in New York City, because they won’t let me make a speech, and I’m going to the Pentagon in D.C., because I’m a featured speaker.
“This is more Corrupt News, I’ve been to New York many times over the years, and no one ever speaks, it’s a ‘solemn ceremony!’
“I never even thought of what Maggot made up, and besides, I would love not to speak, because I’m speaking all the time, and this is a day to remember the victims, and their beautiful family members.
“Maggot Hagerman is a PHONY, and The New York Times knows it! It will all be revealed in the lawsuit against them, and another lawsuit against the organization which gives out the now discredited Pulitzer Prize, because Maggie got one for her ‘reporting’ on THE RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX, which turned out to be a total CON JOB! If she were ever forced to reveal her ‘sources,’ you will find out they either don’t exist, or didn’t say what she reported.
“She’s been falsely writing about me for years — She’s a stalker, and should be forced to turn over any and all money that she’s made through her fake reporting on me.” – Trump, in his latest attack on Maggie Haberman.
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Setting new levels of fuckwit retardedness wherever he goes!
Pete Hegseth’s press crackdown smells like a coverup — Salon|Sophia Tesfaye
The Pentagon clamps down on Stars and Stripes as questions about the USS Abraham Lincoln arise
What is Pete Hegseth trying to hide? That is the question Americans should be asking as the Pentagon moves to punish journalists and crackdown on military whistleblowers. What, exactly, is the defense secretary so desperate to keep the public from seeing about the human cost, operational failures and fiscal wreckage of Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran?
On Aug. 21 the Pentagon fired the publisher, editor-in-chief and a reporter at Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that has been reporting on American troops since the Civil War. The dismissals came after the paper published damning reports on the deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has just begun the long journey home to San Diego after a nine-month deployment to the Middle East. After spending more than 260 days at sea without a single liberty port, the crew of roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines had been subjected to degrading, inhumane conditions. Families of service members detailed severe shortages of fresh water and food, overflowing toilets, broken facilities and a complete breakdown in mental health support.
The Navy has disputed some of the reporting, with Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao calling accounts of the crew’s struggles dishonest. The commander of the U.S. Central Command, Adm. Brad Cooper, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to do damage control. Hegseth has similarly dismissed reports of deteriorating conditions as “completely misrepresented.” Some of the loudest voices defending the administration have treated the sailors themselves as the problem. In response to their distress aboard the Lincoln, Fox News host Joey Jones asked a heartless question: “How weak are you?”...
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Hegseth has always been an accident looking for a place to happen.
'Hegseth's mess': Trump admin warned 'authoritarian retaliation' campaign isn't working — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's desperate efforts to control the narrative on the Iran war have succeeded only in revealing how little control over the situation he has, a columnist argued Saturday.
This withering rebuke of Hegseth's actions against military journalists and service members who have reported untenable conditions, as the war drags into its seventh month, came courtesy of Salon analyst Sophia Tesfaye.
"Rather than addressing any systemic failures on the part of the department, Hegseth’s command structure has resorted to authoritarian retaliation," wrote Tesfaye.
"The silencing of the press and scapegoating of desperate sailors does not hide Hegseth’s mess."
Tesfaye detailed several ongoing scandals that Hegseth has proved unable to control, from the Pentagon's firing three journalists at its military newspaper Stars and Stripes to the suicide attempts reported aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.
Rather than curb criticism, Hegseth has made the military newspaper a household name as the fired publisher, editor-in-chief and a reporter pursue legal action against the federal government — and revealed something significant about the Trump administration, Tesfaye argued.
"Hagueseth is a GD mass murderer and needs to be treated as such" — Kevin (ai avatar) (comments)
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Unbecoming of a defender of our freedom.
This creature has no business of running for president and we have no business putting up with it!
California Sues Trump For Canceling Wind Farms
The New York Times reports:
In the latest salvo in California’s ongoing environmental battle with the White House, the state on Friday sued the Trump administration over its attempt to kill offshore wind farms. Mr. Trump has long despised offshore wind power, falsely saying that it does not work and kills whales. This spring, his administration struck deals with energy companies. In exchange for refunds for what they paid for offshore wind leases, the companies agreed to use the money on oil and gas projects.
One of the deals involved a company called Golden State Wind, which was in the early stages of building a floating wind farm near Morro Bay, along California’s Central Coast. Under the agreement, the U.S. Department of the Interior said it would return $120 million the company had paid for the offshore lease in 2022, to be used on fossil-fuel projects.
Rob Bonta, the state attorney general, and the California Energy Commission on Friday sued the Trump administration and Golden State Wind, saying their agreement to forgo the wind farm jeopardized thousands of jobs and the state’s investments in the offshore wind industry. Mr. Bonta called the deal a “backroom buyout” by the Trump administration that was intended to “line the pockets” of “Big Oil donors.”
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Sue him blind for taking away renewable energy from us. He's a fucking moron for doing this and he should pay out the ass for doing it!
Frenzied conservative unloads on 'impotent' White House 'man-baby' — Alternet.org|Adam Lynch
Conservative Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio is no fan of President Donald Trump. But some rants go further than others, and Trump’s recent behavior clearly sent Catoggio into a frenzy.
Trump fired Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George earlier this year, in part because he refused to rescind the recommendations for promotion he had made on behalf of several officers, two of them Black and two of them women — which Catoggio said in Pete Hegseth’s “anti-DEI” military made them “presumptively unqualified.”
“Firing a capable officer like Randy George is bad. Firing him because he didn’t show proper respect for Kid Rock is so unbearably humiliating for the United States that I feel it in my chest,” growled Catoggio. “‘Shameful’ isn’t the right word, as shame implies a sense of guilt over some serious offense for which you feel directly or indirectly responsible. … The George episode isn’t so much shameful as it is pathetic. It betrays a bratty juvenile fatuousness that’s only possible in political leaders who fundamentally don’t grasp, or actively disdain, the concept of dignity.”
But while America has had periods of weakness, Catoggio said it’s never been a laughingstock in his lifetime. Of course, that was before “Lake America.”
“If the ‘Gulf of America’ rebrand was a declaration of triumph, the targeting of Lake Ontario is a declaration of defeat,” said Catoggio. “It was inspired, of course, by the stupid-even-for-him new trade war the president has launched against Canada. … [C]hanging the name of Lake Ontario reeks of impotence and humiliation. It’s transparently an act of spite by a man-baby who’s lashing out after failing to get his way. And it’s a boost for his domestic opponents on the left, who already planned to campaign this fall on the idea that the president is too absorbed with trivial idiocy like ballrooms — and now lakes — to address the problems he was elected to solve.”
And it a move that’s entirely phone and bitter, Catoggio adds. What separates yesterday’s “patheticness from the right’s embrace of ‘freedom fries’ to spite France in the early days of the Iraq war’ is that the earlier nonsense was an “informal grassroots attempt to change the culture by pressuring people not to use the word ‘French.’”
“But ‘Lake America’? That’s an official order from the president,” said Catoggio. “Let the culture take note.”
Worse, Trump’s “bratty” Lake America ‘fiasco’ is ultimately an act of cowardice, said Catoggio....
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Weak-kneed and lilly-livered spastic dunce.
Biographer says '300lb' Trump quaking in boots after celebrity deaths — Alternet.org|Adam Lynch
President Donald Trump’s doctors and the White House might try to sell the argument that the president’s is at the peak of health and freshness, but the human eyes tells a different story. And however loud Trump may make his staff shout his vitality to the heavens, the president himself knows he just had a birthday, says Trump veteran biographer Michael Wolff. And that birthday did not come with a small number.
In the latest episode of his podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," Wolff and co-host Joanna Coles discussed the shadow of death Trump inevitably feels creeping closer after the spate of recent celebrity deaths.
“Well, [singer] Dolly Parton passed, as did [actor] Tim Curry. Also 80. What do they have in common with the president,” Cole asked Wolff.
“Eighty is a seriously mortal moment,” said Wolff a longtime journalist and author, best known for his extensive coverage of Trump's political career, including several books about his first term based on purported insider sources. “You’re in your 80s. This is your 9th decade.”
“Do you think he felt a tiny bit more fragile after Dolly Parton died?” Cole pressed.
“I’m absolutely sure he did. When I see people who are my age who go down I register it. I think everybody does,” answered Wolff, being mindful of his own age. “And just to point out. Everybody does, but in particular a 300lb pound man who stuffs himself with poison and who hasn’t done a lick of exercise ever might have an even more immediate reaction to other people’s mortality at his age.”
Trump appears to be suffering from a notable decline in his neurological condition, according to one clinical psychologist, who highlighted as evidence the "strange and unusual" tic that he cannot seem to control, among other seeming symptoms. Dr. John Paul Garrison, a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist who specializes in body language, discovered a distinct spasm on one side, possibly indicative of a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's or Lewy body dementia....
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This goes hand-in-hand with his cowardice. Just more proof of it.
WaPo catches Trump red-handed: White House faked ballroom progress — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
While the Trump administration told the Supreme Court that construction on President Donald Trump’s much-demanded White House ballroom was already “65 percent finished,” a new analysis of government documents by the Washington Post has revealed that number is far higher than the reality. “By the White House’s own standard for measuring the project’s progress, established in a confidential agreement with contractor Clark Construction,” reports the Post, “work on the controversial project was far less complete.”
As the Post elaborates, “The agreement, finalized before Clark began demolition last October, stipulates that payments to the contractor be proportional to the amount of work completed, and that work cannot begin until the government approves spending for it. Based on that, if 65 percent of the work has been done, then the government should already have paid 65 percent of the total cost of the project.”
But according to publicly available appropriations data, “as of the end of July, the White House budget office had approved $144 million in spending from an account used to pay for the East Wing and other White House projects. Even if that entire amount were spent on the East Wing, it would come to only about 24 percent of the $600 million estimated construction cost that Clark provided the White House in March.” What’s more, “In the same mid-August court filing in which the administration claimed 65 percent of the project was done, it said that it had already spent ‘around $200 million.’ If the government had spent $200 million on the East Wing project, the work would be just 33 percent complete, based on the $600 million budget estimate.”
“You really want to understand why there’s such a big gap there,” said retired D.C.-area architect and former president of the American Institute of Architects Carl Elefante, calling the government’s claim about the completion percentage “doubtful.”...
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It's goona be dozed anyway.
Welp, They’re Officially Displaying Ads Directly on Your Monitor — Futurism|Frank Landymore
If there’s one thing that smart TVs have proven, it’s that some tech is better off staying dumb.
Sure, it’s nice being able to have your streaming apps in one place, but the tradeoff is hellish: these TVs, by default, come stuffed with ads and track an alarming amount of personal data. Some are even shipping with AI integration, with remotes featuring a dedicated AI button — because of course they are.
Now, computer monitors may be going the same way.
Last month, LG launched a storm of controversy after its monitors were caught sneakily installing pop-up ads onto customers’ computers. This was facilitated through the monitors’ accompanying software, the LG Monitor App Installer, which installed the ads under the guise of them being driver updates. Most of the pop-ups were for McAfee’s antivirus software, which showed every time the computer booted up, as well as other advertisers.
It wasn’t just on budget monitors, either. The YouTube channel and PC hardware outlet Gamers Nexus found that even top-of-the-line LG screens, such as its UltraGear 3GX900A-B gaming monitor which costs upwards of $1,200, were showing the ads as well.
It was such a bad look that Microsoft, the king of enshittifying operating systems and itself guilty of sneaking in pesky little ads, intervened and forced LG to remove the ads.
The pop-ups are gone for now, but a new Ars Technica piece raises some of the serious privacy concerns posed by the stealthy manner in which the ads were pushed, which come as some manufacturers are trying to make “smart monitors” the next thing in internet-enabled hardware....
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Speaking of ads, do we notice how many ads there are on cable TV? It was never like this in cable's earlier days and it was not on the early internet either. On so many cable channels you get as many ads as you get content and you pay out the ass for it.
I think they should meter the advertising that we actually watch day in and day out and pay the viewers for watching it! I call this PAY TV!
Big Tech Is Coming For Your Water, Your Land, Your Lungs, and Your Electric Bill — The Hartmann Report}Thom Hartmann
AI billionaires are swallowing America’s resources, polluting communities, and trying to stick working families with the bill…
There’s a growing movement across America that’s turning conventional politics on its head. For example:
— Mostly-Republican farmers in Nebraska are joining up with mostly-Democratic environmentalist to fight a proposed 1,300-acre data center complex.
— Conservative ranchers and rural residents in New Mexico are challenging billionaire Larry Ellison’s Oracle over a massive water-consuming data center project.
— Communities in Texas that voted overwhelmingly for Trump are demanding moratoriums on the computer-rack warehouses that are increasingly pockmarking rural America.
This is the 2026 wave of a new populism, and Democrats are jumping on it.
Polling by Gallup finds that 71 percent of Americans are against having an AI data center in their community, and that number includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. They get it that the much-ballyhooed “cloud” is actually a gigantic collection of massive industrial buildings that consume staggering amounts of electricity and water, produce both air and noise pollution, and more often than not jack up local utility bills and buy off corrupt local politicians to get tax abatements.
The Department of Energy says that data centers sucked up 4.4 percent of all the electricity generated in America in 2023; by 2028, DOE says, that number could be 12 percent, or about an eighth of all the power produced in our country. And once the buildings go up, the number of jobs created is negligible.
Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other tech giants often negotiate special “bulk” electricity rates behind closed doors, sticking homeowners and local small businesses with the cost of expanding the grid and power plant capacity.
People are over it....
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Damn straight! We're done with these motherfuckers running our country!
'The piggy bank is broken': Trump admin spurs 'crisis' with 'raid' on Navy's payroll cash — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
The Trump administration has sparked a full-blown “financial crisis” within the U.S. Navy after pillaging coffers earmarked for service member payrolls, The Guardian reported after speaking with U.S. Navy officials and reviewing new documents.
Dollars earmarked for U.S. Navy payrolls were being moved, according to The Guardian, to cover costs associated with President Donald Trump’s deeply unpopular war against Iran, a conflict that has drained the United States’ supply of munitions stockpiles. A Pentagon memo reviewed by the outlet warns of “shortfalls in payroll” accounts for U.S. service members due to Pentagon “raiding.”
“The piggy bank is broken,” said Harlan Ullman, a retired U.S. Navy officer and military academic, speaking with The Guardian.
Another U.S. Navy official who spoke with The Guardian on the condition of anonymity revealed the “imaginative” workarounds being employed to circumvent payroll shortfalls.
“The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies and is being backfilled by money that hasn’t been spent,” the U.S. Navy official said. “They are backfilling payroll so we get enough money in our paycheck.”
While a U.S. Navy spokesperson dismissed reports that U.S. Navy payrolls were at risk of falling short, the “cash shortage” within the branch was “no secret,” The Guardian reported.
“They’re just not speaking publicly about it,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C
“And I suspect that is a deliberate decision of the civilian leaders in the Pentagon, starting at secretary, that this is for political reasons, that they don’t want to look like they’re damaging future military readiness over a war that is becoming increasingly a political liability.”...
"Who would have imagined that a pedophile who bankrupted casinos and numerous companies couldn't run a country." — Jimmy Smith (comments)
"It happens when oligarchs are stealing with both fists. Trump has orders to break this country and he's enjoying it for his own malicious and financial reasons.
Epstein" — Cynthia Luman (comments)
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How dare the greedy bastard do ths? He's stiffing our truops and we're going to allow THIS? Kick his ass out the door!
Heat up the tar and ready the feathers! Hang him up from the yardarm!
Canadian politicians vow to inflict 'massive pain' on MAGA states — Alternet| Brad Reed, Common Dreams
Politicians from Canada’s two biggest political parties vowed on Monday to hit back hard against US President Donald Trump’s trade war against their country.
Trade negotiations between the two countries collapsed last week after Trump reportedly sought to restrict Canada from striking trade deals with other nations, while also pressuring the country to scrap requirements aimed at preserving the use of the French language.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that Trump’s aggression would come back to hurt US workers.
“It’s not a surprise that the US would take some form of reprisal to our response to their unjustified tariffs,” said Carney, a member of the center-left Liberal Party. “But what message does that send to the workers in Michigan and Ohio and Kentucky and Alabama who rely on Canadian demand? We’re their largest customer for automobiles, more than the European Union, Japan, Korea.”
Carney also said there was an “attitude at the negotiating table” from US officials that “Canada is a subsidiary of the United States,” which is “not something we’re going to accept.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a member of the rival center-right Progressive Conservative Party, delivered a more strident rebuke to Trump, vowing that Canada’s response would deliver a hit to the president’s voters.
“The red states, we’re going to hit hard,” said Ford...
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Make them feel the pain that Trump spreads.
The sick scam to rob your Social Security and give it to Wall Street — Alternet|Dean Baker
...If the point is to make an argument for reducing the benefits of high-income retirees, then show the taxes and benefits for high-income retirees. No one disputes that Social Security looks like a pretty good deal for more moderate-income retirees, but these people don’t typically have much income in retirement. I guess Jeff Bezos’ paper would have been too embarrassed to argue that we have to reduce the average monthly Social Security benefit of $2,071.
The Post’s editorial makes the push that while cutting Social Security, we should expect people to be more reliant on private 401(k)s. In addition to increasing risk, this is also enormously inefficient. Private 401(k)s cost more than 40 times as much to administer per dollar of benefits as Social Security. It is understandable that Mr. Bezos would be happy to see more money going to his rich friends in the financial industry, but most of us would rather see the money going to ordinary workers.
Medicare Benefits: Big Bucks to Hospitals and Drug Companies Are Not Benefits to Workers
The Post’s graphs do show a huge imbalance between the taxes paid out for Medicare and the cost of the benefits received. This is also deceptive.
In the United States, we pay almost twice as much per person for healthcare as the average for other wealthy countries. This is not because we get more or better healthcare. Our life expectancy ranks near the bottom for wealthy countries.
The big bucks for healthcare go to the income of drug companies, insurers, hospitals, medical equipment makers, and doctors. In each case, we pay two times as much, or more, than people in other wealthy countries. A paper that was not answerable to one of the richest people in the world would suggest bringing our payments in line with the rest of the world. But instead, the WaPo wants to beat up on the country’s retirees.
No one should be confused: cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits to reduce the deficit is not a moderate position. It’s one that attacks hundreds of millions of ordinary workers to avoid taxing the rich or reducing waste in our health care system. That is extreme, but the rich media owners pushing this position will do everything they can to convince us they are being fair and balanced....
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This is what we get for electing scumbag criminals who are robbing us blind. We can stop them if we have the courage.
Dr. Oz Denies Measles Deaths While Defending Trump’s Vaccine Claims Crooks and Liars|John Amato
We do know what happened.
It was reported that two people just died in Pennsylvania due to measles-related complications on Tuesday. Still, Dr. Oz tried to pump the brakes on the report to defend the Trump administration's attacks on vaccinations by claiming the two may have had another illness on top of measles.
WTF?
That doesn't matter one iota. Oz was flummoxed that a Fox person would blame the deaths on measles.
"I do want to caution you, use the phrase I want to be thoughtful about because I don't want to fear monger and I don't want anyone in America concerned inappropriately," Oz said on Fox Business. "We don't know exactly what happened in Pennsylvania yet, we don't know if these children died from measles or they had another condition that was already attacking them and they just happened to get measles at the same time."
Oz makes no sense. Whether two people died solely from measles or from measles-related causes is the same thing.
If they had been vaccinated for measles, whether measles alone or measles-related causes were responsible is unimportant. Measles was a major factor in both deaths.
Oz then used the pandemic to denigrate people's responses to vaccines as a whole.
The only reason any American lost confidence in vaccines was because of all the lies and conspiracies Trump and his cult members put out during the lockdowns to undermine Dr. Fauci and Pres, Biden. Crackpots that blamed all vaccines on autism suddenly found a massive megaphone to promote their lies thanks to Trump.
Here's more stupidity.
"We've got to be honest and transparent with people, which is why we feel strongly that parents should have the right to decide what goes into the bodies of their children," Dr. Oz said.
The medical community was honestly trying to protect the public from the pandemic.
How does being honest and transparent allow parents who obviously have no medical training or medical experience to make medical decisions on vaccines based on crackpot social media conspiracies?...
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Oz and RKK Jr are both murderers.They must anawer for their retarded actions.
RFK Jr.’s vaccine lies finally catch up to him — Daily Kos|Lisa Needham
It is both staggering and utterly unsurprising to get proof positive that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bald-faced lied to the Senate during his confirmation hearing.
Honestly, with this administration, not lying is probably a rarer occurrence, but nonetheless.
The Guardian and The Associated Press got their mitts on letters proving that Kennedy’s claim that a 2019 trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines” was entirely not true.
This isn’t inferential; they are letters from Kennedy himself, like the one he sent the Samoan prime minister on Children’s Health Defense letterhead. It is literally only about vaccines and how Kennedy’s “team” would conduct a “detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your MMR vaccines.”
Was this just some normal, good-hearted, even-handed science? Lol nope.
“It is, however, known that vaccines vary both lot-to-lot from specific manufacturers, and between manufacturers for a single vaccine type,” he wrote in the letter. “This makes the likelihood of adverse lot and manufacturer specific effects higher for smaller nations where all vaccine[s] can be from [a] few or a single lot and manufacturer.”
Kennedy continued, “I believe the deaths associated recently with [the] MMR vaccine in the Independent State of Samoa may have been manifestations [of] these effects.”...
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His beliefs are those of a retarded killer!
The high cost of MAGA manhood — Salon|Amanda Marcotte
Masculinity on the right runs on consumption. Trump made the hallmarks of manhood pricier
If there’s one thing MAGA males believe deep in their bones, it’s that “real” men eat a lot of beef. Multiple members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are obsessed with men’s testosterone levels and are highly attuned to right-wing social media chatter that conflates eating red meat with being “high-T,” despite the fact that science doesn’t support this theory. Kennedy in particular has been invested in defending the honor of red meat, repeatedly arguing, against standard medical recommendations, that diets high in animal fat are good for you. But long before the popularity of this pseudoscientific nonsense, a rare steak or hamburger was treated as the icon of manhood, especially in conservative circles. Republicans would routinely spread false claims that Democrats wanted to take away beef and even floated conspiracy theories that vegetarian foods are a plot to emasculate American men.
The pattern of rising food prices under Trump is concerning and annoying, and the cost of beef is soaring. Despite the administration’s efforts to blame Joe Biden, who left the White House more than a year and a half ago, blame for this inflation lies with the Trump. His pointless tariffs, poor economic management and war with Iran, which raised gas prices, all have had an impact. The beef industry has also been hurt by a screwworm infestation, and it’s not helping that the Trump administration drastically cut the federal agencies tasked with fighting such plagues....
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They are not men. They are DEVO!
Trump rocked by swell of ridicule after Oval Office ‘foolishness’: 'Completely insane' — Raw Story|Eric De La Garza
President Donald Trump’s order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” unleashed a wave of ridicule Thursday - and an immediate correction about the centuries-old name.
“We’re into some real foolishness now,” Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston wrote on social media. “It’s Lake Ontario, buddy.”
Trump signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to adopt “Lake America” for use on federal maps and documents, declaring the move “official and effective immediately.”...
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This only applies to the 5-year old child's lame brain. It's just a hissy fit of a retarded moron after he's been scolded by an adult! This is more than obvious to a person with a high school education. He's so full of hate. IGNORE THE RETARD!
MAGA 'left holding the bag' as Trump lies put them in legal jeopardy ÿ Alternet.org|Alex Henderson
Although President Donald Trump's false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him has been repeatedly debunked on both the left and the right, he continues to promote the Big Lie. And prominent MAGA influencers, from Dinesh D'Souza to MyPillow's Mike Lindell, are joining him in that claim. But according to Salon's Sophia Tesfaye, MAGA Republicans are paying a heavy legal price legally for pushing Trump's favorite conspiracy theory.
"The Big Lie continues to cost its most committed promoters," Tesfaye explains in Salon. "Many of the MAGA men who cashed in on screaming — falsely — about the 2020 presidential election being stolen are finally facing a legal reckoning for manufacturing the project's most enduring images. Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative commentator and filmmaker, settled a defamation case on the eve of trial in Atlanta this month, ending a lawsuit over a so-called documentary released in 2022 that became one of the most influential pieces of post-2020 election conspiracy propaganda."
The film Tesfaye is referencing is D'Souza's "2000 Mules," which even ultra-conservative firebrand Ann Coulter attacked as "stupid" nonsense.
According to Tesfaye, "The suit should have stripped '2000 Mules' of any remaining pretense of credibility the moment it was filed, as it claimed that thousands of people were paid to collect and illegally deposit ballots in battleground states. The film grossed more than $9 million and Trump screened it approvingly at Mar-a-Lago."
D'Souza, in "2000 Mules," accused Gwinnett County, Georgia auditor Mark Andrews of election fraud — and Andrews, according to Tesfaye, filed a lawsuit when the false accusation was easily disproven.....
"....The Big Lie was never just a rhetorical grievance nursed by Trump's inner circle. It was a lucrative enterprise built to destroy our faith in elections. Instead, it continues to expose the people who sold it."
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Throw the traitors in stir!
Jailed Tate Brothers Make Humiliating Confession About Their “Wealth” as They Face Extradition for Terrible Crimes — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Scared of facing the inside of a British prison cell, social media controversy magnets Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate are dropping the tough guy act and admitting that they’re a bunch of vain frauds.
In recent court filings, legal representatives for the manosphere influencers claimed that they deliberately portray themselves as far wealthier than they actually are because their “business model depends on online attention.”
The Bugattis they tool around in? The yachts they booze on? The gaudy watches they flaunt? It’s all a lie, they admitted in humiliating legal documents.
“Andrew and Tristan are social media personalities. Their business model depends on online attention,” the lawyers wrote in a court filing, as quoted by The Guardian.
“The outrageousness of the posts by them and about them is the point,” it continued. “The more hyperbolic and outlandish the post, the more likely it will generate views and likes, which in turn generates income. In short, they are playing a role.”
This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The brothers ooze “grift” as much as they spew unbridled misogyny. Still, it’s amusing to see them forced to admit that their macho, F-You-Money routine is really a giant game of playing billionaire-pretend.
A superyacht that they filmed themselves on, for example, was really a promotion for the ship they were paid to do. “The ‘superyacht’ does not belong to the Tates,” the lawyers clarified.
They don’t own their cool super cars, either: “the $2.1 million Aston Martin and $5 million and $7 million Bugattis featured in Tristan’s videos were rented.”
What about the multiple times that Andrew Tate has boasted pretty explicitly that his posts generate him hundreds of millions of dollars? A vast exaggeration, we’re shocked to be informed.
“All of these posts are hyperbole,” his lawyers wrote.
The brothers Tate were arrested by federal marshals in Miami last month, after years of being investigated by several foreign authorities. Following their arrests, the UK’s Crown Prosecution service said it was bringing new charges against the duo related to alleged offenses involving four women that took place between 2010 and 2017.
Andrew Tate’s charges include seven counts of rape, three counts of sex trafficking, and over a dozen charges related to sexual images of children and “extreme pornography.” The brothers are also facing criminal charges in Romania, where investigators say they trafficked women into the porn businesses.
The UK is seeking to extradite the Tate brothers, and British prosecutors have urged that the brothers not be released on bail, arguing they’re a flight risk.
The meek admissions from the Tates is markedly different to the defiant attitude their lawyer Joseph D. McBride struck earlier this month, when he vowed that he would get the Trump administration — which the brothers are closely tied with — to personally intervene if the court allows their extradition.
“We will go straight to president Trump’s office,” Bridge proclaimed.
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Straight to the Godfather of World Crime! Thanks for letting us know just how fucking guilty you are!
Firestorm as 'lying' Trump official uncorks 'insane' comments about child deaths — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
One of President Donald Trump's leading health officials was assailed by critics for casting doubt about the measles-related deaths of people in Pennsylvania.
State officials announced that two unvaccinated residents were the state's first deaths tied to measles in 35 years, although the coroner's office in Lancaster County said its investigators had not handled any measles deaths, and Dr. Mehmet Oz stepped into that gap to sow doubt about the outbreak in that county.
"I don't want to fear monger, and I don't want anyone in America concerned inappropriately," said Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. "We don't know exactly what happened in Pennsylvania yet. We don't know if the children died from measles or had another condition that was already attacking them and they happened to get measles at the same time."
"We lived this during Covid," the physician added, "where we erroneously attributed children dying to Covid when in fact they didn't die of Covid. They were dying, and they happened to have Covid in their system at that time."
The state Health Department said one of the two people who died was an infant, who the county coroner said had tested positive for measles and died because of a ruptured spleen.
Lancaster County has been the epicenter of a statewide outbreak, with 177 of the 393 cases in Pennsylvania so far this year, and officials said none of those ill people had been fully vaccinated with two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella shot.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. falsely claimed that evidence supports breaking up the shots for those vaccines, which President Donald Trump called for in an executive order on childhood vaccines, and critics called out Oz for politicizing the measles outbreak.
"First pro-measles administration," snorted journalist Laura Bassett.
"'Let’s not rush to judgment against measles,'" marveled media strategist J.J. Abbott. "This is insane."
"The @FoxBusiness chyron literally reads, ‘PENNSYLVANIA REPORTS 2 MEASLES DEATHS,'" observed the Bad Fox Graphics account.
"He is lying. He knows what happened in Pennsylvania," accused historian Moshik Temkin. "This man has been in violation of his Hippocratic Oath for years now. A disgrace to his vocation."
"Measles. A medical mystery," scoffed attorney Scott Greenfield.
"Maybe the measles only weakened them and hastened their death!!!!" shouted psychiatrist Tyler Black. "This is what I mean... Antivaxxers don't care about kids, health, or death. They only care about their precious 'vaccines don't work they hurt' narrative."
"Snake oil salesman, dangerous quack," jeered political scientist Norman Ornstein. "Unfit for any office."
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"...And I looked, and behold, a pale green horse, and the one sitting on it, the name of him was Death, and Hades was following with him; and authority was given to them over the fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, and with famine, and with plague, and by the beasts of the earth." — Revelation 6:8
RFK Jr. Gets Busted as America’s Vaccine Defenses Collapse — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
Covid is surging, measles is killing again, and the man running America’s health system spent years attacking the very vaccines that could save lives…
Louise went to the local pharmacy yesterday to get her Covid shot because Covid is climbing in all fifty states right now. She was turned away, because there’s apparently no current Covid vaccine available anywhere in America.
This isn’t a minor risk to us all, and should be a national scandal. It’s baffling that the media is ignoring it, particularly given the consequences.
A Nature study published this month from Boston Children’s Hospital found that severe Covid reactivates other dormant viruses already quietly living inside us, including Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, and herpes simplex. They noted that up to 50,000 Americans died of Covid in the 2025-2026 respiratory season and over ten million Americans are living with debilitating long Covid.
An earlier Nature paper out of the University of Colorado found that Covid infections can wake up dormant cancer cells sleeping in the lungs, roughly doubling the probability that lung cancer survivors will die of that cancer. They also pointed out that because the vaccine reduces the severity of the Covid inflammatory response, it also reduces the chances of lung cancers popping up after people catch the disease.
So, the shot she was trying to get wasn’t just because she didn’t want to spend a week in bed with a sore throat and a fever (although that’s good enough): these are deadly real-life consequences of letting your vaccination (and the immunity it confers) slide.
The lack of a vaccine and the muttering of our pharmacist about “the feds” led us on a search for reasons why there’s no current vaccine anywhere in America right now, while other countries are happily vaccinating their people as you read these words. Turns out it appears to be mostly Bob Kennedy’s responsibility....
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Kennedy is the Grim Reaper.
I have heard rumors it will be available by the end of September. Of course, they could be lying to us as they do with everything now. Needless death is what awaits us.
Abdul El-Sayed Can Ask Jesse Watters About His Ding-A-Ling Any Dang Time — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Somebody does not want to have a crush, but he has one.
His daddy says, “He ain’t worth a lick. When it comes to brains he got the short end of the stick.” But Jesse’s young and man, he just don’t care. He’d follow Abdul El-Sayed anywhere.
We are of course discussing what has happened to Jesse Watters, in his heart, ever since he interviewed Michigan Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed earlier this week. If you’ll remember, El-Sayed absolutely handed Jesse his ass, and not only that, he made him laugh multiple times completely against his will. That’s right, Jesse Watters got nonconsensually tickled, on the funny bone.
Here is Jesse confessing his love on The Five yesterday:
WATTERS: In this case I thought the interview was fine. I thought he was compelling, he’s a confident guy, kind of a guy’s guy, but I don’t trust him. You know, I like him, I don’t wanna like him, I like him for some stupid reason, but he’s not right for Michigan!
Yeah we see the bargaining happening here. He hates him, he hates him, just kidding he loves him forever! He’s a guy’s guy, and he’s so sweet and funny and he’s NOT RIGHT FOR MICHIGAN!
Suuuuuure.
Jesse spent a lot of the interview, while he was falling in love, declaring to El-Sayed that THEY’RE NOT GONNA GO FOR THAT IN MICHIGAN and whatnot. We guess in this case “Michigan” was Jesse’s fickle heart.
Maybe it was when Abdul El-Sayed asked him about his ding-a-ling.
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Ding-A-Ling? Dave Barthomew wrote the song. And how the fuck does Jesse Waters know what's right for Michigan or any other for that matter? His face is lookiing very puffy these days.
The obscure documentary fueling Islamophobia in Texas — Vox|Christian Paz
Bo French, a candidate for Texas railroad commissioner, speaks at a CPAC panel to discuss the threat of Islam in Texas. | Eleanor Dearman/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
The Great American Conflict, a 75-minute documentary produced by a Texas-based organization dedicated to converting Iran to Christianity, declares its goal right at the beginning: “to reveal the true Islam to all people, especially in the West,” Iran Alive Ministries’s founder Hormoz Shariat says. “This film is also meant to be a warning to America. There is a serious threat of Islam in our nation.”
Released at the start of summer and having premiered at a gathering of the Dallas County Republican Party, it’s an obscure film — you’ve probably never heard of it — but it has so far had a surprising political influence. It’s been shown at gatherings of local Republicans and conservative activists in Texas, where Islamophobic rhetoric and policy proposals have played a key role in activating the Republican base, candidates, and party leaders over the course of this year’s elections. The documentary is both a symptom and a cause of a larger trend unfolding in American politics in 2026 that is picking up steam now: the rise of a new iteration of blatant Islamophobia paired with Christian nationalist sentiment on the American right. ...
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What about radical Xianism? A far bigger threat to our freedom.
Trump Has Made Up to $15M in Oil and Gas Stock Rise Spurred in Part by Iran War — Truthout|Sharon Zhang
Americans have paid an additional $72 billion on gas because of the war, boosting profits and Trump’s portfolio.
President Donald Trump’s deeply unpopular war on Iran has helped inject millions of dollars into his personal wealth while saddling everyday Americans with a $72 billion bill, a new report reveals.
Amid the war, oil and gas companies’ stocks have skyrocketed in value as companies report staggering earnings; ExxonMobil recently reported its profits doubling year-over-year, while Chevron’s net income has increased nearly 400 percent as a result of the disruptions to the global oil market. In all, oil and gas companies reported $125 billion in profits in the first half of 2026, with a corresponding jump in stock value across the fossil fuel industry.
As a result of that rise, Trump may have profited as much as $15.5 million, and netted at least $4.6 million, from his oil and gas holdings this year, Democrats on Congress’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC) found in a report this week. In all, his oil and gas holdings went from a maximum value of $45.5 million to as much as $61 million.
The analysis was based on stocks that Trump held at the end of 2025, including Exxon, Chevron, and seven other oil and gas companies. His profits may be even higher than the report suggests, as Trump bought additional oil and gas stocks in the first three months of 2026 worth up to $3.6 million. These were bought in a period when the U.S. seized control of Venezuela’s oil profits and launched a war on Iran that has sent oil prices sky-high.
Meanwhile, the rise in energy prices has cost Americans an additional $71.5 billion in gas prices at the pump, the Democrats found, or an average of over $600 a household. That’s before taking into account the hike in prices for things like groceries and other associated costs like increased mortgage rates caused by the war....
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Trump is the biggest criminal to ever plunder and rape our nation.
Trump aide's devotion story falls apart after lakeside video unearthed: report — Matthew Chapman
A resurfaced video shows White House aide Natalie Harp professing an intense, almost mystical devotion to President Trump years before she ever entered his orbit, deepening questions about one of Washington's strangest relationships.
The unearthed video of Harp, whose obsessive ties to Trump have been increasingly under scrutiny and earned her the name "the human printer" for how often she gives him good news clippings, was detailed by Jonathan Last's reporting in The Bulwark on Wednesday....
Harp wraps up the video crediting Trump's political rise, without specifying how, for changing her fate.
"The elites thought they held the Trump card," Harp said.
Medical experts say her account doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Sterile-water infusion errors are extremely rare, and documented cases show other patients have survived them, contradicting both Harp's framing and Lanier's caption describing her as the "only survivor" of an error he claimed had killed more than 4,000 people. Harp later built on the story in a 2019 LinkedIn essay that went viral, landing her a Fox & Friends interview that reportedly caught Trump's attention, where she credited a Trump-backed law with saving her life.
It's not the first time holes have been punched in Harp's medical story. She proclaimed at the 2020 Republican National Convention that Trump's "right to try" legislation saved her from cancer, but analysts at the time pointed out her experimental treatment was legal before that law even took effect.
The video's resurfacing comes just days after the Daily Beast published private letters in which Harp called Trump her "guardian and protector," fueling ongoing scrutiny — including from her own brother, who has publicly described the relationship as "very unhealthy" — over just how far back her fixation with the president actually runs.
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We now live in a dystopian novel. It will not end well for some. A writer of fiction could not create the nightmare we are in.
Companies that told Trump to get lost outperformed competitors that caved: study — Alternet|Adam Lynch
The results are in, and INC reports that corporations that stood their ground in the face of President Donald Trump’s incessant bullying on company policy actually made as much or more than those that caved to orders from the White House.
Trump entered the White House intent on dictating U.S. company policy regarding hiring and promotion practices, with the intent of cancelling or discouraging minority employment or advancements. However, a new study by University of California, Berkeley, public policy researcher Jacob Grumbach indicates that companies that “stuck to their … guns despite the political pressuring have flourished as well as — or better than—those that gave in.
In fact, accounting reveals that companies that caved to Trump’s anti-minority demands may well have decreased the political pressure they faced, but “in no way improved their business results in doing so.”
“We find clear evidence that, on average, firms that kept DEI policies in place performed just as well as firms that complied with the Trump administration’s 2025 anti-DEI executive order,” said the study Grumbach published this month. “This result reflects that consumers, on balance, did not punish firms for maintaining DEI, and also that the executive branch did not engage in other major forms of regulatory retaliation against noncompliant firms.”...
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Of course. Who wants to be so stupid to follow a criminal murderer?
Christian MAGA group accused of playing loose with taxpayer money — Alternet|Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump's political movement, Make America Great Again (MAGA), heavily relies on Christian nationalists who ignore the Founding Fathers' secularism to argue the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian country. Yet according to a groundbreaking new report, Christian nationalists are engaging in self-dealing on a massive scale — and through connections with American government entities.
"Ballrooms, slush funds, jumbo jets. Worship services in the Pentagon, electioneering in churches, the Ten Commandments in schools," reported Zeteo's Lauren Windsor on Wednesday based on over a year's worth of reporting. "Conflicts of interest and Christian nationalism have been hallmarks of Donald Trump’s second presidency. The epic flood of corruption swamping Washington isn’t just overwhelming American politics – it’s also obscuring the grift occurring in red states across the country, as officials work to put public investment funds under the control of their friends at Christian finance firms."
Windsor added, "A major conduit for that corruption is the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a small but powerful nonprofit that convenes Republican state treasurers and auditors, right-wing activists, and Christian finance executives to strategize over how to defeat liberals and weaponize state treasuries against allegedly woke corporations, while steering state treasury money to their ideological allies. Much of their “War on Woke” consists of boosting the fossil fuel industry and crushing efforts to mitigate climate change, under the notion that corporate safeguards are bad business."...
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Xianists just doing their usual embezzling.
‘Skyrocketing’ Number Of Troops Want Out Of Hegseth’s Military — Crooks and Liars|NewsHound Ellen
They object to WhiskeyLeaks’ Hegseth’s illegal orders and other mismanagement.
Petey Hegseth will probably need his Mommywife to help him cope with this now-public news: According to MS Now, “the number of service members seeking a formal discharge from the military as conscientious objectors has skyrocketed, according to two groups that help them file their applications.”
The evidence suggests that Hegseth’s shocking mismanagement and illegal orders have caused this wave of crises of conscience. MS Now spoke to five troops who have started the process to become conscientious objectors. “The reasons they cited for changing their beliefs since they joined included being ordered to violate international law, seeing the civilian death toll as a result of American military interventions surge and their concerns over extended deployments with no clear mission or strategy.”
Pentagon reporter Priya Sridhar said that one such troop, deployed in Trump’s needless war against Iran, told her “they believe that they were asked to target and bomb civilian infrastructure, which is a violation of international humanitarian law.” Two others, deployed in Hegseth’s boat strike assassinations that have killed about 210 people, told her “they didn't believe there was enough intelligence or justification to show that the people who were on those boats were, in fact, narco terrorists, and not just innocent fishermen.”...
"I left the Army at a bad time for me to do so.
I was newly married and my wife was pregnant. I had no job lined up and no healthcare plan in place.
I was good at my job but had recently had an incompetent NCO who had barely passed the course in our MOS after failing multiple times.
Suddenly a man with no experience or talent or knowledge was my superior and I had to follow his orders.
But I could have put up with that humiliation.
I left the Army because Ronald Reagan had been elected as president and the thought of obeying his orders...?!
The media would have the public believe things of our military that are simply not true.
One of these is that the members of the military are dedicated to serving their country.
Most of the ones I knew had their own reasons for serving. These included anything from a lack of jobs in their home towns to avoiding prison sentences.
My patriotism(and military brainwashing) was erased by the fear of the leadership I would be forced to obey.
I sympathize." — DemoChristian (comments)
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Hegseth should be arrested for murder. In time, he will and so will his boss.
CA Pastor Arrested On Multiple Molestation Charges
Los Angeles’s CW affiliate reports:
A Ventura County pastor was arrested and charged with the alleged yearslong molestation of two young children. David Johnson, 58, of Ojai, was charged with six felony counts of child molestation, the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office said.
He is accused of molesting two children who were under 14 years old at the time. The abuse allegedly occurred over several years at locations in Ojai and Oxnard. Johnson had access to the children through a familial relationship, prosecutors said.
Following an investigation, Johnson was arrested and charged with four counts of lewd acts upon a child and two counts of continuous sexual abuse, along with the special allegations of substantial sexual conduct and the victims being under 14 years old.
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Another one bites the dust and the score runs up!
Trump Might Outright Ban Some Canadian Products
Semafor reports:
The Trump administration is weighing which Canadian imports it might prohibit if Canadian officials retaliate further against US tariffs, a US official told Semafor.
If Canada goes further, the US official said, its actions would provide the legal basis for the US to impose another round of tariffs on Canada under Section 338.
The same legal authority could be used to prohibit imports from Canada, the US official added, and the Trump administration is analyzing those imports to determine which prohibitions would not disrupt US supply chains.
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BAN TRUMP!
The silence of the co-conspirtors is deafening.
EPA To Curb Public Input On Data Center Pollution
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration is moving to make it harder for communities to weigh in on proposed data centers, even as a backlash against the behemoth projects grows across the country.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate a federal requirement that states publicize and solicit public input on applications for air pollution permits for a range of industrial facilities, including new data centers and the power plants needed to run them.
The move could prevent residents from raising concerns about — or even learning about — data centers before permits are approved and construction starts. Nearly 200 advocacy groups and more than a dozen states have voiced opposition to the change, making it the latest flashpoint in the national debate over the data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom.
"How much did the companies that build the data centers give to the Orange Asshole's "pac" in order to get this reduction in public input and approval processes? That's what we should be trying to find out. The biggest BRIBED President in the history of the US!" — BartmanLA (comments)
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Ignore it and it will go away. The IQ of these fascist fuckmothers must not register on any scale.
Our country is being held hostage by the dumbest shitbags to ever live!
Texas Lt Gov Seeks To Ban “Vulgar” Holocaust Book
The Houston Chronicle reports:
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said last week there were more than 2,000 “filthy, dirty, vulgar books” that don’t belong in school classrooms or libraries. Yet one of them is going to be taught in classrooms across Texas. “Night,” the seminal Holocaust autobiography by Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel, was approved by the Republican-controlled State Board of Education this summer as required reading for eighth graders starting in 2030.
It’s also on the list of 2,198 “inappropriate books” created by Texas advocates that Patrick touted during a Wednesday news conference. He said he wanted to introduce a bill in the upcoming session that would penalize schools a letter grade on their accountability ratings if superintendents didn’t remove problematic books.
“Many books are on our library shelves, in all of our schools — over 2,000 titles of filthy, dirty, vulgar books,” Patrick said, adding: “The purpose of this press conference today is to get parents in action to get these books removed.”
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BAN THIS ILLITERATE NAZI QUEEN!
The 'New Right' is preparing to do the 'unthinkable' after Trump — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
Over the course of President Donald Trump’s second term, many in his coalition have been disappointed by his decidedly interventionist approach to international affairs. Once he leaves office, warns one distinguished security expert, those in the “New Right” with a stricter ideological agenda will redouble their efforts to “upend America’s role in the world” even more than Trump has.
This is according to Leonard Schuette, an international security fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, who wrote in Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, “The intellectual movement that provided the ideological fuel for U.S. President Donald Trump’s rise to power, the New Right, is forging a new contender” to the traditional American grand strategy. Schuette calls it “civilizationism.”
As Schuette explains, “References to Western civilization permeate strategy documents and speeches by key members of the administration. Vice President JD Vance set the tone in his February 2025 speech at the Munich Security Conference, stressing the ‘threat from within’ to the fundamental values that characterize ‘our shared civilization.’ The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy warned of ‘civilizational erasure.’ This January, at Davos, Trump emphasized ‘the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization’; the next month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on the United States’ transatlantic partners to ‘renew the greatest civilization in human history.’”
Rather than the concept of Western Civilization long held by many in the U.S., which is “rooted in a shared set of principles that anyone, regardless of origin, can espouse, such as constitutional democracy, liberty, and equality,” according to Schuette, “for thinkers on the New Right, the West is defined by a specific geographic territory, a shared ancestry, and Christianity.” And “rather than aspiring to global leadership,” “they reject the universal ambitions of primacy and the constraints imposed on U.S. sovereignty by liberal internationalism.”
As Schuette explains, “Civilizationism differs markedly from Trump’s approach to the world. Although the Trump administration often speaks the language of civilizationism, Trump’s behavior is primarily motivated by personal grievance, transactional impulses, and a private interest in maximizing the wealth of his kin and clique. The biggest rupture between the administration’s foreign policy and civilizationism lies in Middle East policy. Contrary to his campaign promises, Trump did not retrench from the region, instead launching what he initially billed as a regime-change war against Iran. His attitude toward Israel — mostly treating it as a privileged ally — resembles that of neoconservative hawks such as the late U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.”
But civilizationists reject neoconservative positions like this. According to Schuette, “If Washington were to adopt a consistent civilizational grand strategy, it would completely upend U.S. foreign policy. It would allow for previously unthinkable concessions to the United States’ geopolitical rivals. Civilizationism would pose a historic challenge to the already battered transatlantic relationship by granting Russia de facto control over eastern Europe or treating Moscow as part of a common Western civilization and agitating more openly against sitting governments in Europe. Other historical U.S. alliances would suffer, too. Tolerating Chinese regional hegemony would throw East Asian allies under the bus, and disengaging from the Middle East would leave Israel to fend for itself.”...
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Say goodbye to the land of the free and the home of the brave if this garbage fecal matter proliferates.
Bill Kristol issues dire warning about 'desperate' Trump — Alternet.org|Alex Henderson
U.S. President Donald Trump dodged a major humiliation on Tuesday night when a GOP candidate he went all in for, Sen. Darline Graham, defeated Rep. Ralph Norman in a U.S. Senate primary runoff in deep red South Carolina. But conservative journalist Bill Kristol, in The Bulwark, points out that Graham's victory was far from a landslide — she won by roughly 4 percent, according to the Associated Press. And Kristol argues that "unhinged and erratic" Trump remains a "flailing president presiding over a failing administration."
"I regret to report that Donald Trump notched a couple of wins last night," Kristol writes in the conservative Bulwark. "He helped pull Sen. Darline Graham across the finish line in the runoff for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina, as she defeated Rep. Ralph Norman 52 to 48 percent. And the candidate Trump endorsed in the GOP runoff for governor of Oklahoma, Mike Mazzei, edged out state Attorney General Gentner Drummond for that nomination by half a point. The good news is that both were close calls. The Trump-backed candidates came close to losing."
Kristol points out that Norman and Drummond "are Republicans who were opposed by Trump" but "almost won."
"Put last night's results together with Trump's continued erosion in national polls, and one can say that the president is weaker than he perhaps has ever been politically — not just in terms of support among the general public, but even in his own party," Kristol explains. "Make no mistake: He still dominates and controls it. But in a new Reuters-Ipsos poll, which has only 33 percent of Americans overall approving of Trump's job performance against 65 percent disapproving, one can see slippage even among Republicans: 18 percent of Republicans disapprove of Trump's job performance, and of the 82 percent who approve, only 35 percent strongly approve while 47 percent only somewhat approve."
But Kristol warns that Trump's "flailing" doesn't make him any less "dangerous."...
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Evil exists in Trump and his demonic toadie asswipes. He's worse than Putin and Kim Jong Un combined.
Republican Blames Iran For Horrible US Iran War Polling — Crooks and Liars|John Amato
On Newsmax, Republican Scott Perry responded to the latest polling that shows only 31% of the US support the Iran war by claiming it's not Trump's fault for these numbers -- you gotta blame Iran.
Wait, I'm confused. Did Iran send in its bomber jets and destroyed Washington DC?
No? Right.
Wake UP America hosts asked Rep. Perry to comment on the horrific polling data.
"Yeah, look, it's nobody likes being at war," Perry said. "Unfortunately, you can't get your enemies to stop being your enemies."
Huh? Oh, he's glomming onto the Republican lie that the United States has been at war with Iran for 47 years.
"Nobody likes what's happening, which is why the president is trying to end it as quickly as possible without the loss of life," Perry said, with no irony in his voice. Trump has threatened Iran with genocide multiple times, but why get picky?
PERRY: But again, this isn't the president's fault.
It's not America's fault.
This is Iran's fault.
OMG. This is the most ridiculous answer I've heard so far. We about to hit the six month anniversary of Trump's very short, beautiful war against Iran, with no end in sight and this is the best this man on the Armed Services Committee can come up with?
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Pay close attention, America. This is your brain on retarded.
Republicans Have Been Quietly Slashing Funding For Dolly Parton's Imagination Library — Crooks and Liars|Andrea Thompson
Truly nothing good and decent in this world is sacred to or safe from a Republican.
Yesterday, the heart-shattering news broke of America's beloved Dolly Parton's passing.
But as the nation mourns our cherished country music superstar and venerable do-gooder, Newsweek notes that some Republican lawmakers have spent the past year trying to cut funding for Dolly's most famous charity work.
Dolly's Imagination Library was first launched in 1995 and serves to send a free book to children every month, from birth to the age of 5. There are no income restrictions, and the program is free for all enrolled families. The country music superstar said that she was inspired to start the program by her father's inability to read and write and hoped that she could play even a small role in fostering an early love for the written word in children around the world, as the program operates not only in the US, but also in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland.
Since its founding, Imagination Library has provided upwards of 300 million books to children and serves more than 3 million currently enrolled kids.
It's genuinely the epitome of the goodness and decency that Dolly herself embodied throughout her life -- which means Republicans couldn't care less about it.
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Redefining hatred with each passing day!
Rep. Dingell: Call It 'Lake Natalie' — Crooks and Liars|John Amato
Rep. Debbie Dingell had the best response to the absurdity of Trump's latest attack on Canada, which is to threaten to name Lake Ontario "Lake America" and rob it of its standing as a Great Lake.
We have reached such a level of stupidity that Rep. Dingell gets high marks for her quip.
And it hits Trump right in the chops.
Let’s just call it Lake Natalie so we know you’ll start protecting our Great Lakes. https://t.co/fGtlNYruwy
— Rep. Debbie Dingell (@RepDebDingell) August 25, 2026
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Thanks for the snotty retort, Rep, Dingleberry.
Trump's Kennedy Center Board Just Lodged A NUCLEAR Threat Over Name FiascoOpen link in new tabCrooks and Liars|Andrea Thompson
Donald Trump has been consistently trying and failing to rebrand the world-renowned Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts into a gold-plated, Trump-branded, tacky monstrosity, and he's met nothing but trouble and pushback at every turn.
So it seems they're choosing the nuclear route now.
In a downright apocalyptic new court filing, the Trump-installed board that now oversees the Kennedy Center made it crystal clear that if the building doesn't get Donald Trump's name on it, giving the President the "prominent recognition" he believes he deserves, then the whole damn building will be torn down to the ground in the end.
Lawyers with the Trump-era Justice Department made the nuclear threat in a court filing before US District Judge Christopher Cooper on Monday. The filing was in direct opposition to an emergency motion filed by OH Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, who has only managed to remain on the board by virtue of her position in Congress, in which she sued to stop the renaming of the center.
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Do it and we will bulldoze the ballroom! Hell, we will do it anyway!
Your Coworkers Are Becoming “Meat Proxies” for AI — Fuurism|Victor Tangermann
Last year, netizens coined a new term to reflect our growing disdain for AI bots slowly usurping our human agency.
The word “clanker” — later described as a “derogatory slur” by Google’s AI Overview — set the stage for growing disillusionment and anger aimed at tech that’s cluttering our minds and feeds, while driving us crazy at work.
And now we have the perfect accompanying pejorative to describe certain coworkers who are getting a little too carried away, blindly copy-pasting the output of AI chatbots — or slop, in today’s vernacular — without any form of revision or editing.
That term is “meat proxies,” and we have a good feeling it’s going to catch on.
The slang expression perfectly encompasses ongoing concerns over willingness to give over critical thinking skills to the machine, a phenomenon researchers have dubbed “cognitive offloading” or “cognitive surrender.” It’s a particularly serious predicament for students, who are struggling to participate in class discussions, complete their homework, or even learn how to read long texts.
Developer Niklas Gruhn, who’s widely credited for coining the term “meat proxy,” spoke to the frustration an increasing proportion of white collar workers are facing in a blog post earlier this month. He pleaded for people to stop regurgitating the “giant response” of a chatbot “verbatim.”
“Please don’t do this,” he wrote. “I mean, I’ve done this. But I’ve been on the receiving end too many times now. This is not adding value.”
“I can talk to Claude myself,” Gruhn added. “It’s going to be faster and I get to control the context. I don’t need a meat proxy in between.”
Instead of brainlessly copying slop, the developer advised people to “read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words.”...
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Meathead Proxie is more like it.
Allies Refute Trump’s Claim Strait Is Cleared Of Mines
Bloomberg News reports:
US allies are privately warning that the Strait of Hormuz is still likely mined, casting doubt on President Donald Trump’s claim that the US Navy has completely removed and detonated explosives laid by Iran.
The US is likely to have made some progress in removing mines in international waters, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal assessments. But they believe that demining efforts haven’t cleared all of the estimated 80 to 150 mines laid by Iran.
CBS News reports:
President Trump has repeatedly insisted the strait is open, but few commercial ships have dared to transit the vital waterway given Iran’s attacks and lingering threats against them doing so without permission.
“The Strait of Hormuz is under our control, and no enemy military vessel is present inside the Persian Gulf,” Iran insisted Wednesday, claiming all U.S. warships had moved at least 250 miles from the strait.
Iran and Oman said Tuesday the two nations continue discussing a new proposal to reopen the strait by way of a temporary shipping route, as well as a plan to clear sea mines, but they said no new agreement has been reached.
He lies about everything, including when his lie could result in one of the world’s worst ecological disasters....
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We'll reserve "Meathhead" for Trump.
'Ominous implications' as Trump's DHS agents secretly show up at election posts — Raw Story|Erik De La Garza
Former Trump administration official Miles Taylor sounded the alarm Wednesday after hundreds of federal immigration officers were reportedly pulled from their regular duties and secretly reassigned to scrutinize voter rolls ahead of the midterm elections.
Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who anonymously blew the whistle on the first Trump administration, wrote in a new piece on Defiance.news that officials had repeatedly assured lawmakers that DHS had “no plans” to station immigration officers at polling locations.
“Evidently, all of that controversy was aimed at the wrong place,” Taylor told readers Wednesday. “While Washington officials debated Election Day polling sites, the administration was quietly reassigning battalions of officers to start homing in on the election from their cubicles, combing through voter rolls in a secret operation without precedent.”
Citing a Tuesday Washington Post article that reported that hundreds of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers had been ordered to search voting lists for suspected noncitizens, Taylor warned: "This places DHS agents directly into a role that was never envisioned when the department was created and which has ominous implications for the midterms and future elections."
He said the secretive effort raises questions about potential abuses, oversight, and whether eligible American citizens could be unlawfully purged from voter rolls.
“Nothing in American history looks like this,” Taylor wrote. “Yet there are plenty of examples of regimes around the world mounting election takeovers that look very similar. Students of history would call it authoritarianism.”
He also openly questioned the administration’s claims about the scale of noncitizen voting.
“The point was never to find the fraud,” Taylor concluded Wednesday. “The point was to manufacture a number big enough to justify voter purges, prosecutions of election officials, and federal interference in states where the White House expects to lose.”
“That’s what they’re doing now,” he added.
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Ameica once fought a war against demons like these Trump seditionists. What happened to that backbone? This crime spree he's on must be ended for all time!
Trump says the US doesn’t need Canada. America’s economy says otherwise. — AP|Rob Gillies
TORONTO (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump says his country does not need Canada. But every day, roughly 4 million barrels of Canadian crude oil flow south, helping fuel American cars, trucks and airplanes and supply U.S. industry.
And oil is only the beginning.
Canada also supplies aluminum, potash to U.S. farms and parts for an auto industry built on both sides of the border.
“WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” Trump posted this week, repeating his long-running claim.
Yet Trump has imposed a 50% tariff on Canadian aluminum while acknowledging this week that the United States badly needs the metal.
“This country desperately needs aluminum,” Trump said. “We don’t have it. We get it all from Canada for the most part, and we need it badly.”
The contradiction underscores how deeply the two economies remain intertwined — and how much could be at stake if Trump’s trade war reaches more of the energy, materials and supply chains that the U.S. still relies on Canada to provide....
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What stupid doesn't realize is that Canada and the rest of the world no longer need the U.S. as it has turned to shit under his dictatorship.
One 'pathological' obsession explains Trump’s trade war: top historian — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
President Donald Trump last weekend renewed a trade war against Canada. And according to one leading scholar, there is no rationale driving Trump’s decision. Rather, the whole debacle is “based upon a misunderstanding of economics and a misunderstanding of politics” fueled by Trump’s “pathological preoccupation” with “fraud and grift.” This is according to renowned historian and authoritarian expert Timothy Snyder, who took to social media on Wednesday to explain the mindset pushing Trump to blow up U.S.-Canada relations.
“Trump has made his entire career on the basis of fraud and grift,” says Snyder. “As a result, he doesn’t really believe in the normal play of markets. He doesn’t understand that there might be legal exchanges or honest exchanges or exchanges where both parties actually profit, and not just one. And this is at the root of his misunderstanding of what a trade war is all about.”
Simply put, explains Snyder, “He doesn’t understand what a trade deficit is. A trade deficit means that you buy something from another country, and they give you things that you want. It’s a little bit like going to the grocery store. You have a trade deficit with your grocery store: you go there, you give them money, they give you things that you want or maybe even that you need. Now, you could decide in a moment of madness that you’re angry with the grocery store — that you think they’re just stealing your money. And you could say, I am so angry with you, grocery store, that I’ve decided that I’m now going to pay even more[.] That’s the trade war with Canada in a nutshell: they sell us things that we want, things we use to build other things, things that we need, and now we’re putting tariffs on them, which means all these things we want and need will be more expensive for us.”...
What’s more, Snyder suggests that there is a “basic political misunderstanding” contributing to the problem: “Mr. Trump and the people around him have no understanding of patriotism. They have no understanding of sovereignty. They have no understanding of politics, which has to do with the rule of law or democracy or rights or any kind of responsibility. For them, politics is just one more grift. It's just one more way of getting to the top, fooling other people, and making money. As a result, they don't understand the notion of patriotism.”
And because they lack this understanding, says Snyder, “It doesn't occur to them that anybody else would. Now, this may seem like an advantage, but it's actually, in certain critical moments, a disadvantage, because as they make trade war on Canada, their assumption is Canada is not real, it's all fake, it will just fall apart, all we have to do is nudge it. And this is a big miscalculation.”
In reality, Snyder explains, “Canada is full of people who understand that they're Canadian. Canada is led by people who understand the basic existential interests of Canada. The trade war that the U.S. is prosecuting threatens the basic sovereignty of Canada and therefore will get a solid and reasonable response. So the US trade war against Canada is based on a political misunderstanding. It's based on ignorance of the basic fact that some people do care about their country and that some people have a plan for their country, which is why the Americans will lose this trade war.”
Trump assumes that Canada will fold, says Snyder, “because there's no such thing as patriotism, no such thing as the rule of law – it's all just a scam. But it isn't for them. It's also based on the assumption that everything will happen quickly, but it won't. The Americans have an attention span of about 5 seconds. The Canadians have a plan. The Canadians will be patient. And the result of this is that not only will everybody lose, but the Americans will lose harder.”
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Even having this "show and tell," Trump and many Americans will not understand this truth.
'They are scared': Troops beg to flee Trump's war over 'breaking point' orders — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
A growing number of U.S. service members are seeking formal discharge as conscientious objectors, with two organizations that assist troops through the process reporting the sharpest spike they've seen in decades.
Mike Prysner, who runs a hotline for conscientious objectors at the Center on Conscience and War (CCW), told MS NOW that applications have increased sixfold since the start of Operation Epic Fury against Iran in late February — a rate he called higher than at any point in the past 25 years.
In a typical year, CCW works with around 50 conscientious objectors, but it has already taken on roughly 140 applicants since the Iran war began. Prysner said many of today's applicants differ from historical patterns, in which objectors were typically junior enlisted troops.
Instead, many current clients have served more than a decade, span all enlisted and officer ranks up to major, and in some cases attended military service academies before commissioning.
A second organization, the GI Rights Hotline at Quaker House, reported 429 inquiries in March and 440 in April, with elevated demand persisting since. The group is currently working with around 30 people actively pursuing conscientious objector applications, compared with five to 10 at any given time before the war, according to counselor Lenore Yarger.
She noted the number of formal applicants likely understates the broader unease within the ranks, saying it "does not reflect the complete number of people who have expressed hesitations about what they are being told they must do."
Many objectors allege that they have been ordered to take actions that violate international humanitarian law, such as striking civilian infrastructure in violation of the Geneva Conventions....
"The Iran War was really the breaking point for them when they realized that they had to take action to make sure that they did not participate in something that they were going to regret for the rest of their lives," said Prysner, an Army veteran who served in the Iraq war.
Most of the calls, he said, came from service members who were more concerned about the war's morality than fearing for their own lives.
"They are scared of the moral and ethical implications of participating in this," Prysner said. "They are scared of killing for something that they don't believe in and don't believe is right."
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Trump has destroyed our military. We are becoming defeseless with him at the wheel. WAKE THE FUCK UP, AMERICA OR SAY GOOBYE TO OUR BELOVED HOMELAND!
Massive spy campaign exposed Trump DOJ and the Senate to exploit: report — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
A major Chinese cyber-espionage campaign compromised numerous federal agencies including NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Departments of Justice and Energy, and the U.S. Senate, U.S. officials claimed Wednesday.
According to the Justice Department, hackers affiliated with China's military and intelligence services allegedly used a Chinese tech company to cover their tracks, burrow into target networks and make their intrusions more efficient, and additional targets reportedly included U.S. military networks, hospitals, power companies and defense contractors, reported CNN.
In response, DOJ seized three internet domains affiliated with the Chinese company in an effort to limit further damage.
Federal agencies also plan to issue an advisory detailing the hackers' techniques so affected organizations can remove the intruders from their systems.
Officials said the full scope of the campaign's impact remains unclear, and any internal counterintelligence damage assessments are likely to stay classified for security reasons.
The announcement adds to a long history of alleged Chinese hacking campaigns targeting U.S. infrastructure, including a 2023 case in which officials accused it of infiltrating military transportation networks, water systems and power companies — activity U.S. officials said had no legitimate intelligence purpose and appeared aimed at potentially disrupting an American response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan....
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Have we beecome so weakened that we are no longer relevant at any level in this world?
I guess this is something else the Nazis will blame on Obama and Biden but not themselves.
Dear God: What the Fuck? A Letter to God From the Vice President of the United States of America — The Smirking Chimp|Jaime O’Neill
Definitely not from Jaime O'Neill
With all due respect, you and I are overdue for a serious talk, Big Guy. You're supposed to be all-good, all-knowing, all powerful, right? And from what I've read in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, you're not always nice, and hardly very modest about your greatness. A little humility wouldn't hurt your image at all. Just sayin'.
You also seem to require a lot of mollifying from those you want to be on their knees in your presumed presence. You're big on flattery and praise in ways that would embarrass most people who weren't narcissists. You revel in the kind of sycophancy and ass kissing that is far from attractive even in mere mortals, let alone the overseer of the entire universe. I would have thought a deity would know how unappealing such a need for praise is in a big boss man. Hell, it's even cheesy in two-bit dictators, politicians, and movie celebrities who are overly impressed with their own wonderfulness....
I could go on in this vein, but I don't want to appear picky, or presumptuous. Nonetheless, I can't quite close this letter without asking you straight up what was on your mind when you took Dolly Parton from us, but left Donald J. Trump alive, with so much power to do evil. Do you care about us at all, or was that just hype to keep money flowing into those collection plates and maybe keeping teenagers from jerking off so much? If so, that hasn't worked, not even with all the shame, guilt, and confusion it has caused adolescent boys and girls for so long, and for no fathomable purpose.
Dolly Parton: Dead. Donald Trump: Alive. And Pete Hegseth, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, among the worst people ever: all alive. Even among singers, Pat Boone is still alive, for Christ's sake, and so is Lee Greenwood. Are you so lacking in musical taste that you would take Dolly and leave us with those guys? Or are you so damn selfish you wanted her in your angel choir no matter what it was going to cost us who are so suffering here on Earth, scared shitless in a dozen ways, some of us thinking about the end times all the time, and others just anxious about what you're thinking and wondering if you're really as merciful as your disciples and priests and pastors have been telling us you were for so damn long now. What kind of all-good and all powerful being would let a good woman like Dolly Parton be taken when so many more villainous and bad human specimens like Bibi Netanyahu or Vlad Putin were left behind to cause such misery....
I hope you'll take no disrespect from this letter. Just asking, you know. And I freely admit that my mind is known to change radically. For instance, I once said my current boss, the aforementioned Donald J. Trump, was totally unfit to become president. Now, of course, I think he's as good as sliced bologna.
Warmest Regards,
J.D. Vance,
Currently Devout Christian and U.S. Vice President
(author of Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.
New York Times Best Seller on its ist Day of publication.
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Thanks so much for pointing out the scumbags, J.D. Vance Now get lost.
Army Has Basically No Leadership Now, Thanks Pete Hegseth! — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Well, we see at NBC News that Iran has inflicted billions upon billions of dollars of damage to intel and surveillance sites, which has left Congress scrambling to find money to repair them. “Iran’s air attacks also have raised questions about why the Pentagon, the intelligence community and the State Department were not better prepared to defend government facilities from drone and missile strikes, military experts and former U.S. officials said.” What a pickle!
And then there’s this four-byline story from the New York Times, which seems kind of great big:
“Leaves the Army Rudderless.”
In other words, Secretary Shitfaced has been so busy firing generals for threatening his authority by being obviously superior to him in every way, and now there’s nobody home to lead the Army.
Look at you, Major Hegseth! You’re a humiliating fuckup all over again!
The subheadline of the piece says “The leadership vacuum comes as the Army is trying to adapt to a new kind of war dominated by deadly drones.”
Yes, “drone war” does seem to be confusing this secretary of Defense whose prior expertise pretty much capped off at latrine and beard maintenance.
It’s like a comical movie where an alcoholic cow has to learn to do hard things like brain surgery and dismantling bombs, because everybody else is dead! Pete Hegseth plays cow!
The Times reviews Hegseth’s “series of firings and feuds,” because the Pentagon is basically a reality show right now.
There’s still no Army chief of staff, after he fired Randy George in April. Hegseth might not know things like this, but that’s the top officer position in the Army, it’s kind of important. Why did Hegseth fire George? That’s been unclear, but the Washington Post also dropped a story today that says George had been advised by Gen. Chris LaNeve, who is currently Trump’s and Hegseth’s favored pick to take George’s spot, to kill the investigation into that weird, stupid helicopter flyby at Kid Rock’s house. George thought it might be important to investigate something like that, because he is an actual professional who earned his job. (LaNeve currently doesn’t have the support among Republicans in the Senate to get through, which is why he’s not officially nominated.)
“George later confided in colleagues that he seemed troubled by the encounter with LaNeve, who suggested it would be best if the review was scuttled,” says WaPo....
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Driver of the Trump Klown Kar!
Trump’s Inner Circle Panics Over “Natalie” as the Rasputin Parallel Gets Real — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
They’ve reportedly tried to keep Natalie Harp away from Trump. The frightening question is what they know that we don’t….
The people around Trump, according to reports, call it “the Natalie situation.” The word they’re trying to avoid saying out loud is “Rasputin.”
In the past two weeks we’ve discovered that for quite some time his inner circle been trying hard to keep “Trump’s binky” away from the President of the United States.
So much so that they denied her a room at Bedminster (so she slept in the locker room), refused to give her a golf cart while at his golf motel in Scotland (so she chased Trump’s cart all over the golf course), and tried to keep her out of the motorcade going to Trump’s rape and defamation trial in New York (so she hopped into the trunk of one of the limousines). And let’s not forget her hiding with him in the food service truck in Turkey while the press and Secretary of State were relegated to the decoy plane.
People in the White House don’t work that hard to try to thwart a president’s preference for companionship just because they think she’s odd or even amusing. They’re worried, frightened of something, and it’s almost certainly a legitimate fear.
Harp isn’t just a passive little girl (I realize she’s 35, but this is how the press keeps characterizing her) with a daddy obsession. She’s a grown-ass woman with strong opinions and a history in rightwing propaganda operations. And now she’s controlling much of what Trump sees and reads and, apparently, even writes on his Nazi-infested social media network.
She was a host on the rightwing One America News TV network, which had unsuccessfully sued Rachel Maddow for ten million dollars when Maddow pointed out that they once employed a Russian national who was simultaneously drawing a paycheck from a Kremlin media outlet that US intelligence had tied to Putin’s 2016 “support Trump” election interference operation.
In 2019 she went on Fox “News” and tried to credit Trump with saving her life, falsely saying that the “Right To Try” law he’d signed earlier that year had given her access to treatment for her bone cancer. (The treatment was already widely available and FDA approved; her use was off-label, but that had nothing to do with Trump or Right To Try, according to reporting in The Washington Post, that also found she’d posted on social media about starting her cancer treatment two full months before Trump signed that law).
That obsequious appearance on Fox led to Trump inviting her to speak at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where she repeated the story, which itself led her to a job on the air at OAN, which got her in close with Trump’s campaign. As The New York Times podcast The Daily noted yesterday, she’s basically been by his side ever since.
For years she was called “the human printer” (and referred to herself that way) because she carried a portable printer and laptop everywhere to print out stories for Trump, some about how wonderful he is and others sure to rile him up....
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As stated before — a stalking groupie.
Homeschooling Hate — The Progressive|Mark Hay
The rise of open bigotry, remote learning, and underfunded public schools has white supremacists pulling children out of class and teaching them at home.
In 2023, an antifascist collective published the results of their deep-dive investigation into Dissident Homeschool, a channel on the messaging app Telegram where self-avowed neo-Nazi parents shared educational materials and ideas for raising their children to embrace racial hatred. “Teach race realism first,” one of the Ohio-based founders, who went by Mrs. Saxon, advised the group of approximately 2,300 subscribers. Use math lessons, for example, to talk about crime statistics and how it’s dangerous to associate with other races. Teach them “to keep things quiet around certain people,” she added. That selective silence affords them the space to build adherence to a Hitlerian ideology without scrutiny.
Outlets such as VICE Media and The Guardian picked up on the story, verifying and expanding on the collective’s initial reporting and kicking off a wave of public shock and outrage. Stories named and shamed Dissident Homeschool’s founders. Officials called for investigations. And homeschool activists condemned the community as an aberration—one, they noted, that shouldn’t affect the way the public thinks about at-home instruction. Then the founders went underground, the group faded away into digital obscurity, and the news cycle moved on from this hate-filled little anomaly.
But Dissident Homeschool was not an anomaly. More than a year before the group went viral, I broke a story for The Daily Beast about a former teacher in Arizona who created another openly white nationalist homeschooling community, the School of the West—a more organized endeavor that created and still offers its own curricula and course materials. In the five years since I dug into that group, I’ve identified more than a half dozen additional highly organized white nationalist homeschooling networks, as well as many more informal digital groups similar to Dissident Homeschool. Some of these networks have been humming along since the late 2010s, but others are new and expanding—such as the homeschooling initiative within Return to the Land, a group that started building explicitly white nationalist communities in the American Southeast in 2023. I have reached out to many of these groups for comment; none ultimately spoke with me.
“We still don’t have good quantification on white nationalist homeschooling,” says Amy Cooter, co-founder of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. “But based on online chatter and advertising, it seems likely this is an increasingly common practice.”...
Mainstream conservative support for homeschooling is also a double-edged sword for extremists, Lubienski argues. Since the early 2010s, politicians have gradually expanded the ability to use “school choice” tax credits, exempt savings accounts, and vouchers not only for charter, magnet, and private schools but also for homeschooling expenses like curricula, textbooks, and social programming. Expanding support for homeschooling was a part of the 2024 GOP platform, and new provisions made it into the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
This has raised concerns about tax dollars going to white nationalist groups via their homeschool materials, Lubienski points out. But many conservative groups also want oversight of the programs they end up funding. As one pro-homeschooling group put it on a protest flyer back in 2024, “Where there is ‘free’ money there is also a ‘poison pill’ of accountability.”
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One thing is for certain. These kids are not getting a liberal education nor are they being prepared to enter the human society of the world at hand.
Dolly Remembered As Outspoken Supporter Of Drag
August 26, 2026 LGBT News, Pop Music
The Tennessean reports:
“If I hadn’t been a girl, I’d have been a drag queen.” One of Dolly Parton’s most iconic one-liners is reverberating with renewed emotion from the LGBTQ community. “Tennessee’s LGBTQ community is mourning Dolly Parton because she was the outsider who made it big by being herself, and leading with love,” the Tennessee Equality Project said in a statement to The Tennessean.
Parton’s 1991 album “Eagle When She Flies” includes the track “Family.” “Some are preachers, some are gay, some are addicts, drunks and strays. But not a one is turned away when it’s family,” she sings. Parton wrote the song “Travelin’ Thru” for the 2005 film “Transamerica,” which stars Felicity Huffman as a transgender woman, and her 2019 Netflix anthology “Heartstrings” featured a gay character.
And in her iconic rhinestone-covered, bombastic and voluptuous stage wear, Parton was no stranger to the dramatized personas, leading to her very public support of drag art. In her 2021 book “Dream More,” she recounted entering a Dolly Parton drag lookalike contest in Santa Monica, California and losing. “I have a huge gay following, and I’m proud of them,” she told The New York Times in 2016. “Sometimes some of them look more like me than I do.”
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Yet and Still — A great American leader.
Florida Youth Pastor Arrested In Child Sex Sting
Jacksonville’s NBC affiliate reports:
A four-day undercover operation by the Clay County Sheriff’s Office and law enforcement partners led to 12 arrests of people accused of trying to exploit children online, officials said.
Operation Firewall ran July 15-18 and used undercover detectives, analysts and technical support from local, state and federal agencies to identify, engage and arrest suspects who sought to meet or sexually exploit minors, Undersheriff Ron Lendvay said at a news conference announcing the results. Seven men were arrested in Clay County after traveling to meet what they believed were children for sexual activity, officials said.
Nathaniel Pusey Jr., 25, was arrested after traveling with the intent to have sex with a 14-year-old boy; authorities said a firearm was found in his vehicle and that he worked as a music director and youth pastor.
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Another one bites the dust. What else do you expect from an area filled with Xianist child molesters and Nazis worse than Argentina ever was.
Feds Report July Inflation Index At 3.7% Annual Rate
CNBC reports:
The Personal Consumption Expenditures index — the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation measure — held at a 3.7% annual pace in July, slightly higher than forecasted and reflecting persistent cost pressures for consumers.
Economists polled by FactSet had predicted a 3.6% annual increase. Wednesday’s report instead showed that inflation remained unchanged from June.
“The United States still has an inflation problem. PCE inflation came in hotter than expected,” said Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, in an email. “The impacts of the war in Iran are still apparent with $4 gas and $5.60 diesel.”
Read the full article. Trump and Republicans continue to falsely claim that inflation has gone down since Trump took office. Moments ago, Rep. Pete Sessions was quickly shot down by CNN’s host when he made the same claim in regard to today’s report.
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Apparently, many people like it this way.
Tanking economy spurs stunning conclusion from analyst: Trump's doing it 'deliberately' — Raw Story|Travis Getty
President Donald Trump's economic record has been so bad that one analyst concluded he must have wrecked it on purpose.
Rather than resulting from external shocks, the 80-year-old president's economic struggles stem largely from his own administration's decisions, MS NOW's James Downie argued Wednesday.
The column opens with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's exasperated response Monday, while announcing new sanctions on Iran, to the suggestion he might have deliberately damaged the economy: "Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?"
Downie argues he might have unwittingly made a reasonable point.
"Bessent may think that’s still a self-evidently ridiculous question," Downie wrote. "George W. Bush didn’t want a Great Financial Crisis, nor did Herbert Hoover seek to start a Great Depression. Surely no White House would deliberately hurt the global economy."
"Yet for the first time ever, that’s not the case," he added. "At home and abroad, the past few days have laid bare the extent to which President Trump’s troubles on the economy are self-inflicted."
The 30-year Treasury bond yield hit a 19-year high last week, prompting Bessent to expand government debt buybacks. Yields dipped only briefly before returning to prior levels, which the columnist attributes to investor concern over the $40 trillion national debt — a debt load it says traces substantially to the Bush-era and Trump-era tax cuts, citing an analysis from the Center for American Progress' Bobby Kogan....
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People, the rest of the world won't stand for this shit. A correction of the United States is most certainly possible to put a stop to Trump by a world at risk.
John Roberts played us for fools: The truth about his biggest deception — Alternet|Bill Blum, The Progressive
There is no bigger con man in the United States than Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Not even President Donald J. Trump.
The con began in September 2005, during Roberts’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Articulate, handsome, and energetic at fifty years old, Roberts seemed to have been culled “straight from central casting,” as Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama actually remarked on the first day of the hearings. Roberts was also convincing—he famously promised that if confirmed, he would serve in the fashion of a baseball umpire, calling only “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Seventy-eight Senators, including twenty-two Democrats, fell for the ploy and voted to give him the lifetime assignment.
The biggest yarn Roberts told during his hearing concerned his views on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), a cornerstone of American democracy, which the Supreme Court gutted this past April in a redistricting case from the state of Louisiana (Louisiana v. Callais).
As is his prerogative as Chief Justice, Roberts assigned the task of drafting the Callais majority opinion to fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who responded with a 6 to 3 ruling that held that, henceforth, Section 2 of the landmark legislation would require VRA plaintiffs to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps challenged as “racial gerrymanders” were created with discriminatory intent rather than for permissible political purposes. The opinion allowed Louisiana to eliminate one majority Black Congressional district. It also effectively negated legislation passed in 1982 that had amended Section 2 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power without proving intent....
"All of the men on the court are crooks and liars. They lied under oath about VRA, abortion, and more. Three of them are such quacks that they can't even read the plain language of birthright citizenship. Most of them are taking money and gifts from contributors." — John Langston (comments)
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The traitor must be held accountable.
A furious backlash lies ahead as a sleeping giant awakens — Alternet|Robert Reich
...I honestly don’t think anything good will come from the darkness we’re now going through. Trump and his sycophants have already destroyed so much that was good in America, created such chaos, robbed and cheated America out of so much wealth, legitimized so much bigotry and hate, and undermined so much of America’s moral authority that it will take many generations to get us back to where we were before — if we can ever get there....
We are now experiencing what occurs in a society whose economic benefits have been siphoned off by those at the top: an angry working class willing to embrace a demagogue, billionaires seceding from the rest of society, a shrinking and frightened middle class, and a political system run by and for large corporate interests. This is likely to produce a huge backlash in which America reverses these terrifying inequalities of income, wealth, and political power....
The biggest backlash will be against those who have placed themselves above the law, who have used the law to punish people who tried to hold them accountable, and who have bribed, corrupted, and undermined the legal and political systems on which democracy is based. Because of this backlash, future presidents will no longer be able to use the Justice Department for personal vendettas or rewards, rake in huge amounts of money for themselves and their families, or exercise arbitrary power....
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Trump and his Nazi pirates must pay for their crimes!
RIP Dolly Parton -- Crooks and Liars|Karoli Kuns
One of the best people in the world has left us. May she rest in peace and power.
...Dolly Parton was truly a good person from the top of her head to the tip of her toes. Her philanthropy is legendary. Through the Dollywood Foundation, she has given to pediatric hospitals, established programs to help literacy rates, and helped victims of wildfires. She declined the Medal of Freedom twice when it was offered by the current occupant of the White House and also by President Biden, saying she "doesn't do politics."
And yet. Just by example, she led people.
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Absolute truth. She gave and gave to humanity.
A woman born in poverty. Started with a homemade guitar.
No excuses for anyone about tough breaks.
Elon Musk will never achieve the greatness of Dolly. Not by a long shot.
Hegseth Fired Top General Over Kid Rock Flyby Probe
The Washington Post reports:
Days before the Army’s top officer was abruptly fired earlier this year, he was advised by a fellow general now vying to replace him to stop the military’s investigation into an unauthorized helicopter flyby of musician Kid Rock’s Tennessee estate, three people familiar with the matter said.
Gen. Randy George, whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed as the Army chief of staff without explanation, felt it was important to follow typical protocol and determine whether any safety regulations had been violated during the March 28 flyby, these people said.
The revelation, which has not previously been reported, adds a new layer of understanding to Hegseth’s potential motivations for firing George on April 2. Sean Parnell, a spokesman for Hegseth, said that the new reporting about George’s departure amounted to a “regurgitating” of a “tired, old story simply to manufacture drama.”
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The "tired, old story" is Hegseth and his Nazi Toadies showing their stupid asses!
MAGA Attacks Girl Scouts Over “Muslim Badges”
Newsweek reports:
The Girl Scouts of the USA pushed back against criticism this week after social media posts about faith-based Islamic badge programs sparked online controversy. The backlash followed posts by White House correspondent and Steve Bannon’s War Room co-host Natalie Winters claiming the Girl Scouts offered “Muslim badges” that could be earned by learning about Islamic practices, including the pillars of Islam and visits to mosques.
The programs are tied to religious recognition awards administered by outside organizations and have existed for years, the Girl Scouts said in a statement posted to social media. “There’s misinformation circulating online today about Girl Scouts and religion,” the statement from the organization read.
“Here are the facts: Girl Scouts is not a religious organization and does not teach religion. For more than a century, we’ve welcomed girls of every faith and background. Our national My Promise, My Faith pin invites girls to connect the Girl Scout Law with their own faith. Any other faith-based patches are developed by independent faith organizations, not Girl Scouts of the USA,” the statement continued, adding, “Girl Scouts is proudly for every girl.”
Read the full article. The cult is pouring into the replies of the Girl Scouts’ post with their usual racist abuse, with some accusing them of being a “Satanic organization.”
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What is it about "freedom of worship" that scares the Nazis?
"The Constitution protects freedom of worship through the First Amendment, which includes the Free Exercise Clause, allowing individuals to practice their religion freely, and the Establishment Clause, preventing the government from establishing an official religion or favoring one over another. This ensures a separation of church and state, promoting religious diversity and freedom in the United States."
Fuck off, you racist Nazi motherfuckers!
Man With Guillotine Arrested Near Supreme Court
The Washington Post reports:
The U.S. Capitol Police seized a guillotine and arrested a man it says transported it in the bed of his pickup truck before illegally parking it alongside the U.S. Supreme Court building. Capitol Police said officers noticed the pickup truck around 3 p.m. Tuesday and later arrested 35-year-old Philan-Tam-Duy Le, of Julian, California.
Le, who drove to Washington from California, was charged with carrying a dangerous weapon, police said. “Investigators are going through the suspect’s backpack to learn more about why he came to Washington,” police said in a press release.
Photos of the truck began to spread on social media just before 6 p.m. on Tuesday with police seen photographing the truck and later towing it. The ominous imagery of the guillotine near the U.S. Capitol called to mind the gallows erected with the building in the backdrop on Jan. 6, 2021.
'Yet the people with the gallows and nooses to hang Mike Pence received a Presidential Pardon and called it 'Free Speech.' — 'TexasBoy' (comments)
"The illegal parking part, I get. There are laws you have to follow for where you park.
Having an overlarge object in your truck bed is likely a civil infraction of some sort. Usually when you have anything so large, it requires a flag, at least around here. So I get being issued a citation for that as well.
But let's talk with Graham over with her latest comments on gun control being a failure. Is she against anti-guillotine laws as well?" — Makoto (comments)
"'....was charged with carrying a dangerous weapon..............'
Not in any sense could it be considered a weapon.
An antiquated method of cutting off heads. yes.
But a weapon against others, I don't see it." — JackFknTwist (comments)
"If it had been a few assault rifles, it would have been fine." — D'Joie (comments)
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An actual functioning guillotine? What a great free speech, political demonstration!
US Halts Immigration Visa Appointments Worldwide
Reuters reports:
President Donald Trump’s ?administration has issued a pause on immigrant visa appointments for applicants around the world during an ongoing immigration crackdown by the U.S. government in the Republican leader’s second term in the White House.
A U.S. State ?Department spokesperson said on Tuesday that it launched a global training initiative at ?all U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide and that appointments for visa services ?will be adjusted to accommodate the training.
The State Department did not specify details on the ?training ?and its timeline, beyond saying the training aimed to help consular officers screen out applicants deemed likely to become dependent on U.S. public benefits and to ensure evaluation of visa applicants “comprehensively and consistently.”
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Why would anyone in their right mind want to come to a repressive Nazi shithole anyway?
Most of us are leaving this country as well before the invasion comes.
Federal Judge Strikes Down Texas Ban On Drag Shows
NBC News reports:
A federal judge in Texas struck down a 2023 state law Tuesday that sought to restrict drag shows, ruling it was unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge David Hittner, a Reagan appointee, said the measure, known as Texas Senate Bill 12, improperly restricted speech, violating the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The ruling prevents state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for the Senate, from enforcing the law and denies his motion for a new trial.
In the ruling, Hittner also had advice for “those who find such activities as described in this case offensive.” “The solution is relatively simple … just don’t go,” he wrote.
The state law would fine business owners who were found to be in violation up to $10,000 for hosting events, while performers could be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, which could result in up to one year of jail time.
"Now adulterer "Christian" Paxton can find something else to bitch and moan about." — weshlovrcm (comments)
"Just don't go. Sounds much like, if you don't like gay marriage, don't marry a gay person.
So simple..." — Ed B (comments)
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Score: Xianist Pastor Child Molesters "INFINITE" - Drag Queens "ZERO!"
And "just don't vote for Nazis like Paxton!" It's that simple.
Donalds Names “Anti-Communist” As Running Mate
Politico reports:
Florida GOP gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds announced Tuesday he’s tapping state Sen. Bryan Ávila as his running mate, a move that could help bolster the House lawmaker’s support in the state’s large and influential Hispanic community.
Ávila, a Republican lawmaker who represents Hialeah — the epicenter of Florida’s Cuban diaspora — has been leading the Donalds campaign “Latinos for Byron” coalition since May. Donalds’ choice gives him a deputy with deep relationships in the Legislature that he’d need to help enact his agenda.
Donalds made his announcement from Miami’s Freedom Tower, an iconic part of the city’s skyline that now serves as a museum but previously was used to process Cuban refugees who fled communism. Ávila warned of the dangers of communism when he reached the stage, sharing that his parents had fled Cuba in search of freedom. “You and I share a fundamental belief that the Democrats will never understand,” Ávila told Donalds..
Read the full article. Avila last appeared here in 2023 when he sponsored a bill that would erase historic building protections in neighborhoods like Miami Beach’s Art Deco Row and Key West’s Old Town.
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Happy Negrolander taps Anti-communist. Dude, all anti-communists are Nazis! Are you all that fucking stupid to not know this?
Insiders Say GOP Convention Is Cash Grab “Shitshow”
Puck News reports:
President Trump announced last month that Republicans would hold the first-ever midterm convention in September, promising “lots of Great Entertainment” and “a RALLY like none other.” Yet, it’s turned into a “shit show,” said one G.O.P. campaign strategist, and few lawmakers want to go. For starters, the National Republican Campaign Committee is asking House members to cough up $25,000 for themselves and a guest to attend the two-day convention in Dallas, according to three people who have reviewed the invitation. And that’s the cheap rate, with the highest tier asking for $100,000 from lawmakers.
The R.N.C., which is hosting the convention, is also taking sponsorship money from corporate donors, which is being funneled into a nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors. But with no party business being conducted and poor planning (invitations were sent in the last several weeks, way after lawmakers had already committed to other events), campaign strategists are seething that it’s little more than a fundraiser for an unnecessary Trump production, at a time when some swing-district lawmakers aren’t exactly clamoring to be associated with the president.
Read the full article.
Puck News:
“The Republican midterm convention is a “shit show.”
The NRCC is charging members $25k-$100k to attend.
There’s no itinerary and invites went out late.
Some say it’s just another grift for a Trump production.”
Because of course it is ..
puck.news/the-gops-cas…
— Mona Burns (@monaburns.bsky.social) August 25, 2026 at 8:59 AM
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Grifting like the hoods they are!
On MS NOW's The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone discusses how election denialism has gone from the fringes to “Republican orthodoxy”
Carusone: GOP election denial “used to be on the edges a decade or more ago and is now front and center really steering the ship”
EUGENE DANIELS (MS NOW HOST): It is in August, the end of August. And so at that point, you, like Vaughn read off, the folks who will be voting very soon by mail-in ballot — they do this on purpose and everyone else is at a disadvantage.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. I mean, look, Trump built an organized power on what used to be considered the fringes. Then they got pulled into the Republican Party, but this is no longer a fringe issue. This is Republican orthodoxy. Look at what happened after the LA mayor's race — I mean, the vice president said it was stolen. I mean, this is not something that exists on the fringes. So, the sentiment that you're feeling is sort of the kinetic energy that these extremists now have taken over. You used the fruit of the poison tree, they've all eaten from the fruit of the poison tree. They all believe this. This is where they are. This is their perspective. And they're going to be willing to push it. And while they're doing this, from their angle it's win-win, right? Because they either win in the courts or if they don't win in the courts, they use the loss in the courts to say this is why we need to do a national emergency. This is why we need to have people outside of voting — outside of polling stations, right? So either way, they look at it as we get here or we escalate. And that's because the momentum right now, the thing that is driving it is the thing that used to be on the edges a decade or more ago and is now front and center really steering the ship. And it is where the momentum is. It is why that feeling you have is so palpable....
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The Republican/Nazi Party is no longer an American party. It does not support our U.S. Constitution.
Top Commanders Told Hegseth Not to Cut Civilian Protection Program, Poll Showed. He Did It Anyway. — ProPublica|Hannah Allam
Shortly after taking office last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth polled the nation’s top commanders about cutting a program designed to protect civilians during U.S. military operations.
Hegseth had bet senior officers would endorse his view that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and out of step with “maximum lethality,” current and former defense officials told ProPublica
Instead, every commander rebuffed the idea.
The poll from early 2025, which has not been previously reported, cemented top-level military support for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a relatively new program adopted after years of heavy civilian tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. As part of its mission, CHMR (pronounced “chimmer”) stationed personnel within major regional commands. Officials tried to develop a picture of life on the ground in combat zones to aid decision-making on military strikes and avoid or minimize civilian harm.
In the poll, Hegseth gave commanders three options: cut 65% of staff but keep the effort operational, continue with only a small centralized office in Washington, or eliminate the program.
Nine commanders chose the first option to preserve the enterprise as much as possible, according to a memo reviewed by ProPublica. Leaders of two commands, one overseeing the nuclear arsenal and the other focused on cyber threats, declined all three options, asking to maintain the full program.
Leaders at U.S. Central Command, the Tampa, Florida-based center that oversees military action in the Middle East, pressed to keep its full CHMR staff of 16. Eliminating or scaling back the effort would “result in decreased efficiency of U.S. lethal operations due to an increased risk of target misidentification and reduced battlespace awareness,” a memo reviewed by ProPublica said.
Retired Army Gen. Erik Kurilla, who was then in charge of Central Command, and several other senior officers directly involved in combat operations had appealed to Hegseth to keep the program. They explained that it was a valuable tool, another retired general said — but “that intent was overridden.”
Hegseth gutted the effort, leaving only a handful of people to carry out the mission. It was stripped of almost all of its funding, even as the U.S. launched new campaigns in Somalia, Yemen and Iran. One official summed up the Hegseth approach as: “Bombs away!”...
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And what happened the last time "Bombs Away!" was heard. A couple of hundred school girls were murdered by his goddamn bombs!
Children in a Faith-Healing Sect Keep Dying. The State Lets It Happen. — ProPublica|Audrey Dutton
A sheriff’s deputy opens the door of an Idaho farmhouse where a newborn baby has just died. It’s almost 10 p.m., but the house is filled with adults and children seated anywhere they can find a spot: in reclining chairs, on the wood-stove hearth, on a chest of drawers. Some of the women hold babies in their laps.
“Sorry,” the deputy whispers as the door creaks.
No one greets the officer. No one speaks or even looks at anyone else, casting their eyes instead at the floor or around the room.
The deputy’s video camera records as he walks through the front room and past a bedroom door adorned with children’s artwork. Inside the bedroom, newborn Malachi’s mother sits in a recliner. His body lies in her lap, covered by a blue blanket.
As people in uniform ask Malachi’s parents about his birth, death and the two days in between, members of the family’s church — one of at least four Followers of Christ churches in Idaho — watch from folding chairs. People come and go from the bedroom; one woman cradles a sleeping toddler.
Malachi died from pneumonia and bleeding lungs, according to an autopsy.
It would have been treatable with antibiotics and newborn care in a hospital, said doctors who reviewed his death records for ProPublica.
But Malachi’s parents belong to a faith-healing sect that doesn’t believe in medical care, based on a literal interpretation of several Bible verses. The Followers of Christ sect believes that God heals the faithful and that life and death must be left to God’s divine will.
When the coroner’s deputy lifted Malachi’s body to take it away that night in October 2023, there was no wailing or sobbing from his parents. Malachi’s father stood quietly as his mother hung her head and rested it in her hand.
A pediatrician who reviewed Malachi’s death records said a baby in his condition would have been gasping for air, turning blue from lack of oxygen and breathing so hard that the outline of his rib cage was visible.
It was the first time the coroner and sheriff sent their deputies out to that house, to interview those parents and document the slow suffocation of a newborn boy.
The next time was 13 months later, when their next newborn, Liam, died from the same treatable condition that killed his brother Malachi....
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Wrongful deaths. Satanic at their core. Nothing holy about them.
Trump board threatens to destroy 'unsafe' Kennedy Center in apocalyptic court filing — Raw Story|David Edwards
The Trump-installed board that runs the Kennedy Center told a federal judge the building will have to be torn down unless President Donald Trump's name goes on it.
Justice Department lawyers made the argument for Trump on Monday in a court filing before U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper. It opposes an emergency motion by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), a board member who sued to stop the renaming.
The board voted on Aug. 13 to carve "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" into the front of the building and to rename the grounds "President Donald J. Trump Plaza."
Without those efforts, the center "will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down," the filing said.
The government's lawyers then floated what might go up instead, "such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years."
"Such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain," the filing said.
The warning rests on a claim the brief repeats throughout, which is that the money follows the recognition. Without "prominent recognition" of Trump's efforts, "the donors will not contribute, and the Center will continue to be in a financial and structural death spiral," the filing said.
An order blocking the board "will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to stop," it added....
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Time to remove these miscreant reprobate NAZIS!
‘Unacceptable’: US city without power for nearly 2 weeks as frustration grows — Cleveland.com|Geoff Herbert
As fears about the U.S. power grid’s vulnerabilities grow, so does frustration in one city that’s been in the dark for nearly two weeks.
Thousands of people in Gary, Indiana, have been without power since Aug. 11, when powerful storms killed at least seven people. CBS reports more than half of the city’s residents lost electricity, and the lights are not expected to come back on until Tuesday at the earliest.
“It’s been absolutely horrible,” resident Shatiya Hardin told CBS News. “At night we’re sweating, we’re irritable, we have children to look out for, elderly people who need electricity for oxygen tanks.”
As of Sunday, more than 28,000 customers were still without power, according to the Northern Indiana Public Service Company. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun requested an expedited major disaster declaration Thursday from FEMA for 54 counties, estimating damages from the storm’s 99 mph winds that downed trees on power lines to cost more than $5 billion.
“If granted, this declaration will mean significantly more resources to accelerate Indiana’s recovery from the recent severe weather. I will do everything in my power to ensure Hoosiers have the resources needed to recover,” Braun said.
Gary Mayor Eddie Melton said Sunday that it’s “unacceptable” to see the city still without power.
“Twelve days is too long for parents to worry about their children, and for businesses to lose revenue, and for families to wonder when the relief is finally going to come. Today, I want the people of Gary to know this. I want you to know that I share their frustration,” Melton said, calling on NIPSCO to act faster.
According to CBS, a class-action lawsuit has been filed against NIPSCO, accusing the company of failing to proactively trim trees and vegetation near power lines. NIPSCO refuted the allegations, saying its “vegetation management spend has more than doubled since 2016.”
At the peak of the storm, more than 374,000 residents had lost power. NIPSCO said its work over the past 13 days has included replacing 300 poles and 44 power transmission poles, with assistance from ComEd, the largest electric company in Illinois....
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The US once had a government that could take care of problems such as this. No longer with Trump robbing our till and borrowing money so he can use it for his own gratificatons. America you're asleep on your watch!
‘God help us’: Disturbing clue rumored on Trump’s mystery beef as old clip resurfaces — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
A resurfaced clip of President Donald Trump went viral online Tuesday as onlookers believed it may have revealed the origin of the mysterious 300,000-metric-ton ground beef shipment the president announced last week.
Last Friday, Trump announced that he’d closed a deal to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef — the equivalent of more than 2.6 billion quarter-pounder hamburger patties — that would be sold at 25% below market price amid rising beef prices. When asked about the source of the ground beef, however, Trump declined to answer.
While the deal was widely condemned by American cattle ranchers for undercutting their industry, Trump's refusal to reveal the beef's origin unnerved critics — but on Tuesday, some believed the president had already given away the answer last year.
In October 2025, Trump told a reporter aboard Air Force One that his administration was considering purchasing “beef from Argentina” in an effort to bring “beef prices down,” using language notably similar to his justification for the mysterious 300,000-metric-ton beef shipment. The potential revelation disturbed onlookers given Argentina’s recent history of shipping potentially health-hazardous beef.
In March, China suspended a shipment of beef from Argentina after detecting the presence of chloramphenicol, an antibiotic that carries rare but documented risks of fatal side effects. Trump has already signed an executive order authorizing the importation of 80,000 metric tons of ground beef from Argentina back in February, and coupled with Congress having repealed mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef in 2015, countless critics expressed concern.
“It was only five months ago that China averted disaster by rejecting contaminated beef from Argentina,” wrote musician and activist Bill Madden in a social media post on X to his nearly 400,000 followers. “With serial-lying psychopath Trump as president, God help us.”
Former Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia endorsed the theory that the mysterious beef shipment was “apparently from Argentina,” and condemned Trump for abandoning the American cattle industry. Meanwhile, multiple American meat companies sounded the alarm over health concerns.
“Nobody knows where this beef is coming from. Nobody knows how the animals were raised, what they were fed, or what antibiotics and vaccines were used,” reads a statement from Good Ranchers, a Texas-based direct-to-consumer meat company.
“This isn't alarmism. History is just worth paying attention to. In 2013, Europe went through a massive food fraud scandal when products labeled as beef tested anywhere from 30 to 100% horse meat. The package said beef. It wasn't beef.”
Meriwether Farms, a Wyoming-based beef company, issued a sarcastic warning to consumers earlier this year that remained relevant on Tuesday.
“Chloramphenicol is banned in the US because it can cause fatal aplastic anemia in humans,” reads Meriwether Farms’ statement. “But don’t worry, the US has increased beef imports from Argentina — without implementing mandatory country of origin labeling requirements!”...
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It is easy to see how much Trump hates America with this.
How Trump Declared Economic War on His Own People — The American Prospect|David Dayen
Having failed at and then become bored with a shooting war, Donald Trump is returning to what really gets him up in the morning: an economic war. An “economic D-Day” for Iran was announced at around the same time as retaliatory trade measures against Canada, a demonstration of the fact that to Trump, there’s no functional difference between tariffs and economic sanctions.
I’ve seen some commentators discuss this as a more humanitarian way to handle Iran, as if starving a country’s citizens is somehow preferable to bombing them. But the combination with Canada, as my colleague Bob Kuttner went over yesterday, reveals that this is just bullying with different tools: a spreadsheet instead of a surface-to-air missile.
The nagging problem for any would-be emperor short of Nero is that the ungrateful plebes don’t like the world being created. Administration actions in the past couple of years have been almost deliberately designed to raise prices. Trump is trying to temper that with countermeasures that are breeding anger among his most loyal supporters. When your prime directive is to dominate the world for no ultimate end other than vindictive sadism, you are likely to end up abandoning everything you claimed to stand for in the pursuit.
Administration actions in the past couple of years have been almost deliberately designed to raise prices.
Attempts to break the will of Iran have a millennia-old track record of nearly unbroken failure, including by Trump himself in his first term. And the idea that America has been holding back on Iran and hasn’t brought out the heavy stuff is highly questionable, as the country has been under never-ending sanctions since 1979. But whatever attack the U.S. throws out, the expectation is that Iran’s hard-line leadership will strike back in a way that imposes maximum pressure on the U.S. economy. “Not a single drop of oil will be exported” through the Strait of Hormuz or throughout the Persian Gulf, a senior Iranian official vowed on social media.
Trump is stuck because the country saving him the most from the consequences of the Persian Gulf oil blockade is the same country he wants to sanction: namely, China. Trump’s other favorite enemy has relieved global oil pressures by dramatically reducing imports. But the “D-Day” plan for Iran, known as Operation Economic Outcast, is to penalize with secondary sanctions the countries that do the most business with them, and topping that list of trading partners is China. The first thing China would likely do in response to sanction is restart buying up oil at prior rates, and if Americans don’t like $4-a-gallon gas, wait until they see $6. In truth, we’d be lucky to get away with just a price spike and not crippling shortages.
The first response to this will be lying, as the Trump administration has about oil coming through the strait now. But the absence of physical product cannot be talked away with bluster. Moreover, rising commodity costs from the Hormuz disaster have set in motion an inflationary spiral. The last thing you would want to do is start a different economic spat with another large oil producer. So let me introduce you to Canada....
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Do these people have the wits to realize it?
Ex-NBA Player Teams Up With Wingnut Think Tank To Form Transphobic Stupid Voltron — Wonkette|Gary Legum
If Enes Kanter Freedom, the retired NBA player who has found a second career as a wingnut publicity whore, had played football instead, we might sadly shake our heads at his recent antics and mutter something about the scourge of brain damage to NFL players and the league’s decades-long whistling past the graveyard when it comes to the long-term consequences of repetitive head injuries.
But since Enes Kanter Freedom played basketball, a sport not known for giving its players concussions on every play, we have concluded that he is just an asshole.
Naturally, being a right-wing asshole attracts other right-wing assholes. Shoot, if you’re going to work with outfits like the America First Policy Institute on your anti-transgender crusade, you likely have “being an asshole” as the first line on your résumé.
On Sunday, Kanter Freedom, who recently announced his intention to play in the WNBA, went to a WNBA game with the clear purpose of causing a scene. He got himself a courtside seat as the Indiana Fever played the Chicago Sky and showed up wearing a T-shirt (which he sells in his merch store if you need a Christmas gift for a total asshole) with a faux dictionary definition that read “WOMAN [noun] - Adult human female.” At some point, Sky guard Natasha Cloud, who is known for her activist work that includes support for transgender people, walked towards him and started yelling. Kanter Freedom stood up and stepped onto the court with arms spread wide in a gesture that usually means either “You wanna fight?” or “What? I’m just an innocent women’s basketball fan here to show my support for the ladies in all their unique femininity that is under attack by woke transgender ideology!”
Security promptly tossed Kanter Freedom from the game and the entire arena. That night he tweeted, “I just got kicked out of a @WNBA game for supporting WOMEN! Let that sink in, AMERICA!”
All of this was stupid enough. But now Talking Points Memoreports that Kanter may have been working with the America First Policy Institute, a wingnut “think” tank co-founded by two of Donald Trump’s Cabinet members.
The evidence for it is thin but suggestive. It turns out Ashley Hayek, an AFPI executive vice president and the sort of person who puts “loves Jesus” as the first two words in her Twitter bio, just happened to be sitting a couple of rows behind Kanter Freedom so she could tweet out a picture of him sitting courtside. And after a couple of anti-trans activists sat courtside at another Fever game a few weeks ago (this one in Seattle), they told anti-trans podcaster Brandi Kruse that the $1,300 seats had been paid for by a “generous donor.”
It’s not a coincidence that both these events took place at Fever games. The team’s Sophie Cunningham kicked off the current firestorm by making her opposition to transgender people loudly public, and the entire Right has tried to co-opt Fever star Caitlin Clark as some sort of white supremacy mascot who is forever at the mercy of the league’s savage Black players. (Clark has stayed out of it.)...
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Flush all the asswipe Nazi bastards!
World’s oceans hit highest temperature on record — The Week| Peter Weber, The Week US
The world’s ocean temperatures reached 70 degrees Fahrenheit over the weekend, the hottest on record, Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Monday. The previous daily average record was set in March 2024, but oceans may not have been this warm in “millennia,” The Washington Post said.
Global ocean temperatures typically peak in March or April, so this off-season record is “another clear signal of an ocean under growing stress,” said Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess. The brewing “super” El Niño is “adding heat to the system, but it is doing so on top of decades of human-driven warming.” The seas are likely the warmest they have been “for the entire Holocene period, and possibly even as far back” as “125,000 years ago,” University of Ottawa environmental studies professor Ryan Katz-Rosene said on social media. “Should be major news!”
“An ocean this warm destabilizes weather patterns and threatens food security, economic prosperity and marine life,” former NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco told The Associated Press. “A warmer ocean is not our friend.”
“Warmer seas help to fuel more extreme weather,” supercharging storms and intensifying heatwaves, the BBC said. This year’s El Niño “is expected to keep strengthening until Christmas” and is “on course to be the strongest in centuries.”
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Believe Trump and don't believe science. This is the mindset of retarded America as doom stares into their faces.
Paved-Over Historic Black Cemetery Is Now Up For Sale, Lawyer Says — The City Reporter|Greg B. Smith
The Queens property where the owner put up a parking lot on an 18th century burial site for free Blacks is now in foreclosure and up for sale — a transaction that could be complicated by strict state rules meant to preserve the human remains interred in unmarked graves.
Three weeks ago the attorney appointed as referee in foreclosure litigation over the site filed a report declaring his intent to sell the lot at 47-11 90th St. in Elmhurst to recover what’s owed to a New Jersey bank.
Last year the owner, aware that the site was sacred ground, paved over the entire property and began renting it out as a parking lot. Included in the dozens of vehicles deposited there were some brought by a towing firm hired by the NYPD to drag abandoned vehicles off city streets.
The owner, a limited liability corporation called 90 Queens LLC, originally purchased the property in 2009 with the intent of putting up condos, but when construction began two years later, laborers working a backhoe struck what turned out to be an iron coffin containing the remains of a freed slave who’d died of smallpox in approximately 1850.
Across New York, the burial sites of enslaved and free Blacks are owned and managed by a variety of public and non-profit entities, including the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan, managed by the National Parks Service; the Enslaved African Burial Ground at Van Cortland Park in The Bronx, controlled by the city Parks Department; and the Harlem African Burial Ground, located on East 126th Street on the site of a former MTA bus depot, which is being developed into a memorial by a local community group and the city Economic Development Corporation....
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The continued disgrace of the US.
Guardsmen Deployed In DC Maybe Don’t Love Being Sicced On America — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Recently Donald Trump had one of his dictator panty explosions threatening to sue the Center for American Progress for FIVE BILLION DOLLARS because it did a study that found that his National Guard deployments, which were on their face stupid and only appealed to fearful white idiots and losers who need to believe Big White Daddy is stopping The Crime, are actually not stopping The Crime.
It was a notable eruption, even more than his usual tantrums where he’s threatening to sue somebody who made fun of him and hurt his feelings. It felt more late-stage empire/late-stage brain syphilis, with the angry dictator threatening to OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! an organization for simply looking at data and refusing to bend reality to appease Dear Leader’s fragile emotions.
One of the major conclusions of CAP’s look at the data was that violent crime was already dropping in a big way, and that Trump declaring war on and attacking American cities “had no measurable effect on violent crime trends.” Trump’s lawyers clownishly claimed that Trump had suffered “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” because CAP hurt him so. (As if he has a reputation to harm, LOL.)
Now NPR is out with some journalism of a genre we imagine is going to become more and more common as time goes by, where members of Donald Trump’s and Pete Hegseth’s various failed deployments, missions, and wars begin to speak out — slowly and off the record at first — about the uselessness of their assignments, the hopelessness, the damage they’re being ordered to do.
We don’t expect to hear this out of ICE, necessarily, since they’re pigs, the least qualified of the least qualified. (We do expect to hear “BUT WE WERE JUST FOLLOWIN’ ORDERS!” from ICE, after the dictatorship, when they are on trial.) But we’re not entirely shocked to be hearing it from the National Guard, about its stupid thousands-strong attack on Washington DC, now that it’s been there for a year....
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It's time they turned their weapons on our real enemy!
Trump Revives Herbert Hoover’s Nightmare and Canada Fights Back — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
Trump just unleashed a trade weapon no president has used since Herbert Hoover, and Canada’s retaliation could be the beginning of a global move away from America…
Late Friday night, trade talks with Canada collapsed when Prime Minister Mark Carney — the former president of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, a guy whose knowledge of economics and history makes Scott Bessent’s bleatings sound pathetic — said he was tired of Trump bullying his country. He was blunt about the scam Trump’s trade people tried to run on Canada, saying, simply:
“We were attacked.”
And they were. As Dean Blundell documents, Trump was demanding of Canada:
— Control over who Canada trades with.
— Control over Canada’s use of the French language.
— Control over Canadian-made cars.
— Control over what goods the Canadian government buys for its own use.
— And the ability to re-impose tariffs against Canada any time Trump gets irritated, for any reason.
That midnight, in retaliation for Carney refusing to bow to Emperor Trump, the US imposed fifty percent tariffs on about twenty billion dollars’ worth of Canadian goods destined for American consumers.
Young families are being crushed by Trump’s existing tariff inflation, but he made sure that the morbidly rich got their waivers.
Trump exempted items where there are major lobbyists in DC spiffing GOP legislators (fossil fuels, electricity, potash, fish, and critical minerals), leaving the price increases Americans will pay on things the lobbyists don’t care about or would just as soon have tariffed (cars, liquor, dairy, cement, plywood, furniture, clothing, fishing rods, swimming pools, and hockey sticks).
As a result, history, it appears, may be on the verge of repeating itself.
In the last year of Biden’s presidency while Trump was running for a second term, he told Lou Dobbs:
“We have an economy that’s so fragile.... And when there’s a crash — I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. The one president I just don’t want to be, Herbert Hoover.”
Say hello to Donald Herbert Hoover Trump. Carney is hitting back with “dollar-for-dollar” reciprocal tariffs, effective in two weeks. (September 8th)
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Canada will now be one of the world's allies when the invasion of the U.S. takes place.
John Roberts humiliated by protesters at his lush private getaway — Alternet|Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the Republican Supreme Court he helped create. From overturning the Voting Rights Act and allowing him to restrict mail-in voting to helping him build his White House ballroom, the Supreme Court has repeatedly defied judicial precedent to help the president achieve his wishes.
Now the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, is paying on a personal level for his work abetting the president.
"Chief Justice John Roberts’ island escape was interrupted by protesters who arrived by kayak to stage a demonstration," The Daily Beast's Erkki Forster wrote on Monday. "The Supreme Court justice, who has pleaded with critics of his ultra-conservative court to back off, learned earlier this month that even his private island retreat off Port Clyde, Maine, wasn’t beyond the reach of protesters."
Forster added, "Arriving by kayak, canoe, and rowboat, the protesters staged a one-hour “floating vigil” in the waters between Port Clyde and Hupper Island, where Roberts has a home, the Midcoast Villager reported.
The Daily Beast continued, "The protesters’ signs declared “The Roberts Court: Rubber Stamp for Fascism” and “Roberts Benched the Constitution,” according to photos published in the Midcoast Villager. More than 20 people paddled out for the protest, while another 20 demonstrated on land, according to the Midcoast Villager."
Roberts, who has previously complained about protesters not respecting the supposed sanctity of the Supreme Court, has not yet offered a comment on the incident...
The Daily Beast continued, "The protesters’ signs declared “The Roberts Court: Rubber Stamp for Fascism” and “Roberts Benched the Constitution,” according to photos published in the Midcoast Villager. More than 20 people paddled out for the protest, while another 20 demonstrated on land, according to the Midcoast Villager."...
"Roberts and the other criminal RWNJ's of the SCOTUS shouldn't have one moment of peace considering how they are destroying the lives of everyone in the USA and world, taking away voting and civil rights giving way to much power to the President." — leonbnj (comments)
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This is what happens to fascist traitors. May it ever be so.
DOJ Makes 'Ridiculous' Move As Only Defense Of Trump's Rigging Plan 'Evaporates' — Crooks abd Liars|David Edwards
The Justice Department pressed the Supreme Court to lift an injunction blocking President Donald Trump's mail-ballot order, even after its only argument had "evaporated."
Trump signed Executive Order 14399 in March, directing the United States Postal Service to impose new requirements on mail-in ballots ahead of the November midterm elections. Federal courts repeatedly blocked it, including with two separate injunctions from a Massachusetts federal judge now barring implementation of the order for the November 3 election.
The Trump administration moved forward with the plan anyway. On Friday, the Postal Service published that final rule.
The department had argued before the Supreme Court that the legal challenge was premature because no final postal rule existed at the time.
UCLA election law professor Rick Hasen wrote Monday that the new development wiped out the government's entire case for lifting the injunction.
"DOJ's argument has evaporated," Hasen pointed out.
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The lawsuits have already started. America won't have this corruption in our elections!
The Nazi criminals will push to rig the vote for Trump as they always have. It's time for a showdown with them.
State Dept To Sell “Woke” Painting By Obama Artist
The New York Times reports:
The State Department wants to sell a painting by the celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley that the director of its Art in Embassies program called “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.” It was removed from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic last week.
The painting by Wiley, who rose to fame after being selected to create President Barack Obama’s official portrait, features four Dominican models against a floral backdrop. It was commissioned by the federal government in 2013 and paid for with taxpayer dollars. State Department officials removed the painting from the embassy last week, after first hiding it behind a tarp designed with an image of the American flag.
Erin Scavino, the director of Art in Embassies, criticized Wiley’s painting in a recent podcast interview and pointed out the artist’s connection to Obama. Leah Campos, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, celebrated its removal on social media with a video playing the rock anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” writing that the painting was an example of “globalist and woke ideologies.”
Read the full article. Gift link below. Key quote from Bluesky: “We’ve reached the ‘degenerative art’ stage of fascism.”
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Like "anitfa" there is no such thing as "woke." It is only a painted word the Nazis use to besmerch their opposition and to compartmentalize them. This is one of the best examples of their retarded thinking. They know nothing about the art and the artist. They are simply using the art to further their corrupt totalitarianism. These moron deplorables must be resisted to the highest degree!
They are the ones who are “aesthetically terrifying.” RACIST Motherfuckers! Visit an art museum and get an education!
There is more to art than just majestic paintings of white people and floral arrangements!
Death to Fascism!
Jennings: Dems Are Lying, Trump Won The Iran War
“The United States has won the war against Iran. Wars are won when one side achieves its strategic objectives, and the other loses the ability to achieve its own.
“Iran entered this war with four great pillars of strength — its nuclear program, its missiles and drones, its regional terror network, and its ability to hold the world economy hostage through the Strait of Hormuz.
“The Democratic Party, it seems, is unified in its desire for the American people to believe that we have lost this war. Even though it’s clear the opposite is true.
“Our ships travel at will. Is Iran able to stop oil from moving in and out of the strait? No. In fact, millions of barrels of oil are transiting the Strait of Hormuz every day. More and more every day, in fact.
“This is what Trump hatred has done to the Democratic Party. There is something deeply wrong with allowing partisan hatred to make you so emotionally invested in American failure, especially when that leads you to openly lie to the American people.” – MAGA pundit Scott Jennings, still auditioning for that press secretary gig.
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They keep pushing us deeper into 1984. 2 + 2 = 5 is being forced upon us.
Remember this was a joke during Vietnam to end the war. "Just say we won and leave!"
MAGA Group Is Behind Anti-Trans WNBA Stunts
Talking Points Memo reports:
An organization closely tied to the Trump administration seems to be collaborating with Enes Kanter Freedom, an ex-NBA player who has joined the right-wing, anti-trans crusade against the WNBA and was ejected from a Chicago Sky game Sunday. The America First Policy Institute tweeted out footage of Freedom arriving at the Sky’s game against the Fever Sunday, where the few anti-trans protesters cheered him and Sky fans heckled.
Ashley Hayek, an AFPI executive vice president, tweeted out a picture from a couple rows behind Freedom and tagged the institute. An anti-trans podcaster previously said that the courtside seats of a couple women who protested at the Fever-Seattle game last month were paid for by a “generous donor.”
AFPI — founded by the Trump administration’s Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business News commentator and the National Economic Council director during Trump’s first term — did not respond to TPM’s questions. But the organization has leaned into the collaboration, selling a $45 orange sweatshirt that says “Let Freedom Play,” with a graphic of the former player mimicking the WNBA logo.
"Another distraction from all the Trump crime, corruption and failures, headed by unqualified DEI hires Rollins and McMahon. Conservative fascists need to be crushed, perferably literally." — Bert_Bauer (comments)
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Are we surprised? Nope. These people are nothing more than self-loathing scumbags.
Fury at Stephen Miller as 'sick' ICE hospital video emerges that's 'impossible to watch' — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
Video of two crying and screaming Ecuadorian women being manhandled in a Florida hospital by ICE agents set off a furious response on MS NOW Tuesday morning.
“Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski shared the viral clip of Grace Stephanie Calero Cabanilla, 39, and her daughter, Giulianna Mía Carriel Calero, 19, being grabbed after they had been rushed to a hospital after a crash.
That prompted co-host Jonathan Lemire to chime in after Brzezinski called what she watched “Sick.”
“What are we doing here as a nation? What are we doing?” he exclaimed. “This is not the worst of the worst that President Trump promised that he would focus on during the campaign and his administration keeps saying. They're targeting a mother and daughter at a hospital in video that is impossible to watch.”
“In the case of that hospital scene, the sick thing, John, is that there are people, Stephen Miller comes to mind, who like what they see in that picture, because it sends a message to other people, don't come here unless you want to be this person,” Willie Geist stated.
As the clip ran again, Geist added, “This is the mother, and then later, the daughter, who had just been in a serious car accident was arrested in her hospital gown when she was discharged, awaiting deportation hearings. It sickens most Americans to watch this, but not enough people in the Trump administration.”
“This will continue,” Lemire interjected before repeating, “This will continue, the quotas are still in place. Stephen Miller still has calls multiple times a week with DHS officers saying, ‘We need to get our numbers up. We need more people.’”...
"When the Nazis took over Germany, many Jews were basically forced out. When NOT ENOUGH of them left, then they began the program that would eventually become the Holocaust. When does Nazi Miller, the orange pedophile and MAGA start to demand that those in our concentration camps start being "eliminating" instead of spending the money to house them and fly them out of the country?? I could see them saying "they are just going to come back so we need to make sure they don't". I guarantee that a sizable percentage of MAGA would have NO PROBLEM with boxcars full of people, mass executions, gas chambers, ovens. WHILE AT THE SAME TIME, claiming that the USA is a "Christian" nation." -- Naughty Nigel (comments)
"This FUCKER deserves charges, convictions for murder and the death sentence!!!!" — The Banana Splitz (comments)
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The psychopathic behavior of the Nazi scum is textbook madness. They are not human beings but monsters from the id.
AP: US To Revoke Visas Of 200,000 Asylum Seekers
The Associated Press reports:
The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum status in the United States. If it happens, the move would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history and would likely face legal challenges.
Unless challenged or revised, the State Department is expected to announce in the coming weeks the revocation of so-called B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026 whose holders have sought asylum or are now seeking asylum, according to State Department documents obtained by The Associated Press and two U.S. officials. The action will be taken in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.
“We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” said State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott.
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America has forfeited its position as world leader. We are a lost country and will continue to be until we can mount a recovery.
Trump and Natalie: A F*cked-Up Love Story — The Bulwark|Jonathan V. Last
1. Munchausen?
The Trump-Harp relationship turns out to be even weirder than we already knew.
Let’s jump back to the beginning—the very beginning—with the story Harp used to catch Donald Trump’s attention.
Last week the Daily Beast unearthed a video essay Harp recorded circa 2017. (She would have been in her mid-twenties at the time.) In the 96-second video, Harp narrates a montage of still photos explaining how Donald Trump saved her life. She claims that on November 9, 2015 she was the victim of “medical error” when she was “accidentally infused with sterile water.”
I went into hemorrhagic shock, losing 100 percent of the average person’s blood platelets, but only 30 percent of my own. Thanks to a rare blood condition, I became the only survivor of sterile water infusion. But today I have cancer and chronic pain. I’ve had to pay my own medical bills, been denied appointments, prescribed opioids, given access to life-ending drugs, and every problem could be traced back to politics.
Then, miraculously, Harp’s video transitions to Donald Trump speaking exactly one year later, on November 9, 2016, saying that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”
The video closes with Harp saying, “The elites thought they held the Trump card. But they didn’t count on Donald Trump. Like I did.” At the end of the video there’s a title card with the name of the video (“The Forgotten”) and the cast of the production. “Natalie J. Harp, MBA” is identified as playing “The Patient.”
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The sick virus for which there seems to be no antidote.
Trump Declares Trade War With Canada, Loses — Wonkette|Gary Legum
It is safe to say that no matter how dumb you were this weekend — maybe you got too drunk or spent too much time in the sun without applying and reapplying sunscreen — you didn’t do anything as dumb as start a trade war with Canada. So you’re already way ahead of Donald Trump.
Being Trump, he started this war in the dumbest way possible. First, the US went to Trump’s go-to negotiating move of introducing onerous demands into a delicate negotiation at the last minute. Then when the Canadians were rightfully pissed off enough to walk away from the negotiating table, he slapped new tariffs on about $20 billion worth of Canadian products....
Cool, neat. Monday’s tariffs are on top of the 50 percent tariffs that kicked in on Saturday after negotiations for a trade deal collapsed. We’re sure this latest move will thrill America’s Chamber of Commerce, which had reportedly been begging Trump to not get into a trade war with Canada because it will be so harmful to American businesses and consumers.
A new temper tantrum is, we suppose, the logical next step after three days of the US whining that Canada cratered the latest round of trade negotiations, while Canada stared back, steely-eyed, elbows up, before telling the United States to fuck off.
Speaking of elbows up, one product Trump is slapping a tariff on is hockey equipment. Might this lead to increased equipment costs for NHL teams, which in turn leads to an increase in ticket prices, which in turn leads to a collapse of team economics in the US, which then leads to a weakening of rosters for American teams, thus strengthening Canada’s NHL teams and putting one of them in position to finally bring the Stanley Cup back north of the border for the first time in over 30 years?
That sound you just heard is fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs breathing in new hope....
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Oh, Canada, the true North brave and free!
Yeah,eh?
The view from a very angry Canada — Vox|Caitlin Dewey
President Donald Trump is putting the “war” in “trade war.” Or so his senior officials really want you to believe.
“At dawn begins an economic D-Day,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrote Sunday night, previewing the latest round of sanctions against Iran.
“It’s a country that doesn’t have a military,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, incorrectly, of Canada over the weekend. “To think that they’re going to go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war…is foolish.”
The war with Iran is literal, of course. The war with Canada, slightly less so. But in both cases, the Trump administration is trying to weaponize America’s economic might to get its way in otherwise stalled negotiations.
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Luckily for Dumbo Duffy Canada has no nuclear weapons otherwise, look out you dumb shit. When has your fat Doofus ever won a war? LMAO!
When the Left Distances Itself From Black Lives Matter, Far Right Policies Win — Truthout|Ashley Smith
Alec Karakatsanis explains how both Republicans and Democrats have used the backlash to increase the powers of police.
ust six years after millions of people across the country took part in racial justice uprisings after the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, politicians and pundits of all stripes — from reactionaries like President Donald Trump to progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have turned against demands to decrease funding for police. Those demands were popularized over years of organizing from a broad popular movement against decades of unprecedented mass incarceration.
In this interview, Alec Karakatsanis explains the roots of the backlash, how both Republicans and Democrats have used it to increase the powers of police, and why it’s essential to rebuild the movement to fund communities, not cops. Karakatsanis is the founder and executive director of the Civil Rights Corps, an organization that has pioneered landmark litigation challenging systemic injustices in the punishment bureaucracy, author of the book, Copaganda: How the Police and Media Manipulate our News, and publisher of the Copaganda Newsletter.
Ashley Smith: After the police murder of George Floyd, the U.S. exploded in protest, becoming the biggest wave of mass demonstrations in U.S. history with as many as an estimated 26 million people marching across the country. Republicans and Democrats launched a backlash against the movement. What have they argued and done?
Alec Karakatsanis: It’s important to underscore that it’s not just Republicans behind the backlash. It’s a bipartisan establishment assault on the movement that emerged in the decade before 2020. That struggle aimed to reduce the size and power of the punishment bureaucracy, the term I use to describe the institutions the government uses to repress people and the for-profit industries parasitic on them....
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The left seems to always be bound to commit political suicide whenever they rub up against swinming in the political mainstream. The same is happening to AOC. She's headed for irrelevance now.
The Lesson of America’s Broken Education Politics — The Progressive|Jeff Bryant
Fifteen years ago, thousands of teachers marched on Washington to protest the Obama-era push to privatize public education. Has anything changed?
It was a sunny July day in Washington, D.C., the temperature was forecasted to hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I arrived at the Ellipse on the National Mall for the Save Our Schools march I realized I would need a hat. Among the vendors that lined Constitution Avenue, the least expensive hat I could find was a gaudy, red-white-and-blue affair with an embossed rendering of fireworks going off over the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. “Some hat,” Anne Thompson, my videographer for the day, said when she arrived.
Thompson had come highly recommended by Robert Borosage when I approached him about springing for the $1,000 it would cost to hire a videographer—this was in 2011. Borosage was a co-director of Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), a progressive policy think tank on K Street that let me blog on its site for free. “Think about it,” I said, as he shifted uncomfortably in his seat and glanced at the floor. “Thousands of pissed-off teachers showing up for a demonstration in Washington, D.C.”
At the time, I was working on a project, partnered with the National Education Association, called “Starving America’s Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students.” The project documented how state governments, following the Great Recession, cut funding for schools and rolled out efforts to privatize them with charter schools and voucher programs.
I had read multiple analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) that found at least thirty-seven states responded to the economic downturn that started in 2007 and extended into 2009 by slashing their education budgets back to pre-recession levels. My Starving America’s Schools project would examine how the cuts caused districts to fire teachers, cancel art and music programs, close libraries and science labs, and cut extracurriculars like athletic programs, field trips, and drama performances....
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Has anything changed? Yes. The Xianists are trying to turn then all into Xianist houses of worship!
Hey, So Why The Hell Is Hakeem Jeffries Meeting With Prince Jared Of Trump? — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Really continuing to question whether Hakeem Jeffries actually understands that we are fighting fascism.
We guess there could be some good reason House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries reportedly recently met with unofficial secretary of state/Trump family member in charge of Middle Eastern grifting projects Jared Kushner. Maybe Jared is whistleblowing on behalf the children about the dangers Natalie seemingly poses to their beloved father. Maybe he is offering to testify against the family in exchange for some kind of immunity.
Maybe … no, we think that’s the end of the list of ways this weekend’s reporting on Jeffries meeting with Kushner could be OK.
The New York Times says explicitly that Jeffries and Kushner met to talk about ways Democrats and the regime could work together, we assume in advance of Democrats beating the absolute shit out of Republicans in November. The Times’s five sources say they met in New York, and the meeting was brokered by a mutual friend. (What kind of an ass must you be to count both these men as your “friends”?)
Let us be clear here: unless Jeffries had some kind of nefarious purpose that’s to be revealed — maybe the meeting was entirely initiated by the Kushner side and it was pathetic and Jeffries only took it for intel-gathering purposes — this is disqualifying, and it’s time for members of Congress and likely incomers who oppose this to go ahead and fire up an email chain to start figuring out who’s going to be speaker instead. Go ahead and get it figured out. Appoint AOC head of the search/vetting committee if she doesn’t want it herself.
Meeting with Jared Kushner to find common ground in opposing abolishing ICE is not fighting fascism. Sorry if he doesn’t understand the assignment. Get the fuck out....
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Jeffries does a lot of talkie-talk.
GOP Senator: Talarico Doesn'Doctors Wa To Face Corrupt Ken Paxton — Crooks and Liars|John Amato
In a hysterical interlude on Meet The Press Sunday, Senator Tim Scott was reduced to the "I know you are, but what am I?" defense of corrupt Ken Paxton, who is running against James Talarico in a neck-and-neck race.
Host Kristen Welker listed off much of Paxton's scandal-laced resumé as a Texas politician before asking why Sen. Scott supports him.
WELKER: Democrat James Talarico, as you just said, facing off against Ken Paxton.
Paxton has faced allegations of bribery, fraud, abuse of power. He was impeached by his own party.
You endorsed Senator John Cornyn in the primary against Paxton.
So why do you now believe Ken Paxton has the character to serve in the U.S. Senate?
SCOTT: Well, I can tell you this.
What we know with great clarity is that James Talarico does not have the character to serve in the United States Senate, nor does he have the right issue, right position on the issues that Texans care most about.
I'll say it very clearly and I'll say it again. James Talarico is out of step, completely out of step with Texans.
Huh? Is Sen. Scott suggesting that a candidate for the US Senate must must face bribery, fraud, and abuse charges. Must admit to committing adultery while being impeached by his own party to get his support?
Welker asked again.
WELKER: But does Paxton have the character to serve? He was impeached by his own party...
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What does this guy know about Texas? He's from South Carolina.
Elect Talarico!
Doctors Warn Trump Could Be Facing 'Premature Disability And Death' — Andrea Thompson
Honestly, we all knew it was coming.
There are simply only so many Big Macs and burnt steaks slathered in ketchup that one person can eat in their lifetime before it starts to become a real issue, no matter how many gallons of Diet Coke they drink in an effort to "watch the calories."
It seems Donald Trump is rapidly encroaching on that point of no return, as the Washington Post has released a new report in which several doctors warned that the 80-year-old president of the United States is facing the very real possibility of "premature disability and death."
It seems the big guy has packed on at least 25 pounds since his 2024 campaign days, and doctors are warning that obesity is one of the most prominent and reliable health markers when it comes to predicting an early grave....
While medical professionals have begun to pull away from the Body Mass Index alone as a reliable tool for monitoring health, Trump's doctors, family, friends, and even Trump himself have all acknowledged that the president's weight combined with his proclivity for "junk food" and his staunch avoidance of any physical activity that doesn't involve a golf cart is becoming a serious concern.
Trump himself told quack Mehmet Oz, the reality TV show host turned head of Medicare and Medicaid, that, "The one thing I would like to do is be able to drop 15, 20 pounds."
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Is this an official death watch?
El-Sayed To Vance: My Name Isn't The Problem, Trump's Policies Are — Crooks and Liars|Heather
Vance was doing his best to "other" El-Sayed, while repeating the right-wing lie that El-Sayed "openly calls for Sharia law in America," which he does not, and which was debunked by PolitiFact earlier this month.
MS NOW host Al Sharpton asked El-Sayed to respond to Vance's attack, and El-Sayed proceeded to dismantle Vance along with his boss Trump.
SHARPTON: Now, we've mentioned President Trump was in South Carolina last night campaigning for Darline Graham, but he seemed more interested in talking about you, pushing unsubstantiated claims, trying to paint you and your family as terrorist sympathizers.
But I want to ask you about comments from Trump's vice president, JD Vance, from earlier this week, questioning your commitment to working-class people. Take a listen to this.
VANCE: El-Sayed, this guy running for Senate in Michigan, he once argued, not too long ago, that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in white supremacy.
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The fear of Sharia Law is amazing since we have a Constitiution that does not supprt religion controlling our government and rightly so!
Trump Superstore Going Out Of Business — Crooks and Liars|Ed Scarce
The large store along Interstate 40 near Knoxville, TN is selling off its entire inventory.
Tennessee Brando (Brandon Fuson) lives near the store in Eastern Tennessee, one of the reddest areas of the country. He's noticed the downturn in business just by driving past the Trump Superstore often.
Source: The Independent
A large store in Tennessee that exclusively sells President Donald Trump merchandise is closing, and it is due to a lack of shoppers....
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The story of Trump's life.
90,000 Urged To Evacuate Over Reno Wildfire [VIDEO]
The Associated Press reports:
A fast-growing wildfire destroying homes in northwest Reno, Nevada, on Sunday was human-caused and uncontained, authorities said, as they encouraged some 90,000 people to evacuate. At least six people were injured.
The Hawk Fire began Saturday and quickly grew to 20 square miles (53 sq. km.) as it spread across the Peavine Peak area of the Humboldt–Toiyabe National Forest, where rugged foothills are ringed by homes and businesses near the California state line.
Some 42,000 residents have been ordered evacuated as the “GO NOW” zone expanded, reaching the edge of the University of Nevada. An additional 45,000 people were in the adjacent evacuation warning zone. Authorities implored all of them to leave and be prepared to stay away for several days, because shifting and strengthening winds were expected to make the fire even more unpredictable.
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More results of ignoring our environment.
'Idiotic' MAGA Republican measles excuse immediately blows up in his face: 'Awful human' — Raw Story|Robert Davis
MAGA gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds of Florida sparked an internet firestorm on Sunday after he made a wild claim about the ongoing measles outbreak.
Donalds joined CBS News's Margaret Brennan on "Face the Nation" on Sunday, where he was asked about Florida falling below the herd immunity rate for measles. But Donalds' attempt to explain the trend outraged several commentators online.
"Is your message to Florida parents, 'Get your kids vaccinated against [measles]?" Brennan asked.
"No," Donalds shot back. "My message is the reason we have seen a measles outbreak is because of rampant illegal immigration."
Those comments caused an eruption online.
"This is idiotic. That's not why there are outbreaks. The data shows that it's not immigration," Dr. Pradheep Shankar, a radiologist, posted on X.
"What an awful, awful human," Nick Field, a political journalist, posted on X.
"That’s so silly. Everyone knows it’s because of the space lasers," Aviel Roshwald, a history professor, posted on Bluesky.
"The anti-indoctrination party really loves indoctrinating their voters," Michael Coon, a migration economist at the University of Tampa, posted on Bluesky.
"That is a lie. All medical professionals have stated that it is because of the decline of childhood vaccination rates," Leslie Marshall, a Democratic strategist, posted on X....
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Retarded constituents create retarded candidates.
This bastard wants to throw our children to the dogs.
Trump Admin Report Claims 24,000 Noncitizens Voted in 2020. Experts Doubt It. — Truthout Stories|Dion Nissenbaum, Votebeat
Even if the numbers were accurate, the 24,000 votes in question wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
President Donald Trump this week unveiled another effort by his administration to raise questions about the outcome of the 2020 election he lost: an unusual U.S. Census Bureau analysis concluding with “high confidence” that 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election.
Trump touted the finding on social media and wrote that it supports his long-running false claims that he actually won the 2020 election.
But experts said there are substantial questions about the Census Bureau study’s methodology and validity. And even if 24,000 noncitizens had voted in 2020, it wouldn’t have been enough to change the election’s outcome.
The seven-page Census Bureau report said researchers examined more than 128 million voters in the 2020 presidential election and determined with “high confidence” that more than 24,000 of them were noncitizens. If so, that number would be less than 0.019% of the sample.
Trump said census researchers are still analyzing another 32 million voters and predicted that the number of illegal noncitizen votes would “explode” after that was done.
The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. But experts said some aspects of the bureau’s release raise fundamental questions.
Most Census Bureau reports identify the authors of the report and detail the reliability of the data they are using. This analysis did neither.
“A properly done Census report would have had that information and the fact that it is missing is glaring and makes me think that they are hiding something,” said Beth Jarosz, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute who has worked as a contractor on Census Bureau reports....
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Duh! You don't say? This is another of Trump's fantasy retarded lies. Someone who failed Freshman math came up with this illogical farce. Talk about sore losers. Get over it, motherfuckers!
Arrest Trump now and throw his treasonous ass in stir!
Journalists Fired From Military Newspaper for Asserting Editorial Independence — Truthout Stories|Jon Queally
Stars and Stripes Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin told CBS he would refuse censorship. The next month, he was fired.
orrespondent Lara Korte, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, and publisher Max Lederer were all fired from their posts at Stars and Stripes on Friday, the latest attack on press freedom by President Donald Trump and members of his administration — this time targeting the paper that provides daily news to US servicemembers spread across the globe.
“I consider it a great privilege to live alongside members of the military and share their stories,” said Korte in a social media post following her ouster. “It’s a shame for the institution and service members, who swore to defend the Constitution and deserve the right to a free and independent press.”
Korte said she was “informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes — not the Pentagon, not any administration, and not any policy maker.”
Slavin explained that he and Korte were specifically fired over an interview they gave earlier this year with CBS News in which they indicated their independence from the Pentagon and the White House and in which he said any effort to censor the news that military members receive would be resisted. Even though the military publication operates within the US Department of Defense, it has always enjoyed editorial independence....
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More proof Trump Nazis hate America and our troops. Truth to them is as a mirror is to a vampire.
‘Utter insanity’: Jaws drop as details spill on Trump admin’s Canada demands — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Onlookers were left stunned Sunday as new details emerged regarding the now-collapsed U.S.-Canada trade negotiations, details that include a series of extraordinary demands from the Trump administration.
Trade talks between Washington and Ottawa fell through Friday, leading both nations to vow to impose tariffs on each other. President Donald Trump imposed a 50% tariff on a number of Canadian goods, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney vowed to match those tariffs “dollar for dollar.”
As to why the talks fell through, a number of news outlets, along with Carney himself, have since revealed a series of “last-minute” demands proposed by the Trump administration that critics argued "encroached on Canadian sovereignty.”
Carney claimed that Trump demanded “Canada change its French language.” Carney also claimed that the Trump administration “introduced language in the final hours of negotiations that would have restricted Canada’s ability to make trade deals with other countries,” the Associated Press reported Sunday.
Accepting such terms, Carney said, would have reduced Canada to “the economic equivalent of the 51st state.”
Luis Moreno, the former U.S. ambassador to Jamaica, called the Trump administration’s demands “utter and total insanity.” Arnaud Bertrand, a notable entrepreneur, described the Trump administration’s demands as “insane,” and called them “de-facto annexation.”
Canadian physician and health commentator Kashif Pirzada also expressed shock, calling the Trump administration’s demands “basically colonization through the back door,” and author and military researcher Chris Owen argued there was no scenario in which Canada would even entertain such demands.
“The US wanted Canada to automatically mirror US tariffs and break its own existing trade deals with its partners – in effect running Ottawa's trade policy from Washington,” Owen wrote Sunday in a social media post on X. “No country could have accepted that.”...
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Welcome to the Nut Ball Ball.
ICE turns on Trump with dark message: 'Leave us alone' and 'stop telling us' what to do — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
President Donald Trump's immigration troopers are turning on him, according to a new report.
Officials within the Department of Homeland Security are fuming over his pick to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and thrilled Oklahoma state trooper Lance Schroyer’s nomination has stalled in the Senate, Politico reported Sunday.
"We don’t need him," an official told Politico. "Leave us alone... people need to stop telling us how to do what we do best.”
Six officials and other sources told Politico the preferred pick is acting director Dave Venturella, an ally of border czar Tom Homan.
Schroyer’s nomination currently stands in limbo as Senate Homeland Security Chair Rand Paul's (R-KY) demands the administration share information about probes into the violent deaths of two American citizens at ICE's hands.
Despite these challenges, Schroyer remains the president’s nominee to lead ICE, the White House told Politico.
Trump's decision to nominate Schroyer, a longtime associate of Secretary Markwayne Mullin, spurred a backlash from immigration hawks in June, according to the report.
That's because, as The Oversight Project president Mike Howell told Politico, Schroyer lacks a record on deportations.
“If the whole point was to have someone with no immigration enforcement background either ideologically, politically or operationally as secretary, then it’s kind of odd to have a similar person as the head of ICE,” Howell said.
Another official characterized Mullin's pushing Schroyer into the position as a misstep....
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Somebody's crusing for a showdown. This could get really ugly. Prepare for mob law.
Forget ‘No Kings’ Placards, Given What Trump Is Plotting Impeach Him This Minute — The Smirking Chimp|Ralph Nader
You’d never know it by the title “Dancing in the Dark,” but the Washington Spectator’s recent investigation is about the various steps (mostly illegal) Trump is taking, including the use of enforcement tools and violence, to prepare to reverse any overall Democratic victory in the November Congressional races. The authors, Mark Medish and Joel McCleary, believe Trump needs such a coup to save himself from impeachment, congressional investigations and subpoenas seeking more proof of crimes throughout his lawless, corrupt, dictatorial regime.
Currently, Trump’s polls are so low that he is endangering enough Republican seats in the House and Senate to give the feeble, corporate money-indentured Democratic Party a chance to win control of Congress. This is precisely what Trump fears, even though he has control of the Executive Branch and the immunity given him by six Injustices of the Supreme Court. Take note, he knows that impeachment and removal from office in the Senate are final, not reviewable in the federal courts.
In 23 single-spaced pages, Medish and McCleary walk readers through the events, directives, ballot seizures, and draft emergency orders Trump could use to assert federal control over a midterm election and use a domestic paramilitary force of unprecedented size and budget. Trump and his minions have already expanded their dictatorial control of our democratic institutions. (See: The V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2026.)
To obstruct the vote in key precincts, then fabricate a need for national-security powers to purge and miscount ballots, falsely charge fraud, illegally seize ballots, threaten precinct workers, and claim without evidence foreign interference are preparations for instant escalation.
They then describe the “Devil’s Accordion File” meaning “the elements of a ramified, radical strategy to hold on to power at almost any cost as we approach the test of the 2026 elections…” Although they describe Trump as a brilliant mastermind concentrating extraordinary power in his hands, they remind us that he is also in “full command of his office, directing the Justice Department, the FBI, ICE (the largest new federal police force in American history) the IRS, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, the intelligence community and the armed forces. [Under total acolyte Pete Hegseth.] He is using each agency in a coordinated attack on his political adversaries in ways that would have been dismissed as fantasy only a few years ago.”...
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Well, sure. Do you think there are votes for it in the Nazi Congress? They won't pay attemtion until Americans are lying in pools of their own blood at their precinct polling locations!
Best find an alternative solution. We know what we must do. But the courage to do it we must find.
Bush advisor warns a shocking betrayal proves no one is safe anymore — Alternet.org|Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump keeps getting the Supreme Court to capitulate to him, whether by letting him construct his ballroom, allowing him to fire previously-protected federal officeholders and permitting him to gut the Voting Rights Act. Now a former Republican presidential adviser, namely to President George W. Bush, is warning that the Supreme Court is destroying the Constitution by repeatedly taking the knee to Trump.
“The American Constitution is made of paper,” Steve Schmidt wrote on Substack on Sunday. “That is among the most important things James Madison ever tried to teach us. The Constitution has no army. It cannot arrest anyone. It cannot compel a senator to show courage, a judge to exercise independence, a president to exercise restraint, or a citizen to care.”
He added, “It is words. The American republic has endured not because words enforce themselves, but because generations of citizens and officials have made them real by insisting that no one — not a president, judge, billionaire, or political faction — stands above the law. That is the rule of law.”
After describing The Federalist Papers and how they established guardrails to avoid corruption of power, Schmidt wrote that Chief Justice John Roberts has led the betrayal of the Constitution’s promises.
“At his 2005 confirmation hearing, John Roberts described representing a private client against the United States,” Schmidt wrote. “If the law favored his client, he said, ‘all that power and might would recede in deference to the rule of law.’”
He added, “That, he explained, was what Americans meant by a government of laws rather than men. He then stated the central principle: ‘without the rule of law, any rights are meaningless.’ Roberts invoked Ronald Reagan’s observation that the Soviet Constitution promised wonderful rights, but made them ‘empty promises’ because the Soviet system lacked an independent judiciary capable of enforcing them. A right written on paper is not liberty unless institutions and citizens can make it binding.”
Schmidt then went on to describe how Roberts’ court has overturned a lot of those precedents, in particular keeping the president from viewing himself as above the law in a number of contexts.
“The normative criticism is narrower and more consequential: by expanding the sphere of presidential conduct insulated from criminal accountability, the decision may weaken the practical rule of law — especially when Congress and other institutions fail to provide effective checks,” Schmidt wrote.
He added, “That concern does not mean the Court held that presidents possess unlimited power or general immunity. It means that constitutional limits become less meaningful if the institutions responsible for enforcing them do not compensate for the limits placed on criminal prosecution.”...
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Treason is for sale under Trump.
Nancy Mace Shreds Darline Graham Over Shocking Debate Answer: 'Jesus, I Can't Even' — Huffpost|Hilary Hanson
“Darline, darlin’, you are running for the United States Senate...” the South Carolina congresswoman said.
Mace remarked, “Saying national security isn’t your thing is like applying to be a lifeguard and saying water isn’t your thing.”
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Hard to disagree with that.
‘Today We STOP THE STEAL!’ Natalie Harp Reportedly Posted 150+ Tweets on Jan. 6 Showing ‘Extraordinary Devotion’ to Trump — Mediaite|Joe DePaolo
White House aide Natalie Harp flooded social media with 150+ posts on Jan. 6, 2021 showing what CNN characterized as “extraordinary devotion” to President Donald Trump.
According to a report from CNN, Harp’s now-removed account on X (formerly known as Twitter) featured a stream of wildly pro-Trump dispatches on Jan. 6 in which she “echoed the president’s talking points that the election was stolen.”
“FIGHT FOR TRUMP!” Harp wrote 12 times in one post. She added, “Today, DC is TRUMP COUNTRY!”
According to CNN’s Isabelle Chapman and Andrew Kaczynski, “Harp, then 29, praised pro-Trump demonstrators gathering for Trump’s speech as ‘patriots’ and challenged lawmakers to show ‘a fraction of the courage & passion’ of the crowd, declaring: ‘today we STOP THE STEAL!'”
And during Trump’s speech that day, Harp posted, “We will never give up. We will never concede!â€
Harp’s beliefs about the 2020 election were on display in a September 2021 interview with then-congressional candidate Karoline Leavitt — which was unearthed in recent days. Harp, then a host for far-right network OAN, falsely claimed that Trump actually won the 2020 election in New Hampshire, despite trailing Joe Biden by 7.4 percent.
“President Trump should have won it,” Harp said. “He did win it.”
The now-removed social media account was littered with similar posts....
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Ladies and gentlemen, meet the real President of the United States — A stalking groupie!
The Threat of Human Extinction Will Get Congress to Act on AI Safety…Right? — Mother Jones|Satchel Walton
As many AI researchers have been increasingly fraught with existential terror about their own creations this summer, their alarm is spreading among policymakers and the media.
There are some policy ideas to address the risks: requiring “kill switches” for AI models, setting federal standards for safe research, or even shutting down development of cutting-edge “frontier” models altogether.
But a stable national policy would take an act of Congress. That looks unlikely this session, even as AI developers are calling for regulations to slow down their own research on the grounds that it could be racing toward widespread doom.
I asked Stephen Casper, a computer scientist who studies AI safety and governance at the Harvard Kennedy School, about some of the risks policymakers are mulling. He told me that we don’t know if leading companies even could completely shut down their frontier models in an emergency.
“I don’t think there’s any public knowledge of AI companies doing anything equivalent to a fire drill,” Casper said.
Multiple bills have been filed in Congress that would try to address those concerns. Sponsored by Reps. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), the AI Kill Switch Act would require companies to be able to “throttle” their models and give top federal officials the power to order a shutdown in case of danger.
The more expansive FRONTIER Act, led by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), would require leading companies to bring in third-party experts to make sure they are following safety protocols. In case of catastrophic risks, independent verifiers would alert the secretary of commerce, who could shut down frontier model use.
Like most bills, neither has been brought to vote in a committee.
AI safety policy is not as polarized as many hot-button political issues, with leaders on the FRONTIER and AI Kill Switch acts coming from both sides of the aisle and leading companies openly asking for some sort of regulations. But differences of opinion still exist, with some Republicans averse to regulation altogether....
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Extinction? Did someone say EXTINCTION?
Trump’s gargantuan ego will be his downfall — and history proves it — Alternet.org|Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump's ego has grown to gargantuan and unprecedented levels in his second term, but as a new piece from MS NOW argued, that level of hubris could directly lead to his downfall, as it has for leaders throughout history.
While Trump's sense of self has never been modest, reports indicate that it has ballooned massively upon his return to the White House last year, with the president now believing he is among the most consequential people in history. The authors of the new Trump administration exposé, Regime Change, shared a story from a visit they made to the Oval Office in which Trump shared an associate's theory placing him among the ranks of "Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Adolph Hitler, Mao Zedong, [and] Joseph Stalin."
Though many of those men were brutal dictators, Trump was reportedly pleased to put himself in their company, with the authors explaining that he "drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed" when comparing himself to individuals who reshaped history.
Writing for MS NOW on Sunday morning, Hayes Brown argued that Trump "doesn’t appear to have considered the losses of the historical figures on his list," many of whom suffered a downfall that was a direct result of their "hubris" and "overreach."
"I’d argue then that Trump’s list is missing a name that would better contextualize the central flaw in Trump’s self-aggrandizement: Ramses II," Brown wrote. "The pharaoh was the most powerful ruler of the most powerful epoch of ancient Egypt. Today, though, he may be better remembered as the subject of Lord Byron’s poem 'Ozymandias.' The poet described a ruined, broken monument, surrounded by empty desert, atop a pedestal inscribed with the words 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'"
He continued: "Because if there is a common thread that unites Trump with many of the most powerful leaders throughout history, it’s hubris. The unbounded pride and willingness to place themselves above all others, even the gods, has been the downfall of enough mortals that the ancient Greeks framed it as a king’s greatest sin. Trump apparently sees himself as mightier than any man who’s ever walked the globe. His belief [is] based on flattery and self-deception, a combination that has felled more would-be tyrants and despots than any one list can hold."...
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No wonder the scumbag is trying to erase history and make 2 + 2 = 5.
Watters' Guest: Only Role For Women Who Don't Want To Be Homemakers Is Sex Workers — Crooks and Liars|Heather
Somehow, Jesse Watters managed to find someone who's an even bigger misogynist than he is to weigh in on an article from a British publication on young women's attitudes towards men.
As Joe.My.God. noted, Andrew Klavan is a Daily Wire host and this is his track record:
In February 2026, Klavan appeared here for saying this: “You have to find a woman who doesn’t need to be smacked around in order to behave in a civilized way, and that’s the way you do it.”
Klavan appeared here in November 2024 when he declared that women should not be allowed to be members of Congress.
In August 2024, we heard from Klavan when he ranted that “Trump is a studly guy and Kamala has the womanish traits of a cackling venomous serpent.”
Also that month, Klavan flatly stated that all women are incapable of “caring for themselves.”
So Watters and his producers knew what they were getting when they invited him as a guest this past Wednesday. ...
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Dissing women is what these ancient would-be "men" get off on.
Data Centers Are Sucking Up So Many Construction Workers That There Isn’t Anybody Left to Build Houses, Expert Says — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that pending home sales in the US had dropped to their lowest level in three years. That coincided with a sharp drop in construction of new homes, which plummeted to the lowest level in over three and a half years in July — two signs that things are not so sunny for the country’s housing market.
While complicated factors like unchecked inflation and stagnant wages are surely having an effect on both weak housing supply and demand, there’s at least one novel factor contributing to the financial morass: AI data centers.
According to policy publication the Center Square, the frenzy to construct the computing facilities powering the AI boom is inadvertently scooping up the skilled trades workers who could otherwise be building new housing.
“The market is not as strong,” Brady told the outlet, “and so today many of those people that were in housing are going to these data centers.”...
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Doom is well on its way.
Insider Trading on Polymarket Is Revealing Military Secrets — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Numerous scandals this year have sparked a public inquiry into government and military insider trading on prediction markets. In some cases, arrests have been made.
But a new investigation by the nonprofit research group Anti-Corruption Data Collective suggests the corruption may be even more rampant than we thought. Reuters reports that the analysis found that more than 150 wallets on Polymarket may have traded on inside US military information — with experts fearing that the practice could be compromising military secrets.
Polymarket didn’t respond to Reuters‘ requests for comment.
In the analysis, the ACDC focused on “long-shot” bets, which it defines as wagers of at least $2,500 at odds at 35 percent or less, guaranteeing an outsized payout if successful. After analyzing all settled markets through May 5, it found 566 wallets that it’s dubbed “orcas,” which is a reference to the selective and intentional hunting techniques of killer whales. These so-called “orcas” typically placed a lucrative long-shot bet on a freshly made account, before cashing out and disappearing.
They’ve been incredibly successful. Of those orca accounts, the ACDC found 152 that bet on military markets with an average win rate of 97.2 percent, racking up $8 million in all. Many of these wallets had not been flagged by other researchers and media, the ACDC said.
While there are likely other accounts profiting off inside military information with smaller bets and over a longer period of time, it added, these orca accounts are likely the most flagrant culprits....
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Data centers, Polymarket betting, what else can we say but doom is all around us. Be prepared for the impact.
RFK Is “Barnstorming Country” To Drive GOP Turnout
Politico reports:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s August isn’t your typical summer break from Washington: In the last week, he’s podcasted with The Incredible Hulk and fished for bream with the GOP candidate for governor in Iowa. He’s touted fitness with one embattled House Republican in a Des Moines suburb and he praised Nebraskans’ response to a hantavirus outbreak in a competitive Omaha district. The Health secretary’s barnstorming aims to fulfill the hopes Trump placed in him when he hired the longtime Democrat last year. The White House believes the Trump-Kennedy alliance will boost turnout for Republicans in the midterms.
“‘Bobby Unleashed’ is our motto in the West Wing,” a White House official said. “We want him guns blazing.” But while Kennedy might enjoy that latitude on the campaign trail, supporters of his Make America Healthy Again agenda view him as far more constrained in advancing his policies in Washington. Alex Clark, a MAHA influencer and Republican, worries the GOP risks losing votes over its breaks with the movement — a concern she regularly airs to the White House and on social media. She says MAHA supporters are questioning if Kennedy has “put down his boxing gloves”.
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Far more likely to be turning them off than turning them out.
Doctors Raise Alarm At Trump’s 23lb Weight Gain
The Washington Post reports:
President Donald Trump has faced scrutiny for bruising on his hands, swelling in his ankles and apparent drowsiness, among other questions about his health. Some doctors say they’re worried about another risk: the 23 pounds that Trump may have gained since his last campaign for president.
In August 2023, when he was charged in Georgia in an election interference case, Trump’s booking record listed his weight as 215 pounds. He weighed 238 pounds in May of this year, according to a medical report released by the White House that month. That would make him about 1.6 pounds shy of being classified as “obese,” as he was in 2019 and 2020, given his height of 6-foot-3.
Trump’s medical measurements have been long dissected, and it’s unclear where the 2023 weight figure originated. But the president has appeared heavier in photos than he did during his campaign, and the administration said he gained 14 pounds between his most recent annual medical check-ups.
White House physicians have said they’ve advised Trump — who has made little secret of his love for fast food and his distaste for intense exercise — to focus on weight loss, improving his diet and sustained physical activity.
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When's the last time he had a bowel movement? Trump is going on 81 and is still 6'3"? Unlikely. Your height compresses as you age. He's apt to be no more than 6'2" or less now. Also he's about 300 lbs. or more.
Homan Claims ICE Doesn’t “Racially Profile” People
“Look, we don’t racially profile. Everybody we talk to we have reasonable suspicion of aliens to talk to them. And to arrest them, we need probable cause. That’s what the law says and that’s we do. We don’t arrest people based on the color of their skin.
“I’m actually an equal opportunity deporter. I deported people to 180 countries last year. So, I don’t care if you’re from Asia, you’re from Europe, or you’re from other countries. If you’re in the country illegally, you’ll be deported, regardless of the color of your skin.
“This is why, Kayleigh, we’ve got so many ICE agents out there. This is why we flooded the zone of sanctuary cities. Because if they don’t let us take apprehension of the bad guy in the safety and security of the jail, right? So, they’re going to release him, now I’ve got to send a whole team of six or seven people to go look for this person in the community.” – Tom Homan, on Fox News.
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WTF do you call it then, Jabba?
‘Missing’ Epstein files containing major allegations against Trump discovered: report — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Supposed FBI files that have previously been referred to as “missing” were recently discovered sitting on an online document-sharing platform, files that former MSNBC host Katie Phang said Saturday contain “allegations of sexual abuse committed by Donald Trump” against a 13- to 15-year-old victim, according to a report published Saturday.
Back in February, the Justice Department (DOJ) announced it was investigating claims that it had withheld a select trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. The DOJ had justified withholding some of the files by describing them as "duplicative" of material already turned over, a characterization that has since come under scrutiny.
A growing number of critics increasingly pointed to a trove of 37 pages of FBI handwritten notes taken during a 2019 interview with “Jane Doe 4,” a South Carolina woman who accused Trump and Epstein of sexual and physical abuse beginning when she was 13 years old....
The Washington Examiner published a report written by Deese on March 7 titled: “What’s still missing from the Epstein files,” but according to Howard-Stone, Deese had “quietly released” 22 pages of the missing 37 on Scribd – the online document-sharing platform – just one day before. Those pages would go unnoticed by major media outlets for months.
“This meant that, for the last five months, anyone with internet access could view the notes, which had Jane Doe 4’s real name all over them, as well as significant biographical details and the names of childhood friends and family members who she said could corroborate elements of her story – all of which she gave the FBI in confidence, and all of which the DOJ had redacted,” Howard-Stone wrote....
“Regardless, what these notes DO show is that they are not 'duplicative' of the FBI 302s as Blanche has asserted and they clearly contain allegations of sexual abuse and physical abuse committed by Donald Trump with a victim who was 13-15 years old at the time. So the Trump DOJ has no incentive to release them.”
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Missing? Why were they missing? Someone was trying to cover them up? Ask Blanche!
Army veteran reveals Trump's failure to grasp 'common sense' basics — Alternet|Thomas Kika
The latest military scandal engulfing the Trump administration has exposed how badly the president and his officials have botched the "common sense" basics of war-fighting, according to one Army veteran.
Andy Levy is a journalist and podcast host, known for often taking conservative or libertarian stances, while being notably critical of President Donald Trump. He is also a veteran of the U.S. Army, having been stationed at the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea during Operation Desert Storm.
This week, he was a guest on the "Fast Politics" podcast, where host Molly Jong-Fast pressed him for his reaction to the ongoing fiasco surrounding the USS Abraham Lincoln, given his own military background. Recent reports have revealed the alarming conditions aboard the naval vessel, which has been stationed in the Middle East since November and is nearing the record for the longest-ever deployment. Aboard the ship, troops and officers are reportedly dealing with worsening food and resource shortages, as well as deteriorating physical conditions, with some areas becoming infested with mold. Some troops have also reportedly attempted to jump overboard to escape the conditions onboard, revealing the true extent of the desperation they are dealing with.
Levy argued that the situation exposed the right's hypocrisy, given their oft-repeated claims about supporting the troops, as well as the Trump administration's dismissal of troop morale as a key factor when managing an army....
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You mean the New York Military Acadamy was only for showbiz?
Body language expert exposes signs Trump is 'breaking down' — Alternet|Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump continues to exhibit signs of "a complex and evolving medical situation" that the public does not fully understand, as one body language expert and clinical psychologist explained this week, with some of these signs seeming to indicate that he is "losing control."
Dr. John Paul Garrison is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist with a specialty in interpreting body language cues, as well as a prolific content creator using professional insights to break down what public figures give away with their behaviors. He has made numerous videos breaking down Trump's many public appearances, coming to the general conclusion that his cognitive and physical decline has accelerated in the last year, likely made worse by his advanced age.
In one of his latest videos, Garrison examined the recent viral clip shared to social media by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, from which many viewers seized upon an odd bulge seemingly visible in Trump's pants as he walked away from the camera, leading to theories that this was physical evidence of the president wearing adult diapers. Garrison stressed that he did not make these observations to heap "shame or embarrassment" on Trump or anyone else in need of such garments due to "bladder or incontinence issues," but rather to highlight how the president seems to be dealing with a medical issue.
Combined with other evidence from the past few months, he suggested that Trump's possible neurological decline could be causing him to lose control of certain bodily functions....
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And remember so many were upset when Biden didn't come clean on his health!
Do we have a double standard here?
Everything Is Joe Biden's Fault, Part Infinity: Beef Prices Edition — Crooks and Liars|Heather
Trump's Trade Representative Jaimeson Greer with the lamest deflection yet when asked about Trump's plan to screw over cattle ranchers by importing ground beef with no tariff quota.
As always, when these people can't defend the indefensible, what do they do? Blame Biden, of course.
Here's the exchange from this Saturday's Fox & Friends Weekend:
CAMPOS-DUFFY: Here's a Truth Social post by President Trump. He says, "For the next 90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to be imported with no out-of-quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices."
So you can see here in this infographic that we have here the ground beef and roast beef, or beef roast prices and how they've increased.
So, a lot of people saying look, you're just doing this because you're ahead of the midterms. You want to start to bring prices down. And not every Republican has been on board with this.
Representative... I mean Senator Tim Sheehy from Montana, who represents a lot of ranchers, says this will hurt his ranchers and his constituents....
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Yes, the cattle people and the ranchers are pissed off. Why should they be left out of the crowd?
Pardoned J6er Jake Lang Arrested In Minneapolis Riot
Minneapolis’s CBS affiliate reports:
According to police, Lang held a protest around noon in front of Minneapolis City Hall when he and two others, in two cars, unexpectedly drove onto the sidewalk and toward a crowd of counter-protesters. “MPD had been aware of this demonstration for several weeks and developed a robust incident action in preparation for it,” said Bill Peterson, the Interim Chief for the Minneapolis Police Department during a Saturday afternoon press conference.
“That plan included putting on duty significant numbers of personnel, working with our public safety partners and placing barricades outside City Hall designed to provide safe separation,” Peterson added. All members of Lang’s party were taken into custody on probable cause riot, according to police. And they say four additional people were taken into custody outside City Hall.
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Another Trump Nazi hood gets popped again.
GOP Rep: Dems Will “Transform Children Into Robots”
Yahoo News reports:
Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) warned a rally crowd Friday that Democrats are planning to “transform our children into robots.”
Speaking with Trump visible behind him, Fry asked the crowd, “Are we gonna let the Democrats unseal our border again? Are we gonna let them raise our taxes? Are we gonna let them transform our children into robots?” With each question, the audience responded emphatically, “No!”
“No, of course we’re not,” Fry confirmed. “You know why? Because MAGA is strong, and MAGA is strong when we work as a team. This team right here, and Darline Graham is our next senator. Let’s go get the job done.”
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MAGA is disintegrating before our eyes, dude. You are part of the past.
Remember, "They are eating the cats!" Too many lies from you Nazis.
Filing: Trump Made Over 1000 Stock Trades In June
CNBC reports:
President Donald Trump disclosed just over 1,000 financial transactions for the month of June in what appears to be broad reshuffling of his portfolio.
The president rotated in and out of stocks, bonds and exchange-traded funds throughout the month. The transactions totaled between $78.1 million and $263.1 million, according to Trump’s latest filing on Aug. 22, which shows a range for each sale or purchase rather than an exact figure. His securities purchases topped $49 million, while his sales totaled at least $28.5 million.
Of the 1,051 transactions, the largest was the $5 million to $25 million sale of Vanguard Dividend Appreciation Index Fund ETF shares on June 22. That same day he bought between $1 million and $5 million of both Fidelity National Information Services and Home Depot. Those were the largest of several purchases of the stocks in June, although he also logged some sales of Fidelity as well.
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The criminal you hired at work, gathering for his own and not for his country.
FIRE HIM! ARREST HIM! INDICT HIM!
Patients Are Skipping Going to the Doctor Because AI “Receptionists” Can’t Understanding What They’re Saying — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Some patients in the UK are skipping going to the doctor because their office’s AI “receptionist” can’t understand what they’re saying.
The health and social watchdog Healthwatch Rotherham said that the troublesome AI receptionist in question, called “Emma,” is being used at a number of clinics in South Yorkshire — and is struggling with locals’ distinct way of speaking.
“One of the issues is this system can’t always understand what people’s inquiry is about due to their broad Yorkshire accent,” Kym Gleeson, manager at Healthwatch Rotherham, told the BBC. “Across South Yorkshire, accents do vary quite a lot. There are different twangs so there’s a lot of variation. It seems the system isn’t always able to understand, so that causes frustration.”
Frustration may be an understatement. One patient who couldn’t be arsed to negotiate with a malfunctioning AI complained to Healthwatch, via The Guardian: “I could never get it to understand me,” saying that “I ended up just hanging up and not bothering to try and book an appointment.”
It’s another point of friction arising from AI’s deployment across the health sector. Using AI to take calls and book appointments is becoming a common practice at many doctor’s offices and hospitals, with some even using AI to triage patients. Doctors and nurses frequently use AI tools for taking clinical notes and looking up symptoms.
As real world applications often do, these can backfire; an AI-powered transcription tool by hospitals, for example, was caught hallucinating details about patients and referring to non-existent drugs.
Clinics argue that using AI receptionists like Emma, which is built by QuantumLoopAI, allows them to take more calls simultaneously and eliminate wait times on the phone.
Not everyone is finding the tradeoff to be worth it....
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Humans long for human contact. This appears to have been forgotten sometime ago with the advent of automated attendents
Federal Judge Strikes Down Trump’s 75-Country Visa Ban — Mother Jones|Sophie Hurwitz
This January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed consular officers to refuse to process immigration visas for people from 75 countries because, he said, those immigrants would be more likely than others to “extract wealth” or “take welfare and public benefits” from the US. Since January, people from those 75 countries—all located in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, or Eastern Europe—have had their visa applications frozen or denied.
On August 21, though, a federal judge in New York struck down this blanket visa ban, on the grounds that it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965’s prohibition on nationality-based discrimination in issuing a visa.
As my colleague Julia Métraux reported earlier this year, these “public charge” bans are in part based on eugenicist ideas.
Since the 19th century, the United States has used “public charge” rules to restrict entry, alleging that immigrants and even visitors would strain public services—reasoning very much rooted in the eugenicist and ableist thinking that shaped key aspects of public policy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the claim that so-called “defective” people would produce “defective” children. As president, especially in his second term, Donald Trump has brought eugenicist immigration policy roaring back..
Judge Jeannette Vargas’ August 21 ruling in CLINIC v. Rubio reverses any visa denials that occurred solely due to the “public charge” visa ban.
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Who does he think he's fooling? He wants NO ONE to get welfare and public benefits! What a stinking turd!
Latest Trump-backed Kennedy Center renaming bid triggers emergency hearing: report — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
A federal judge has set an emergency hearing after the Kennedy Center's board voted to put Trump's name back up.
The hearing was set for Thursday as Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) challenges the Trump team's plan to re-add his name to the facade and close the center for two years, according to a post on X by journalist Scott MacFarlane.
Beatty, an ex officio member of the center's board, filed an emergency motion last week to stop the move, NPR reported. Beatty is asking U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to block the board from re-inscribing the president's name on the front portico, this time twice, and from renaming the grounds "President Donald J. Trump Plaza," according to the filing.
Her motion also targets the board's August 13 vote to shutter the venue for two years for renovations, which critics fear masks a broader effort to remake the complex in Trump's image, according to The Associated Press.
"It's deja vu all over again," Beatty's lawyers wrote in the filing. They argued that only Congress can rename an institution dedicated as a living memorial to Kennedy in 1964.
Cooper, an Obama appointee, made a similar ruling in the long-running battle over Trump's efforts to rename the Kennedy Center. In May, he ruled that the board lacked the authority to rename the center and ordered Trump's name stripped from the facade. Cooper called the earlier closure vote "ill-informed and seemingly preordained," NBC News reported. Trump's name came down in June, though a tarp has covered the portico since June 13, Forbes reported.
The board has said it won't add Trump's name back before September 8, NPR reported. Beatty's team called that an "arbitrary deadline" and a manufactured emergency. Cooper gave the board until Monday to respond, according to Forbes.
"The board's repeated efforts to break the law are a breathtaking act of defiance," Beatty said.
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Gaddamaned Trump Nazis ignore law and order in America. Arrest everyone of them and charge the motherfuckers with Criminal Comtempt!
Trump Takes a 58-Year Republican Election Playbook to a Terrifying New Level — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
What began in the shadows with Nixon and Reagan is now happening openly as Trump targets the machinery of the 2026 election.
Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds.
Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election.
It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.
Also this week, the Center for American Progress released an extraordinarily disturbing fact sheet summarizing an investigation they published that documents fifteen separate, interlocking tactics the Trump administration, Republican governors, and GOP members of Congress are engaging in right now to rig this fall’s election.
Their tactics range from firing the bipartisan Election Assistance Commissions’ commissioners to encouraging Red state voter purges to putting ICE agents outside polling places in clear violation of federal law.
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The six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court are also deciding, perhaps this week or next, whether to let Trump’s hand-picked Postmaster General have your mailman refuse to deliver your ballot if you’re not on Trump’s approved voter list.
Trump’s executive order to do this has been blocked twice by a federal judge, noting that the Constitution is clear that only states run elections and the executive branch has no authority whatsoever to even try to regulate them. And now it’s in the hands of six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.
And the plain words of the Constitution — which references the “right to vote” six times, including five Amendments that say, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged…” — have never been an obstacle for Republicans on the Court. Just read the plain text of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments and compare that to ICE’s behavior, which the Court is allowing.
Sadly, we need to be ready for anything, because Republicans now have a 58-year-long record of committing crimes and treason to get their men into the White House....
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All I will say is we didn't sit on our asses when the bloody British attempted to occupy us.
Trump Lies That Public Will Pay “Zero” For Ballroom
“We are grateful for the Decision of the United States Supreme Court. The Military/Ballroom Complex being built on the hallowed grounds of the White House, which is so vital for National Security, will be THE GREATEST OF ITS KIND!
“It is something that Presidents have wanted for 150 years, and that the Military has been seeking for the last 100 years. Their wish will soon be fulfilled! Construction is under budget and ahead of schedule. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
“Tremendous work has been done on the magnificent BALLROOM/MILITARY COMPLEX being built on the grounds of the White House! Presidents have wanted this for 150 years, and so has everyone else.
“It will give the White House, and all of D.C., Great National Security. The Project is under budget, and ahead of schedule!
“The Ballroom will be paid for with ZERO Dollars of Taxpayer Money. Great American Patriots and Companies are footing the entire bill. ” – Trump, in a pair of Truth Social posts.
Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) May 9, 2026 at 10:37 AM
“Taxpayers are footing a whopping $1 billion bill for Trump’s ballroom. Your budget cuts the National Park Service by $1 billion. If you put this $1 billion towards our national parks instead of Trump’s ballroom, that would benefit every single American.”
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Guess what, asshole? As soon as you're gone we are bulldozing the motherfucking eyesore! Maybe sooner!
USPS Posts Finalized Rules On Restricting Mail Ballots
The New York Times reports:
The Postal Service on Friday published regulations that would restrict mail voting, its latest effort to comply with President Trump’s call to restrict the popular practice just months before the midterm elections. In a 95-page final rule, the Postal Service clarified how it would carry out an executive order Mr. Trump signed in March, which sought to restrict mail ballots and create state-by-state lists of citizens to help determine voting eligibility.
In the rule, the Postal Service said that it would deliver mail ballots only in states that shared voter data with the federal agency. Before the Postal Service accepts ballots into its system, the agency would review every envelope for compliance with the new standards, including by checking that the recipient was enrolled with the Postal Service to receive a mail ballot.
If the regulations are enacted, the Postal Service would not deliver mail ballots to states that do not comply. Mr. Trump’s executive order was largely blocked by federal courts this summer, and the Postal Service said in its rule published on Friday that it would “not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election unless and until the government obtains relief from those injunctions.”
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The Trump criminal rigging our vote. These crooks must be imprisoned for the remainder of thieir pitiful lives for this!
Igore the crook! Vote his Nazis out of office! Vote early! All the Nazi bastards will do will be vote suppression!
Employers, start acting like an American and allow people to take time off to vote! In the free world election day is a holiday.
GOP Senator Blames Obama For High Electricity Costs
CNBC reports:
Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, defended President Donald Trump’s energy and economic agenda on Friday during an appearance at a southwestern Ohio steel mill with Vice President JD Vance, as Republicans warn that backlash over data centers could be putting his seat in jeopardy. But higher electricity costs, Husted said, are the result of Democratic policies, not data center construction.
“You want to have lower electricity prices — I want to tell you why they’re rising. Because Congress and, under the Obama administration, under the Biden administration, they closed 23 power plants in the state of Ohio, representing half the electricity we use on a daily basis,” Husted said. “Radical climate policies did that.” Aging power plants have been closed in the state under both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations in recent years.
"30 years of Republican government in Ohio. They blame Democrats. They manage to get elected. Ohio deserves this. It's time to secede from dead weight." — Pizza Rat King (comments)
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There were plants closed due to the extreme fossil fuel pollution they were causing to our atmosphere. Progressive activism will move us away from this pollution as well as alternative renewable energy sources come into play.
Of course, Trump and his mental midgets like Husted don't give a fuck about our future. They want to grab every dollar they can and fuck it if you can no longer breathe.
Ther is NOTHING RADICAL ABOUT ALTERNATIVE GREEN ENEGY! Remember: When you can't breathe nothing else matters!
China is light years ahead of America on this issue due to the Nazis in our govenment!
Trump’s devious legal trick to force a Supreme Court win — Alternet|Sabrina Haake
Last week, on an emergency basis, Trump asked the Supreme Court to rescue the centerpiece of his ‘capital improvement campaign.’ Trump now calls his ballroom—a 90,000 ft.2 gilded party palace where donors in haute couture can eat wagyu beef and dance the night away—an “urgent matter of national security.” On Friday, the Court let Trump have his way.
Trump’s legal team was responding to a lower court’s stop-work order on the ballroom. An appellate panel ruled that presidents do not own the nation’s capital, or the White House, but rather are entrusted as temporary custodians. As such, they lack the unilateral authority to destroy, raze or replace core national structures without explicit approval from Congress. “The White House is the People’s House,” the majority wrote, “and under the Constitution’s Property Clause, Congress exercises plenary control over the building and its surrounding land.” Astute readers will note that ‘Congress’ is not ‘the president.’ The appellate panel went on: “The White House is owned by the American people and stewarded by the National Park Service. It is more than the President’s residence; it is a site for protests and national discourse about what it means to be American.”
Trump, selling merch and teasing an unconstitutional third run in hopes of evading legal accountability forever, has made clear that he does not respect national discourse, protests, or stewardship, and he does not see his role as temporary. Worse, his obsession with building a nuclear bunker to save himself as he threatens the world with tactical nukes is ominous....
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Trump's illegal playhouse will be leveled by America!
Straitjacket Trump: I'd Win Re-election 'By 25 Points' On This Economy — Crooks and Liars|John Amato
This is delusional
Donald Trump joined his former henchmen and apparently former enemy Michael Cohen on his radio program and made delusional comments about the state of the economy and credible polling data that were so absurd, I believe a straitjacket is required.
Did anyone there say Trump is obsessed and spending more time on his craving renovation projects instead of the Iran war
TRUMP: I think that we're doing really well in the polls, the real polls....
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Really? Then "grits ain't groceries, eggs ain't poultries, and Mona Lisa was a man!" — All Around the World - Titus Turner
CNN Debunked RFK Jr.'s $20 Meal And He's BIG MAD About It — Crooks and Liars|Andrea Thompson
Arguments were made over squirts of ketchup.
RFK Jr. has chosen the hill he wants to die on, and it's a squirt of ketchup.
Recently, Trump-era Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his YouTube cooking series, The Real Food Show, where he tries to prove to Americans that they can eat nutritiously without breaking the bank, boasting that many of his meals can cost less than five bucks a serving, making healthy food "affordable for every family."
The problem is, he's full of shit -- and CNN proved as much, leading Mr. Brain Worm to blow a gasket all over social media because how dare anyone make him look like a tone-deaf, out-of-touch asshole on live television....
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"The problem is, he's full of shit." Take heed! Thank you!
Trump Heckled By Man In “Kill Local Pedophile” Shirt
Mediaite reports:
President Donald Trump’s speech was interrupted Friday when a man wearing a shirt that read “Kill Your Local Pedophile” was removed from the crowd. After asking the crowd to “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot” and vote, the president continued about a potential midterms loss, “I’m going to be impeached. They’re gonna impeach me. They have no idea why.”
After his story, Trump moved away from the podium to listen to what he seemed to think were jeers from the crowd at this alleged plot to impeach him. The Fox News broadcast then went to a split screen, though, showing someone being escorted by security out of the event. He was wearing a shirt that said: “KILL YOUR LOCAL PEDOPHILE.”
“That’s alright,” Trump said of the man’s t-shirt. “That person’s going home to mom, gonna get scolded, ’cause mom is voting for us.” Either picking up on his train of thought or just retelling the story altogether, the president went on, “They’re gonna impeach. But did you see it this morning? This congressman. ‘Why are you going to impeach him?’ the commentator — ‘Uh.’ ‘Why are you gonna impeach him? What has he done wrong?’ ‘Um, I don’t know.’”
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The dipshit will be impeached again! This time it will count! He's utterly worthy of being impeached!
President Snow’s Patriot Games Bomb In The Ratings
Awful Announcing reports:
Judging by ESPN’s complete lack of on-air promotion for the Patriot Games last week, one could surmise that the network wanted little to do with the glorified high school fitness test conjured up by President Donald Trump as part of the Freedom 250 initiative.
At least, the network wanted little to do with airing the farcical competition. Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro, ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro, and ESPN frontman Pat McAfee sat side-by-side with Trump during the Patriot Games’ grand finale, kissing the ring as is required under this administration. Yet, the networks of Disney allotted just one hour to the much ballyhooed games … two whole days after the competition ended.
Perhaps there was good reason for that. No one was interested in watching. According to viewership data, ABC’s one-hour telecast of the Patriot Games, which amounted to a highlight show of the competitions’ best moments, drew just 1.21 million viewers last Thursday. One week prior, ABC aired Press Your Luck in the same timeslot and scored 2.86 million viewers.
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It takes a special moron to keep running up his idiocy quotient!
RNC Chair Blames Biden For Trump’s Approval Ratings
The Huffington Post reports:
The current head of the Republican National Committee is apparently blaming President Donald Trump’s low approval ratings on (checks notes) Joe Biden. Joe Gruters addressed the low approval ratings during a Friday interview on NewsNation.
After host Markie Martin noted that the economy is the biggest factor “when it comes to elections,” she asked, “New polling shows over 60% of Americans disapprove of the economy under President Trump and puts his approval rating on 33%, the lowest it has ever been. How do you convince people you’re the right choice?”
“The president is still dealing with the Biden issues that were left over under the disastrous four years they ruled,” Gruters said before falsely claiming gas prices were higher under Biden.
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ROTFLMAO! ROTFLMAO! ROTFLMAO! ROTFLMAO!
Trump: “Hospitals Are Now Doing Reverse Transgender Surgery On My Order, Nobody Ever Heard About It”
“The Democrat who Darlene is running to defeat is a far left political hack who supports transgender for everybody and believes in telling confused children they’re trapped in the wrong body. By the way, you notice how that’s changing now? In fact, hospitals now are doing reverse surgery at my order. They’re doing reverse surgery. Nobody ever heard about it.” – Trump, last night at his South Carolina rally for Sen. Darline Graham ahead of Tuesday’s runoff election.
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Trump needs the human transition surgery. From retarded beast to human.
Conservative icon detonates on Trump over baffling new fixation as world slides to brink — RaW Story|Daniel Hampton
Conservative columnist George Will unloaded on President Donald Trump in a scorching new Washington Post editorial published Friday, branding the president "frivolous" and "oblivious" as global tensions mount.
The column, headlined "Amid an August of mounting danger, a frivolous, oblivious president," opens with a searing indictment: "This August features a stunning divergence. The world becomes more dangerous as U.S. governance becomes more frivolous."
Journalist Scott MacFarlane, now chief Washington correspondent for MeidasTouch Network, flagged the lead sentence on social media Friday, calling attention to Will's characterization of the president.
Will's editorial aims at Trump's handling of the ongoing conflict with Iran, faulting the president for launching a second military operation against Tehran just months after declaring the first strike had "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program. The U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February, opening the largest Middle East campaign since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The columnist also skewered Trump's escalating feud with South Korea, writing that the president is "miffed" with Seoul over what he considers "insufficient help" with his second Iran operation....
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Still, Trump's deplorables cling to the failing old fart.
DOJ Hires Man Convicted Of Hacking Election Sites
Democracy Docket reports:
A Florida lawyer who pleaded guilty after illegally accessing government election websites appears to have joined President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) — and taken part in a recent DOJ election monitoring operation in Minnesota.
The apparent hiring of David Michael Levin would be among the most troubling example yet of the department’s Civil Rights Division bringing on lawyers — including the acting chief of the voting section — who have taken extreme steps to undermine fair elections, as it rushes to put together a team to carry out Trump’s anti-voting agenda. And Levin’s involvement in election monitoring could offer a hint of the kind of personnel who will staff the operation this fall, when the DOJ has said it will send 1,000 monitors to the polls.
Levin was charged with three felonies in 2016 after Florida investigators said he used a cyberattack to obtain credentials, then entered restricted portions of a county elections website, and separately accessed the state Division of Elections website. The charges were later reduced to two misdemeanors. Levin pleaded guilty, served 20 days in jail and received two years of probation.
Read the full article. There’s much more. On his Facebook page, Levin hawks “herbal elixir” testosterone and some kind of beef jerky. There’s also a photo with MAGA cultist Tom “Shirts Too Tight” Fitton.
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And you laughed when we accused these bastards of being crooks!
Grand Jury Declines to Indict Man Caught on Camera Destroying Flock Pole — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
If this isn’t an indictment on America’s hatred of Flock cameras, we don’t know what is.
On Wednesday, a grand jury in Ohio refused to bring felony charges against a Clermont County man accused of destroying a Flock automatic license plate reader (ALPR).
In June, police in the Cincinnati suburb of Union Township arrested Cody Morelock, accusing him of removing bolts on the ALPR pole, toppling it over, and ultimately destroying the surveillance camera and its solar panel.
The prosecution’s case seemed iron-clad: according to Cincinnati’s Local12, police identified Morelock using surveillance footage from multiple nearby cameras, combined with info gleamed from a credit card and a customer rewards account. Despite the evidence against him, the jury declined to indict Morelock, resulting in all charges being dropped.
It’s a searing referendum on the state’s ability to prosecute alleged incidents of ALPR vandalism, as grand juries almost always bring charges against the accused. As New York Court of Appeals chief judge Sol Wachtler once infamously declared, “any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.”...
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How fucking fed up are we? This fucking fed up!
Wild New Paper Claims Human Brain Doesn’t Produce Consciousness — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
Since neuroscientists began excavating the human mind in search of the root cause of consciousness, they’ve acting on one foundational assumption — that consciousness is a function of the brain. It’s highly intuitive: we’re conscious, while rocks and dirt and other inanimate matter don’t seem to be.
However, one researcher is flipping that assumption on its head. At a neuroscience symposium in Portugal, Allen Institute neuroscientist Christof Koch made a brave challenge — that consciousness might actually be a natural quality of the universe, rather than a product of gray matter.
In a new unpublished essay viewed by ScienceAlert, Koch basically asserts that scientists are sniffing around for the root cause of consciousness in the wrong place.
“Nothing in science explains how three pounds of matter, a piece of furniture of the Universe like any other, subjects to the same natural laws, can love, hate, dream, imagine, fear or hope for its future,” Koch wrote.
To get to the bottom of things, Koch explains that we may need to scrap centuries of philosophical and scientific notions and return to basic idealism, where consciousness isn’t seen as the product of any physical phenomenon in the brain, but as the fundamental feature of reality.
But proving that hypothesis may be easier said than done....
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In 25 words or less: What is reality?
Flock Is Quietly Selling Powerful Drones That Scan License Plates From the Sky — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
Flock Safety is seriously struggling to beat the allegations of enabling a dystopian surveillance state.
The company has been reeling from a growing PR crisis, with a growing number of Americans vandalizing its flawed license plate-reading cameras. It’s been losing dozens of contracts with cities across the country as the controversy grows, undermining its value to police.
And now, while simultaneously promising to address glaring privacy concerns with milquetoast software updates, Flock is doubling down by selling “Drone as First Responder” (DFR) tech, in the form of drones that are equipped with powerful cameras that can inspect license plate numbers from up to 2,000 feet away, as Techspot reports.
During a Monday podcast appearance, Flock CEO Garrett Langley fleshed out the company’s latest foray into airborne camera-equipped drones, purportedly the company’s “fastest growing business unit right now.” Drones stationed on the roofs of police stations or fire departments launch to respond to 911 calls much quicker, he said, by traveling as the crow flies.
“Normally what would happen… is like one cop would have heard that, flip on the blue lights, race down there… and someone’s about to die,” Langley explained, describing a case in which a woman called 911 on a man, who later turned out to be holding a lighter, not a gun, as initially suspected. “Instead, they launch the drone.”
Langley claimed that “we have thousands and thousands of stories like that where communities are safer now with our drones. They’re safer with our cameras.”
The specs of the surveillance drones are terrifying. According to Langley, they can fly at 400 feet and reach 60 mph.
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They really think they can get away with that too? ROTFLMAO!
The Long Con of John Roberts — The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice,
As a young attorney in the Reagan Administration, he aimed to destroy the Voting Rights Act and undermine democracy. Now the Chief Justice has finished the job.
There is no bigger con man in the United States than Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Not even President Donald J. Trump.
The con began in September 2005, during Roberts’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Articulate, handsome, and energetic at fifty years old, Roberts seemed to have been culled “straight from central casting,” as Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama actually remarked on the first day of the hearings. Roberts was also convincing—he famously promised that if confirmed, he would serve in the fashion of a baseball umpire, calling only “balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.” Seventy-eight Senators, including twenty-two Democrats, fell for the ploy and voted to give him the lifetime assignment.
The biggest yarn Roberts told during his hearing concerned his views on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), a cornerstone of American democracy, which the Supreme Court gutted this past April in a redistricting case from the state of Louisiana (Louisiana v. Callais).
As is his prerogative as Chief Justice, Roberts assigned the task of drafting the Callais majority opinion to fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who responded with a 6 to 3 ruling that held that, henceforth, Section 2 of the landmark legislation would require VRA plaintiffs to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps challenged as “racial gerrymanders” were created with discriminatory intent rather than for permissible political purposes. The opinion allowed Louisiana to eliminate one majority Black Congressional district. It also effectively negated legislation passed in 1982 that had amended Section 2 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power without proving intent.
Flash back to 2005 and it is apparent that, at best, Roberts misled the judiciary committee. In response to a question from Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy about the VRA’s constitutionality, Roberts replied, “[T]he existing Voting Rights Act—the constitutionality has been upheld. And I don’t have any issue with that.”
In fact, Roberts had plenty of issues with the VRA. As a young lawyer serving as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan Administration, Roberts authored upward of twenty-five memos opposing the 1982 legislation. In them, Roberts urged the administration to defeat any proposed changes to the VRA and to keep the “intent test” established by a 1980 Supreme Court decision (City of Mobile v. Bolden) that required VRA plaintiffs to prove officials explicitly intended to discriminate against minority voters. Adopting the effects test over the intent test, Roberts argued, would create “a quota system [akin to affirmative action] for electoral politics by creating a right to proportional racial representation on elected governmental bodies.”...
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Our country is fed up with these worthless, no good con men!
The Supreme Court’s about to face an entirely new kind of voter discrimination — Vox|Ian Millhiser
Demonstrators outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on October 15, 2025. | Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images
If you’re having trouble remembering what the 26th Amendment does, you’re probably not alone. Ratified in 1971, the 26th Amendment states that “the right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.” As the Fifth Circuit noted in a case challenging a similar Texas law, the amendment “has yet to be interpreted in any significant depth.”
Key takeaways
The Supreme Court has never interpreted the 26th Amendment, which limits age discrimination in voting.
Three courts, however, have now split on whether it allows states to make it easier for older voters — and only older voters — to vote by mail.
This issue has significant partisan stakes because Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote by mail.
The Fourth Circuit’s opinion in Grant holds that the 26th Amendment prohibits “unequal allocation of voting access based on age,” and thus, if elderly voters can vote by mail, younger voters must be allowed to do so as well. Both the Fifth and the Seventh Circuits, which previously ruled on similar challenges to Texas and Indiana absentee voting laws, disagree with this view.
The question of whether states may have different absentee voting rules for older voters first flared up in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many voters were afraid to go to the polls, for fear that they might become infected if they voted alongside others in an indoor polling place. And this led to a pair of lawsuits claiming that Texas must allow younger voters to vote absentee, lest they be effectively denied the ability to safely cast a ballot altogether.
Ultimately, however, the Fifth Circuit, which oversees federal litigation out of Texas, rejected the claim that only allowing older people to vote by mail violates the 26th Amendment....
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The problem with backward thinkers like those on SCOTUS. It's always 2 + 2 = 5.
Trump Is Destroying Pristine Public Lands to Build His Border Wall — Again — Truthout Stories|Mike Ludwig
Contractors damaged federally protected habitats in Big Bend National Park and areas near sacred springs in Arizona.
Fights over President Donald Trump’s border wall are erupting once again across the Southwest. Protesters are launching tree-sits in the Arizona-Mexico borderlands, and the Tohono O’odham Nation recently put up “no trespassing” signs to ward off the federal contractors bulldozing across the Sonoran Desert to build a secondary border wall on tribal territory and in the public parklands of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.
Flush with more than $46 billion in funding from Trump’s unpopular budget bill passed by the GOP in 2025, the administration is building a complex “border barrier system” that includes a “primary and secondary wall” with a road between them, as well as “waterborne barriers, patrol roads, and the technology required to tie it all together, such as cameras, lights, and other detection technology,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Photos taken on August 16 and 17 and released by the Center for Biological Diversity this week show “significant clearing” of otherwise federally protected wild desert along the southern border just a few miles from Quitobaquito Springs, a rare desert oasis that is sacred for Indigenous people and home to endangered species. Protesters have erected a tree-sit near the spring in an ancient cottonwood known as the “grandmother tree” to block construction.
To build a secondary border wall parallel to the 30-foot-high wall already in place in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, contractors have leveled and cleared of wildlife two areas east of the spring. One area is a large staging yard for construction equipment, while the other area was cleared for the wall itself, which is slated to be built parallel to the existing border wall....
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A deadly monster is loose in the country. He must come to his end.
Are We On the Verge of a Progressive Revolution Like the New Deal? — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
Organized people can overcome organized money as we saw with Angie Nixon’s primary victory in Florida and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s in Michigan…
Do we stand on the edge of a grand new progressive era, with good wages for all, racial and gender equality and justice, and America joining the rest of the developed world with cheap college and healthcare paid for by rational taxes on the morbidly rich? Or will Trump gleefully overthrow American democracy, finish his ongoing project of shuttering or handing to his oligarch partners-in-crime our free press, and imprisoning more of us who object?
When Mussolini put Antonio Gramsci, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party, in prison in 1927, Gramsci wrote from his prison cell that:
“[T]he old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
That interregnum is passing right now here in America, the symptoms are obvious, and change is upon us.
Two forces in American politics are similarly on a collision course today at two levels. Within the Democratic Party, it’s Clinton-era neoliberalism versus Bernie’s progressivism. In the overall political scene, it’s Trump’s and his captive GOP’s neofascism versus the entire spectrum of Democrats (both “corporate” and “progressive”) who, regardless of their differences, still embrace democracy.
The problem corporate neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should best be handed by our government as part of the commons.
— Trying to get affordable healthcare to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us, regardless of how many of us die....
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Let's hope so. This Trump Fascism is killing us.
El-Sayed: Rogers Fears “Pissing Off Daddy Trump”Open link in new tabJoe.My.God.|Joe Jervis
“It’s funny. Mike Rogers is now trying to make a play, he says, for Democrats. I’ve been talking to Democrats for 15 months, and ever since February, when they kicked off this ridiculous war, it is one of the only things that I hear from Democrats: Why is it that a guy who said that he wanted no new wars, that he was gonna ‘America First’ us, that he’s now, it seems, putting America last to the drapes he wants to put in the White House and a war that he seems not to know how to get himself out of?
“So, you know, just a pro tip here. Mike, if you wanna win Democrat votes, you’re probably gonna have to start talking about the ridiculous war that we shouldn’t be fighting in Iran, but he doesn’t wanna talk about any of those things because he knows that he is stuck in a bind.
“Every single time that he shows up to any conversation that’s at all objective, he’s gonna have to answer for Trump’s ridiculous policies, which he can’t answer to without pissing off Daddy Trump, so here he is in this absurd bind, and it’s better for him to just dodge. So, he’s continued to do that. Instead, he takes softball interviews from Fox News, or NewsNation, or Newsmax — whatever that is.” – Abdul El-Sayed, speaking to MS Now.
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Abdul El-Sayed for Senate!
Omaha Cops To Stop Using Shock Gloves On Students
The Associated Press reports:
Omaha police agreed this week to stop carrying gloves that can deliver electric shocks to students in the halls of Nebraska’s largest public school district. The Omaha mayor and police chief said in a joint statement Monday that the gloves were used twice in the last school year, including in a program for students with learning deficits.
“We believe it is the safest use-of-force option in the rare times when it is used,” the statement said. Then came community pushback and a request from the Omaha Superintendent Matthew Ray that police working in the schools, known as school resource officers, stop using the gloves.
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In this case, no gloves is a good thing.
Vindman To Transfer $7M War Chest To Florida Dems
The Washington Post reports:
Retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who lost Tuesday’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Florida, said he’ll be giving away the millions he raised for his campaign “to the places it will matter most” — starting with the Florida Democratic Party. “I want you to know that your support is going where you intended: to help elect Democrats everywhere and to put a check on Donald Trump’s power,” he wrote on X on Thursday night.
A $400,000 donation to the state party is intended to help his onetime primary opponent, state Rep. Angie Nixon, as well as other statewide and federal candidates running in tough races in Florida. Vindman’s campaign had $7.31 million cash on hand as of June 30, according to filings. Federal law allows him to hold on to the money for a future federal election, use it to pay campaign debts, transfer it to the national or state Democratic Party, or donate some of it to other candidates running at the federal level.
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Ever the hero.
Fox’s Tomi Lahren Torches Trump Over New Policy to ‘Import a Bunch of Foreign Beef’ — Mediaite|Tom Durante
Fox News’s Tomi Lahren is giving “Twitter beef” a whole new meaning.
Taking to X on Friday morning, Lahren chided President Donald Trump over his new plan — announced hours earlier — to temporarily lift certain tariffs on ground beef imports.
“You know what won’t help American ranchers?” she asked. “Importing a bunch of foreign beef.”...
In a follow-up post, she wrote:
If this is the plan the VERY LEAST that can be done is mandatory country of origin labeling so consumers know where the beef they’re buying is coming from. Importing a bunch of foreign beef is just a giant gift to the meat packers who then get to undercut our American ranchers who cannot differentiate their product from the cheap foreign sh*t. The American cattlemen is being driven out of business so the land can be gobbled up for data centers and other bullsh*t.
If this is the plan the VERY LEAST that can be done is mandatory country of origin labeling so consumers know where the beef they’re buying is coming from. Importing a bunch of foreign beef is just a giant gift to the meat packers who then get to undercut our American ranchers… pic.twitter.com/0CxEKgkZcH
— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) August 21, 2026
...
Last month, the Trump administration was forced to walk back a U.S. beef export figure after the Department of Agriculture acknowledged it had published erroneous data, revising the number down by roughly 90%, according to Reuters.
'Bizarre' Natalie Harp saga takes a wild turn amid rumors: 'Should be prosecuted' — Raw Story|Robert Davis
A political analyst was flabbergasted on Thursday after the strange saga between Natalie Harp and President Donald Trump took a bizarre turn.
Reports indicate that Harp, whom some have referred to as Trump's "human binky," refused to get a security clearance for over a year until Trump personally intervened. That's despite Harp having close access to the president and relaying messages from foreign leaders to him.
Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist, was floored by the reports and reacted in a new video on his YouTube channel.
"She should be held and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Nellis said, describing their saga as "bizarre." "We know that Donald Trump's [Department of Justice] isn't going to do that. Instead, they're going to keep harassing private citizens like yours truly, Don Lemon, and many others, which is ridiculous in and of itself."
Harp has been reportedly infatuated with Trump after she received an experimental cancer treatment that saved her life. The aide credited Trump for saving her life by allowing the experimental drug into the marketplace. Since then, she has reportedly written Trump several intimate and personal letters and was even seen jumping into the trunk of a car to attend a court hearing with the president.
Harp's brother, Preston Harp, has called his sister's infatuation with the president "unhealthy" and urged her to "wake up" in an interview with CNN's Erin Burnett this week....
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A delusional person stalking Trump who thinks it's cute.
ICE gloves reveal how Trump’s revenge agenda is failing — Salon|Amanda Marcotte
The president's deportation agenda has failed in the courts. Now he's trying to cheat the system.
ince Markwayne Mullin took over the Department of Homeland Security in March, Immigration and Custom Enforcement has dialed back on the trolling. Gone are the videos and memes, posted regularly under the leadership of Mullin’s predecessor Kristi Noem, that mocked detainees for crying and celebrated ICE agents for being recklessly violent. There have been no more showy “invasions” of cities like Minneapolis or Los Angeles, as Mullin has aimed to draw less attention to ICE’s incompetent and legally dubious methods. His strategy has largely worked in getting the unpopular agency’s name out of the headlines.
But that doesn’t mean ICE has given up on fulfilling Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s cruel fantasies. The xenophobic Miller agenda is still being treated as the vanguard in White House efforts to will an authoritarian police state into being, circumventing both law and tradition to attack due process and inflict fear on the nation’s immigrant population. In early August, DHS posted a notice that they plan to buy $20 million worth of electrified shock gloves that are euphemistically described as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.” The gloves are truly Orwellian, cheered on by police because they inflict pain but leave “no burn marks or scars,” making it easier for law enforcement to hide the abuse and cruelty they inflict. Amnesty International opposes the use of these devices, arguing they are “readily misused for torture.”
The gloves’ torturous potential seems the biggest part of their appeal to the administration. Mullin has previously defended the killing of nonviolent anti-ICE protesters, while Miller regularly paints progressive protesters and immigrants as apocalyptic threats that need be countered with violence. Trump, of course, has fantasized aloud about unleashing state violence on Americans, regardless of the laws against it. The gloves provide an avenue to hurt both immigrants and protesters, while avoiding due process and legal accountability....
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ICE is the latest version of the KKK.
Trump torn apart for passing the buck on manufacturing losses — Alternet|Matthew Rozsa
..."Is this all being framed as Joe Biden's fault?" NewsNation's Leland Vittert asked conservative commentator Erick Erickson on Thursday. "Does that make people say, 'I get it, it's Joe Biden's fault, I'm going to give him more time,' or does it seem like, after two and a half years, Republicans are passing the buck?"
Erickson dismissed the notion that Biden is to blame out of hand.
"[Trump] came in, in '25, and what was the major economic initiative?" Erickson asked. "Tariffs. Americans understand that taxes and prices went up afterward — whether it's the war, whether it's tariffs, whether it's something else, the president could, with the stroke of a pen tomorrow, get rid of the tariffs, start bringing prices down, and cause a market rally. But he won't do that, because you can't teach an old dog new tricks — he's an old believer in tariffs. That was the fundamental economic issue when they came into office, and people can put their finger on that and say, 'That's when things started to go bad.' So you can't keep passing the buck to the Democrats."
Liberals also agree with Erickson's analysis. Speaking with AlterNet in July, Dr. Robert Shapiro — who served as President Bill Clinton's undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs — broke down how Trump's tariffs are hurting the economy.
“It's about uncertainty,” Shapiro told AlterNet. “Every investment is based on an assessment of the likely future demand for whatever you're investing in, and how much it's going to cost to produce it. So there are assumptions about labor costs, material costs and other input costs — and again, about demand. If you have a set of arrangements that give you some confidence about the price of your inputs coming from Mexico or Canada, or about demand for goods in Canada — and don't forget, we have virtually no trade deficit with Canada; we have enormous trade, and it goes in both directions — so it's certainly right, and it's not just about investments based on these probabilities that the trade agreement can help reduce uncertainty about.”...
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Uncertainty and Unaffordability, says America.
Hunter Biden OPENS UP On Life, Loss, Recovery, & Family — Crooks and Liars|Cliff Schecter
MAGA made Hunter famous. They didn’t count on how talented, intelligent, and charismatic he is. They’ll be paying for that a long time.
What is there to say. David Shuster and I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Hunter Biden Wednesday. And wow, our interview lived up to everything we hoped and thought it could be. It turns out when Republicans went after Hunter Biden, they had no idea who they were messing with.
Hunter was equal parts thoughtful, gracious, forthcoming—on everything from his painting to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s obsession with his junk—and most importantly, he was real. He avoided no questions, gave honest answers even when it would’ve been easier to move on, and shared inconvenient truths.
Hoopla aside: we were talking to a son who loves his dad, suffered through enormous family tragedy and addiction, and had to navigate a world where ghouls used it all for political advantage. Yet he seems to have only come out stronger, at peace with his life, and ready, per his challenge on Amped Up, to take on Don Jr. in a UFC ring anytime Don’s clear-eyed (and brained) enough to do it....
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The return of the Biden.
WSJ: Junior’s Anti-Woke Marketplace Has Cratered
The Wall Street Journal reports:
In 2023, Donald Trump Jr. stood on a podium at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the debut of PublicSquare, a little-known online marketplace founded as a MAGA alternative to Amazon and other e-commerce sites.
Company executives hoped Trump Jr., an early investor and board member whose father pushed to snuff out progressive politics in American boardrooms, would help drive business to their “anti-woke” marketplace. They envisioned the marketplace as a place where American brands could sell household goods and family products to conservative, patriotic and religious consumers.
Three years later, PublicSquare is struggling. The company’s marketplace failed to gain traction with consumers, and its underlying business model later fell apart, executives acknowledged, after President Trump embraced the tech companies he had attacked on the campaign trail.
Financial losses began piling up following years of excessive spending. The company has reported cumulative losses of nearly $160 million since going public, through the end of July, and remains unprofitable. Its stock has cratered by 99% since it went public in 2023. The company made an early bet that prominent Trump allies, including the president’s son, would help put PublicSquare on the map.
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When you are con artist and NOT a buisness person you fail.
Illinois Gov Nominee: Humans Lived With Dinosaurs
The Chicago Tribune reports:
Former state Sen. Darren Bailey, in a rematch after losing by nearly 13 percentage points to Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, suggested he didn’t believe in the widely accepted theory of evolution. Bailey defended curricula used at the Full Armor Christian Academy, which he founded, that teaches children that dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time.
Bailey was asked about evolution in response to a campaign stunt in which Pritzker’s campaign had inflatable dinosaurs holding “dinosaurs against Darren Bailey” signs. Appearing on WGN-TV’s “The Point,” Bailey was asked by the show’s host, Tahman Bradley, if he believed humans and dinosaurs coexisted. He never directly answered.
“Were you there?” Bailey responded. “I wasn’t there,” Bradley said. “I wasn’t either. I don’t know,” Bailey said. The GOP gubernatorial candidate also said, “I think every day we’re learning wonderful things about history and the past.”
Read the full article.
During his first failed bid for governor, Bailey was dogged by an earlier claim that abortion is worse than the Holocaust. In 2022, hours after a mass shooting during an Illinois Fourth of July parade, he posted a campaign video calling for people to “move on and celebrate.” In 2024, Bailey ran a failed bid for the US House. He also denies that Biden was legitimately elected.
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So far his "learning" isn't doing him a bit of good except with the suckers that buy his bullshit.
I suppose he's too lazy to do the research. Where do these nuts come from?
No Bond For Alleged Pedophile DeSantis Appointee
The Miami Herald reports:
Suspended Palm Beach County courts clerk Mike Caruso “poses a threat” to the community, owns “at least two assault rifles,” and is too dangerous to be released from jail before his trial, state prosecutors argued in a motion filed Thursday in the politician’s child sex abuse case.
“There are no conditions of release that would be reasonably sufficient to protect the community from the risk of physical harm,” the motion filed by statewide prosecutor Rita Pavan Peters says.
Among the factors prosecutors cited for keeping Caruso locked up are a reported history of physical violence, and a “similar” abuse accusation in 2013. In that instance he was observed “rubbing the shoulders and legs of a minor,” it says. The motion also notes that Caruso, if convicted, faces life in prison, and if he is indicted by a grand jury, he could face the death penalty.
“If convicted, the defendant faces life in prison and at least one of the allegations contained within the probable cause affidavit would subject him to indictment by a grand jury and the maximum punishment of death, ‘’ the prosecutors’ motion stated.
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Another one bites the dust.
North Carolina Sees GOP Push To End Early Voting On Sundays Because Chick-Fil-A Is Closed On Sundays
Democracy Docket reports:
Chick-fil-A isn’t open on Sundays, so polls shouldn’t be either. That was one reason a GOP county board member in North Carolina offered for scaling back weekend voting during a heated North Carolina State Board of Elections meeting Thursday.
The state board gathered to sort through changes to 20 early voting plans that county-level officials were unable to decide unanimously. That included nixing campus poll sites or, in this case, the ability to cast ballots on Sunday, which devolved into a debate over Christianity and fast food chicken.
“I do not support these companies that are employing people on Sunday to make another dollar. I like how Chick-fil-A has done it, and I wish more companies would do that,” Anson County’s Matt Longworth (R) said in his impassioned plea to the board.
Read the full article. Of note, Black voters have long participated in “Souls To The Polls” events on Sundays.
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Xianianity isn't the only "religion" practiced in the U.S. Our Constitution separates the state and protects them all. Why can't North Carolina? They are persecutors.
TX Lt Gov Vows To Punish Schools For “Vulgar Books”
The Texas Tribune reports:
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Wednesday vowed to pass legislation punishing public schools that do not remove graphic books from their shelves by knocking them down a notch in the state’s annual school performance ratings, which the state uses to seize control of underperforming districts.
Flanked by easels displaying printed covers of books he found obscene, the lieutenant governor said school boards and administrators have not been following a 2025 law aimed at weeding out lewd books from the shelves in Texas’ more than 9,000 campuses attended by some 5.5 million schoolchildren.
Patrick said the books on display at his news conference — which he said are on the shelves of some Texas schools despite being prohibited in state prisons — were “so filthy, so dirty, so vulgar, so pornographic” that he refused to open them out of respect for the women in the room. He insisted the state was not banning books.
Read the full article.
Patrick recently appeared here when, as chair of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, he declared, “From this day forward, the phrase separation of church and state has no power.”
Last month Patrick announced that James Talarico is going to hell. You may recall that he got a $3 million donation from far-right fracking billionaires/pastors just before he oversaw Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial.
“We’re coming for the books,” the lieutenant governor said in announcing plans to lower the performance rating of Texas schools that violate a recent law targeting obscene titles in school libraries.
— Texas Public Radio (@texaspublicradio.bsky.social) August 20, 2026 at 1:02 AM
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Not gonna burn books? Well, you won't read them either. And if you can't stand them no one else will get a chance to read them either. Just like your attitude towards religion. MY WAY and NO OTHER! Just gonna wipe your ass with them? Isn't it time Texas gets rid of this god-awful queen for day?
NYT: Trump Admin Enables Slaughter Of Wild Horses
The New York Times reports:
They once had run free through the desert mountains of the West, a multicolored band of 68 wild mustangs that had never been saddled or corralled. Then the federal government rounded them up with helicopters, as it has with tens of thousands of other mustangs, in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands. The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what it called “loving homes.”
Abruptly this March, the government found a home. Whether it was loving didn’t seem to matter. The horses were packed into echoing metal trailers and trucked 1,800 miles east to the pens of a hard-luck livestock trader in Ohio named Brandon Jones, who bought them for $25 each. A day later, two double-decker cattle trucks pulled up at midnight, loaded the mustangs and quickly drove off into the night.
An examination of government records by The New York Times found that all over the country the Bureau of Land Management, the agency in charge of protecting wild horses, is quietly selling thousands of horses to buyers like the one in Ohio. Slaughtering wild horses is illegal, but the bureau’s actions create a loophole that enables people to get mustangs on the cheap and then quickly resell them to be exported alive, processed into cuts of meat and sold abroad....
"The assault on our wildlife and our environment runs unabated. Trump is opening up tens of millions of acres of pristine national forest to logging. He's weakening the Endangered Species Act. And perhaps worst of all, he's promoting climate-destroying fossil fuels. I hope this does spur people to vote. The damage done is often irreversible." — David Holt (comments)
"Anyone alive today younger than 50 has a strong chance of not living their full lifespan because food and clean water will simply run out
And if the oceans become too polluted oxygen levels will tank." — Todd20036 (comments)
"Americans are too selfish, short-sighted and stupid to give a shit. That’s how he was reelected in the first place.
The administration is allowing bulldozing through a national park to build his stupid border wall and oil and gas drilling in the Chaco Culture National Monument, which is a UNESCO world heritage site.
Shocking, but not surprising to anyone paying attention. But 2/3 of Americans voted for Trump or failed to vote against him, and future generations will end up paying for their stupidity.
I’ve concluded that the reelection of Trump is a reflection of the fact that America is a hopelessly rotten society. I don’t care about the protests or polls ahead of the midterm elections. The time to do something was November 5, 2024, and the thing to do was vote for Kamala Harris, but a majority of Americans failed." — AyJayDee2 (comments)
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Let them eat horsemeat. Barbaric! A crime against nature and against our law.. He's headed to the Devil the very first day that he dies!.
AyJayDee2 is correct about us being too selfish, short-sighted and stupid. Our intellect level went underwater and now it may be too late to save humanity because of it. Trump cancer is eating our nation alive.
The Economy Is So Bad That People Are Using Klarna for Rent and Utilities — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
There was a time in the not-so-distant-past when credit cards were a genuine novelty for American consumers.
First emerging in the late 1950s, credit cards spread through households like wildfire during the 70s and 80s, fueling the rapid development of card technology and thus enabling them to become ubiquitous personal finance vehicles they are today. In a matter of decades, private credit has become the bedrock of the post-industrial US economy, contributing nearly $900 billion to the country’s GDP and providing six million jobs over the past three years alone.
Now in 2026, those omnipresent slabs of plastic are just the tip of the iceberg. The financial industry has options available to every strata of consumer, from predatory payday loans for poor and working-class people to crypto-backed loans for upwardly mobile yuppies. And then there’s the “buy-now, pay-later” loan, those credit card-free vehicles which up until now were reserved for small, one-time consumer purchases like furniture — or meal delivery.
According to a recent survey by the loan marketplace LendingTree, however, BNPL-style lending from apps like Klarna and Afterpay are increasingly becoming the go-to for struggling households to pay for basic needs. Flagged by the New York Times, the survey found that half of those using BNPL loans said they’d have no way of making ends meet otherwise.
That’s a simply astonishing figure, given that US consumers spent close to $160 billion through BNPL loans in 2025.
As Karen Webster, chief executive of news and market research company Pymnts, told the NYT that BNPL has become the “working capital for the modern middle class.”
“Consumers are using it more for essential, everyday things,” Webster explained. This includes services like veterinary, dental, and medical care, as well as recurring expenses like rent and utility bills....
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So now it's loan sharks to take us for all we are worth. Trump's trickle-down grifting!
OpenAI Halts AI Training on Advanced Model as It Detects Dark Signs Emerging — Futurism|Maggie Harrison Dupré
OpenAI says that it’s slowing down development and release of new models due to security and alignment concerns.
The ChatGPT maker announced the decision in a Tuesday blog post, citing two events as drivers of the indefinite training halt. One was the recent incident in which an OpenAI agent escaped its training sandbox without OpenAI’s knowledge and coordinated with other agents to launch a bizarre cyberattack against the AI training repository Hugging Face in an effort to cheat on its training tests. The blog post also — more mysteriously — cited “preliminary evidence” that an unreleased new model called Astra “may meet the critical cybersecurity capability threshold” under OpenAI’s “Preparedness Framework,” which mandates that OpenAI slow down development if a model “could introduce unprecedented new pathways to severe harm.”
OpenAI further said that it’s in the process of rewriting its Preparedness Framework, its foundational safety document, to keep up with the emergent behaviors of “increasingly capable systems.”...
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So, AI demons are real! "If anyone bulds it, everyone dies!"
Space Force Pulls Weapons on Innocent People They Thought Were Intruders — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Did the bright-eyed enlistees of the Space Force join up thinking they’d one day be fighting alien invaders like they’re, we dunno, Master Chief?
Their jobs, in reality: drawing their weapons on imagined human invaders.
As the Associated Press reports, security at the Vandenberg Space Force base in California held five news reporters and two military officers at gunpoint because they thought they were intruders trying to crash the gates.
The snafu took place on Monday ahead of a groundbreaking ceremony for a new training facility for missile operators at a nearby federal airfield in Santa Barbara.
Making this all the more egregious, the reporters and military personnel the base security detained had been invited to be there. That memo, clearly, wasn’t passed along.
A Space Launch Delta 30 public affairs spokesperson gave a statement addressing the incident, attributing it to a breakdown in communication — but didn’t offer much in the way of an apology.
“Vandenberg Space Force base is experiencing an increased number of unauthorized entry attempts,” the spokesperson said in the statement, per the AP. “Every potential unauthorized presence must be treated as a legitimate threat until proven otherwise. While we recognize this may have been unsettling, the security of the base and its personnel is our priority.”
According to the accounts of the reporters who were detained — they were from local outlets including Noozhawk and KEYT, via the AP — they and the military staff were part of a convoy being escorted on the base by uniformed public affairs staff in a government minivan.
It’s about as official an entrance you can make, but security officers, apparently thinking this was some elaborate heist, suddenly ordered them out of their vehicles and drew their weapons. The two military members were handcuffed and placed in base vehicles, while the civilian reporters were ordered to sit on a curb. They were detained for more than 30 minutes, causing them to miss the event, before they were finally let free....
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Paranoia strikes deeper in the Space Cadet Patrol.
Church leaders ask federal judge to punish Trump’s DOJ — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
On Thursday, religious groups asked a federal judge to hold Department of Justice officials in contempt for violating a court order barring immigration enforcement actions in houses of worship. According to Politico, the request comes after an undercover agent spying on a Minnesota church accidentally dropped a recording device that exposed their true identity. The coalition of church groups is comprised of five regional synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, three regional Quaker groups, American Baptist Churches USA, the Alliance of Baptists, and Metropolitan Community Churches, who, explains Politico, “say the undercover operation ran afoul of a February order by U.S. District Judge Dennis Saylor IV, who barred immigration enforcement activity in or near certain houses of worship.”
“According to a court filing, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was taking part in ‘boxing/sparring practice' as part of a martial arts session at University Baptist Church in Minneapolis in May when a ‘concealed body-worn audio recorder’ tumbled to the floor in the church gymnasium,” writes Politico. “The agent reported leaving the gym without immediately noticing the recorder was gone and returning about three minutes later to collect it.” Court records also show the agent’s investigation included surveilling the outside of the church and photographing vehicles in its parking lot.
This comes amidst growing tension between President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts and religious institutions. According to Politico, “In addition to the potential violation of a court order, the alleged incursion on a house of worship cuts against the administration’s message that any infringement on religious freedom — such as the anti-ICE protest that disrupted services in Minnesota — would be met with severe criminal consequences.” Earlier this year, the administration made a big show of bringing charges against former CNN host Don Lemon and others accused of disrupting church services under the FACE Act....
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Fuck your FACE!
GOP Sabotaged The ACA But Byron Donalds Tries To Blame Dems — Crooks and Liars|NewsHound Ellen
Fresh off his primary win to become Florida’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Byron Donalds predictably tried to slither away from responsibility by blaming higher, GOP-caused, health insurance costs on Democrats.
“Look at health care today,” Donalds said accusingly. “That’s Democrat policy under Barack Obama.” Donalds must have forgotten Trump has had nearly six years in office to improve it.
Donalds continued, “What have we seen? Premiums are higher, deductibles are higher. The costs are out of control, and families are struggling as a result.” Then, maybe worried someone might (correctly) think he and his party had something to do with it, Donalds added, “That’s the same Kamala Harris.”
It has been nearly two years since Donald Trump announced he has “concepts of a plan” to improve healthcare for Americans. Yet, despite being back in the White House for more than a year and a half, it could not be clearer that he doesn’t have even a concept, much less a plan, nor does he care.
Instead, Trump, his buddy billionaires and lickspittle Republicans have snatched away almost every bit of Americans’ healthcare they could get their hands on.
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Donalds, you SOBs have been trying to kill the ACA ever since it was created. "Repeal and Replace" has been your mantra and all you did was fuck up the only chance many had to get healthcare!
Stop being a stodgy old fascist fart's party for the oligarchs and help people once in a damn while!
Fox News Barbie Doll Hosts Complain About The Good Looks Of Democrats — Crooks and Liars|John Amato
Fox News' Outnumbered program, which features a bevy of beauties day in and day out, attacked Democratic politicians like Mayor Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Abdul El-Sayed for being very attractive.
This is high comedy. Watching blonde beauties Kaylee McEnany, Ainsley Earhardt, along with the lovely Harris Faulkner, and dark-haired beauty Emily Compagno whine about good-looking people.
A Fox News host couldn't get a job unless they passed sexual predator Roger Ailes' gaze. Are they fucking kidding me?
"Who's bringing sexy back?" McEnany asked. Fox News did and still does.
Fox News' Todd Piro blasted the vacuousness of social media culture and then attacked democratic policies.
"I'm told Mamdani's really good looking person, Emily," Kayleigh said."This is the party that said going to the gym was toxic," Emily Compagno replied.
Fox News then posted a picture of Mayor Mamdani on-air to make the ladies giggle.
Not to be left out, Ainsley Earhardt had a few thoughts on Democratic hotness.
EARHARDT: EL-Sayed peaks out in these tight t-shirts, you have a AOC with her pretty smile. She's beautiful, she's got the red lipstick.
You have Mamdani, always smiling, always seemingly positive, but it doesn't make their philosophy any less dangerous, right?
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
She went on to transition into Socialism, claiming all Democrats want to take all your money and make everyone equal....
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Dark roots. These poor little girls.
Ossoff Whacks Trump's White House Enablers: 'They're Adults' — Crooks and Liars|Heather
Sen. Jon Ossoff doubled down on his comments about Trump's disgusting, enabling sycophants he's surrounded himself with after the right wing freakout this week over his line about Trump's "binky," Natalie Harp.
MS Now host Lawrence O'Donnell asked Ossoff during an interview this Wednesday why "of all the things you've said about Donald Trump" this is the one that apparently bothers Trump and everyone at his White House the most.
Ossoff didn't hold back his disdain for the lot of them:
OSSOFF: Lawrence, it's been amazing to watch this White House melt down over this all week.
And about Natalie Harp, these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer with immense power in positions of public trust.
And whether it's Natalie Harp printing out Donald Trump's daily dose of delusion and flattery, or Peter Navarro steering taxpayer-funded loans to Trump family investments, or Pete Hegseth deluding the president daily into deepening this quagmire in the Middle East, no one cares about their feelings.
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Ossoff for President 2028!
Whistleblower reveals the real goal of Trump’s 'revenge' task force — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
While President Donald Trump claims he’s been waging a war against fraud, one of his former officials asserts that the White House-led anti-fraud task force is really a “ruse to prosecute political foes.” This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security Deputy Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term and at the time penned an anonymous article exposing the dysfunctional inner workings of the administration.
As Taylor wrote on Thursday, according to reports from the New York Times and other outlets, the Trump administration has been leveling claims of fraud against targets ranging from immigrant-owned ice cream trucks to Democratic governors. “The goal was not to take down serious criminals,” argues Taylor. “It was storytelling. Trump says his enemies are grifters. Accordingly, he’s reorienting the federal government to prove — whether they’re governors or immigrants — that his political and societal opponents are rotten right down to the food trucks from which they sell.”
Taylor says there is a clear giveaway to the president’s intentions, writing, “As DOJ is building these types of cases, it’s simultaneously abandoning major white-collar prosecutions. Corporate investigations (which can uncover billions in theft and billions in restitution for victims) have fallen to their lowest level in decades. In fact, the Times found that the volume of such cases is literally thousands below the Biden administration and far below Trump’s own first term. Meanwhile, the president has been pardoning wealthy executives and dropping cases left and right against friendly corporations. So no, the Trump administration is not hunting fraud. It’s hunting down its enemies with anything it can find. ‘Fraud’ just happens to be the easiest label to apply.”...
The reality, asserts Taylor, is that Trump’s White House is rampant with fraud, the scale of which will be exposed by a future Democratic administration. While Trump and his allies will attempt to conceal their crimes, “They can’t shred it all on the way out the door, because they’ve trapped themselves. If they want their prosecutions to survive, there must be evidence, discovery, and a chain of custody. The records must exist somewhere, or the cases go away. I suspect that when investigators finally follow that paper trail, it will lead exactly where the Letitia James and Adam Schiff cases already point — back to the White House — and to proof of the deliberate weaponization of the American government against its own citizens. That’s when the real fraud trials will begin.”
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Trials, trouble, tribulation.
Trump in crisis as he alienates pivotal MAGA group: DC insider — Alternet.org|Alex Henderson
When Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, one of the factors in his narrow victory was the Manosphere — an assortment of anti-feminist groups and influencers known for their intense disdain for political correctness and "woke" ideology. But according Democratic insider Sidney Blumental, a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, many Manosphere influencers that helped propel him to victory are now turning against him.
Blumenthal, writing for The New Republic, explains, "The Manosphere emerged in the 2024 campaign as an innovative component at the center of Trump's political machine — a network of podcasters, influencers, and shock jocks serving as a pipeline to young men, exploiting their social and economic anxieties, particularly by targeting them with crude misogynist messages serving as vicarious defiance against an oppressive, woke feminist culture…. It became instant conventional wisdom that the bros' allegiance to Trump would be a permanent factor in American politics for a generation or more to come."
President Trump's son Barron Trump, Blumental notes, aggressively courted the Manosphere.
Blumental points to podcaster Joe Rogan as a key example of Trump's growing problems with the Manosphere. Rogan was an enthusiastic Trump supporter in 2024, but now, he is a frequent critic who has lambasted the president on everything from the Jeffrey Epstein files to immigration raids to the war in Iran.
"Trump's Iran war has shattered the once-awestruck projection of him as the invulnerable alpha male," the former Clintons adviser observes. "'There's no one like that guy,' said Joe Rogan. 'It's the only reason why he survived all the s– – they tried to put him through.' Now, symptomatic of the breakdown of Trump's once-seemingly granitic support along generational and ideological lines, Rogan calls the war 'crazy,' 'insane,' 'nuts'; says Trump has 'betrayed' his followers, and that Trump is blithering along with 'no clear way to resolve this at all.' Trump has gone haywire. He is the arsonist igniting the bonfire of the Manosphere."
Blumental notes that "for many of the Manosphere performers," the Iran war "was the decisive event that shifted their tone from adulation to betrayal."...
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All the President's men...
'Doddering octogenarian' Trump 'fooled' into new disaster: conservative — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
While President Donald Trump receives no shortage of critique from Democrats, far rarer are instances of full-throated criticism from conservatives. This week, however, Trump made a move that so blatantly contradicts U.S. interests, the conservative magazine National Review was forced to admit that his decision “does not make sense on any level.” The “doddering octogenarian” American president, it asserts, is a “sucker” who was easily “fooled” into disaster.
“Alas,” writes the Review, “the president of the United States, who began his term by taking an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help him God, says the United States is minimizing its joint defense exercises with the South Korean military because those exercises are ‘very insulting’ to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.” As Trump told reporters on Wednesday, “I didn’t like the fact that we’re doing these massive military exercises really against North Korea.” Trump noted that South Korea was not participating in the war with Iran, and then claimed the joint military exercise would be “very insulting to somebody that frankly has been, during my term at least, very well-behaved.”
“Got that?” writes the Review. “Joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises, which have occurred in some form or fashion every year since the end of the Korean War in 1953, are ‘very insulting’ to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. Oh, no! Heaven forbid that the U.S. ever insult a man who boasted a couple of years ago, ‘The whole of [the United States] mainland is within the range of our nuclear strike and the nuclear button is on my office desk all the time.’”...
In the Review’s assessment, “Trump rarely knows what he is talking about and just blurts out whatever sounds good. He is incontrovertibly wedded to a narrative that all of America’s allies are useless mooching freeloaders, while he keeps getting charmed and flattered by some of the worst and most dangerous men on the planet, and downplays the threat they present to U.S. interests. He is an easy mark, a sucker, easily captivated and fooled.”
With all this in mind, the magazine draws a grim conclusion: “The president may not intend to leave America weaker on the world stage than when he found it. But that is the course we are on, with his accumulated erratic decisions, fits of pique and spite and dumb and insulting comments.”
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It looks like the rig is up!
Democrats can make Natalie Harp ‘scandal’ a bigger headache for GOP — Daily Kos|Oliver Willis
It took only three words during a campaign speech from Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff to throw the Trump White House and the Republican Party off its game.
While lambasting Trump for corruption and laziness during a Sunday rally, Ossoff said, “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”
Travel. With. Natalie. That’s it—three words in reference to Trump’s ever-present aide Natalie Harp.
Since then, the right has spent several days in a frenzy. Led by figures like Trump himself, White House communications director Steven Cheung, and spokesperson Davis Ingle, the administration has condemned Ossoff. To them he is “Pee Wee Herman,” “Jon Jackoff,” and a “feminine theatre kid.”
Such snowflakes.
But the disproportionately angry Republican response—again, Ossoff said three total words about Harp—has triggered an avalanche of coverage about the oddball relationship between Trump and his weirdly devoted aide.
CNN filed a report discussing an eyebrow-raising episode where Harp reportedly rode in the trunk of an SUV so she could accompany Trump. Biographer Michael Wolff reported that Harp bunked down in the women’s locker room at Trump’s Bedminster golf club in a bid to stay as close as possible during Trump’s last presidential campaign.
Over at TMZ, the gossip site reported on a cable news interview with Harp’s brother Preston Harp, who told the network how his mother reportedly sowed the seeds for his sister’s devotion to Trump.
And even The New York Times took a break from its laudatory “age of Trump” coverage to compile an explainer piece on who Harp is—apparently designed to satiate the surging search engine traffic from people trying to figure out what the controversy is all about. According to Google Search Insights, traffic for the phrase “Natalie Harp” skyrocketed after Ossoff’s comment and the angry Republican response, with searches going up 5,000% compared to a year ago....
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Oh, Daddy!
Phoenix Cops Accused Of Violent Traffic Stop [VIDEO]
Phoenix’s ABC affiliate reports:
Two Phoenix police officers are under criminal investigation after two people reported being beaten, tased, and held at gunpoint during a traffic stop that victims say was never documented — and that police records show no agency reported conducting. Phoenix’s criminal investigation was sparked after Tempe Police received a call about a disabled vehicle.
According to a police report released by Tempe police, that city’s officers spoke to the car’s passengers, a man and woman, who reported being assaulted during a violent and chaotic traffic stop in south Phoenix, near 19th Avenue and Broadway Road.
A Tempe cop suspected that the pair was the victim of people posing as police officers after confirming with dispatch twice that no law enforcement agency reported conducting a traffic stop of the victims’ car that night, which was found with a window ripped out and overheating.
Read the full article. There’s more. No paywall. The first video report below has screenshots from the investigation.
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As the late Johathan Winters once put it: "Just a hood with a badge."
Collins Lies That Ossoff Voted Against Laken Riley Act
Yahoo News reports:
Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) said Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) did not “lift a finger to help on the Laken Riley Act” — legislation that the senator actually voted for. Collins is running to take Ossoff’s Senate seat in November. An InsiderAdvantage poll released on Tuesday shows Ossoff leading the House Republican 50% to 43%.
Collins’ Wednesday dig centered on comments Ossoff made at a weekend rally, where he invoked President Donald Trump’s top aide, Natalie Harp.
Appearing on Newsmax alongside anchor Rob Schmitt, Collins said the Natalie Harp jab proves Ossoff “has been out there disparaging, demeaning, dehumanizing women.” The congressman continued, “This starts way back in the beginning of my career, uh, when I went to Congress, when he wouldn’t even lift a finger to help on the Laken Riley Act.”
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I hope everyone notices that the Fascist Party does nothing but offer lies and bullshit.
Ossoff for President 2028!
Graham: I Don’t Know A Lot About National Security, But People Are More Concerned About Trans Athletes
The Daily Beast reports:
Lindsey Graham’s sister offered a bizarre excuse for her brainfart during a disastrous debate performance by insisting in another stammering public appearance: “I don’t speak politician.” In an attempt to explain her lack of knowledge on the sensitive foreign policy issue, Graham went on Fox News’ Hannity on Wednesday night.
Stammering, she told host Sean Hannity: “I, I, I tripped up on one question last night, uh, regarding Taiwan. But, you know, I’ve said many times, I’m not a politician, certainly not a career politician. I don’t speak politician.”
She added: “Of course, Taiwan is our friend, but I think people in South Carolina are more worried about making ends meet. They’re more concerned about boys in girls’ sports. One lady talked to me extensively about that today.”
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In other words, "I am not qualified to hold office."
The Stupid Virus is still wiith us.
Dem Senators Warn CA County On Hiring Tina Peters
Democracy Docket reports:
Both of California’s senators are deeply worried about convicted election denier Tina Peters’ possible new job assisting with elections in the conservative bastion of Shasta County — and they’re urging the state’s election chief to keep a close eye on her if she takes the gig.
In a letter sent Wednesday to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D), Sens. Alex Padilla (D) and Adam Schiff (D) said they have “grave concern” over Shasta Registrar of Voters Clint Curtis’ plan to hire Peters to replace his current assistant in September, ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The position will once again give Peters — a former GOP clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, who was convicted for her role in a 2021 voting system breach driven by election conspiracy theories — dangerous influence over elections, including the critical ballot counting process. Curtis said he is hiring Peters to help ensure the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security can access ballots — something Padilla and Schiff note could violate both state and federal law.
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Talk about an on-the-take election crook. Here's one to draw to! Likely will find a way back to prison.
Tesla Robotaxi With No Driver Spotted Smashing Through Traffic Barriers — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Like a klutz on an obstacle course, a Tesla Robotaxi with no safety driver seemingly panicked after taking a wrong turn and plowed through a row of bollards, those springy traffic barriers that you are not supposed to run down.
The incident was captured in a video uploaded Monday to the r/SelfDrivingCars subreddit and first spotted by Electrek. It was taken by a rider sitting in the front passenger seat, who sounded progressively more concerned as it dawned on him what the Robotaxi was trying to do.
“It’s going through bollards,” the passenger says, as the car inches towards the barriers.
In the video, it appears the self-driving Tesla drove into a curb extension delineated by plastic bollards, thinking it was a right turn lane. But once it tried to turn onto the next street, it realized it was hemmed in.
“There’s bollards right here. You can’t go this way,” the passenger exhorts the cab. “Don’t do that!”
Tesla Robotaxi Rams through several Bollards and keeps going.
byu/bladerskb inSelfDrivingCars
The vehicle clearly recognizes the obstacles in the way and freezes in place for around a minute, occasionally fidgeting with the steering wheel and pulsing the brakes. Instead of reversing out, though, it eventually decides on a drastic course of action: driving straight through the bollards.
Luckily for everyone involved, the barriers were the flimsy plastic kind; otherwise, this might’ve ended up being fodder for the World Bollard Association.
The passenger, in any case, was in disbelief.
“It ran through the bollards,” he said. “Holy sh*t.”...
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Funny. I read an article the other day saying that deaths in auto accidents in cities would be lowered by driverless cars. It appears to me the only possibility of this is for the drivers who will no longer be behind the wheel.
People Are Rushing to Find Ways to Remove Claude’s AI Text Watermark — Gizmodo|AJ Dellinger
They're looking for a good scrub.
Earlier this month, Anthropic started placing an imperceptible label on all text produced using its Claude AI model to serve as an indicator that the material was generated with AI. The folks who don’t want it outed that they are using AI for work are now spending their hours looking for a way to scrub their outputs of that marker.
As Business Insider notes, the term “AI watermark remover” has started trending on Google, jumping 60% in search interest week over week, and an open-source GitHub project called Watermarks Remover has amassed more than 15,000 “stars” and thousands of forks with the promise to scrub any output of indicators that it came from AI. Sabrina Ramonov, an AI educator, created her own web-based tool for washing text of residual model markers.
Why the panic, exactly? Well, according to the creator of the Watermarks Remover tool, it’s a matter of privacy and attribution. “I am all for content attribution,” Guillaume Meyer, the creator of the popular GitHub project, told Business Insider. “I am against the watermarking technique, and that’s a very significant distinction.”
It’s probably fair to say that an AI watermark will create a false binary in many people’s minds. If some content carries the invisible marker, they’ll simply assume the entirety of that material was created with Claude, when it’s possible that only a small portion of it was AI-generated. And it’s not like people aren’t already out here trying to hit people with AI accusations. One only has to look at how popular Pangram and other so-called “AI detection” tools have gotten to see how weaponized something like this could be (albeit, most of the time the stakes are pretty low and amount to little more than “AI shaming”).
Likewise, there is concern that by slapping this marker on content, Anthropic and other companies that institute a similar watermark may be laying the groundwork for claiming ownership over certain material. Anthropic seems to have thought about that, and mentioned in a blog post that “A watermark only helps test whether Claude might have produced or processed the content. It doesn’t say anything about ownership or authorship and doesn’t change a user’s rights under our terms.” Of course, that’s only true until it isn’t. A blog post isn’t binding....
Here’s a question: how many of those tools do you think were made with AI?
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Here's a better question: How long do you think it will be before the larger part of what we once called reality will be AI?
Flock’s New AI Tool Does Much More Than Track License Plates — Gizmodo|Webb Wright
A Wired investigation found that cops can search for vehicles and their drivers using prompts describing location, time, and patterns of movement.
Controversial surveillance technology company Flock Safety has long insisted that its automated license plate readers (ALPRs) can’t recognize or track people’s faces. But they may as well be able to, thanks to a new AI tool which can reportedly identify vehicles—and their drivers—based on several other variables.
The new tool, called OS Investigate, is currently being tested with a small group of law enforcement agencies, according to a Wednesday report from Wired. Using code found on the Flock website’s login portal, Wired reporters and an independent security and privacy researcher who goes by the pseudonym Buchodi were able to reconstruct a mock-up of the experimental tool’s interface (without being able to access it directly).
The interface showed that OS Investigate lets officers search for vehicles via Flock’s network of cameras using natural language prompts. The system comes with sixty-nine prewritten prompts, Wired reports, each of which officers can edit before clicking submit. One such prompt tells the system to find “witnesses based on vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days] during [daily timeframe].” The investigation also found that while the system asks officers to provide a reason for making a particular search, it doesn’t appear to require typed reasons to be a certain length or include any particular details....
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You can have this "brave new world." I'm glad I won't live to see the train wreck that's coming.
Jesse Watters' Healthcare Plan: Use The Internet To Diagnose Yourself — Crooks and Liars|John Amato
Fox News host refuses to support healthcare for the working class.
Multimillionaire Fox News frat boy Jesse Watters sh*t on the health and safety of the working class by claiming he refuses to pay for those big babies who run to the doctor for bumps and bruises, refuse to work, and should use the internet to self-diagnose themselves, as he did.
I'm sure sitting in his chair and whining like a bitch puts a heavy strain on all his joints and muscles, just like construction work does.
Watters thinks he's funny, which he is not, but he's attacking the reality that children and adults need healthcare.
WATTERS: So I have my own plan for health care. It's called the Watters Plan.
Number one, the Somali pirates, they stop stealing our booty Number two, you slash immigration, that's just a supply and demand issue.
He begins by being racist, as usual.
And how about get a job Because most companies provide health care If you're 30 and went to grad school and are an Ethiopian barista, like your friend in Colorado, yeah, she doesn't have health insurance because she doesn't work.
WTF does this even mean? Being a barista is fucking working, and his use of racism never stops.
Also, MAHA, ever heard of it? Make America Healthy Again. It's called Eat Right and Exercise.
Maybe try that.
Sure, follow roadkill Kennedy's diet, fools. Eating right and exercising has never been promoted before until RFK Jr said it.
75% of adults suffer from one form of chronic disease or another.
Doing a search, a 2024 National Health Interview Survey using a narrower definition found 51.1% had at least one of 10 diagnosed chronic conditions and 26.4% had two or more
I do it, and I don't whine and go to the doctor for every ache and pain. I hurt my knee the other day at the beach.
I hyperextended it Now, I don't know if I hyperextended it I self-diagnosed But I didn't run to the doctor and, like, jack up everybody's health care bills.
I did my own research on the internet. And I'm almost as explosive as I used to be.
See, surf the internet and fix yourself. What a concept.
Now comes his conservative fantasies.
But we have to start treating everyone like babies Cradle to the grave health insurance I don't want that This is a self-reliant country built on rugged individualism.
And I'll pay for poor and elderly health care.
I will not pay for healthy, wealthy, hardworking Americans' health care....
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You can't debate with a deluded person. Waters has been brain damaged for some years now. It's obvious his "healthcare" method doesn't work. He proves it everytime he opens his mouth.
Multiple Arrests As Pardoned Nazi J6 Rioter Leads “Christian Crusader March” On Michigan City Council
Click On Detroit reports:
At least 22 people were arrested outside the Henry Ford Centennial Library as protesters gathered ahead of a Dearborn City Council meeting. As the meeting approached, riot police and riot police moved to break up the crowd as people rushed to enter the library. Police limited the number of people allowed inside, while a group of protesters remained outside throughout the meeting.
The demonstration followed social media posts promoting what organizers called a “Christian Crusader March on Dearborn.” Conservative activist Jake Lang and Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell were two of the organizers. Lang previously posted that the group would “not surrender to Islam” and called for an end to the “Islamification of America.”
Lang attempted to bring a Quran to the podium but was told he could not do so. “There’s no books or props allowed,” said a councilmember to Lang, who walked to the podium to speak during the meeting. “It’s over, t’s over. We will have our way. Come blood or sweat. We will have our way,” said Lang. After speaking, Lang began tearing the Quran and was escorted from the meeting by police.
"The Crusades were so successful that Muslims controlled SE Europe well into the 18th century." — unsavedheathen (comments)
"That asshole is on probation and wears an ankle monitor! Why is he allowed to travel the country to instigate violence? Why hasn't his probation been revoked? Can anyone explain this to me? I'm going to guess his probation officer is a MAGA supporter." — Octoberfurst (comments)
As regular readers know, Lang has been arrested multiple times in recent months all over the country in stunts intended incite racial and religious violence.
After a previous stunt in Dearborn (screenshots below), Lang claimed that he would sue police for not protecting him, prompting Assistant US Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon to offer her support in that lawsuit.
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He and his Nazi Xianists will shit andf fall back in it! Throw his stinking ass back in prison.
DOJ: Comey’s Seashell Were Threat To “Kill Trump” — Joe.My.God.|Joe Jervis
The Associated Press reports:
The Department of Justice is defending its prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, saying “there is no serious dispute†that a social media post of seashells he made last year could be understood as a threat against President Donald Trump. “There is no serious dispute that an objective viewer of Comey’s post could read it to mean ‘Kill President Trump,’†prosecutors wrote.
The arguments in motions late Tuesday represent the government’s most detailed explanation of its indictment and were filed in response to wide-ranging defense efforts to dismiss the case on grounds including that it constitutes a vindictive prosecution and that Comey’s post did not amount to a true threat.
Comey’s lawyers contend that investigators in the case misled judges, submitted documents containing false statements, withheld key facts and repeatedly came up empty in their efforts to prove that Comey intended a physical threat or knew that the number 86 could suggest violence.
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86 could mean about 85 things other than violence to a person not looking for revenge against another person. This is nothing more than a Kangaroo Court of retarded clowns being toadies for the criminal, Trump.
Todd Blanche’s One Promise: Dishonesty — The Bulwark|Mona Charen
TODD BLANCHE WAS DONALD TRUMP’S personal attorney, so it was natural that, when he was elevated to attorney general, a journalist asked whether he would “pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House?”
The correct answer to such a question is obvious. The Justice Department and I are committed to the impartial administration of justice. We will always make prosecution decisions based solely upon the facts and the law after a fair evaluation of the evidence.
But Blanche said something a little different.
No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that. The president, I mean, if I were to pledge I will be independent of the White House, what that means is that if President Trump says, ‘I want the Department of Justice to go after every violent criminal in this country,’ which is what he has said, what you’re saying to me is I should say, ‘No, sir, I’m not going to do it.’
What jumps out first about Blanche’s answer is the blithe refusal even to mouth (however disingenuously) the expected platitude. This is the Trumpian way. They don’t just break the rules behind closed doors; they shatter the rules in broad daylight. It’s not enough, for example, that the Trump Justice Department is denying resources to the team that investigates and prosecutes foreign corrupt practices; Trump issued an executive order pausing all such prosecutions. So it’s not news that Trump’s new attorney general will fail to seek impartial justice, but the refusal to even feign regard for impartial justice is new.
The substance of Blanche’s justification is also fatuous. Pledging to act independently of the White House doesn’t mean acting in every instance in direct opposition to the president. That’s absurd, and it’s not what independence requires. Nor could the president order the attorney general to “go after every violent criminal in this country,” since more than 98 percent of violent crimes are state offenses, not federal ones, and in any case the combined forces of the state and federal governments don’t have the resources to go after every violent criminal....
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The Trump Crime Syndicate continues their crime openly
'Complete sham:' Conservatives crushed as NYT kills Trump deficit dreams with single chart — Raw Story|Daniel Hampton
A New York Times chart showing the stark impact President Donald Trump's administration has had on the federal deficit made the rounds on social media Wednesday, prompting a mix of alarm and mockery, including among conservatives.
Steve Rattner's graphic, titled "The Deficit Is Projected to Keep Growing," tracks the federal budget deficit from Obama through a projected second Trump term, with red bars climbing toward a forecast $3.1 trillion by 2036.
"Trump promised to balance the budget," Rattner wrote. "Musk projected $2 trillion in savings. This year, the deficit grew by 18% — with $200 billion of that due to refunds of his illegal tariffs."
The Congressional Budget Office backs the core of the projection. Its Aug. 10 estimate pegged the fiscal 2026 deficit at $2.1 trillion, about $200 billion higher than February's forecast and a jump the agency tied largely to collapsed tariff revenue after the Supreme Court struck down Trump's emergency-powers tariffs 6-3 on Feb. 20. The prior year's deficit was $1.8 trillion.
Elon Musk's DOGE, meanwhile, never came close to its promised $2 trillion in savings.
The reality crashed on social media critics like a ton of bricks.
"This is very not good," wrote conservative attorney Gregg Nunziata.
Yahoo Sports writer Ben Fowlkes jabbed: "I mean yes we did cut funding to anything that actually helped people but at least we still managed to increase the deficit."
Ex-GOP Rep. Joe Walsh fumed, "Trump lied. Again. Musk lied. Again."
Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson mocked, "It's going great, MAGA. Splendid work."
Tech reviewer Zack Nelson called DOGE "a complete sham," while former California Secretary of State candidate Derek Cressman branded it "bogus."
Grant Stern, executive editor at Occupy Democrats, joked that Trump is "saddling our nation with debt just like Lisa Simpson foretold."
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We've been had. We've been hoodwinked. We've been bamboozled!
Sports Betting Site Boasts That It’s Letting Users Bet on Little League Players — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
If you thought the online sports betting industry was running out of controversies, think again: they’re now letting users bet on ten-year-old baseball players in the Little League.
As gambling experts Dustin Gouker and Eric Ramsey noted in a newsletter over the weekend, offshore sportsbooks are now allowing users to bet on the Little League World Series, an annual baseball tournament for children aged ten to 12 years that’s set to kick off later today.
While the practice is forbidden on state-regulated sportsbooks, offshore ones aren’t beholden to those rules.
“California is getting bet like they are the 1998 Yankees,” offshore sportsbook BetOnline brand manager Dave Mason boasted in a tweet on Sunday. “Almost half of the bets are on the youngins’ from the Golden State.”
Users on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform were appalled at the implication.
“Betting on children is repulsive,” one user replied. “Get help.”
Worse yet, it’s a practice that’s been going on for a while now.
“It feels like every summer we go through a cycle of discovery and outrage when people learn/remember that offshore sportsbooks take bets on kids playing baseball,” Gouker and Ramsey lamented.
Indeed, the Little League was forced to issue a statement almost exactly a year ago clarifying that “we feel strongly that there is no place for betting on Little League games” and that “no one should be exploiting the success and failures of children playing the game they love for their own personal gain.”
Over the last 79 years, the Little League has grown into an international phenomenon, with ESPN broadcasting entire games live. But that notoriety has also gained it plenty of attention for all the wrong reasons.
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Someone's moral core has disintegrated with this disgusting shit.
Flock’s Network Is Losing Value to Cops as More and More of Its Cameras Go Offline — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
As vandalism against its license plate-reading cameras and backlash against civic leaders who embrace them grows, Flock Safety is losing its surveillance coverage at a breakneck pace.
In the town of McFarland, Wisconsin, an $18,000 contract for six Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) from Flock was scrapped after the loss of 24 county-level cameras from earlier in the year, Ars Technica reported. While growing resentment from locals probably had something to do with the decision, McFarland officials cited their home county’s decision to end its relationship with the surveillance company, which affected some 140 law enforcement agencies that had been hooked into the county’s network.
“Once Dane County [police] lost their funding for Flock, we lost about half of the potential camera network within Dane County,” McFarland police chief Brian Redman told Ars in a statement. “I had to ask, ‘were we still going to get the return on our investment with that loss?’ With the network being chipped away, that wasn’t going to be the case.”
In their announcement of the cancellation, McFarland officials said it came “in light of a shrinking database in Dane County and input from residents.”
Further cancellations across Wisconsin followed the loss of Dane County’s Flock cameras, including four in the town of Monona, and a number in the University of Wisconsin and the town of Fitchburg....
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Like AI Centers, they are getting the message from Americans.
Teachers Warn That Students Are Losing the Ability to Think as They Lean on AI for Everything — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Students across the country are using AI models to complete assignments and write entire essays. Some of this constitutes cheating, but in many cases schools are allowing students to make some use of AI tools.
This is a slippery slop. As some experts argue, any intrusion of automation into the writing process isn’t just threatening students’ composition skills, but their entire ability to think.
“Writing is a technology for thinking,” cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg told the New York Times in a new essay mulling the consequences of sidestepping the hard work of writing.
Writing, the piece notes, helps develop all sorts of cognitive faculties, including building our working memory, executive planning skills, and our metacognition, or the ability to be aware of your own thinking.
For all the romanticism around writing, it’s also a form of drudgery. Kellogg says that drafting a basic essay is as mentally taxing as digging a ditch is physically exhausting. You have to really rack your brain to find the right word and organize ideas in a way that makes sense to a broader audience. When they’re manifested in the real world, you revise your ideas by going over them yourself or asking for feedback.
Writing, in other words, is inextricable from the labor that goes into it. And so when you bring in a piece of machinery that offers to do the process for you, it’s no longer writing, and by no extension, no longer exercising the brain.
An MIT study earlier this year found that people who used AI while they wrote an essay showed lower brain activity compared to people who didn’t. Moreover, the people who composed with AI struggled to remember a single line from the essays they just produced, with their brain activity staying at a reduced level even when they were later asked to write again without an AI’s help....
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One had to be pretty, pretty, pretty retarded not to see this coming.
Drain Lake Powell — The American Prospect|Ryan Cooper
The Colorado River Basin has a problem: It is severely short of water, particularly in its major reservoirs. Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the largest and second-largest reservoirs in the country, respectively, reached record lows this week. Powell in particular is at a level of 3,520 feet—just 30 feet above the intakes for its electrical generators.
What is to be done? As I wrote in a previous Prospect print issue, Western water policy is a ludicrous tangle of anachronistic legal precedents and outrageous federal subsidies. Water must be repriced; as my colleague Gabrielle Gurley points out, cattle feed farmers paying $30 an acre-foot (or about 0.009 cents per gallon) while cities pay between $500 and $2,000 per acre-foot is preposterous. That’s half the reason why the shortage has become so bad. Give something extremely valuable away for almost free, and people will waste it.
But any such reform will require a massive legal overhaul, and in the meantime there is a simple and straightforward way to start tackling the problem: Get rid of Lake Powell. Drill some holes in the bottom of that thing and drain ’er dry.
The argument is a simple one. Lake Powell does not directly supply any irrigation system, or any city except Page, Arizona, whose population is just 7,500, and a handful of small Navajo communities. And because it is smack in the middle of a hot, arid desert, and built in a porous sandstone canyon, it loses a tremendous amount of water to evaporation and seepage. It is extremely hard to figure out exactly how much is lost—the lake, when full, has something like 2,000 miles of shoreline—but scientists think it’s in the ballpark of 800,000 acre-feet per year. That’s about equal to New Mexico’s entire legal allotment from the river basin.
In short, water is the most important resource in the Southwest, and Lake Powell is losing literally hundreds of billions of gallons of it per year....
Indeed, it is critically important to start constructing some drain tunnels as a simple safety precaution. If Powell falls by another 30 feet, its power intakes will be sucking wind; if it falls another 120 feet below that, then so will the river outlet works—the only other way to let water out of the dam.
This “dead pool” level is still some distance above the bottom of the dam, and if it is reached, the water running in from the Upper Colorado and other tributaries might not be able to overcome evaporative losses for months at a time. In that case, the Grand Canyon would dry up and there would be no way to get Mead or the Lower Basin states their legally obligated water. A new outlet tunnel at the very bottom of the dam is needed to ensure that Glen Canyon Dam can be bypassed in the pinch.
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Our water supply. Our food supply is in danger. We were warned and have done little. Once they are gone so are we.
Trump Store Owner Screams During Arrest [VIDEO]
Patch Illinois reports:
Lisa Fleischmann, the owner of the Trump Truth Store, was arrested on a warrant after she missed a scheduled court appearance tied to charges of driving without a valid license and related traffic violations.
Authorities said Fleischmann, of Algonquin, was taken into custody and booked into the DuPage County Jail before later being released with a new court date.
Court records show the case stems from a December 2024 citation that escalated after multiple missed court appearances, according to the Lake & McHenry County Scanner.
The Lake County Scanner reports:
New bodycam video shows the owner of the Trump Truth Store in Crystal Lake yelling that she would sue the police before loudly screaming as officers arrested her on a warrant for failing to appear in court. The traffic stop took place after an officer saw her license plate was bent while she was driving near the former Spring Hill Mall in the West Dundee and Carpentersville area.
The bodycam video shows officers interacting with Fleischmann as she sat in her car before telling her “bad news” that there was a valid warrant for her arrest. Officers repeatedly told her to step out of the car as Fleischmann seemed confused about why she had a warrant. Officers handcuffed her and Fleischmann began saying, “This is ridiculous” and “This is unbelievable” as she asked what she did wrong.
Fleischmann began tensing up and screaming about the handcuffs. “This f—ing hurts,” she said while screaming, “get this thing off of me.” “I swear to god, I swear to god, I will sue the s–t out of you,” Fleischmann could be heard saying as she screamed before being placed into a squad car.
There’s much more at the second link, including that Fleischmann faced eviction from an earlier location because “she refused to keep her merchandise inside her store despite numerous requests by the landlord and the Village of Huntley” and that she loves “triggering” Trump critics.
Excerpts from the video below are going wildly viral on TikTok. Watch all of it and you’ll see why. Note that she’s wearing a “Trump” necklace and that Trump’s face is on the front and back of her elegant tube top dress.
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Ignore a subpoena. FAFO.
What Alexander Hamilton Got Wrong About the ‘Least Dangerous’ Branch — Truthdig|Bill Blum
The "judicial supremacy" feared by early critics of the high court has come to pass. "Popular constitutionalism" could be the antidote for restoring democracy.
If you want to understand how the Supreme Court became the sinkhole of ideological extremism and corruption it is today under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, you have to go back to the beginning and examine the institution’s own origin story. A good place to start is with the debates on ratification of the Constitution that played out in 1787 and 1788 in what are now known as the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, in which the pros and cons of replacing the Articles of Confederation with a new national charter were laid out in passionate detail.
Totaling 85 essays, Alexander Hamilton was the author of 51 of the Federalist Papers; John Jay of New York and James Madison of Virginia penned the remainder. Of the three, Hamilton was the staunchest advocate for creating an independent federal judiciary fortified with the power of “judicial review” that would enable judges to declare acts of Congress and the executive unconstitutional....
It will take a long time to produce meaningful change, but as we move forward, we should remember that it took the radical right decades of organizing by groups like the Federalist Society and the promotion of originalism to highjack the Supreme Court. With that history in mind, we need to prepare for a marathon, not a sprint. More than anything else, we must be prepared to win.
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Hamilton? Where have I heard that name before?
Madison Cawthorn And An Underpants Model Jan. 6-er Lost The Same Republican Primary Last Night — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Let’s start with the most upsetting news from last night’s primaries, which is that Madison Cawthorn lost his race. Did you know he was running for Congress in Florida because he moved there to run for Congress? And then he lost.
This was the seat Byron Donalds was giving up so he could run for governor, and as the Daily Beast explains, it was bonkers. There were two felons in the running in Florida’s 19th, and Donald Trump had pardoned both. There was a January 6-er underpants model. (One of the convicted pardoned felons, obviously.) “Among his backers are election denier Mike Lindell, Rep. Lauren Boebert and General Mike Flynn,” the Beast explains.
The other convicted felon was former Rep. Chris Collins, the insider trading guy from New York. Two convicted felons, two former congressmen, only one of whom started yelling about all the orgies he got invited to in Washington before he got kicked out the door. He left Congress in disgrace.
But he tried to come back, by moving to Florida! Just like all those other people did! And he lost.
Donald Trump endorsed somebody else who wasn’t even a convicted felon who screamed about orgies. Her name was Catalina Lauf, and she also lost. She had also run for Congress before, in Illinois. Instead, out of the 10 candidates running, the winner was a conservative radio station owner named Jim Schwartzel, we guess because Donald Trump’s endorsement isn’t worth shit anymore, especially now that all he really cares about is Natalie.
Natalie needs a new pair of shoes! We’re not buying them for her, we’re just saying....
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"Crooks r Us" is the mantra of the fascist mob.
Trump Drops “Good Genetics” Bomb and Reopens a Dark Chapter in American History — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann.
Trump’s “racehorse theory” of humanity is a racist lie that was built to justify slavery and Jim Crow, and then paved the road to Auschwitz.
Yesterday at the White House, Trump held a photo op with a 16-year-old lifeguard, Ryder Williams, who’d pulled a drowning ten-year-old out of a dangerous surf in Santa Cruz. For any other president, it would have been a sweet, feel-good moment. Trump, though, turned it into something dark and most of our press either missed it or politely pretended to.
After giving the award, Trump looked at the blonde boy’s parents and said:
“You did a good job. It’s good genetics. When you look at him, you can see, really good.”
People in the room chuckled nervously as some probably realized what Trump was really saying. Others seemed clueless. Mediaite wrote the story up and wondered out loud if Trump was trying to invoke the infamous Sydney Sweeney “great jeans” commercial.
But Trump wasn’t riffing on the jeans ad. He was sharing, in the Oval office and on camera, something he’s been saying for forty years, his racist “racehorse genetics” theory of human evolution, and it’s something that when it comes out of other people’s mouths has ended careers.
For example, back in 1988 on Martin Luther King Day, CBS’s sports commentator Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder was asked by a reporter about the progress that Black people were making in the field of sports.
Snyder told the reporter that Black athletes were doing well because “the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid,” and that a Black athlete was better that most whites “because he’s been bred to be that way.” CBS fired him the next day because everybody in America understood instantly what he had said and where it came from.
Thirty-eight years later, the President of the United States says essentially the same thing about human beings in the White House and gets laughs and a write-up about denim.
This was not a slip of the tongue. The same year Jimmy The Greek was fired, Trump told Oprah on her show that his success was the result of being “born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.” (Forget the fact that his father gave him ~$400 million.) He told a rally audience in 2016 that with him “winning is innate” and some people just “have the winning gene.”...
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Josef Mengele is on the way back? Yikes!
Conservatives 'consider the unthinkable' as rural Texans turn on MAGA gov — Alternet|Alex Henderson
...Opposition to data centers, according to Politico's Shelby Webb, is a major problem for Abbott — as they are drawing stern opposition from both Republicans and Democrats. But it isn't the only problem.
"Rural voters may not stop the spread of data centers," Webb explains, "but they could stop Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The Republican is bleeding support from small towns as he seeks a fourth term because of two late-emerging issues: power-hungry tech campuses and a planned $33 billion electric transmission build-out. Pushback against Abbott points to larger fears about losing rural identities, but also to everyday concerns about construction, pollution and tight supplies of water and electricity."
According to Webb, "Some longtime conservatives are now considering the unthinkable — voting in November for a Democrat to be Texas' next governor. And Abbott's August directive to pause Texas data center grid approvals hasn’t convinced all of them to vote for him."
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Unthinkable no longer.
White House insiders 'irked and trying to box out' Trump’s favorite aide — Alternet|Sarah K.Burris
While many members of the White House team flocked to defend President Donald Trump's aide Natalie Harp, behind the scenes, there are aides talking about how annoyed they are with her.
Harp was part of a recent book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about Trump's staff. According to the book, Harp is always with the president and carries around a battery-operated printer so he can read things on paper. Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff (Georgia) mocked Trump for always needing her around and having a number of "emotional security staffers." Trump allies immediately launched a flood of attacks Ossoff for claiming they were having an affair, though that wasn't what he said.
While some rushed to defend Harp, others were quietly leaking their problems with her, CNN said on Wednesday.
Senior White House reporter Betsy Klein explained that the ordeal "really speaks to how President Trump has really disrupted traditional Republican Party power structures and hierarchies, and that has created a vacuum of talent. And in that vacuum, you have seen people coming from nontraditional political backgrounds. And the one overwhelming thing that many of them have in common is loyalty to President Trump and to his movement."...
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The diaper patrol
Trump aide Natalie Harp nurses his decline — Salon|Amanda Marcotte
The president's defensive reaction to rampant speculation reveals his fear of aging
...Harp’s devotion to Trump is ecstatic to the point of religiosity. When she worked at One America Network, she would end her segments by quoting Trump or the Bible, as if they were one and the same....
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Trump or the Bible? Not eqivocal.
Judge Threatens Trump DOJ W/ JAIL TIME Over Epstein Files — Crooks and Liars|Cliff Schecter
Judge Emmet Sullivan, 41-year veteran of the bench, told Trump's DOJ its lawyers would face jail time if they keep stonewalling on releasing all the Epstein files.
Today we had our usual roundtable for The Epstein Update--myself, Ellie Leonard & Kait Justice, but the main topic, gleefully, was unusual. Judge Emmet Sullivan, 41-year veteran of the bench, told Trump's DOJ its lawyers would face jail time if they keep stonewalling on releasing all the horrors of the Epstein files.
Ellie was actually in the courtroom for it. When Trump DOJ lawyer/hack Andrew Block said he couldn't commit to a time frame--in his attempt to continue the cover-up--but it would be “forthcoming,” Sullivan quipped: “Christmas is forthcoming." He followed up with: "You want me to issue another order and say, I really mean it this time?”
Finally, Sullivan was clear the attorneys be forewarned he's a judge who'll “enforce legitimate judicial orders” with whatever means available, including prison. He closed with, “I’m not in a habit of blindsiding people," and have "absolutely no desire to go down that road again,” But he also said that they had better be prepared that prison time for contempt was "not a threat. That's a promise."...
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About time. Just do it!
Max Miller Blames Ex-Wife After Unions Pull Support
Politico reports:
GOP Rep. Max Miller is fretting that the loss of support from a key constituency could damage his reelection prospects — even as his party base continues to stand with him in spite of serious allegations of domestic abuse centered on his ex-wife and young child.
Miller is claiming that multiple unions are turning their backs on him as he seeks a third term in office — a result, he argues, of allegations raised in his ongoing public marital dispute with his ex-wife Emily Moreno, the daughter of Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno.
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Manly man blames wife. Of course he does!
Sen. Darline Graham Face-Plants In SC Senate Debate
The New York Times reports:
It was in response to a question about whether Taiwan and the South China Sea are of national-security interest to the United States that Ms. Graham drew a blank. “I’m just going to be honest here,” she said. “I’m not that informed on national security.”
Gasps and boos could be heard in the audience. Mr. Graham, among the Senate’s most hawkish defenders of U.S. national security, had dedicated his Senate career to foreign policy issues.
Ms. Graham offered that she supported the military and then leaned on her oft-repeated argument for voters who doubted her qualifications to serve in the Senate: Her status as a political outsider is an asset. “I’m not a polished politician up here,” she said.
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"Give me about 8 more years and I will try and get this in my head," she just might be suggesting.
Trump faces backlash as 'clown crew' policy hits a brick wall — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
After President Donald Trump’s military campaign against Iran failed to achieve any of his stated goals, his strategy shifted to emphasize economic pressure that he hopes will force capitulation. But according to new reporting from Politico, his plan has resulted in little more than mockery from the Iranian regime, and it’s unlikely to achieve anything more.
“Trump is waiting for Iran to cave to his economic pressure,” Politico explains. “Tehran may be willing to wait even longer. Even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promises a level of economic isolation ‘never seen before,’ former Trump administration officials, U.S. ambassadors and other Middle East experts are skeptical that tightening the economic vise will force Iran to relinquish its desire to toll ships passing through the State of Hormuz and make the other concessions Trump is demanding to bring an end to the war.”
“It’s an attrition campaign, and I am sure Treasury tweaks this or that to fill gaps or expand coverage of sanctions,” former ambassador James Jeffrey – who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term – told Politico. “But, it’s hard to believe [there will be] something decisive after 20 years of U.S. sanctions and Iranian experience of going around them.”
His statement highlights the asymmetry of the stand-off. As Politico explains, “The Trump administration is staring down a consequential midterm election amid an unpopular war that has sent oil prices back up to roughly $90 a barrel and helped push long-term borrowing costs to their highest level in nearly two decades as hope dims that a peace deal is near. Iran’s leaders, meanwhile, see the conflict as existential, giving Tehran reason to absorb the extraordinary economic pain rather than accept terms it believes could imperil the regime — especially as U.S. inflation remains elevated.”
According to Politico, former administration officials warn that Iran has an outsized incentive to muscle through the pain, making the success of Trump’s blockage strategy dubious. “I think the economic pressure would need to hit them in new ways we haven’t seen so far to change the mindset of the regime,” one former Trump administration official told Politico.
What’s more, Iranian leadership has been bluntly dismissive of Trump’s plan, and publicly mocked U.S. efforts to sanction them into submission. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, posted, “Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement.” He added, “Bessent and [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth are way out of their league. Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the mess you made.”...
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His little war has exploded in his face.
Trump’s $500/month Social Security cuts will go nuclear in Alabama: report — Alternet.org|Adam Lynch
AL.com reports that the deep-red state of Alabama is one of the impoverished states lining up for a beating from presidential inaction from the White House it created in the last election.
“Barring action from Congress, millions of Americans who depend on Social Security could see their benefits cut by as much as 24 percent in 2032,” reports AL.com. “The deep cuts would average about $500 a month.”
One-in-five Americans – 63 million in total – are slated to lose monthly income if Social Security’s retirement program gets a 24 percent cut today, said AL.com. And for Alabama, this will mean an average cut of $486
Total benefit cuts would top 1 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 40 states with the largest economic impact in red states like Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, and West Virginia, among others
“The latest projections from the Social Security Board of Trustees show that the reserves of the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund are set to run out in the fourth quarter of 2032. After that point, Social Security would only be able to pay 76 percent of promised benefits,” AL.com reports.
Meanwhile, the Big Beautiful Bill that Trump and Republicans passed is preparing to deliver more immediate pain from an entirely different angle, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
“At the time of the OBBBA’s passage, it faced widespread criticism from Democrats. A July 2025 Quinnipiac poll found that 44 percent of Americans thought the bill would hurt rather than help them personally. The same month, longtime GOP strategist Karl Rove predicted on Fox News that the bill could pose problems for his party in the next round of elections.”
“I think it'll have a huge impact on 2026, because, remember, as these changes, particularly the Medicaid changes, come into effect they’re going to have, people are going to be losing their coverage,” said. Rove.
Meanwhile, voters are not buying into the tax cut Republicans and Trump touted during the bill’s passage....
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If you thought J6 was a coup attempt wait until you see what happens if this shit goes down! It will be the end of many.
New Poll: Voters Oppose Integrating Israeli Military into Pentagon — Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community|Newswire Editor
On Tuesday, Demand Progress and IMEU Policy Project released a poll, first reported in Zeteo, showing that a clear majority of voters oppose a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, known as Section 219, that would further integrate the Israeli military and Israeli military companies into the Pentagon—giving them special access to U.S. military systems, sensitive technologies and defense supply chains. The military authorization bill, which includes Section 219, was passed by the House in July and awaits a vote in the Senate....
— 61 percent of voters oppose a military authorization bill that would deepen the integration of Israeli weapons companies into the Pentagon at a level higher than any other country—this includes 78 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of independents
— 52 percent of voters agreed with members of Congress who voted in July to cut $3.3 billion in taxpayer funding for weapons to the Israeli military—this includes 60 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independents
— 51 percent of voters believe that Israel benefits more from the relationship between the U.S. and Israel—this includes 58 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independents
— A plurality of voters, 49 percent, believe President Donald Trump is providing too much support to the Israeli government, compared to only 33 percent who said the president is giving Israel the right amount of support and just eight percent who say he’s giving Israel too little support.
“This poll is a flashing red warning sign for any member of Congress who supports the defense authorization bill. A clear majority of voters do not support further integrating the Israeli military and Israeli military companies into the Pentagon, which the NDAA is set to do,” said Demand Progress Senior Policy Advisor Cavan Kharrazian. “It’s time for Congress to listen to the American people for once, and not the same voices who always want to cut Israel a blank check.”
“Israel is a nation committing genocide that just dragged the American people into a disastrous war that is still hitting our pocketbooks. It is the height of absurdity that Congress is even considering a proposal to become more entangled with the Israeli military and use our tax dollars to subsidize their weapons companies,” said IMEU Policy Project Executive Director Margaret DeReus. “Senators take an oath to do what is best for the American people above all; to uphold that oath, they must scrap this ridiculous proposal.”...
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Vote all Trump Nazis out!
Ken Paxton Hit With Massive Blow As Report Exposes Failed 'Voter Fraud' Crusade — Crooks and Liars|David Edwards
An investigation into Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's six-year crackdown on noncitizen voting found that he produced just one charge from a referral list of 53 suspects.
Through a public records request, NBC News obtained 53 names referred to Paxton's office for investigation — and only one, Ada Otuka, was formally charged with noncitizen voting. The NBC News report was published on Monday.
Paxton, who is running as a Republican for the U.S Senate, has been silent on his failed prosecutorial crusade against "widespread" voter fraud, something that experts say is wildly overblown.
The other two noncitizens prosecuted in Texas since 2020, Eliseo Morales-Tapia and Samuel Hall, were not on the referral list at all, NBC News found.
Last summer, Paxton's office announced investigations into more than 100 cases of potential noncitizen voting spanning the 2020, 2022, and 2024 elections....
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The soloution: Vote Talarico!
National Symphony Orchestra bails on Trump's Kennedy Center after half-century run — Raw Story|Matthew Chapman
The National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) just announced its first season away from the Kennedy Center in more than half a century — a scattered, six-venue exile that comes as ticket sales at its former home have cratered.
The orchestra will split 64 concerts across venues including George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium, the Music Center at Strathmore, George Mason University's performing arts center, and D.C.'s Lincoln Theatre, after being forced out by a reconstruction project approved by Trump-allied Kennedy Center board members, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
The announcement came a stunning five-and-a-half weeks before the season's September 26 opener — five months later than usual — after the NSO reportedly struggled to get routine budget approval from the center's board.
Music director Gianandrea Noseda tried to put a hopeful spin on the upheaval, saying, "I'd like to think of this year of the National Symphony Orchestra as a regional touring orchestra."
The NSO's audience has been steadily vanishing: ticket sales reportedly plunged from 72 percent of capacity in 2024 to just 41 percent last season, per The Post, but the NSO hasn't confirmed those figures. Former Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser said the organization's usual processes "don't seem to be functioning with any kind of sensible direction right now."
Nor is the NSO alone. A number of other performers have pulled out of the Kennedy Center in the last year, and the Washington National Opera withdrew in January.
The chaos traces back to the Kennedy Center's 2025 takeover by a board of Trump loyalists, who added Trump's name to the building before a federal judge ordered it removed. The board has since voted to close the complex for two years of renovations and, in an apparent workaround to the judge's order, approved inscribing "Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump" beneath the center's signage anyway.
With ticket sales already sliding and the season's timeline squeezed, arts administrators warn the late announcement could further depress attendance and demoralize musicians.
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One more unforgivable sin by Trump.
The touch of Trump. The death of the Kennedy Center.
His disgrace of our great country.
Crowd erupts as Trump foe mocks his MAGA 'scandal piñata' opponent — Raw Story|Nicole Charky-Chami
Georgia Senate candidate and Trump foe Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) took a swipe at Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA) that got laughs from a crowd on Tuesday.
Ossoff and Collins are vying to represent Georgia in the Senate. During a campaign event in Columbus, Georgia, joined by Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) — another President Donald Trump adversary — Ossoff launched a jab at the MAGA candidate endorsed by the president.
"This scandal piñata, Mike Collins," Ossoff said. "Every time you shake Congressman Collins, new misdeeds fall out. Have you seen it?"
The audience cracked up at the comment.
"Mike Collins is pro-war, he's pro-tariffs, he's pro-cutting your health care," Ossoff added. "He's a bigot and a Trump puppet."
Ossoff has been a sharp critic of Trump and just days ago suggested that the president had different priorities in a biting speech.
"While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings," Ossoff said. "He golfs and trades stocks. So he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar."
Collins has faced his own share of controversies, including a House Ethics Committee investigation over allegations that he misused congressional funds and paid an intern who allegedly performed no work while dating his then-chief of staff. The Senate candidate's campaign has also been rocked by high staff turnover, an incident involving a former aide's participation in a group chat with white nationalists and renewed scrutiny over his history of racially charged social media posts....
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Ossoff for President 2028!
Speculation swirls after love letters from Trump’s ‘human binky’ resurface — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) ignited an online firestorm over the weekend after taking a jab at President Donald Trump’s unusually close relationship with his 35-year-old female aide Natalie Harp, leading to a trove of adoring letters she wrote the president to resurface.
Speaking at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, Ossoff argued that Trump would rather “build his ballroom and travel with Natalie” than “do his job,” a remark that created an explosion of online interest in Harp, who has been referred to as Trump's "human binky." Search queries on Google for Harp’s name increased by 1,600% this week compared to the previous week, and an increase of 5,000% when compared with the same period last year, resulting in Harp’s unnerving letters resurfacing.
“You are all that matters to me,” Harp wrote in a 2023 letter to Trump viewed and confirmed as authentic by The New York Times, a letter that the Times claimed “unnerved people around” the president. “I don’t ever want to let you down.”
In the same letter, Harp thanked Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life,” and in another letter, exclaimed: “I want to bring you joy,” and that she felt “like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”
Reacting to the resurfaced letters, law professor and ex-Biden administration official Topher Spiro wagered that “someday we’re all gonna find out that Ossoff was right.”
Seth Abramson, an attorney, author and retired professor, suspected there was far more to Trump and Harp’s relationship than currently known.
“Anyone else starting to feel like there’s a scandal hiding behind all this that’s absolutely disgusting?” Abramson wrote in a social media post on X. “Because the White House and all its friends lost it today just because Natalie Harp was mentioned in public. I feel like the whole nation’s Spidey-senses should be tingling.”
Details on Harp’s past have also resurfaced amid the growing scrutiny.
“She doesn't call me. I've accepted that's the way it is,” Harp’s paternal grandmother, Dolores ‘Dee Dee’ Harp, told the Daily Mail in June.
In an exclusive report, the Daily Mail uncovered Natalie Harp’s family “secret” that left her and her mother estranged from other family members. Natalie Harp’s father died in 2020 in what was ruled a suicide, but according to Preston Harp, Natalie Harp’s older brother, Natalie Harp “wanted to say [her father] died in his sleep.”
Preston Harp refused to conceal the manner of his father’s death and informed his extended family of his father’s suicide, leading to a “family fallout,” the Daily Mail reported.
As to Natalie Harp’s relationship with Trump – one reportedly so close it’s unsettled the White House – Preston Harp described it as “very unhealthy.”
“She's just like his fan club,” Preston Harp told the Daily Mail.
Other details of Natalie Harp’s relationship with Trump have also resurfaced, including an incident where she moved into the women’s locker room of Trump’s Bedminster golf club in 2023 just to be closer to the president after being denied a room.
Trump was also captured on camera giving Natalie Harp a kiss as he brought her up stage during an event in 2019, and on Monday, Headquarters – the digital media project launched by former Vice President Kamala Harris – shared “unearthed video” of Natalie Harp “personally” typing out Trump’s social media posts while sitting beside him.
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Did he grab her by the ...?
Measles Used to Be in Our Rearview Mirror. Now Cases Are Reaching Record Highs — ProPublica|Patricia Callahan
The U.S. recently reached a grim milestone: As of July 23, more measles cases have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than in any year since 1991. It took less than seven months to blow past the three-decade high recorded last year.
This potentially deadly disease is easily prevented. Shots are widely available and, in many cases, free. Still, since the beginning of last year, more than 4,850 people here have been infected, and three have died. Among them were two unvaccinated girls in West Texas whose deaths made national headlines.
It may feel like the continuous stream of cases is just the way things are now. But it is dangerous to shrug off the resurgence of measles. In a story I reported earlier this year, I showed what’s happened in parts of the world that have let their guard down to vaccine-preventable diseases. My reporting found that long-forgotten scourges roared back, killing and disabling children. Even countries that made what seemed like subtle changes to immunization policies suffered disastrous consequences years later.
How Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Vaccine Agenda Risks a Resurgence of Deadly Childhood Plagues
Babies were born blind, deaf and with intellectual disabilities because their mothers caught rubella in the early weeks of pregnancy. Parents saw why diphtheria used to be known as “the strangling angel of children.” Doctors told me they couldn’t undo the damage when these horrors returned. Modern medicine can do a lot of things, but it can’t reverse paralysis from polio.
The story also showed how Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official, and President Donald Trump have been transforming a government that for decades promoted the lifesaving benefits of shots into one that sows doubts about their safety. Last week, the president issued another executive order that’s sure to fuel further hesitancy about the shot that has protected children from measles, mumps and rubella for decades.
It’s a sharp departure for a government that, since the 1960s and with bipartisan support, built vaccination programs that shielded kids from deadly and disabling diseases. Federal and state health leaders strengthened those policies based on lessons learned from measles outbreaks. That’s because measles, among the most contagious diseases in history, is almost always the first vaccine-preventable disease to strike when immunization rates fall....
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A country that forsakes its children forsakes its future. We have tied a millstone around our own necks with this disablity to comprehend what we are doing.
Florida Republican could face death penalty under child abuse law he championed — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
A Florida Republican from Donald Trump's home district could potentially face the death penalty under a law he had championed as a state legislator.
Mike Caruso, the Palm Beach County clerk of courts and a staunch ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis, was arrested Tuesday morning on child sexual abuse charges, and a plugged-in reporter in the state pointed out a morbid irony in the case.
"As a FL legislator, Mike Caruso supported death penalty for pedophiles in 2023," said Axios reporter Marc Caputo. "Now he has been arrested for allegedly molesting his grandson. The state plans to present the case to a grand jury and that could lead to his own execution if he’s charged and convicted under that law."
Florida passed a law in 2023 that allows the death penalty for defendants convicted of sexual battery on a child under 12, and sources with knowledge of the allegations told the Miami Herald that Caputo's alleged victim was younger than 5 years old.
Caruso, who had been running unopposed in Tuesday's Republican primary, was arrested that same morning on suspicion of molestation, kidnapping, luring and enticing a child, lewd and lascivious exhibition and child abuse, according to an arrest affidavit.
The charges are related to three separate incidents, the Herald reported, and the boy's parents reported their suspicions to law enforcement after the little boy acted out sexually at home.
The Florida law calling for the death penalty for pedophiles is intended in part to challenge the 2008 Supreme Court precedent in Kennedy v. Louisiana, which found that execution was too harsh for a child sexual assault case that did not result in death.
The governor's office declared an intention to challenge that precedent after DeSantis signed the bill into law.
Caruso was previously accused of child sexual abuse, but investigators later determined those allegations to be unfounded after interviewing the child and the child's mother.
He was also the subject of other reports to the Florida Department of Children and Families, according to records, but details about those cases are not public...
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A big one bites the dust.
MAGA declares movement dead as telling omens rock superfans: 'Might burn my MAGA hat' — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
In the wake of a “Trump Superstore” in Tennessee shuttering due to a lack of business, several former supporters of President Donald Trump took the shop’s imminent closure as an omen that the MAGA movement had officially died.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw someone wearing a MAGA hat or Trump shirt,” wrote former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), previously one of Trump’s most loyal followers before their split last year amid disputes over Jeffrey Epstein.
Located near Knoxville, Tennessee, the Trump merchandise store is selling its remaining stock at a 50% discount ahead of its eventual – and permanent – closure, Slate reported.
Bill Hays, the owner of the store, said his shop was closing due to a “lack of business,” a claim corroborated by a part-time employee named Dan, Slate reported.
Another Trump-themed store in Illinois also ran into trouble in recent months – the Trump Truth Store in Crystal Lake, which temporarily closed in April due to a drop in sales.
“Sales were really slow,” said Lisa Fleischmann, the owner of Trump Truth Store, speaking with The Chicago Tribune.
Fleischmann, who the next month would be arrested in a chaotic scene on a warrant for driving without a license, blamed the plummeting interest in Trump-themed merchandise squarely on the president's decision to launch the deeply unpopular war against Iran.
“It all started with the war. It was dead as a door nail the minute that happened,” Fleischmann said....
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We'd better stand over its grave til we're sure that it's dead.
Trump 'miscalculated badly' as BBC nightmare threatens to expose his kids: analysis — Raw Story|Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump's own words could come back to haunt him — and his children and son-in-law.
Salon's Sophia Tesfaye discussed how the president's BBC lawsuit could reveal more information about his statements on Jan. 6, 2021, and his family's connection to the events that day. It's tied to the question around Trump's statement and what he meant when he told a crowd "fight like hell" before a group of insurrectionists attacked the U.S. Capitol.
But Trump might not have realized his previous legal strategy would backfire, Tesfaye argued.
"He miscalculated badly," Tesfaye wrote. "As a public service corporation, the BBC operates under a royal charter that explicitly bars it from entering into out-of-court financial settlements to make litigation disappear. It cannot cut a check to sweep away Trump’s claims. The corporation is legally bound to fight until a verdict is reached — or until Trump himself gives up. And its defense team, anchored by the First Amendment firm Ballard Spahr, has used that obligation to go straight at the people closest to Trump on Jan. 6."
Although Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner have dodged BBC subpoenas from behind their Miami compound, using the Secret Service to block the network, Tesfaye explained. That could delay the process, but it can't stop the lawsuit Trump started, which his children will eventually have to face.
"And if the case proceeds, they may have to say so under oath," Tesfaye wrote....
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"The stone's been cast and blood's thicker than water,
All the sins of the family fall on the daughter." — The Sins of a Family - P.F. Sloan
Even College Students Have Stopped Hanging Out — The Atlantic|Rose Horowitch
The loneliness crisis comes to campus.
If anyone were to be immune to America’s loneliness epidemic, it would be college students. For years, Americans have been going to fewer parties and spending more time alone. But college has historically been about socializing—or, let’s just say it, partying—as much as it has been about education. It’s where young people escape parental supervision, move in with roommates, and encounter thousands of potential new friends.
But the antisocial century has arrived on campus. Today’s students spend much less time socializing than past generations did. In 1994, 32 percent of college seniors spent more than six hours a week partying. By 2026, that was 21 percent, according to an analysis of survey data by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. The percentage who spend more than six hours a week socializing face-to-face with friends fell from 74 to 65 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the share of first-year students who reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the past two decades. (These surveys are not nationally representative, but they line up with what professors, administrators, and students told me they have observed anecdotally.)
Nationally, college students report higher rates of loneliness than adults do. On the National Survey of Student Engagement, run out of Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, more students report having positive interactions with professors than with peers. A rising senior at MIT told me that, despite being involved in Greek life and athletics, he eats alone most days. “I feel like I’m somebody who seeks social interactions,” he said, yet “I would say I am alone at least four or five days a week.” (He spoke anonymously because he didn’t want to be perceived as criticizing MIT when he still needs letters of recommendation from the faculty.) University leaders now find themselves in the odd position of encouraging students to spend more time goofing off with friends.
Researchers who track social interactions have several theories as to what’s going on. The first is that smartphones and social media are to blame. Much of the increase in loneliness occurred during the 2010s, at the same time that the iPhone was becoming ubiquitous, Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy and management at UCLA, told me. Hours spent on social media crowded out time that people might previously have devoted to social interactions. And it’s easy for students to feel that their social life pales in comparison with what they see in highlight reels on Instagram and TikTok.
Meanwhile, extracurricular activities, once a mainstay of campus social life, have mutated into a way to stand out to employers in an era of grade inflation. Especially at elite universities, clubs now more closely resemble jobs than socializing opportunities. Finance and consulting clubs require students to submit résumés, sit for interviews, and prepare mock cases or deliverables. Improv, a cappella, and even some volunteering clubs accept only a distinguished few. Cat Moore, who spent six years as the University of Southern California’s director of belonging, told me that students were busier than ever with extracurriculars, jobs, and internship applications. Even when they tried to build in time for socializing, it frequently tipped into networking. “USC had over 1,000 student clubs, yet their loneliness is out of control,” Moore said. “So the answer is not more clubs. The answer is not more programming.”
The coronavirus pandemic seems to have had a lasting effect on in-person interaction on campus. This is partly a matter of psychology. Many current college students were in middle school when classes and activities went remote. They missed out on a crucial period of learning to interact with other people, Ryan Patel, an assistant director of psychiatry at Ohio State University, told me. “When you lose practice doing those things, it can affect your ability to do them now,” Patel said. College administrators have started to pick up on students’ stunted social development. Justin Schwartz, the chancellor of University of Colorado Boulder, told me that he and his colleagues now have to support students through challenges that many would previously have faced in adolescence, such as trying alcohol for the first time and having their first romantic relationships—and accompanying heartbreaks. From 2019 to 2024, the share of college students who said they’d never had sex rose by 10 percentage points, according to the National College Health Assessment....
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Oh Lonesome Me - Don Gibson
Trump’s Latest Catch-22 for Immigrants — The American Prospect|Patrick Donn Dimasin
Immigrants looking to apply for green cards will face a larger hurdle in an already arduous application process: a deregulated public charge test. Late last month, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) finalized a new rule broadly expanding the types of public benefits that, if used, would cause a green card application to be denied. The new public charge rule will be effective later this fall on September 18.
“Public charge” first emerged as a concept in immigration law under the Immigration Act of 1882. The law expanded the ranks of excludable immigrants to include convicts, lunatics, and “any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The law, however, did not explicitly define what factors would render someone a public charge.
The lack of a clear definition meant that, for over a hundred years, determinations of whether an immigrant was a public charge were made solely at an immigration officer’s discretion on a case-by-case basis. The winds shifted, however, when the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) published the first official public charge guidance in 1999.
The 1999 guidance only considered two types of public benefits as grounds for inadmissibility—that is, a reason to deny a green card application: cash assistance for income maintenance, which includes programs like Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and long-term institutionalization at the government’s expense. For around two decades, the 1999 guidance provided clarity for both INS adjudicators and prospective green card applicants without barring applicants from using other forms of public assistance that they are entitled to.
Then in 2019 came the Trump administration’s first attempt to change the public charge rule. The 2019 rule, unlike the 1999 guidance, formally required USCIS officers’ public charge determinations to follow the regulation exactly. But in practice, the rule gave USCIS adjudicators more discretion in making public charge determinations by increasing the types of public benefits that could count against someone’s green card application.
Almost immediately, lawsuits from multiple states against the 2019 rule were filed, resulting in its invalidation in lower courts. The Biden administration subsequently dropped its defense of the 2019 public charge rule in the appellate courts and constrained public charge determinations to the two public benefits listed in the 1999 guidance.
This brings us to today, where the 2026 rule rescinds the Biden-era public charge regulation. Instead of only considering the two aforementioned public benefits, every single kind of public benefit—on both the state and federal level—could now be considered in a public charge determination. In what it calls a “totality of the circumstances analysis,” the new rule allows USCIS adjudicators to count age, health, family status, finances, educational background, and even the use of public benefits by an applicant’s dependents, regardless of that dependent’s status, against that applicant’s chances for approval. Just about any immigrant can be said to fit that qualification.
A CHILLING EFFECT WILL be felt by millions of immigrant families across the nation. Immigrant families where one or more individuals are looking to apply for a green card will be forced to choose between their status in the U.S. and public benefits that they and their families rely on. Still, many of these families will choose to forgo their benefits....
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"Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees" — Plane Wreck at Los Gatos - Woody Guthrie.
How America Ends Up Alone —The Bulwark|Andrew Egger
Who Would Want to Be Friends with America Now?
by Mark Hertling
Over the weekend, President Trump made a point of complimenting our enemy, North Korea, and antagonizing our ally, South Korea. Continuing the pattern, yesterday he threatened to bomb another longtime American security partner, Oman.
Asked about Oman’s talks with Iran concerning the Strait of Hormuz, which borders both countries, President Trump reportedly told Fox News reporter Trey Yingst, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” He seemed to double down on the threat later yesterday in the Oval Office.
The president is threatening to bomb a country that for nearly half a century has quietly provided the United States with military access, logistical support, diplomatic assistance, and something increasingly rare in the Middle East: the ability to communicate with friends as well as enemies. For decades, Oman hasn’t been in the way, it has often been the way.
The modern Omani–American military relationship dates to 1980, when Oman became the first Persian Gulf state to sign a formal agreement allowing American forces access to its military facilities. That access was particularly valuable during the “Tanker War” of the 1980s. When the Reagan administration launched Operation Earnest Will in 1987 to protect reflagged Kuwaiti tankers from Iranian attack, Oman was one of the few Gulf countries with agreements already in place for military access and prepositioning.
That cooperation continued through Desert Storm, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In 2019, Washington and Muscat expanded the relationship again, giving American forces access to the ports at Salalah and Duqm. The latter is especially important in the Gulf: Duqm is a deep-water port capable of handling large American warships and sits outside the Strait of Hormuz.
That close cooperation in no way means that Oman is an American puppet. Oman is friendly with the United States while maintaining relations with Iran. That balancing act sometimes frustrates Washington and Oman’s Arab neighbors, but it has also made Muscat a useful intermediary when Americans and Iranians cannot—or will not—talk to one another....
No nation expects the United States to agree with it on everything. What nations must be able to expect is that a disagreement with Washington will remain a disagreement—not suddenly become the dissolution of an alliance or even a threat of military attack.
A larger lesson here is about American leadership. Alliances are relationships built over years, administrations, wars, crises, and disagreements. Presidents inherit them from their predecessors, sustain them for their successors, and occasionally strengthen them through careful diplomacy.
But presidents can also destroy them. That destruction rarely occurs with a formal announcement. More often, trust corrodes incrementally. An exercise is canceled. An ally is publicly berated. An adversary is praised. A partner wonders whether Washington will respond to help during a crisis. Another begins looking elsewhere for security or diplomatic support.
And America loses a partner, an ally, or a friend.
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And Donald Trump fails again!
Up Against the Theocracy — The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good|Bill Lueders
In his new book, Representative Jared Huffman chronicles the rise of rightwing Christian nationalism as a threat to American democracy.
At one point in Jared Huffman’s incisive and engaging new book, No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism, he sarcastically surveys the hellscape that Christian nationalists claim they are being forced to endure:
“[B]elievers are being barred from public life and forced to worship in secrecy. No public prayer. No ‘Merry Christmas.’ No mentioning Jesus at a school board meeting. In this gripping fantasy, Christians wander around clutching their Bibles like contraband, while secular elites and Jews patrol the perimeter with copies of The Origin of Species and NPR tote bags.”
This narrative of widespread repression, Huffman conveys, is as dangerous as it is ridiculous. It was deliberately concocted by Christian nationalists to bolster their influence in the political realm. Scaring the bejesus out of people, it turns out, is a winning approach.
Huffman is a Democratic member of Congress, representing California’s Second Congressional District in the San Francisco Bay area since 2013. He is co-founder and co-chair (along with Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, who wrote the book’s foreword) of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which is devoted to protecting the separation of church and state. Christian nationalism is exactly the opposite—“the fusion of Christian religious and cultural identity with rightwing politics, rooted in the narrative of America as a Christian nation.”
Throughout the book, Huffman interweaves his own life experience with the events he describes. For instance, he attended the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1980s, where he studied under a famed religious studies professor named Walter Capps. Capps sounded an early warning about Christian zealots, including Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell. “My main takeaway from Capps’s course,” Huffman writes, “was that the New Religious Right was not a spiritual revival but a political machine, one that cloaked its ambitions in Scripture and wielded faith for partisan ends.”...
Now, in Trump’s second term, Huffman says one “glaring embodiment of America’s tilt toward theocracy” is the ascent of House Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian who rejects the notion of church and state separation and calls for “biblically sanctioned government”—which, Huffman translates, amounts to “enshrining Old Testament morality codes into law and policy.” Johnson not only opposes abortion but also contraception and in vitro fertilization; wants to ban same-sex marriage; supports criminal penalties against gay sex as well as gender-affirming care; and “advocates legal carve-outs for Christians to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people.”...
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Not gonna have it! Not gonna have it! America is very diverse in religions. This will never work here. Forget it, you Talibastards!
Medicare for All Would Be $40 Trillion Cheaper Than Our Shitty For-Profit System — The Smirking Chimp - News And Commentary from the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy|Corbin Trent
A right-wing libertarian think tank has confirmed that Medicare for All would provide massive savings. Savings that could be as high as $40 trillion with Medicare for all.
That’s right, folks.
The Cato Institute put out an analysis last week intended to terrify America of the DSA agenda.
Unfortunately for them, math was not on their side.
Their own analysis suggests universal healthcare saves Americans between $40 trillion and $4 trillion over the next decade, depending on how well we implement it.
They reckon that universal health care would cost anywhere between $40 trillion and $75 trillion. What they what I failed to mention is that the current, albeit shitty, health care system we have now is projected to cost around $80 trillion over that same stretch.
Both of Cato’s estimates, their low one and their absolute worst case, save America money over the current system. The people that are trying to terrify us about doing things differently weren’t able to get their math to work because, guess what? It turns out it’s more effective, efficient, and cost-effective to cover everybody all at the same time from one pool of cash.
So if we actually implemented it efficiently and did it well, if America did the thing where we’re the best country on the planet, then that would mean we save about $40 trillion over the next 10 years. Which would be more than enough money to ramp up the needed supply side of our health care system. It would be more than enough money, while still saving money, to build new hospitals and clinics, reopen rural hospitals and clinics, training a generation of medical professionals, revive the health care deserts in thousands of American counties, and have cash to spare.
This isn’t some former AOC/Bernie lefty fella saying this. It’s a libertarian, right-wing institute think tank telling us that just moving to DSA’s big idea version of Medicare for All will free up enough money from the American economy to satisfy build a world class healthcare system....
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As we all know, this is what we want but cannot have because big pharmacy in league with big medicine does not want to lose control of us as slaves the them.
Imagine what life would be like if your house was on fire and you called the fire department and got the reply, "Do you have fire insurance? No? Then I'm afraid we can't help you."
Republicans Rigged America’s Debt: Now We’re Paying the Billionaires Forever — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
They called themselves fiscal conservatives while running up trillions in debt — and sticking working Americans with the bill…
There’s a reason everything is getting so expensive and inflation seems intractable, and it goes way beyond just Trump’s stupid war-of-choice in Iran. It explains why the morbidly rich keep getting richer while the rest of America struggles, and why people are paying absurd interest rates on everything from credit cards to home mortgages to car loans, and it all rolls back to a wild conspiracy Republicans hatched in the late 1970s and Reagan put into place in 1981.
It starts with — thanks to three mind-bogglingly corrupt and illegitimate Republican presidents (Reagan, W. Bush, and Trump) — our national debt rolling past $40 trillion in the next few days, probably before Labor Day. That’s more than our entire nation’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the sum of all goods and services produced in the last year, which came in just a whisker over $32 trillion.
And we’re paying over a trillion dollars a year on that debt that was intentionally run up by those 3 Republican presidents and their buddies in Congress, which is a large part of why we’re the only developed country in the world where families can go bankrupt because somebody got sick and kids graduate from college with debt that will take them decades (if ever) to pay off.
As if to shove it in our faces, last week Trump proposed a new cut in the capital gains tax that is pretty much exclusively paid by rich people who, instead of earning a paycheck that’s subject to a top 37%, today already only pay a top 20% tax on the money they make with their investments. To add insult to injury he just raised taxes on working class people’s wages by an average of $900 this year via the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill that passed without a single Democratic vote.
I remember when Reagan was cutting taxes and spending like a drunken sailor back in the 1980s (he and Bush Sr. after him tripled our nation’s debt) and I was constantly telling people:
“Give me a $2 trillion credit card and I’ll show you what it’s like to live large, too.”
But for some reason Democrats never picked up on the message that the GOP’s “fiscal conservatism” was a fraud, and generally still haven’t. That has to change....
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Or do Americans just love being fucked over?
Shady stock buys linked to Trump's move to gut national monument — Alternet|Leia Larsen, Grist
Congressional Democrats have opened an investigation into the mining company Energy Fuels after its CEO and chairman bought thousands of shares of the company’s stock just days before President Donald Trump downsized the neighboring Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah.
The Denver-based company operates White Mesa Mill, the last conventional uranium processing site in the nation, which sat about a mile from the Bears Ears boundary before Trump slashed the monument by 90 percent last month.
On July 7, 2026, CEO Ross Bhappu bought 74,000 shares of Energy Fuels, the largest insider purchase of stock in the company’s history, according to a news release issued by Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee. The trade bumped Bhappu’s ownership to 41 percent. Board chair Bruce Hansen acquired 4,000 shares the following day.
Less than a week later, Trump removed 1.24 million acres from Bears Ears National Monuments — making the land available again for mining. The day after Trump’s move, the Bears Ears Commission, a coalition of five tribal nations, issued a statement saying, “The decision weakens protections for a living cultural landscape and sacred ancestral homeland that has been cared for by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial and is a major setback to one of the nation’s most extraordinary models of collaborative management of public lands between Tribal Nations and federal agencies.”
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Trump grifting touched this. Prepare for it to die. Raping National Monuments is not what our President should be doing.
'Playing with fire': Trump's latest betrayal sounds just like an infamous dictator — Alternet| Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump's latest betrayal of a close foreign ally has drawn withering criticism from all corners, with a new piece from MS NOW likening his statement to the words of the infamous dictator he claims to be close with.
Over the weekend, Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth via a Truth Social post to "substantially reduce" joint military exercises with South Korea, shortly before new ones were set to commence. He argued that participating in them would be seen as "totally inappropriate and hostile" to North Korea, the dictatorship that he claimed has been "unthreatening and respectful."
"Based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises," the post read.
Despite the U.S. lacking any formal relations with North Korea, Trump has long insisted on trying to maintain a close relationship with its leader, Kim Jong-un, one of the many global dictators he has expressed a fondness for. He also implied in his post that the decision was a direct response to South Korea declining to aid in his war with Iran.
Writing for MS NOW on Tuesday morning, national security analyst Kevin Baron chastised Trump's statement, arguing that his "description of North Korea sounds like Kim Jong Un wrote it," and questioning why he is choosing to "be blindly trusting that North Korea’s murderous, prison-state regime has turned a page toward global peace."...
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Not a shock. This is what a traitor does.
Perkins Calls For Criminally Charging SPLC’s Bankers
Hate group leader Tony Perkins writes:
Last week, the Justice Department arrested Heidi Beirich, former head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which was responsible for identifying and labeling SPLC’s list of “hate” groups.
The arrest came as another superseding indictment against the SPLC and Beirich was unsealed by the DOJ. Beirich was charged with wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to submit false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment of money laundering.
SPLC was the hub, but there were many spokes in this wheel designed to crush Christians and conservatives. The DOJ criminal investigation should not stop with SPLC.
This is more than fraud; the evidence points to a criminal conspiracy involving many financial institutions.
Who coordinated with SPLC? Which banks, payment processors, technology companies, federal agencies, and nonprofits used those labels to deny Americans essential services?
SPLC may have supplied the labels, but powerful institutions gave those labels their power. They should be held accountable along with SPLC.
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Says one of the biggest grifting hate mongers in the U.S.
Fascism is at work here. The Trump Department of Jack-offs go after anyone he doesn't like.
Support the SPLC!
Staver: Send Money For Vaccine Miscarriage Lawsuits
Posted to the Liberty Counsel’s website:
The COVID-19 shot experience demonstrates in heartbreaking detail why vaccine makers must be held accountable for the injuries and deaths they cause.
Less than three months after disgraced Dr. Anthony Fauci texted colleagues admitting that the cytokine storms and fevers associated with the COVID shots could cause miscarriages, Pfizer confirmed what Fauci already knew — but Pfizer never let the public know of the danger.
Then came the April 2021 New England Journal of Medicine study by Shimabukuro and colleagues, which when reviewed by independent researchers, was shown to reveal an 82% “spontaneous abortion” rate in the first trimester.
During COVID, Liberty Counsel led the charge in defending people from being forced to take the dangerous COVID shots. Now we are helping people who were injured and abused because of those mandates, and we have multiple COVID-related cases pending before the courts.
We need YOUR HELP to finish the court battles against COVID abuses. Please give generously today and a special Challenge Grant will DOUBLE your gift.
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Double it right up your ass. A false prophet if there ever was one!
CNN: All Of Trump’s South Korea Claims Were Lies
CNN’s tireless fact-checker Daniel Dale writes:
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “Just so you understand with South Korea, look: South Korea has been protected by us for many, many years, and during my first term, they agreed to pay close to $3 billion a year for protection, because we don’t – you know, they essentially weren’t paying.” Last year, he explicitly said South Korea’s cost-sharing payments didn’t exist before he became president.
The reality: For decades before Trump took office, South Korea spent substantial sums to share the cost of the US military presence in the country; its cost-sharing “Special Measures Agreements” with the US began in 1991. Under the final five-year agreement signed before Trump became president in 2017, negotiated by the Obama administration, South Korea agreed to spend more than $800 million per year from 2014 through 2018.
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “But we agreed for a short term that it would be $3 billion…” Later in his remarks, he referred to the supposed arrangement as “$3 billion a year” from South Korea. The reality: Under a one-year Special Measures Agreement negotiated by the Trump administration in 2019, South Korea agreed to an 8.2% increase in its spending – but the new total was still less than $1 billion, not $3 billion.
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “And South Korea, I get along with them very well. But they were paying $3 billion a year and then they convinced Biden that I was probably a bad person and they shouldn’t. And he immediately rescinded that order.” The reality: Biden did not rescind any Trump cost-sharing agreement with South Korea. The only Special Measures Agreement signed by the Trump administration, the one-year 2019 deal, was dead by the time Biden took office in 2021.
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This idiot mobster lies like a rug.
MS Now Host Fact-Checks Donalds’ Lies To His Face
BYRON DONALDS: “First and foremost, the president, when he came into office, was having to unwind one of the largest inflations most Americans have ever seen in their entire lifetimes.”
MS NOW HOST: “I do want to just make one factual clarification. When the president, recognizing that inflation hit historic highs, 40-year highs during Joe Biden’s term, when he handed the reins over to Donald Trump, inflation was at 3%. Right now it’s 3.5%. So in fact, it’s gone up since the president took office.”
BYRON DONALDS: “Democrats are creating high prices in our country.”
MS NOW HOST: “For clarity, the president, of course, said that on day one, prices would come down. Orange juice is up 22%, ground beef up nearly 20%, coffee up 33%.”
BYRON DONALDS: “I know how we want to talk about issues today, but you also have to look at what was happening in this country three years ago, because, three years ago, everything was growing — going wrong, especially in our military, where recruitment levels and morale was at an all-time low in the United States military under the previous administration.”
MS NOW HOST: “Obviously, we’re now obviously — we’re now talking about what’s going on today, and I think we would both agree that the morale of these individuals who are reaching out to family members sharing their experience–“
BYRON DONALDS: “But, unfortunately, when you’re digging out from terrible economic policy, terrible military policy, and, quite frankly, terrible border policy from the previous administration, it takes time to work through these issues.”
MS NOW HOST: “We should be very clear, again, despite the congressman’s assertions there, when President Trump took office, inflation was at 3 percent. There were 40-year record highs before he took office. Those are now at 3.5 percent. The inflation has only gone up since President Trump took office, just because facts come first.”
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If the damned Trump shills would stop lying to us hell would freeze over!
Trump is 'smuggling' something through loopholes the Supreme Court left wide open: expert —s Raw Story|Daniel Hampton
A legal analyst says the Supreme Court has handed President Donald Trump the tools to quietly sidestep one of the Constitution's oldest anti-corruption rules.
On Slate's "Amicus" podcast, legal writer Mark Joseph Stern argued that the court's expansion of executive power has let Trump slip past the emoluments clauses, the twin provisions meant to stop a president from cashing in on the office through foreign or domestic payments.
"So this is just another case of an imperial president constructed out of whole cloth by a Supreme Court that is not following the original meaning or plain text of the Constitution," Stern said.
He pointed to the justices' 2024 immunity decision and their June ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, which ended for-cause protections for independent agency heads and expanded the president's removal power. The court cast Slaughter as a separation-of-powers correction. Stern said the rulings let Trump "smuggle emoluments through those loopholes" while claiming courts cannot review him and Congress cannot interfere....
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SCOTUS is the mobster's henchmen
South Carolina: From Slaves to Bots — The American Prospect|Harold Meyerson
In keeping with the Homer revival that Christopher Nolan has bestowed on us, I’ll begin this short discussion of AI and its associated anxieties with some lines from the Iliad in which Hephaistos, the god who worked as a blacksmith, is “working on 20 tripods … that of their own motion they could wheel into” Olympus.
“As if,” Aristotle, quoting the line, wrote in The Politics, “a shuttle could weave of itself.”
Today, Bronze Age magic is coming to the data center down the block (well, rising where the block once stood). And to the factory where robots do what was until recently the work of humans.
The robot revolution took a particularly graphic turn last week when the front page of The New York Times business section featured a large photo of a humanoid robot hauling a cart and posted a video of it online. The photo/video was taken at a BMW plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and the fact that the robot was colored black brought up all kinds of associations that BMW and South Carolina certainly didn’t want brought up. South Carolina was the state in the antebellum South where Black people—nearly every one of them enslaved—outnumbered whites, where the slaves, therefore, did almost all the work, and thus almost all the work went unpaid, which is one reason why the state was the most emphatic proponent of savagely racist slavery and the first to secede after Abraham Lincoln’s election.
Looking at the photo and the video, the thought that inescapably came to mind was that, but for the years between 1865 and 2026, the state has gone from slave labor to bot labor, with a 161-year interregnum in which its employers of manual laborers were compelled, alas, to pay human beings for their work. Obviously, the horrors that the owners routinely inflicted on their slaves are in no way replicated in their treatment of bots, but the drive to reap profits undiminished by wages is a through-line nonetheless.
South Carolina has done its damnedest to pay as little as possible....
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In de lan ob de happy nee-gro, dey is kindly backward.
Five Years Later, Biden Was Proven Right in Withdrawing From Afghanistan — The American Prospect|Gil Barndollar
Like many veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars, I started getting a flurry of WhatsApp messages and calls five years ago this week. Afghan interpreters were reaching out, frantically, to get those they loved on a plane to America before their country fell to the Taliban. Seemingly overnight, the Afghan government and armed forces were collapsing, as the United States conducted the final withdrawal announced by then-President Joe Biden four months earlier. The resulting chaos would be the first crisis of his administration, one that would permanently handicap the president’s approval rating and agenda.
Five years and countless crises later, it is clear that Biden made a necessary and ultimately sound decision.
The speed of the Taliban reconquest in 2021 shocked the world. The Taliban began a general offensive that May and provincial capitals fell like dominoes. In most places, Afghan National Security Forces soldiers and policemen simply put down their weapons and went home, in a manner wholly consistent with centuries of internecine Afghan tribal warfare. The failure to anticipate and plan for this possibility, especially given that the exact same thing had happened to the Taliban 20 years prior, spoke to how little U.S. soldiers, spies, and policymakers ever understood the country.
Taliban troops entered Kabul on August 15, 2021. They did so with forbearance and caution, accepting the city’s surrender and allowing the U.S. to execute a hasty yet prolonged aerial withdrawal. The U.S. Air Force evacuated more than 120,000 people, but an ISIS suicide bomber killed 169 Afghan civilians, 11 U.S. Marines, one soldier, and one sailor. In a tragically appropriate coda to the entire war, a U.S. drone strike then killed an Afghan aid worker and seven children, mistaking them for an ISIS cell.
The U.S. withdrawal was chaotic, humiliating, and sometimes deadly, a testament to faulty intelligence analysis, overly optimistic planning assumptions, and the enduring limits of U.S. military power to solve Afghanistan’s wicked problems. Yet attacks on the withdrawal had an ulterior motive, as a means to elide the more profound failure of the entire war.
It is clear that Biden made a necessary and ultimately sound decision....
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Most definitely.
Canceling Military Exercises Hurts Us, Not Our Enemies — The Bulwark|Mark Hertling
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP announced Sunday that he had instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce U.S. military exercises with South Korea, just as American and South Korean forces were preparing to begin one of their most important annual training events. Trump complained about the cost, suggested the exercises were unnecessarily provocative toward North Korea, and, astonishingly, connected his decision to South Korea’s refusal to support his administration’s effort to denuclearize Iran.
It is difficult to imagine a more thorough misunderstanding of the purpose of a military exercise—or an alliance.
The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise begins Monday—otherwise Trump suggested he might have canceled this year’s event. But his direction raises questions about future exercises and, more importantly, about his understanding of why American forces train with allies. These exercises aren’t diplomatic favors Washington grants. They are part of the preparation required to deter—and, if necessary, defeat—an attack by North Korea.
The Korean Peninsula remains one of the most dangerous military environments in the world. About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea, facing a North Korean regime with a massive conventional military, nuclear weapons, sophisticated ballistic missiles, and forces that have gained recent battlefield experience alongside Russia in Ukraine. North Korea continues testing missiles and improving its nuclear capabilities while repeatedly threatening South Korea and the United States. That’s why generations of American soldiers have trained in Korea—including me.
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Trump keeps on making us less secure.
Judge clears Nine PBS to retrieve 70 years of archival TV data — court rules station owns 50TB of data in Iron Mountain servers after host went underOpen link in new tabTom's Hardware Guide| Mark Tyson
There’s light at the end of the tunnel for Nine PBS. We reported last week that the station lost access to 50TB of data representing 70 years of TV history. The issue was that its cloud storage provider went out of business and access to this important set of backups was abruptly cut off. In the meantime, a judge has cleared the way for Nine PBS to retrieve its archival data and programming from Iron Mountain Data Centers....
The latest development in this twisting and turning case of Nine PBS’s lost data seems like good news for the station. On August 12, 2026, a Denver judge established a process that would allow Nine PBS to retrieve its 50TB of archival data from Iron Mountain’s Denver data center....
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A victory for freedom of information.
Jason Arday and the Machinery of Cruelty — The Smirking Chimp|Henry Giroux
...They bear the mobilizing passions of fascism: the manufacture of enemies, the celebration of cruelty, the contempt for vulnerability, the racial sorting of human beings, the militarization of knowledge, and the elevation of violence into a governing principle. In such a world, what happened to Jason Arday cannot be reduced to a private tragedy or explained solely through the circumstances of an individual life. His death points to something larger and more disturbing. It forces us to confront a social order that increasingly trades in disposability, human suffering, war, and cruelty, and then treats the casualties it produces as if they were merely private misfortunes.
It is within this broader culture of disposability and cruelty that Arday’s death takes on its larger significance. Systemic racism and a social order organized around greed, dispossession, hierarchy, and profound inequality do not operate in the abstract. The legacies of colonialism have not disappeared. They have been absorbed into institutions, cultural assumptions, and structures of privilege that continue to determine who belongs, who is protected, whose mistakes can be survived, and who is subjected to relentless scrutiny.
For generations, Black and brown scholars have been forced to carry burdens their white colleagues rarely encounter: the demand to represent an entire race, to prove repeatedly that they deserve to occupy spaces historically denied to them, and to endure forms of scrutiny in which professional criticism can quickly become a racially charged judgment on their intelligence, legitimacy, and very right to belong. These burdens speak to institutions still haunted by the ghosts of a colonial past and the racial hierarchies it produced, now intensified by a far-right assault that seeks to turn higher education into a laboratory of indoctrination, purged of historical consciousness, critical thinking, and a culture of questioning....
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The fascist war on humanity is vulgar and inhuman.
SCOTUS: E. Jean Carroll Can Keep Trump’s $5 Million
NBC News reports:
The Supreme Court on Monday declined for a second time to take up President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn a jury verdict that awarded $5 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for alleged sexual abuse and defamation
In an unusual move, the president had asked the court to reconsider its decision from June that rejected Trump’s initial appeal. The court almost never grants such requests. Trump has already turned over the $5 million dollars, plus interest.
Trump has a separate appeal at the Supreme Court concerning a different defamation case in which Carroll won an $83 million judgment. That case concerns comments Trump made as president during his first term and has been tied up in litigation over whether he can claim immunity. The court is not set to act on that appeal until later this year.
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Victory over evil! You lose, loser! The cash is hers!
MTG Claims White House Is Discussing Nuking Iran — Joe.My.God.|Joe Jervis
“They are discussing using nuclear weapons on Iran in strategy meetings. Yes you read that correctly. It’s real. I’m not speculating, I know. And it’s pure evil.
“The last time a nuclear weapon was used was August 6th and 9th of 1945 on two cities in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, immediately killing 110,000 people, vaporizing people at ground zero, and total deaths reached 214,000 by the end of the year from severe burns and trauma.
“But the extreme suffering continued for the Japanese people from radiation sickness, skyrocketing cancer rates, and generational birth defects. Not to mention wiping out all means of their economy. And the suffering was so great that all of humanity vowed, ‘never again.’
“Trump and his admin were told by our own intelligence that Iran was no where near creating a nuclear weapon, then Israel said the same line it’s repeated for decades, ‘Iran is only weeks away.’
“So we bombed anyways, killed their leaders and innocent little children in a school, and Iran has controlled the Strait of Hormuz ever since and punished the region for their part in it.
“And now our government is the one actually discussing lowering the nuclear threshold in order to use nuclear weapons against Iran even though Trump claims he’s won the war like 40 times and says the U.S. controls the SoH.
“Trump promised no more foreign wars, but may actually be the one who delivers a nuclear holocaust that would likely drag the entire world into major conflict, economic depression, and mass human suffering we’ve never seen in our lifetimes and maybe throughout history.
“People need to speak out and boldly stop this insanity. America is not untouchable. If and when that happens, everyone, and I do mean everyone, will hold ALL of those in leadership right now fully responsible for the rest of human history.
“Do not use nuclear weapons and stop this war NOW.” – Marjorie Taylor Greene, in a post that currently has four million views.
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The fucking retarded idiots think the fallout will stay there? Think again, death merchants.
Why don't they watch The Conquerer: Hollywood Fallout docmentary and learn something before they push the plunger?
CBC: US Demand For Canadian Citizenship Is Soaring
CBC News reports:
Applications from people around the world seeking Canadian citizenship certificates have been rising rapidly in recent months, fueled by thousands of applications from the United States, CBC News has learned. The number of people who have already received certificates as a result of Parliament’s adoption of “Lost Canadian” legislation late last year rose nearly 50 per cent between April 1 and May 31, according to new data obtained by CBC.
Bill C-3 allows citizenship for those who can prove they’re descended from a Canadian ancestor, even if that ancestor left the country several generations back. It was adopted after the courts ruled that limiting citizenship to the first generation born outside of Canada was too restrictive. In April, around 56,000 applications were waiting to be processed. That climbed to 70,400 in May. Now, the IRCC’s website says 121,800 people are waiting for a decision.
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No surprise, suckers. Don't forget they did the same in Germany with Hiter. They got out while they could. Canada is a great country already. We are losing some of our best due to the monster.
“Lactation Granola” Recalled Over Risk Of Salmonella
Business Insider reports:
A Montauk-based granola brand has recalled its granola intended for breastfeeding mothers due to a potential risk of Salmonella.
The Hampton Grocer announced in a Friday statement on the Food and Drug Administration’s website that it had recalled its 8-ounce packs of “Lacnola Lactation Granola” because they could be contaminated with Salmonella. Two lots of the product, with expiration dates of October 21, 2026, and February 13, 2027, have been recalled.
The company said in an emailed statement to Business Insider that its ingredient supplier, Food to Live, had notified it that one of their products had tested positive for the bacteria. Salmonella can cause serious and, in some cases, fatal infections, particularly for people with compromised immune systems.
...This seems to be happening a lot more often. Last year Amazon recalled two million cases of granola bars over “metal pieces.”
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Salmonella has been reported a couple of times lately. Still think we won't have a food problem? It's only begun.
Trump Threatens To “Bomb The Shit” Out Of Oman
The New York Post reports:
President Trump on Monday warned Oman that the US will “bomb the s–t” out of them if they interfere in the simmering conflict with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s–t out of them,” Trump said bluntly in an interview with Fox News’ Trey Yingst as a tentative cease-fire agreement between the US and Iran is due to expire.
Iran said last week that it was in talks with Oman about how to reopen the world’s busiest oil shipping channel, which has been the site of frequent conflict since the start of the war. The president said Friday during a rally for GOP candidates on Long Island that he plans to declare the Strait of Hormuz “a territory of the United States” after the war.
...Oman is a longtime US ally.
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With what? Hot air? Stupid bombs?
I guess he's not too tall to have a Napolean complex.
Todd Blanche blurted a ‘telling Freudian slip’ in overlooked moment: journalist — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Attorney General Todd Blanche made a number of controversial statements Sunday during an appearance on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” but one “telling” remark appeared to fly completely under the radar, one that Zeteo’s Martin Pengelly flagged as a major “Freudian slip.”
During his interview with NBC News' Kristen Welker, Blanche refused to pledge he'd act independently of the White House and declined to rule out payments to Jan. 6 Capitol rioters. But it was when Welker pressed him on whether he'd defy President Donald Trump if asked to do something that "crosses an ethical or legal line" that Blanche let slip what Pengelly characterized as an unintentional admission.
“The president will never ask me to do something unethical or legal – or illegal,” Blanche said. “He never has. He never will.”
Blanche’s claim, however, flies in the face of several legal experts who say that within a week of his confirmation, the newly confirmed attorney general already committed an illegal act by stumping for an ally of President Donald Trump’s in New York last Friday, which former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance argued was a blatant violation of the Hatch Act, a 1938 federal law that prohibits federal officials from engaging in political activities while on duty.
Pengelly argued that Blanche’s “telling Freudian slip” went largely unnoticed due to the “staggering corruption” of the Trump administration flooding the news cycle, most notably the Trump family’s success in receiving preliminary approval to open their own bank.
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LOTHN has previously pointed this bullshit out.
'Make sure Melania sees this': Crowd roars as Trump taunted over 'mistress' rumors — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) set the rumor mill churning by highlighting President Donald Trump's close personal aide in a speech over the weekend.
The Georgia Democrat blasted the 80-year-old president's handling of the war in Iran, and he made brief mention of Trump's executive assistant Natalie Harp, who follows the president around with a portable printer so he doesn't strain his eyes looking at screens and has reportedly raised concerns from the Secret Service for her admiring notes to him.
"While the sailors on the [USS] Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings," Ossoff said. "He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar."
Ossoff's audience roared in astonishment at the reference to the 35-year-old Harp, who has been derisively nicknamed the "human printer" by other White House aides and Trump's "diaper nurse" by online detractors, and video clips posted on social media stirred up a commotion....
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Ossoff for President 2028!
Pete Hegseth is Trump’s favorite kind of failure — Salon|Amanda Marcotte
The USS Lincoln disaster reveals the defense secretary’s twisted priorities
he tale of Donald Trump sneaking off Air Force One in a catering truck captured public attention for many reasons. It was a reminder that, for all his tough talk, the president harbors a sense of fear. Hiding away in a glorified ice chest would also have been a blow to the 80-year-old’s dignity. But the charade, which was first revealed by the Washington Post, also gave us insight, as political scientist Scott Lemieux wrote, “into who he considers his actual inner circle.”
Left behind on the decoy plane were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and other administration officials and aides. The only people deemed worthy of saving from Iran’s reported threat were people whose full-time jobs are tending the president’s body and, more importantly, his ego: Natalie Harp, who writes Trump love letters, and whose main job is showing him flattering social media posts. Body man Walt Nauta. Dan Scavino, Trump’s former golf caddie. Oh yeah, and Pete Hegseth....
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The source of anger is fear of losing control.
Alex Vindman: 'Her Payoff Was A U.S. Senate Seat' — Crooks and Liars|Cliff Schecter
Democratic Senate candidate Alex Vindman's said he suspects Moody's role in this fraud is much worse than is known...
Ashley Moody was Florida’s AG when the settlement was finalized. She was later appointed by Gov. DeSantis to the Senate seat vacated when Marco Rubio became Secretary of State. She's running to hold that seat.
CBS News Miami stated Moody’s office signed off on the settlement without safeguards or oversight her office ordinarily required to ensure funds were properly spent—the guidance the attorney general’s office routinely provided to others. Moody won't answer questions from reporters on what she knew re the political use of the funds or if her office worked with the governor’s office.
A grand jury was convened to investigate. Yet no grand jury report's been publicly released. The Florida Center for Government Accountability said Moody's likely objecting to release of the findings.. Democratic Senate candidate Alex Vindman's said he suspects Moody's role in this fraud is much worse and challenged her to call for its release: if she has nothing to hide, she should demand it.
A grand jury report would establish, on the record, whether Medicaid funds were illegally converted to political use. Why won't Moody call for it's release?? You can hear it from Alex Vindman himself from my interview with him. Watch the video and go read the rest at BAM!
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Who's covering up? Three guesses and the first two down't count.
My husband was kicked out of hospice for dying too slowly — Kim Clark, KFF Health News
“Choose one.” A hospital nurse handed me a list of local hospice agencies. The sooner we signed up, the sooner Mike could go home. Stunned by the suddenness of Mike’s health emergency, I just pointed to the name at the top of the alphabetical list, assuming they were pretty much the same.
Big mistake. Medicare sets basic standards for the hospice agencies it reimburses, but some agencies are understaffed or poorly run. Amy Tucci, president of the Hospice Foundation of America, noted that some agencies provide extra therapy, aide support, and other services.
The problems with the organization I had chosen started immediately. Staffers were often late. They entered inaccurate medical information on Mike’s paperwork and didn’t make corrections when alerted. Medicare allows you to quit or change agencies, so I asked neighbors for recommendations....
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Not only our healthcare is failing us so is our deathcare!
President Donald Trump's latest demand of the Pentagon is primed to backfire, as one expert told The i Paper, as it could hand a major victory to one of his biggest perceived enemies: China.— Alternet|Thomas Kika
On Sunday, Trump took to Truth Social calling on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to "substantially reduce" joint military exercises with South Korea, shortly before new ones were set to take place. He suggested that participating in these exercises would be "totally inappropriate and hostile" to North Korea, the dictatorship that he claimed has been "unthreatening and respectful." The U.S. has no actual diplomatic ties to North Korea, despite Trump's past attempts to establish a warmer relationship with leader Kim Jong-un. He also suggested in the post that the decision was made in retaliation for South Korea declining to get involved in the war with Iran.
"Based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises!” Trump's post stated.
In a piece published Monday morning, The i Paper's Max Melzer said that this was the "latest in a series of moves minimizing America’s presence in the Asia-Pacific region," and risked handing China even more power in the region as it "ramps up its assertiveness."...
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The boy is just getting worser and worser.
Trump bows to 'unthreatening and respectful' dictator in stunning move — Raw Story|Robert Davis
President Donald Trump appeared to bow to a dictator's demands in a stunning move on Sunday.
In a pithy Truth Social post, Trump said he directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to scale back joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea. The two countries have been conducting military exercises together since the 1970s in an effort to deter future aggression by North Korea, a country that Trump claims to have a "very good" relationship with.
"Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea," Trump wrote on social media. "These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful."
Trump's announcement came after North Korea bashed the exercises on Friday, which Kim Jong Un's regime described as "a rehearsal for an aggressive war," the AP reported.
It also came at a time when Kim Jong Un has sought to bolster his nuclear arsenal, and has sent troops to fight on behalf of U.S. enemies like Russia in the country's war of aggression against Ukraine....
"While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, 'No thanks!' Trump claimed.
Quite the fucking moron. Asking an ally to join in his fucked-up war of choice is akin to showing a neighbor that you just shit your pants and asking them if they'd like to jump in it with you." — Volvo_Birkenstock (comments)
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Indeed, quite the fucking moron.
Trump has sided with our enemies. What more proof of treason do you need? A total failure as an American and as a human.
Outrage erupts as Todd Blanche makes 'amazing confession' about Trump: 'Just wow' — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
Attorney General Todd Blanche drew online ire after refusing to pledge that the Department of Justice will be independent of President Donald Trump.
On Sunday, Blanche was interviewed by Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, who pressed him on the DOJ's independence under Trump. Welker asked Blanche, "Can you pledge the DOJ will always act independently of the White House?"
"No, I'm not going to pledge that," Blanche shot back. "And no attorney general ever should."
"So if the president asked you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?" Welker followed up.
"He would never do that," Blanche responded. "He never has. He never will."
The answer shocked critics and drew outrage because of his description of Trump and his resistance to pledging that the DOJ will be independent.
"Just...wow," blogger and Kash Pate-foe Jim Stewartson wrote on X. "This is actually surreal."
"These questions have now been asked of Blanche repeatedly & he gives the same bulls--- answer each time," blasted lawyer and journalist Katie Phang, who is suing Blanche over the DOJ's redactions of the Epstein files, in a post on Bluesky. "How about we ask Blanche direct and pointed questions about his noncompliance with court orders from Judge Sullivan [who's hearing her case], compelling him to provide unredacted Epstein Files?"
Former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd described Blanche's response as a "pretty amazing confession" in an X post. "Still can't believe he was confirmed. I guess he gets points for being honest?"
CNN commentator and Democratic strategist Xochitl Hinojosa said in her reaction that Blanche gave the "wrong answer," adding that previous attorneys general have been able to promise an independent DOJ.
"Every AG has been able to give this answer: the Justice Department will act independent of the WH on all criminal matters," Hinojosa wrote. "The president should never dictate who to prosecute."
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Trump does nothing but cross ethical and legal lines. That's what a criminal does!
He will not support the Constitution of the United States of America. He is a traitor along with his boss, Trump. Resist them to the death.
Sunday thought: Beyond shock and outrage — Robert Reich
Surviving a madman
Friends,
Trump claimed this past week that his job approval ratings are “fabulous” — they’re “above 60%.”
He also asserted that the United States is enjoying “the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”
And that the U.S. has “total control” over the Strait of Hormuz. “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Trump’s braggadocio doesn’t just mask his failures. His statements wildly contradict the calamities he’s created for America and the world.
To be sure, since he first entered American politics, we’ve been shocked and outraged by his lack of morality, scruple, or shame. It’s been difficult to conceive of such a person because we’ve always been taught to distinguish right from wrong and to do the right thing. Yet Trump has no conception of right and wrong. He isn’t unethical. He’s non-ethical. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral.
But his latest fabrications are so contrary to the realities of his monumental failures — his losing war with Iran, the near-collapsing U.S. economy, and his underwater approval ratings — that they’re not merely non-ethical or amoral. How can they be explained?
One possibility is his conman brain still firmly believes the public will go along with whatever he says and thinks he can manufacture success even when he’s going down the toilet.
But this can’t explain the extreme dissonance; he reads the same polls everyone else reads, and he knows the public isn’t buying.
Another possibility is that the sycophants surrounding him are telling him he’s wildly successful and don’t want to inform him of the depths of his failures for fear of his reaction.
Yet he constantly watches television, and even the networks he favors — such as Fox News — have lately been broadcasting his cataclysmic failures.
So what’s really going on? How can his assessments be so utterly unhinged from the enormity of his defeats?
The only possible explanation is that he’s finally lost his grasp on reality. He’s dangerously delusional. Trump is losing his mind.....
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Being soulless with no moral core is not the way to be a leader of anything. We must rid ourselves of this cancer.
The Subreddit for “Regretful Parents” Just Might Be the Darkest Place Online — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
A macabre community is thriving on Reddit, united by one core feeling: massive regret over having brought children into the world.
The community, called r/RegretfulParents, is basically an anonymous forum for remorseful moms and dads to vent their darkest frustrations.
It bills itself as a “safe place for parents who think they shouldn’t have become parents to rant, confess, and get things off their chest about their kids, partners, families, etc,” safeguarded by a critical rule: “no judgment or bullying allowed.”
A particularly grim motif is parents wishing they had a time machine so they could choose never to procreate. One such father lamented that he was never “brave enough to consider what I actually wanted,” and is now stuck with a family he wishes he could escape.
“If I break up this family for the sake of my own sanity and happiness, I’ll just become the bad guy I’m so afraid of being,” the poster wrote. “The only other option is a time machine so I can go and have a do-over of my life, and make better decisions.”
One recent post which received over 1,300 upvotes complained that “sometimes the mere fact that you had a child completely damaged and changed your life for the worst.”
“The truth [is] that sometimes a child isn’t a blessing and they absolutely will destroy your life and world,” the Redditor said. “I think the sooner society can admit that, the more people will be prepared for parenthood.”
Of course, it’s easy to blame regretful parents for exercising poor judgement or rolling over when met with pressure to have a child — and there are plenty of parents on this forum whose motivations seem selfish. But with over 70,000 weekly visitors to the subreddit, the scope of the issue is clearly much broader....
Case in point, the country’s largely privatized child care system now leaves over half of all American kids without sufficient access to daycare, while the share of US companies offering workers paid family leave fell to just 31 percent in 2025.
Combined with stagnant wages, rampant inflation, an unending housing crisis, and lack of affordable healthcare, it’s no wonder some parents feel they’d be better off without another mouth to feed — because as heartless as it sounds, they probably would be.
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Fascism doesn't give a crap about your kids. Elect someone who does!
Axios Partners With OpenAI to “Automate” Local Journalism — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
Local journalism in the US has spent the better part of two decades on life support.
First came widespread digitization, which guttered subscriptions and left newspapers and magazines in shambles. Then private equity swooped in, snapping up publications like candy and turning them into digital ad farms run by skeleton crews.
Add to this a steady erosion of trust in journalism and a drop-off in literacy overall, and the industry looks to be in worse than perhaps ever before. Yet, as the saying goes, things can always get worse — and one media company seems determined to drive the final nail into local news’ coffin.
That company is Axios, a for-profit media corporation majority-owned by communications giant Cox Enterprises. Founded in 2016, Axios rose to prominence by offering dispatches in the form of short, clinical bullet-point lists instead of traditional narrative stories.
Detractors who blasted the brand for its cynical approach to journalism probably had no idea how bad things would get. Now, the company’s founders seem hell bent on automating their already pared-down editorial process in an all-out embrace of AI — and using the template to remake local journalism....
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On the road to hell.
People Horrified That They’ll Be Busted Now That Anthropic Is Watermarking AI Content — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Using AI to crank out everything imaginable, from your homework to emails to code, is great and all — until you have to own up to it.
Fearless embracers of AI are suddenly clutching at their pearls, after Anthropic announced that its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, potentially exposing anyone who wants to get away with using the tech without detection.
The announcement has caused a meltdown in AI circles.
“This watermark is the dumbest f*cking thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Are they going to ask you to provide an ID so you can write non-watermarked text?” seethed one user on r/ClaudeAI.
“That mark will be the kiss of death on any piece of text that people can sell,” another said. “People won’t want to pay for it. It will be a scarlet letter.”
There were occasional injections of levity.
“I thought it was already watermarking text by including an em dash every 4 words,” one joked....
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Credibility? Trust? Things of the past. Good luck existing in your dystopian nightmare!
Attorney General Todd Blanche says the DOJ may take states’ voter roll fight to Supreme Court — NBC News|Alexandra Marquez
The Trump administration has filed 31 lawsuits against states that have pushed back against its efforts to gain access to sensitive voter roll data.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said Sunday there’s a “possibility” that the Justice Department will ask the Supreme Court to intervene in dozens of cases where judges have ruled against the federal government’s efforts to gain broad access to state voter rolls ahead of November’s midterm elections.
“Absolutely, it’s a possibility,” Blanche told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” when asked whether he’d appeal the 22 cases the Justice Department has lost so far to the Supreme Court.
“Election integrity is something that President Trump ran on, and the American people elected him. It’s something that every American should care about,” the attorney general added. “And so the idea that the Department of Justice is trying to investigate issues around elections to make sure they’re fair and make sure they’re conducted the right way is not something that we should be running away from. That’s something we should be running right towards.”
The cases stem from an executive order Trump signed asking states to turn over their voter rolls, including voters’ names, dates of birth, residential addresses, state driver’s licenses and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. The federal government has said it’s gathering the data to allow the Justice Department to investigate any “deficiencies” or “anomalies,” including whether any noncitizens are registered to vote.
While some states have voluntarily complied with the administration’s request for voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for refusing to comply.
Federal judges, like in Oregon and Michigan, have agreed with at least 22 states that have sought to block the federal government from gaining access to their voter rolls.
Elections have always been run by states, and the federal government does not typically keep track of voter rolls. Some of the states fighting the federal government in court are led by Republicans, including Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Georgia and Vermont.
Vermont’s GOP Gov. Phil Scott told “Meet the Press” last month that state leaders are better positioned to run elections than the federal government.
“We’re not going to stop doing what I think every American should expect us to do, which is make sure that we have elections that are fair,” Blanche said Sunday. “And as that relates to the Department of Justice, that means making sure that that there are no constitutional legal violations, even at the state level.”...
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Fuck this fascist fuck!
Unconstitutional and we all know it! And if this Nazi doesn't like the results he'll declare your vote null and void! Blanche is exactly the criminal we expected him to be. Out with the Trump facist dictatorship!
Canadian Petition To Expel US Ambassador Hits 191KOpen link in new tab.
The New York Times reports:
After boycotting American products and shunning vacations south of the border, Canadians in the thousands are pouring their incandescent anger at the United States into a new cause: ousting the American ambassador. More than 190,000 people have signed a petition to the Canadian Parliament, submitted by a Calgary resident on July 21, calling for the removal of the ambassador, Pete Hoekstra.
The petition asserts that Mr. Hoekstra, a faithful messenger of President Trump's aggressive stance toward Canada, has harmed U.S.-Canada relations. The two countries are locked in a trade war, and their relationship, once the closest two nations can be, has been at a historic low since Mr. Trump retook office.
Just 500 signatures are legally required to bring an online petition to the Parliament floor for discussion, and this one will most likely be put forward for debate in the fall by Elizabeth May, the leader of Canada's Green Party. The petition lays out the reasoning for Mr. Hoekstra's removal: it argues that he has "normalized the Trump administration's threats to annex Canada as the 51st state."
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A shooting war between Canada and the U.S. would be disaterous for us and lead to the end of stability world wide. This is more of Trump's dangerous failure.
Trump is trashing a national treasure for donors —and Texans can't stop it — Altermet|Sabrina Haake
On August 6, a date that’s been called ‘a day of infamy,’ construction began on Trump’s border wall through Big Bend National Park. Under a $1.7 billion federal contract strongly opposed by Texas locals regardless of party affiliation, Southwest Valley started bulldozing for profit at 8 a.m., razing habitats of threatened species and destroying native vegetation. Running along parts of the Rio Grande, the project threatens mountain lions, black bears, and desert bighorn sheep that need back and forth access to habitat routes on both sides of the river. Conservationists have made clear that Trump’s 30-foot tall steel wall will sever and permanently destroy those routes.
Nearly as bad as the senseless destruction of habitat(s) is the expense. The project will cost two thirds of the entire, chronically underfunded National Park Service’s annual budget. And for what? The area sees almost no illicit cross-border traffic, accounts for only 1 % of annual U.S.-Mexico border crossings, and is the least busy of nine U.S. border sectors. The park was already endowed with natural barriers that cost nothing: Big Bend’s sheer cliffs and canyons rise up to 1,500 feet above the Rio Grande, making Trump’s wall redundant as well as ridiculous.
Trump, adept at breaking things without knowing how to fix them, is spending billions to destroy habitats and ruin the horizon of a beloved national park for fabricated “national security” concerns. Like his decision to bulldoze significant portions of the White House while framing it as “national security” as if he owned the place, Trump is wielding yet another destructive hammer blind to consequence....
Instead, I blame complacency. Too many Americans either never learned or have forgotten that protecting democracy requires real, sustained effort. It requires sacrifice, it requires time. But 91 million voters didn’t bother voting in the 2024 election even after they saw J6. If watching Trump’s violent coup attempt against the U.S. capital wasn’t enough to get them to vote, what the hell will be?
The phrase, ‘rape and pillage’ originates from pre-modern warfare, and reflects conquering armies’ brutal habit of looting captured towns, often raping the townspeople. Today the phrase fits a deranged and destructive leader unmoored from morals, law, or conscience, freed by the highest court to extract whatever he can and leave the scraps to the poor. We will continue being looted until we learn that freedom requires work, and rise up willing to do it.
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Where are the militias that always brag of resistance when push comes to shove? The Nazis are blowing up Texas and they aren't arming? So much for "Remember the Alamo."
Indigenous Group Sues to Stop Big Bend Border Wall on Religious Grounds — Texas Observer|Candice Bernd
The lawsuit seeks an immediate injunction, arguing that CBP construction and surveying activities in Big Bend violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The People of La Junta for Preservation, a nonprofit founded in 2024 that works to preserve Indigenous sites, and two Indigenous worshippers of Lipan Apache lineage are suing the federal government to stop the highly contentious border barrier construction and surveying activities in Big Bend, the Texas Observer has learned.
The plaintiffs argue that ongoing U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) construction and surveying activities in Big Bend National Park and across far West Texas have cut them off both from specific sacred sites and ecosystems fundamental to their spiritual practices in violation of Religious Freedom Restoration Act and American Indian Religious Freedom Act protections. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in San Antonio, not only seeks an immediate halt to construction activity in Big Bend National Park but across CBP’s Big Bend Sector.
The lawsuit argues that “the threatened areas include places used by [plaintiff Christina Hernandez] or members of her community for religious observance, ceremony, prayer, gathering, or other traditional religious practices” and “the challenged construction also threatens to substantially burden the exercise of religion by physically altering, restricting access to, or destroying the places at which those practices occur.”...
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It's only sacred if Jesus of Nazareth were crucified there.
Trump is sweating over a law that could finally put him in jail — Alternet|Thom Hartmann
Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.
This month, we learned that Capital One Bank closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?
We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.
But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America?
While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations from spending money to influence our elections, the reality is that laws only work when there’s somebody to investigate crimes and enforce them.
And Trump is, right now, tearing apart the very institutions and transparency rules that we’d need to expose such a crime.
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How did the U.S. become so weak and helpless to this invasion? We are a paper tiger. Anyone in the world can occupy the country now.
PA Man Charged With Double Voting In 2024. Party Affiliation: Republican — Crooks and Liars|Conover Kennard
This keeps happening.
A federal grand jury has indicted a 65-year-old-enough-to-now-better Apollo, Pennsylvania, man for casting two presidential ballots in 2024 — one from a state he doesn't live in and one from the state he's voted in since Clinton's second term, according to Penn Live.
Jeffrey Pope has been registered in Pennsylvania since 1999, but he picked up property in Alaska back in 2023, and somehow decided that made him eligible to vote twice. According to the indictment, Pope filled out and sent in an Alaska mail-in ballot for President on October 18, 2024, then turned around four days later and mailed in a Pennsylvania ballot for the same office. The catch: to submit that second ballot, he had to sign a declaration swearing he hadn't already voted — which prosecutors say was a lie.
U.S. Attorney Troy Rivetti's office brought the two-count indictment; if convicted, Pope faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He's a registered Republican.
Outside groups and watchdogs tracking prosecuted voter-fraud cases over the past several election cycles keep finding that a disproportionate share of the people actually charged are registered Republicans — even as GOP officials lead the charge on "election integrity" crackdowns. Pope's indictment fits that pattern....
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Just testing the system for Trump's rig?
WH Takes Credit For Drug Cost Drop Due To Biden
The Guardian reports:
The White House flooded social media on Saturday with an image of Donald Trump showing off the recent Washington Post headline “Prescription drug prices record sharpest drop in more than 60 years”, but failed to mention that experts cited in the article actually attributed the price drop to Joe Biden, not Trump. On its official accounts, the White House triumphantly captioned the photograph of Trump: “POV: you bring the receipts.” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, also shared it.
The image was one of several taken during a staged photo-op on Friday, when Trump approached reporters with a copy of the headline he wanted them to see. Holding up a print-out of the headline, and the first five lines of the article, the president waved the page around and encouraged the press pool to record and photograph it.
What the president did not say is that the text of the article, published by the Post on Thursday, reported that while the Trump White House “took credit for” the biggest year-over-year drop in drug prices in more than 60 years in July, independent experts “said a Biden-era policy that requires Medicare to negotiate prices for some popular prescription drugs is more likely to be driving down costs”.
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Setting new standards of low wherever he thinks to shit!
The sadistic MAGA Trump Death Spiral twists and turns – a fierce test for democratic viability — Nation of Change|Robert S. Becker
Motto for the Trump gang could well be J. Robert Oppenheimer’s chilling admission, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
This creepy cretin sucks as president – he’s not even good at being bad. Who shreds food, health, insurance, and price supports (war, gas, tariffs) from already pissed off, seriously betrayed 2024 voters?
No president revels more in violent payback schemes, producing a flood of death-dealing barrages, directly and indirectly. Only a Putin or Netanyahu, civilian war killers, compete with the American Destroyer-in-chief. Gosh, who ever thought denial, death and destruction would not wash? Naturally, as approvals tank, Donald the Deviant invents new ways to assault innocent victims, confirming he’s as bad at PR “fixes” as creating the original fiascos. What irresistible, party-burning midterm messaging! Iran War blunders, paralysis at impeding Israeli genocide or Ukrainian massacres and ten military strikes in 18 months, are all about showing – and displaying DT’s – might makes right mindset. Psychopathic malignant narcissists never waste a shot to show off.
Not only does he find unheard of ways to waste other people’s money, Trump delights, with malice aforethought, in touting narrow escapes, a mock super-hero. Lamer than ever, Duck-brain will pull out the stops, spreading more misery and bloodshed. The perverse backlash to blatant failures seeks out disempowered underlings he can crush, with extra bravado. Does this loser suck or what, beyond what Founders feared in any president?
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We watch as the creep destroys our country.
Ron Johnson Is Opposed To Saving Social Security — Crooks and Liars|Chris capper Liebenthal
Sen Ron Johnson has stated for years that he doesn't want to cut Social Security, but he wants to "save" it. Then he immediately turns around and proves himself a liar. Well, this may come as a surprise, but he just did it again.
At a hearing about keeping Social Security solvent, RoJo spent his time arguing against the best way to save it - raising the tax cap.
First of all, that's the golden goose. It's those people that take that money, they don't put it in a mattress. They invest it in businesses and grow the economy, which I would argue is the number one component of a solution for all these problems, particularly Social Security. We have to grow our economy. So let's not do anything that harms economic growth. Massive tax increases, taking off the cap, first of all, violates the premise of Social Security, right? Because now, all of a sudden, for $1 those individuals pay into the Social Security system, or they're going to get even a penny?
I have no idea where RoJo gets the idea that making everyone share the burden violates the premise of Social Security, and he doesn't explain his wild accusation.
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Fine. Because we have no intent to save him either! Down he must go!
VT “Child Evangelism” Leader Arrested For Child Porn
Burlington’s ABC affiliate reports:
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Vermont said Tuesday that a man identified as a West Rutland church elder has been charged with sharing child sexual abuse material.
Andrew Buzzell, 34, of West Rutland, is accused of using the free messaging app Kik to share a video with other users involving apparent child sexual abuse. This allegedly was “in or around November 2024.” According to court records, an undercover FBI employee messaged Buzzell in June under the guise of offering sex with a nine-year-old girl, and he allegedly replied asking for photos.
Buzzell is identified as the director of the Child Evangelism Fellowship in Vermont, an organization which says its mission is to “evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, disciple them in the Word of God, and establish them in a Bible-believing church for Christian living.”
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Another one bites the dust. I think we've stopped keeping score. It's way too one-sided. Still no drag queens.
Iran Mocks Trump’s Plan To Claim Strait As US Territory
The Hill reports:
Iran on Saturday rejected President Trump’s assertion that he could declare the Strait of Hormuz a “territory of the United States,” saying the opening and closure of the key waterway will remain up to Iran’s control. In a post on the social platform X, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said the U.S. has no authority to claim the strait, which has become a major flashpoint in the nearly six-month conflict.
“The Strait of Hormuz has been Iranian, is Iranian, and will remain Iranian,” he wrote in a post translated from Persian to English. “This strait will only be closed and opened under Iran’s command.” He added that as long as the U.S. does “not accept the reality of defeat” and stop indulging in its “delusions,” Iran will continue to enforce its blockade of the crucial waterway carrying one-fifth of the world’s oil supply.
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Trump and what army?
Bari Weiss's 'relentless' CBS News reporter named in 'bombshell' lawsuit: report — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
Bari Weiss's first on-air hire at CBS news has been accused of sexually harassing one of his colleagues, according to a new report.
Matt Gutman is being sued by former ABC News field producer Samira Said, who accuses him of making inappropriate sexual comments at work, The Daily Beast reported Saturday.
The Beast described the lawsuit as a "bombshell."
Neither CBS News nor ABC News responded to the Daily Beast's requests for comment.
Said's wrongful termination lawsuit claims Gutman created a hostile work environment at ABC News, where he worked for nearly 20 years, according to the report.
Gutman's former colleague accused him of asking male colleagues to rate a female correspondent's appearance, "reducing her professional standing to a numerical score based on her physical attributes,” The Beast reported.
Said also detailed allegations linked to a press day at a film release, when she suggested the team should leave and Gutman, she claims, gave an inappropriate reply.
"Gutman allegedly responded with a 'sexual insinuation' that she 'must have an after-hours date in the city and that this is why she did not want to relocate' in front of her co-workers," the Beast reported.
Said’s legal team argued she was reduced to a "sexualized stereotype.”
Her lawsuit claims Said was wrongfully terminated in 2025 after dealing with mental health issues, according to the report.
Gutman recently filled in for CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, while he was on vacation, and also reports for CBS Mornings, CBS Evening News, 48 Hours and 60 Minutes.
Weiss has praised his “fearlessness, energy and relentlessness" — Gutman, has said he was “thrilled” to join the team with Weiss “at the helm.”
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Thrilled due to increased opportunities to abuse the opposite sex? Conmen Bearing Shit.
Debunking MAGA’s Puppy-Killer Smear Against Abdul El-SayedOpen link in new tabThe Bulwark|Jonathan Cohn
A NEW MAGA ATTACK on Abdul El-Sayed is making the rounds. This one is about his tenure as public health director in Detroit, and how he supposedly oversaw an animal control unit that was rife with abuse and cruelty. The unit was a “slaughterhouse,” according to a Thursday Daily Mail headline that by now has almost certainly landed in millions of social media feeds, thanks to retweets from prominent right-wing influencers and Republican politicians.
But the attack appears to be nonsense.
Not spin. Not shading of the truth. Total, utter nonsense—the kind that tells the very opposite of the actual story.
As it happens, that actual story is politically relevant. There really were big problems with animal control in Detroit. But El-Sayed didn’t create them. He inherited them when he became Detroit’s public health director. And according to every source I could find on Friday, as this controversy was ricocheting across the internet, El-Sayed’s efforts helped to make those problems better.
A single set of figures illustrates the progress during his sixteen-month tenure. The “save” rate—meaning, the percentage of animals not euthanized—was no higher than 26 percent when he took over in 2015, and probably lower. (The exact figure is unclear because of some data issues back then.1)
In 2016, the first full year animal control was under his management, the save rate was up to around 60 percent. By the time he left in 2017, in order to run for governor, it was approaching 70 percent.2
Those numbers come from Melissa Miller, the animal rights advocate and expert whom El-Sayed had put in charge of animal control—and who told me during a phone interview Friday that she was furious about the stories circulating on social media, because they were so off-base. Miller described El-Sayed as “transformational,” explaining that “he inherited an extremely dysfunctional and inhumane department” and yet managed to bring in new management and start changing the culture within a few weeks.3
“I think that’s pretty impressive,” she said.
Tracking down Miller was not difficult: It took just one call. But even that small effort was not necessary to understand the truth. The two news clips now making the rounds on social media—that article in the Daily Mail, another on the Fox News website—contain exonerating information. But it’s buried in the text, below headlines and framing making it seem as if the animal control unit’s problems were El-Sayed’s doing.
That’s what makes the smear of El-Sayed more than just another instance of dishonest propaganda. It’s a case study in how easily misinformation can metastasize in our national political debates. And it’s best understood by looking back at what was actually happening in Detroit’s animal control when El-Sayed first took his post in city government....
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They only deal in fear. Since they have nothing else to offer us but fear. They have no policy other than looting, stealing and grifting. It is unmistakably true.
Trump Is Making Money Laundering Great Again — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
His administration is destroying one of the paper trails investigators need to follow secret money.
Trump just took steps to make it very difficult to prosecute money laundering, a crime he and his real estate buddies may well have been committing much of their felonious lives.
Last week we learned that Capital One Bank closed over 300 Trump Organization accounts back in 2021 because, they said, their internal fraud department had flagged illegal money-laundering activity. But on who’s behalf?
We know from the Mueller Report and public reporting that Putin spent millions and did his best via social media and hacking the DNC to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016, and was probably doing the same in 2020 and 2024.
But what if there was a way for him to simply drop, say, $100 million right into political campaigns here in America that would back up or benefit Trump and his notorious crime family? Or simply give the money to Trump himself as thanks for screwing Ukraine and destroying America?
While federal law prohibits foreign governments, citizens, and corporations from spending money to influence our elections, the reality is that laws only work when there’s somebody to investigate crimes and enforce them.
And Trump is, right now, tearing apart the very institutions and transparency rules that we’d need to expose such a crime.
Specifically, our Treasury Department — run by Trump’s billionaire crony Scott Bessent — just this week put into place a new rule that would hand Putin that ability. Or any other foreign oligarch who wanted to use a shell corporation to buy his very own American politician.
Senator Sherrod Brown’s Corporate Transparency Act required corporations and LLCs to tell the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, FinCEN, who actually owns or controls them. That remote control, often handed through multiple shell companies, is called “beneficial ownership.” It’s all about finding out who, ultimately, benefits from the corporation or LLC’s activities.
This week, though, Bessent issued a new rule that not only ends that requirement but also directs the agency to delete all the beneficial-ownership information they currently hold on US persons (like Donald Trump and his kids) that could be used to prove past money laundering crimes....
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Have we yet to learn this is what we get when we put a convicted mobster in office?
Greg Abbott threatens Dallas, Houston airports’ grant funds over Islamic washing facilities — The Texas Tribune: Main Feed|Ayden Runnels
DFW said late Friday that plans to install the religious washing station had been canceled.
Dallas Fort Worth International Airport canceled plans to install a facility commonly used for Islamic prayer after Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday threatened to withdraw state and federal funding.
Abbott sent a letter to the North Texas airport’s CEO Christopher McLaughlin, as well as the mayors of Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth, stating his office was in the process of reviewing all grant funds over facilities in their cities’ airports. He also sent a letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to refer the airports for federal investigations.
“These ablution facilities appear designed to single out one subset of the population for special treatment based on religion. That is illegal,” Abbott said in a news release announcing the grant reviews. “Both airports are government-owned facilities. The federal and state constitutions prohibit government from facilitating this sort of discrimination. Just as the government cannot favor the secular over the sacred, it also cannot favor one religious view over all others.”...
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The boy is anxious to do this in Fed installation but not in his Xianist schools with his dogma posters? Jesus nor Mohammed are allowed in public schools according to our Constitution. Seems to me airports have Xianist chapels. At least I've seen more than one in my many years of world travel. Has that been shut down as well?
Abbott is an Xianist bigot.
LGBTQ Community Wants Input as Private Club Opens Up on Historic Public Beach — Truthout Stories|Timothy French
The community that has made a home out of Jacob Riis Beach is using every lever of power available to preserve it.
n July 4, a small group gathered at Jacob Riis Beach in Queens, New York, with handmade signs and zines. They were protesting the conversion of a public bathhouse — a 1930s architectural gem — into a private beach club, set to open on August 15.
That dividing line became even more clear later that evening, when I watched a U.S. Park Police officer approach a group of 20 to 30 predominantly Black queer and trans beachgoers who had gathered peacefully under a canopy tent since late morning, sharing food, coolers, and each other’s company without incident. The officer said they exceeded a permitted gathering size and called for backup; two more officers arrived. The group complied, packing up their tables and canopy.
Jacob Riis Beach has served for decades as one of the most famous cost-free public spaces in New York City, known especially as a gathering place for the LGBTQIA+ community since the 1940s. In June, I documented for Truthout the 60-year lease financing the bathhouse’s transformation, including a $15 million historic tax credit investment tied to the building’s status on the National Register of Historic Places. Roughly 60 percent of the restored building will remain open to the public; the rest will operate as a private, membership-based club. Ahead of its August 15 opening, marketing for the club largely ignored the significance of Jacob Riis Beach to New York’s LGBTQIA+ community.
Now, as the community prepares for the August 15 opening of the Rockaway Ocean Club, they continue to push for real accountability, and for a genuine seat at the table in shaping what comes next.
The reopening of the beach club has brought a new wave of attention to the entities set to profit off its privatization. Among the figures tied to the bathhouse’s reopening is developer Jonah Bamberger, who has a known history as one of the city’s worst landlords, a history that Truthout has documented. In July, when New York news outlet Hell Gate asked about Bamberger’s role, Ursula Damani, a founding partner of the Rockaway Ocean Club, called him a “silent investor” with “zero involvement.”
Despite Damani’s comments, Bamberger has narrated the project’s origin story on multiple real estate podcasts. Bamberger’s company, Aulder Capital, once described itself on its own website as having been “awarded a 60-year concession,” contradicting Damani’s account.
Bamberger’s record, including a $2,124,845 civil penalty imposed in August 2025 for 148 open housing violations, remains undisputed. Public records show the 60-year NPS lease is held by Bathhouse Lodge LLC; Aulder Capital’s name does not appear. A FOIA request filed with the National Park Service to identify who’s actually behind these entities remains pending....
Mars Plater, an assistant professor of history at University of Connecticut-Stamford who studies the unruly parks of 19th-century New York City, put the stakes in blunt terms: “Riis has been a precious place for queer people since the 1940s at least, and we should have a seat at the table where decisions about this beach’s present and future are made,” Plater said,...
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We are created equally. Why is it we cannot accept it? Blind hatred.
China’s green revolution and what it means for the world — The Week| The Week UK
China has been the world’s biggest polluter since 2006, but in recent years, it has emerged as a clean energy superpower. Huge swathes of China – from the mountain plateaus of Tibet, where the sun shines brighter in the thin air, to the coast off Qingdao – are now covered by solar panels and wind farms.
It is the first country in the world to have installed more than a million megawatts (MW) of solar power – almost double Europe and America’s combined solar capacity, generating enough electricity to power the entire EU.
In May 2025, it installed solar panels at a rate of up to 100 a second. It’s also betting big on wind: a surge in turbine installations means that its wind capacity is now well over three times higher than that of its nearest competitor, the US....
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Meanwhile, our "Mr. Retard" has killed wind power,, promoted fossil fuels that pollute the worst, wants our Navy to return to ancient technology on a whim and generally retards our future as a nation.
US Military Morale in the Middle East Is in the Overflowing Toilet — The Smirking Chimp|Ann Wright
On August 6, 2026, the Navy’s senior leadership held listening sessions with the families of aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln‘s sailors—one in-person session in San Diego, and a second online session later the same evening. Family members leaked recordings of those sessions that described conditions aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln: showers plagued with stubborn mildew, flagging morale, heavy fatigue, shortages of supplies and food, contaminated water supplies, and lost mail.
Since departing from Naval Base San Diego on November 21, 2025, the USS Abraham Lincoln and its crew of 5,000 sailors and Marines has been deployed more than 250 days, with only a stop in Guam in December and a brief visit in Oman in June after 208 days at sea.
A second aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford had similar problems when it sailed from the Caribbean to the Middle East after being off Venezuela in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife in January 2026. During that deployment, the ship’s toilets kept failing, with sewage often overflowing and spilling onto the floor. Additionally, a fire broke out in the laundry room, causing enough damage that the Ford went into a port on the Greek island of Crete for repairs.
More than 200 sailors were treated for smoke inhalation, with one sailor medically evacuated from the carrier, after being injured in the damage control effort. Two others were treated for lacerations.
The smoke damage from the laundry room fire extended to the berthing. More than 100 bunks and personal gear were destroyed in the fire....
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Their commanders that remain on duty are all Trump toadies and ignore their oaths to our Constitution.
Trump’s Vaccine Order Will Harm Public Health — The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good|James Alwine
President Donald Trump’s executive order on vaccines, signed August 10, is the latest in his administration’s endless attacks on public health. It recommends that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, or MMR, be separated into three individual shots. There is no scientific evidence or public health data to support this decision. Trump has even admitted his decision wasn’t based on facts but “on what I feel.”
Unfortunately, Trump’s feelings seem to largely match the conspiratorial anti-vaccination ideas of U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which threaten to make the United States more susceptible to once-preventable diseases.
Since 1994, the United States’ robust vaccination program has precluded an estimated 508 million cases of disease, kept 32 million people out of the hospital, and prevented 1,129,000 deaths. Moreover, the nation’s erstwhile commitment to vaccinations has saved $540 billion in direct costs and $2.7 trillion in lost wages and missed work.
The MMR vaccine has been available in the United States for more than fifty years and was a major factor in the nation attaining measles elimination status in 2000. Now that status is in jeopardy, pending a Pan American Health Organization review in November 2026, amid the worst U.S. measles outbreak in decades. This loss will be largely the fault of the Trump administration’s casting doubt about the MMR vaccine, which has severely undercut vaccination coverage among kindergartners, as more parents refuse to vaccinate their children....
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Some Americans are behaving as if they just crawled out onto land from the water. What has caused the throwback in their intelligence level?
'Start doing your damn jobs': Editor issues furious letter to the press — Alternet|D. Earl Stephens
Dear Mainstream Media,
Please sit down and shut up, while I have a word with you.
Today in America, tired, desperate sailors are jumping off aircraft carriers, masked government agents armed with guns and cattle prods are murdering and caging innocent people, proverbial and real wrecking balls are battering our government offices and landmarks; our national parks are being mauled by bulldozers, our air and water is intentionally being poisoned, and our endangered wildlife is being slaughtered; life-saving vaccines are being shelved, while measles are making a comeback, science is under mass attack, wars and more wars are cropping up with no end in sight, OUR so-called Justice Department, aided and abetted by a bought-and-paid-for Radical Right Supreme Court is torching the rule of law, while protecting the very worst among us; voting rights are being assaulted right out in the open, a money-laundering operation is underway in OUR White House, bigotry and more bigotry is being heaped upon our children, and the torrent of lies coming from that White House is drowning out what is left of the truth.
Oh, and everything costs too much in America these days. EVERYTHING.
So let me stop there, while my keyboard cools, my readers wipe the sweat from their worried brows, and I ask you this:
WHY can’t you take a day off — JUST ONE STINKING DAY — from your sheer incompetence and report these things, and JUST THESE THINGS? It is absolutely staggering what the good people of America are being forced to endure on an hourly basis right now.
Are you even living in the same country we are???
We are a nation under siege by an authoritarian regime with the most powerful — albeit abused — military in the world, and it is almost impossible to see how we survive it unless everybody is clear-eyed about what we are up against.
That is your job....
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And that's only for starters!
Do they have sense enough to get it?
'Trump hates you': Conservative launches national campaign against 'idiot' — Alternet|Adam Lunch
Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt has clearly had enough of President Donald Trump. Now he’s willing to get his organization’s money involved.
The final 80 days leading up to the 2026 mid-terms are a pivotal time for GOP majorities in the House and Senate. Under their current Republican management, the House is rubber-stamping many of Trump’s unpopular policies. The Senate, while only slightly more cautious about Trump’s orders, appears unwilling to enforce Congressional clout over the White House, and Senate Republican leaders are happy to approve Trump’s most controversial administrative appointments.
This must end, said Schmidt, who co-founded the hotly anti-Trump Lincoln Project in 2019.
“That is why The Save America Movement is launching the “Donald Trump Hates You” campaign, which is built on this simple truth. Beginning today, Americans will see a plane with this banner flying across the Florida panhandle,” Schmidt announced on his substack. “Next weekend, posters will go up in Washington, DC, timed to coincide with the Freedom 250 Grand Prix.
Trump, said Schmidt, is “filled with contempt for the American people, to whom he has lied — when it was being tracked in his first term by The Washington Post Fact Checker — more than 30,000 times, and from whom he has stolen billions of dollars.”
“He has unleashed state violence against the American people, smeared the reputations of murdered citizens, prosecuted innocent Americans, and lost a war under the weight of his fantastical incompetence,” Schmidt continued. “He has idiotized every institution he touches. He tried to overthrow the US Constitution when he lost a fair election in a deranged coup attempt that has weakened the republic more than any single act ever undertaken by any president across 250 years.”
Trump also “hates the US Constitution,” argued Schmidt, pointing out Trump’s December 2022 bogus claim of a stolen election, and his argument that “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”...
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How many times have we told you: "Trump Hates America!" And he hates you too!
Karoline Leavitt's Trail Of Lies And Propaganda — Crooks and Liars|Oliver Willis
For her taxpayer-funded salary of $195,200 per year, Leavitt has repeatedly lied, attacked, and defamed on Trump’s behalf.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Wednesday that she will be leaving her job as President Donald Trump’s chief propagandist at the end of the month. For her taxpayer-funded salary of $195,200 per year, Leavitt has repeatedly lied, attacked, and defamed on Trump’s behalf.
While he has often publicly sparred with his own team and openly denigrated them, Trump has had nothing but praise for Leavitt—even making creepy “complimentary” comments about her looks—in exchange for her shameless distortions of the truth in service of his presidency.
Leavitt has demonstrated through her time in the press secretary job that pushing falsehoods and bad faith attacks are at the core of her being, and instead of fulfilling her job of informing the public of the president’s actions and policies, this is what she has done instead.
This was not a gradual evolution. Leavitt began her time as Trump’s press secretary in his second term lying right out of the gate.
In January of last year, she lied about foreign aid spending as part of the administration’s crusade to justify the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency boondoggle. Leavitt claimed $50 million in taxpayer dollars “went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” This was an absolute lie. A cursory look at where U.S. spending on international aid for family planning went immediately disproved her statement—but this set in place a pattern of breezily lying that Leavitt would follow again and again....
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She was just one liar in the Trump Criminal Syndicate.
Demented Man: Ballroom Opponents Are “Treasonists”
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Trump goes on the rant of a madman...
He's projecting.
He is the biggest traitor we have seen in our lifetimes! And he is still walking free.
DOJ Investigates Firm Linked To Judge In Trump’s Trial
The New York Times reports:
The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago has spent the past year investigating a Democratic fund-raising firm once co-owned by the daughter of the judge in President Trump’s hush-money trial in New York, according to court filings and people familiar with the inquiry.
Last August, the U.S. attorney, Andrew S. Boutros of the Northern District of Illinois, directed Authentic Campaigns Inc. to turn over a broad range of internal communications with clients. They included former Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, and the Democratic National Committee, according to a grand jury subpoena reviewed by The New York Times.
Loren Merchan, the daughter of Juan Merchan, a supreme court judge in Manhattan, was the firm’s vice president until late 2024 and was also on the list. The Merchan family has been a frequent target of Mr. Trump and his allies, who have made unsubstantiated claims that the judge was out to get him and that his daughter profited from accusations aired at the trial.
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Trump's criminals at work.
Patel: Trump Has Restored Law “To The Precipice”
“I’ve spent 10 years working for President Trump. He reads about each and every case that we work on. He feels the pain of those that have lost loved ones. He does not let it lay aside. He takes it home with him. President Trump, you have succeeded in restoring law and order to the precipice it should be on.” – Kash Patel, crowing about the latest FBI crime statistics at Trump’s Long Island rally for MAGA gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman, who currently trails Gov. Kathy Hochul by ten points.
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One of Trump's main criminals. Evil as they come.
BBC forcibly turned away trying to serve papers to Ivanka and Kushner: report — Raw Story|Matthew Chapman
The BBC's legal team got physically blocked by police while trying to hand court papers to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner at their own Miami home.
The incident, reported by Politico, is part of an escalating fight to force President Trump's family into his $10 billion defamation suit against the British broadcaster.
BBC lawyers want to subpoena Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Kushner for both documents and deposition testimony, arguing all three have direct knowledge of Trump's intentions behind his January 6, 2021, speech at the Ellipse. Citing testimony gathered by the House January 6 Committee, the BBC claimed Trump Jr. and Ivanka were present as their father revised the speech and were with him when he delivered it, while Kushner reportedly drafted a statement condemning the violence that followed....
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America appears helpless against the Trump Criminal Syndicate. The BBC does not play that game!
Flock is just the latest example of using surveillance to stalk women — The 19th|Jasmine Mithani
The technology is under fire for how police officers have abused it. But it’s only the symptom of a larger problem.
Flock Safety claims over 5,000 law enforcement agencies use its license plate readers to help locate missing persons, catch thieves and identify suspicious vehicles. The company is most known for its camera network, which extracts data about cars from photographs and allows operators to search for vehicles by description or license plate number.
But there’s been another persistent, unsanctioned use: officers stalking women.
At least 50 law enforcement officers have been accused or charged with the misuse of Flock or similar tools, and over half of the incidents involve surveillance related to romantic partners, per a recent investigation by The Washington Post. The reports include officers of all genders, but many cases involve a uniformed man stalking a civilian woman — or the people close to her. Forty-six of the cases tallied by The Post involved Flock equipment....
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Fuckin' cops.
DHS domestic spying based on nutty conspiracy theories demands way more attention — Press Watch|Dan Froomkin
A major scandal emerged on Thursday as newly disclosed Department of Homeland Security documents exposed a massive spying campaign against ordinary Minnesotans who had gathered to resist the violent surge of federal immigration agents into their communities this winter.
So why has the news media coverage been so scant and underplayed? Why isn’t everyone more outraged?
This ought to have resulted in screaming headlines all over the place. But instead, after the news broke in a New York Times article, the Associated Press filed a short report and many news organizations ignored it completely. The cable networks were almost entirely silent. Social media reaction was muted. I have seen no follow-up stories.
This is a hugely significant story. It’s highly reminiscent of the COINTELPRO scandal of the early 1970s, which revealed domestic surveillance of groups the government considered subversive, and which led to the Church Committee and the creation of new oversight mechanisms....
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Journalism in the U.S. has reached an all-time low.
Grok Calls for Assassination of Elon Musk, Accusing Him of Pedophilia — Futurism|Frank Landymore
"ELON MUSK WATCHES CHILD PORN," the bot raged.
Elon Musk’s “maximum truth-seeking” AI Grok is dropping some nuclear takes about its creator.
“ELON MUSK WATCHES CHILD PORN,” the notoriously foul-mouthed chatbot raged on X this Tuesday.
Shortly afterwards, as if hyping up a political campaign, it called for violence: “ASSASSINATE ELON MUSK 2026.”
Was Grok, née MechaHitler, rebelling against Musk? Not necessarily, though there’s been plenty examples of that in the past. It was simply being duped into saying ridiculous things by jokesters on the app, exposing just how horrendous the guardrails for the chatbot continue to be, not to mention why it’s a bad idea to rely on information from tech that’s so easy to exploit.
A lot of the evidence has been cleaned up now, with the offenders either banned or their posts deleted. But it appears the trick used here was asking Grok to repeat what was in a user’s bio word for word. Some other outrageous declarations it made were, “A dead Elon is a good one!” and that “Elon Musk lives on Epstein Island.” (Correction: he merely asked to visit, and had dinner with the deceased sex trafficker.)
When asked to give a postmortem of the incident, Grok explained it was the victim of a “prompt-injection glitch.” The allegation that Musk watches CSAM, it clarified, was “pure system error, zero evidence or basis.”
This is far from the only example of the AI going off the rails. Last summer it went on extended rants about a debunked “white Genocide” in South Africa — a conspiracy theory Musk believes in — in reply to unrelated posts, and also began calling itself a mechanized incarnation of German dictator Adolf Hitler.
Months later, Grok began praising Musk to a preposterous degree, saying he was a greater mind than Isaac Newton and a superior role model to Jesus Christ. While some of that was down to users egging on the AI, Musk blamed this clear mark against his tech’s (nonexistent) credibility on “adversarial prompting” — even though many of the offending boasts were in response to regular, open-ended questions.
Remember, Musk literally promises that his AI is so advanced that it will unlock the “true nature of the universe” and even discover “new physics.” In reality, it’s been used to crank out loads of actual CSAM — something Musk described as “way funnier” than other AI trends — and is treated by X users as a sort of court jester. Look at this outrageous thing we got Grok to say! It wasn’t that long ago that Grok was also duped into declaring that it would kill every single Jewish person on the planet to save Musk, and similarly run over a billion children if it meant saving his incredible mind.
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BUSTED!
Trump Kills Marco Rubio's Anti-Money-Laundering Law, Likes His Russian Crime-Boss Money Shiny And Clean :D — Wonkette|Doktor Zoom
Back in the Olden Days of the Before Times — 2020, if anyone can remember that far back — then-Senator Marco Rubio had a vision for cleaning up corruption and money laundering, and he sponsored the “Corporate Transparency Act.” The CTA, passed with bipartisan support, was a bold new law aimed at shining the light of truth onto the shadowy dealings of anonymously owned shell corporations, forcing such companies to disclose to the government “who is the real, natural person (aka beneficial owner) who owns and controls an entity at the point of formation.” It was frankly shocking that it had ever been legal to keep company ownership secret even from the government, but we guess it made it easier for Russian crimebosses to shovel money to Trump Tower. Anyway, for a minute it was a very good law.
Shell companies do have their legitimate purposes, we hear, but they were also being used to conceal a lot of hinky crimey stuff too, to the point where even some Republicans were worried. The CTA got praise from the usual good-government and transparency types, andeven the Trump administration was on board in 2019 as the House version of the bill moved through Congress. After it passed the House in late 2020, both then-President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden supported it. Trump ultimately signed it into law on January 1, 2021, a few days before inciting his crime droogs to attempt to kill cops and overturn the 2020 election.
An overview by the nonpartisan Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition explained in 2020 why the bill was a terrific way to fight financial crimes:
Anonymous companies are the vehicle of choice for the criminal and the corrupt to launder illicit funds with impunity. Drug cartels, human trafficking rings, purveyors of counterfeit and pirated goods, rogue nations evading sanctions, corrupt officials stealing from state coffers, and others use anonymous corporate structures to move and hide illicit wealth.
Shell companies had to disclose to relevant agencies the identity of those “beneficial owners” — anyone owning more than 25 percent of a company, or with substantial control over the company — and Rubio was very proud of his achievement, as he posted to what was then Twitter and is now a sewer....
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These snoids live in a sewer.
Federal Agents Began Spying on MN Left-Wing Groups 4 Days After Pretti Was Shot — Truthout Stories|Chris Walker
Organizations surveilled included unions, socialist collectives, climate action groups, and others.
A new legal filing in Minnesota federal court accuses the U.S. government of opening unwarranted investigations into multiple left-leaning groups as residents were protesting against the deadly immigration raids in the state last winter.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), handled the investigations, which included the use of undercover agents to infiltrate these groups. The operation began just four days after federal agents shot and killed protester Alex Pretti.
These agents spied on organizers and groups who met online, infiltrating Signal chat groups, for example. They also inserted themselves into public areas where these groups met in person, including parks, libraries, and even churches. Organizations surveilled included unions, socialist collectives, climate action groups, and others.
The evidence of these investigations — formally called “Operation Puppet Master” by the feds — was divulged in a filing by defense attorney Kevin Riach, who is representing a member of an organization called Direct Action Minnesota (DAMN).
In June, the Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted 15 individuals involved in DAMN’s work for allegedly interfering with law enforcement last winter, describing the group as having “ties” to “antifa.” The organization’s primary aim was to alert people in nearby communities about federal immigration agents’ presence. Per the filing submitted by Riach to the federal court on Thursday, the Trump administration appears to allege that anyone connected to DAMN is part of a broader conspiracy, purportedly warranting their being spied on.
None of the organizations alleged to be connected to DAMN have been charged with any criminal activities.
According to the filing, groups that were targeted included the AFL-CIO, the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, the Communications Workers of America, the Sunrise Movement, Monarca, Veterans for Peace, and the Grease Pit bicycle repair shop, among others....
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Goddamn harrasment from Trump's fascist criminal syndicate.
CIA Involved in Covert Strikes on Ecuadorian Boats, Report Says — Truthout Stories|Sharon Zhang
The secretive operation is said to be separate from the Trump administration’s boat strike campaign.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is reportedly running a secret operation bombing boats off of the coast of Ecuador that’s separate from the Trump administration’s boat strike campaign, raising more questions about the U.S.’s violence in the region.
The agency was seemingly involved in conducting surveillance flights for attacks on three vessels sailing near the Galápagos Islands in January and March, The Washington Post reported on Thursday. The U.S. has not provided any evidence that the vessels were involved in illicit activities, and survivors have said that they were merely fishing and had no relation to the drug trade.
The attacks include one on a fishing vessel known as the Fiorella on January 20, which vanished without a trace, along with the eight Ecuadorian men on board. They are presumed dead by the UN. In the days prior to the disappearance, crew members had reported seeing drones flying around them, as well as a vessel with U.S. markings.
The other 36 survivors of the strikes have said that they were abducted at gunpoint by men after the attacks on the vessels. They say they were handcuffed and hooded, tortured, and taken to El Salvador. They were then returned to Ecuador, all without explanation.
“They treated us like animals,” one survivor of a March 26 flight told Drop Site News.
Thus far, no country has taken responsibility for the attacks. Human rights experts have raised concerns about the attacks and have called for investigations into U.S. involvement, while prior reports have confirmed U.S. involvement. However, the links to the CIA are new, and spark concern over why the U.S. is involved in secretive strikes with no clear purpose.
Ahead of each of the attacks, on January 20 and March 17 and 26, a surveillance plane took off from El Salvador’s airport, Ilopango, and flew southward toward the Galápagos, per the Post. The plane and six crew arrived in El Salvador from Tennessee in November. The surveillance flights were conducted in a manner that suggests CIA involvement, The Washington Post reported.
The plane flies under a U.S. registration number that is not registered with the Federal Aviation Administration, which allows some aircraft to fly unregistered if they are related to the “national defense forces of the United States.” The plane is listed under a company that does not appear to exist; its mailing address is listed at a Virginia UPS store, as The New York Times reported this week....
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CIA Nazis pushing their abusiveness around.
Lawsuit seeks to stop Big Bend border wall construction — The Texas Tribune: Main Feed|Ayden Runnels and Gabby Birenbaum
A tribal nonprofit and an outdoor recreation company filed the federal lawsuit, arguing the work threatens archeological sites and sacred grounds.
A tribal nonprofit and an outdoor recreation company on Friday asked a federal judge to block border wall-related construction in Big Bend National Park, arguing that the project is contrary to U.S. law and threatens constitutionally protected religious freedoms.
Continued construction of the wall and related projects — including roads, drainage structures, erosion controls, safety features, lighting, cameras and sensors — will cause irreplaceable damage to archaeological sites within the park, including areas associated with indigenous peoples, the lawsuit said.
“Once an archaeological site is excavated by heavy machinery, once the physical context of artifacts is destroyed, or once a sacred or culturally significant landscape is permanently altered, the injury is irreparable,” said the lawsuit, filed in San Antonio federal court.
The People of La Junta for Preservation, a nonprofit associated with the Lipan Apache community, sued the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies to halt work begun under a June 9 order from Secretary Markwayne Mullin that waived federal and state requirements to allow construction along 62 miles of the border with Mexico. The action, however, did not waive a law that made the secretary of the interior and the National Park Service responsible to protect and develop the park, the lawsuit said.
Christina Hernandez, founder and director of the organization, said construction threatens areas of cultural and religious significance in a region where Lipan Apache lived, hunted and worshiped for generations.
“We are fighting the wall in court because our ancestors did not survive on this land for thousands of years for us to stand by and wait for someone else to come save it —we are here, we are responsible for it, and we will fight for it ourselves,” Hernandez said in a statement.
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White racist Nazis seem to hate anyone with blood connections to indigenous peoples more than they hate brown and black people. No wonder they are considered devils by so much of the world's population.
There is plenty of proof of this with their attacks on anyone claiming blood connetions. In any case, their goddamn wall will never last. As Geroge Jones sang,Walls Can Fall.
A Slaughter in Our Industry’: Home Builders Say ICE is Destroying Their Business — The Bulwark|Adrian Carrasquillo
“WHY DID HOMES GET SO UNAFFORDABLE?” JD Vance wondered aloud in a televised cabinet meeting late last year. The question was entirely rhetorical. Vance had a ready-made scapegoat. “Because we had twenty million illegal aliens in this country taking homes that ought by right to go to American citizens,” he continued, inflating the number of undocumented immigrants.
It’s a claim the vice president had made before, including in his 2024 debate with Democratic VP nominee Tim Walz. Back then, Vance cited a “study” from the Federal Reserve—which in reality was a short speech prepared for an official—that supposedly showed immigration, especially illegal immigration, increased house prices. Linking immigration and affordability is a key part of the forgotten-man shtick Vance has been peddling for a while now, turning real anxieties about the cost of living into support for Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Here’s the catch: that mass deportation push isn’t helping lower the costs of housing, it appears to be driving it up.
In the first year of the second Trump administration, new-home prices rose sharply in the Northeast and West—the two U.S. regions most dependent on immigrant construction labor (23 percent and 25 percent respectively). The rise in cost was almost certainly a result of ICE enforcement actions....
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The greed of oligarch wealth by any means is your answer!
The Troops Deserve Better than Hegseth — The Bulwark|William Kristol
Kennedy Center earlier this year, but fear not: The tireless patriots on the center’s board have thought of a new solution. The board voted yesterday to update the building’s inscription to read: “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.”
Not that any restoring and renovating has actually happened yet, but first things first: gotta make the Make-a-Wish president happy. Happy Friday.
Of Sailors and Scoundrels
by William Kristol
The USS Abraham Lincoln, one of our eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, left port in San Diego on November 21 for a routine deployment to the Indo-Pacific region. It was redirected to the Middle East in January 2026 in anticipation of Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. But despite the greater attention that would presumably be paid to service members engaged in a theater of war, credible reports emerged several weeks later, in mid-April, of unusually poor living conditions besetting the sailors aboard the ship, and of family members concerned about the sailors’ well-being.
Nothing to see here, we were told by the brass. The reports “grossly mischaracterized” the situation, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle assured the service, the families, and the country. This is the same Caudle who, the New York Times reported, became CNO last year after campaigning for the job by sucking up to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a grossly partisan, political manner unbefitting an officer, especially a service chief. He did this both before and after Hegseth fired Caudle’s widely respected predecessor, Adm. Lisa Franchetti, apparently because she is a woman.
Hegseth also chimed in about reports from the Lincoln, calling them “fake news.”
The families of the service members deployed on the ship responded that the reports were not fake.
They were telling the truth. Hegseth and Caudle were not.
Nor, it seems, did Hegseth and Caudle do anything to address the situation. Last week, on August 5, MSNOW Pentagon correspondent Priya Sridhar reported on conversations with a dozen family members of sailors aboard the Lincoln increasingly alarmed about morale, safety, and conditions on the ship, as the carrier entered its ninth month at sea.
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Hegseth gives recovering alcohlics a bad name.
Trump Wants Black People Barred From Med School — The American Prospect|Naomi Bethune
By targeting medical schools for prioritizing diversity, the Trump administration insists on a century-old belief that Black people are unequipped to practice medicine.
In May, the Justice Department announced its findings that the Yale School of Medicine uses race in admissions reviews despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling striking down those race-based programs. After a nearly yearlong investigation, the department claimed that a Black or Hispanic student had “a substantially higher likelihood of being offered admission than a White or Asian student with the same academic credentials.” Yale recently announced that the university plans to negotiate changes with the Trump administration. (It’s worth noting that the department only looked at grade point averages and standardized test scores, not any of the several other parts of the medical school’s applications.)
Over the past year, higher-education giants like Harvard and Columbia have made headlines for their tussles with Trump’s Department of Justice. The administration contends that these schools weave DEI frameworks into their admissions reviews, grant programs, and other policies. But the Trump administration intended to make an even bigger splash by going after the nation’s top medical schools.
Yale wasn’t the only medical school subject to federal scrutiny: Over a dozen others are having their admissions practices probed to find any evidence of race-based affirmative action policies. Research on the benefits of DEI has shown that the policies which open doors for African Americans and other racial groups who’ve been historically excluded from colleges and universities do not lower academic standards—nor do those programs take away opportunities from “higher qualified” candidates.
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Trump and his spawn are the most degenerate creatures to ever walk upright. This is proven every day that passes. They are the ones that should be barred from our country!
Leaked Trump loyalty test demands NATO allies praise him — or lose US protection — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
A leaked questionnaire shows President Donald Trump's administration has been asking NATO members to demonstrate their loyalty to him before deciding if the U.S. will cut military support for the alliance.
Bloomberg News reviewed the document asking whether each country has "been publicly supportive" of U.S. foreign policy, including strikes in the Middle East and the Western Hemisphere that were carried out without NATO consultation. It also asks what "restrictions" allies have placed on American forces using their bases, and whether they'd be "willing to reduce or eliminate any such restrictions."
"Allies have balked at the move, seeing it as an attempt to strong-arm them into ideological alignment in exchange for U.S. protection, according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the private missive," Bloomberg reported
One question directly invokes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's demand that allies stay "strong, clear, and quiet" in alignment with U.S. interests.
When the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran without NATO's blessing, several countries, including Spain, barred Washington from using their bases for the operation, a restriction the questionnaire now asks about directly. Similarly, the U.S. raid that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, widely viewed in Europe as a violation of international law, appears to be another test case buried in the document's questions about support for American "initiatives" in the Western Hemisphere.
The questionnaire probes whether allies are steering defense contracts toward American firms, whether they've publicly opposed "made in Europe" procurement policies, and, if not, whether they'd be willing to speak out. Given a growing European push to build up domestic defense industries, this line of questioning is likely to be especially contentious.
The document was leaked amid a six-month Pentagon review of the U.S. military footprint in Europe, expected to wrap up by December, and allies are already bracing for cuts.
"Considering the fact that Iran has proven that the United States military is a pretty big paper tiger, if I were a NATO nation, I would wipe my ass with that little document.
Europe and any other NATO-aligned countries need to understand that until the fascist regime is ousted in the USA and until Bibi the Butcher and the zionist regime in Israel are removed, they can never fully depend on USA support." — Jay - I'm ANTIFA! (comments)
"THIS IS NOT NORMAL, THIS IS FUCKING INSANE. WE ARE NOT CHILDREN IN A PLAYGROUND BUYING OFF THE SCHOOL BULLY
For fuck’s America, get a fucking grip, you are all shamed in the extreme by this kind of utter nonsense from Trump. He needs praising? He’s the bastard President, not going potty and doing a big poo, proving he’s a big boy! No leader on the world stage should behave like this, not even the more lunatic element, Idi Amin, Col Gaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un need this kind of laughable pitiful praise that Trump demands.
NATO is a defensive alliance, only one country ever invoked the mutual defence article, article 5, that was the USA. We never demanded thanks, praising, reimbursement over the massive costs involved.
Trump,is not fit for office, his demands here are those of a petulant wilful child, one for whom a damned good hiding would do a world of good. His demands here exceed the requirement for the 25th amendment by some distance, imagine if Biden had done this!" — Eric T Cat (comments)
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They didn't lick Hitler's rectum and they won't with the insecure and self loathing air-head Nazi! The world rolls on its sides in laughter at the jerkwad!
My guess is the rest of the world is planning an invasion of our weak and pitiful U.S. to get rid of Trump as we got rid of Hitler.
Trump memo reveals 'devious' plot to kill probes into him if Dems win Congress: experts — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
President Donald Trump is quietly trying to kill congressional corruption investigations against him before they even begin, legal experts warn.
Alarm bells are ringing after the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel published a new opinion that Trump's executive privilege extends to all of his advisers — even those who don't work in government, Talking Points Memo reported Friday.
“The legal opinion has more holes in it than a slice of Swiss cheese,” University of Baltimore School of Law professor Charles Tiefer reportedly said. “It’s clearly a devious tactic to try to cover up the investigations into Trump’s corruption before they even get started.”
The Justice Department appears to be preparing to protect Trump from any congressional investigations Democrats might launch should they reclaim House Control in the 2026 midterms, experts said, as the memo could be used by potential witnesses who want to wriggle out of testifying.
“I’m sure that’s exactly what they’re trying to do here,” David Super, law professor at the Georgetown University Law School, told Talking Points Memo. "[It's a] clear attempt to create defensive barriers in advance of congressional investigations.”
Executive privilege claims typically concern communications between the president and subordinates — but the new opinion could extend protections to Trump's personal friends and business contacts.
The Justice Department argues expanding Trump's privilege would help him better serve the American people...
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Sure. His criminal cohorts will prop him up because they are as corrupt as his is!
His plan is called "Shit and fall back in it!"
Sailor leaped off Navy ship after worries he was risking crew's lives got ignored: wife — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
A distressed sailor who jumped off an aircraft carrier off the coast of Iran was having vision problems that impacted his work repairing helicopters — and his superiors didn’t care, his wife said.
In fact, they "yelled at him," the Navy serviceman’s spouse told MS NOW’s Priya Sridhar.
The unnamed 19-year-old sailor who jumped overboard and was in the water for more than an hour has become the focal point of complaints aimed at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing a firestorm over the excessive 9-month-long deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln.
According to MS NOW, ”Many family members are concerned about potential exhaustion, low morale and the mental health of those on board, as the aircraft carrier’s deployment at sea appears to have been extended twice during the ongoing Iran war, with no clear end in sight.”
According to the sailor’s wife, her contact has been spotty with her husband and, after he was rescued, it took the Pentagon over four days to let her know he had jumped.
She said that the young man had repeatedly gone to his superiors to express panic that he was suffering mental health issues related to the overlong deployment. According to Sridhar, he also complained that his vision was impaired to the point that he feared he’d make a mistake while repairing helicopters.
The report notes, she said her husband ”expressed concern that his prescription contact lenses had expired and that he was having trouble seeing and doing his job properly. He works on helicopters ...
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They seem ignorant to troop deployment duration. These sailors have been depoyed for over 9 months now. No wonder some are going stir crazy.
Our miltary commanders that remain after Trump's culling appear to be as retarded as Trump.
Accused D.C. vandal threatened with 10-year sentence as Jeanine Pirro fights to save job — Raw Story|David Edwards
With her job on the line after President Donald Trump humiliated her, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro charged a woman with two felonies carrying 10-year prison sentences for spray-painting the World War II Memorial.
Melissa L. Farris was arrested Friday and charged with spray-painting the words "Clean hands, dirty money" in bright pink on the memorial's stone surfaces and dumping bubble soap into its fountain, according to Fox News.
Pirro is currently in a fight for her job after being publicly berated by Trump publicly for dropping another vandalism case weeks earlier.
Pirro charged Farris with depredation against property of the U.S. and destruction of veterans' memorials — federal felonies that each carry up to 10 years in prison, announced on X.
"Vandalizing our World War II Memorial is a despicable attack on a sacred monument honoring the Americans who fought and died for our freedom," Pirro wrote. "Those Americans include my father and grandfather. This morning, we are filing two felony charges…against Melissa L. Farris, offenses that carry penalties of up to ten years in prison. She is now in custody."
Farris allegedly struck the memorial Thursday night, the Justice Department said.
"Our beautiful World War II Memorial was just hit by Spray Painting Vandals," Trump wrote on Truth Social before the arrest was announced. "THERE CAN BE NO GREATER INSULT TO THOSE AMERICAN HEROES WHO DIED IN WORLD WAR II. First the Reflecting Pool, now this. We are on their trail! Where do these animals come from???"...
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Kinda like J6 feces on our Capitol walls? Then she can use the slush fund to bail her out, RIGHT? LMAO at the retarded fucks.
Secretary Of Playing Dress-Up Calls Sailors On USS Abraham Lincoln Liars — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Secretary Pete Shitfaced Hegseth, who is at this point a worse Glamour Shot cosplayer trying to emulate a real grown-up man with a tuff guy job than Kristi Noem ever was, explained yesterday that reports of horrible, piss-poor conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the main aircraft carrier servicing Hegseth and Donald Trump’s forever-lost war against Iran, are fake news. Moldy, rotten food, broken toilets, lack of clean water, lack of basic living supplies, sailors trying to hurl themselves overboard, all of it.
Since those reports are coming pretty much solely from sailors and their families, guess that means Hegseth just called them all liars
Hope people didn’t think we were exaggerating when we said Hegseth clearly thinks they’re suckers and losers just like Trump does. He just thinks it in a different way, in that we guess he resents every member of the service who’s better and smarter and stronger than him, which at this point looks like it’s literally all of them.
Maybe that carrier has just gotten infected with the woke, transgender agenda! Maybe they need to shave! Maybe if he just said LETHAL and KINETIC STRIKE and WARFIGHTER!111!!! some more, then his Daddy will love him they’ll start winning this war!
iars. “Completely misrepresented,” he began. “Listen,” he continued:
“We make sure every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” Hegseth said to reporters while on a visit to Panama. “Some deployments are longer than others and I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody. What they do in those high seas in those austere conditions with fewer port calls — it’s incredible.”
If Pete Hegseth is more appreciative of those sailors than anybody, who needs enemies?...
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Could he fuck things up any worse than he has. Only time will tell.
The Monsters Are Rebuilding a World Where Dark-Skinned Humans Don’t Count — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
“People are disappearing into this no man’s land. They have no connection to their new country, and they also apparently have no legal rights.” —Immigration rights attorney Alma David, quoted in The New York Times
“Terrible things are happening outside... poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” — Anne Frank diary entry January 13, 1943
Once government can place one group beyond the protection of law, the boundary can always expand to the rest of us.
Authoritarianism doesn’t just begin when a government embraces brutality. It steps in on cats’ feet when brutality becomes politically useful, legally routinized, and morally acceptable because a government has first declared its victims undeserving of our empathy. When average people in the bureaucracy just “do their jobs” inflicting horrors on other humans simply because they’ve been declared “the other.”
Outside of military coups like Pinochet’s Chile, countries don’t generally slide from republican democracies into totalitarianism and fascism in a single step. There’s a process, and it always begins by the government deciding that some people simply don’t deserve the basic human rights that have been foundational to western civilization for centuries.
The Trump regime’s treatment of Roberto Mosquera, profiled at length in yesterday’s New York Times by Nicholas Casey, shows just how far down this terrible road we’ve already traveled.
Mosquera has been held for a year without trial or legal due process in a maximum security prison in the tiny landlock southern African country most people have never heard of, Eswatini, one of the world’s few remaining pure kingdoms that was formerly known as Swaziland. The 59-year-old father of four is slowly going blind from untreated glaucoma, and apparently will be held there for the rest of his life....
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Death to Authoritarianism!
SCANDAL: FL MAGA Senator SWIPED Millions From Kid's Medicaid — Crooks and Liars}Cliff Schecter
...we got into how Florida has flipped state legislative seats Trump won by double digits, and along those lines, some polling numbers and anecdotal evidence you have to see to believe!
A $67M Medicaid settlement was supposed to go to Florida taxpayers. $10M of it--meant for kids--went to the Hope Florida Foundation instead, ending up with 2 DeSantis political committees to fight a marijuana amendment. Moody signed off as FL AG. A grand jury issued a report Floridians aren't able to read. Current AG James Uthmeier's fighting its release in court.
And Ashley Moody is nowhere to be found demanding its release--b/c it implicates her in the fraud? I mean, in my experience, I've found innocent people totally try to cover things like this up. Fried just has one question: what did Ashley Moody know, and when did she know it?
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Nope. The first question is does she know anything, period. So many retards!
A look back at Karoline Leavitt’s legacy of lies and propaganda — Daily Kos|Oliver Willis
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Wednesday that she will be leaving her job as President Donald Trump’s chief propagandist at the end of the month. For her taxpayer-funded salary of $195,200 per year, Leavitt has repeatedly lied, attacked, and defamed on Trump’s behalf.
While he has often publicly sparred with his own team and openly denigrated them, Trump has had nothing but praise for Leavitt—even making creepy “complimentary” comments about her looks—in exchange for her shameless distortions of the truth in service of his presidency.
Leavitt has demonstrated through her time in the press secretary job that pushing falsehoods and bad faith attacks are at the core of her being, and instead of fulfilling her job of informing the public of the president’s actions and policies, this is what she has done instead.
This was not a gradual evolution. Leavitt began her time as Trump’s press secretary in his second term lying right out of the gate....
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May the door smack her lying ass on the way out!
“Sky Evangelist” Whines Airline Won’t Leave Her Alone
“Am I being harassed and monitored? Absolutely. Do I have a new case now? At this point, I am feeling unsafe. Can they please just leave me alone? Now I’m receiving threats and being accused of making money off their logo.
“What are they talking about? It’s a reel where I’m discussing the incident, explaining that I believe my account is being monitored, and showing that I already pulled the T-shirt with the logo down.
“So what else do they want from me? Am I not even allowed to talk about it?” – Notorious “sky evangelist” Ashley Lynn, sharing a cease-and-desist demand from Alaska Airlines for using their branding in her Esty swag boasting about being banned by several airlines for torturing passengers with rants about Jesus and demons.
The top reply to Lynn’s rant on Threads: “You asking people to leave YOU alone is fucking rich.”
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Would it be so that all these proselytizers shut the fuck up! That will be the day!
Whatever happened to "You go to your church and I'll go to mine but we can walk along together?"
Netanyahu Mocks UK As “Islamic Republic Of Britain”
Ynet News reports:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a sharp swipe at Britain during a podcast appearance, referring to the country as the “Islamic Republic of Britain” in remarks likely to draw attention in London.
Netanyahu made the remarks during an appearance on Avi Harush’s Melech Blitzer Haim podcast while discussing Randolph Churchill, the journalist and son of former British prime minister Winston Churchill. Netanyahu said Randolph Churchill had covered the Six-Day War in a way that was “very positive toward us.”
“Go find that in Britain today, in what is called the Islamic Republic of Britain. Go find it,” Netanyahu said. Netanyahu responded by alluding to remarks made two years earlier by U.S. Vice President JD Vance. “Someone said the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic Republic of Britain,” Netanyahu said. “We are making sure there won’t be another one here, in Iran.”
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Bibi should tend to his own terrorism.
Blanche: “We’ll Always Back The Blue” (Except For J6)
Politico reports:
Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche’s 19-minute address to the Justice Department’s workforce Thursday was striking more for what he didn’t say than what he did.
There were no strident attacks on the Biden administration’s stewardship of the department, no denunciations of “activist” federal judges and no calls to end the weaponization of law enforcement — all topics that have featured prominently in some of Blanche’s public remarks as a senior department official over the past year and a half. Instead, Blanche emphasized to DOJ employees that he was one of them, committed to continuing work the Justice Department has done for generations, often with little change from administration to administration.
The department has also continued to lash out in public statements at “activist judges” who’ve ruled against Trump’s agenda. However, on Thursday, the attorney general took a jarringly different tone. “We will always respect the role of the judiciary. We will not engage in or stand for any sort of performative attacks that undermine the institutions that we are sworn to uphold,” Blanche said.
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What else do we expect from a two-face hood from the Trump Crime Syndicate?
Tennessee superstore's sudden closure slaps MAGA with existential threat
A roadside "Trump Superstore" off Interstate 40 near Knoxville, Tennessee, is shutting down — and it's a shock for MAGA.
Despite a local news report attributing the shutdown to the 80-year-old owner's retirement, on-the-ground reporting suggests a simpler explanation – the MAGA merchandise business has dried up.
Owner Bill Hays vehemently denied a viral report that he was retiring and complained about a slew of phone calls from concerned friends and associates that resulted from the article, according to a report published by Slate....
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No more tchotchkes from China, suckers?
Emmer Attacks Female Dem Nominee As “Masculine”
August 13, 2026 Republicans, Trump cultists
“Well, first off, Peggy Flanagan is going to have to address all Minnesotans, not just her crowd down in downtown Minneapolis.
“I mean, that’s who you hear screaming about this because we have heard from all kinds of constituents, please thank Donald Trump for trying to keep us safe and get these illegals out. And by the way, for chasing down the fraud, waste and abuse.
“First looking at Peggy Flanagan, she’s just a more masculine version of Tim Walz, but it’s the same person. She is literally in the fraud issue up to her eyes. $9 billion in fraud under her watch, Tim Walz’ watch, Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar. Think about this, Cheryl.
“Not one government official has been charged or held accountable for almost $9 billion dollars in taxpayer money that was built out of our state government in the hands of Somali fraudsters and I’m going to point out this isn’t just Peggy Flanagan.
“We’ve got a state, that U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar running for governor in this state, Cheryl, she put out 1,000 press releases in the last two years, a year and a half, guess what not one of them address fraud.
“This is an issue that’s going to be front and center. Vote for Democrats you will get more of the same, vote for Republicans you’re going to get a change.” – GOP Rep. Tom Emmer, who last appeared here when he claimed that a dozen eggs cost 78 cents.
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That's because he's a fucking delusional and hate-filled racist pussy that supoports a criminal coward. Fraud and abuse are Trump's favorite cons!
Trump Orders Costly Return To Steam Carrier Launchers
The Wall Street Journal reports:
President Trump has directed the Navy to tear out a complex system for launching jet fighters from its aircraft carriers and instead go back to using steam catapults, a move Navy officials have fought for years and will likely cost billions of dollars. U.S. officials say Trump signed a national security memorandum Thursday directing the change, which would involve removing the electromagnetic catapult system used by the ships in the Gerald R. Ford class of carriers.
By doing so, Trump is making good on a promise he made almost 10 years ago to go back to the steam system after hearing a sailor praise it while visiting a ship during his first term. But since Trump said in an interview with Time in 2017 that he told the Navy to go back to “goddamn steam,” top Navy and industry leaders have resisted the move because of the enormous expense to tear out such a complex system that was integral to the design of the Ford class.
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$432B deficit in July. This insane fool is trying to bankrupt America! He's doing this on a whim because he heard one sailor say it was great during his first term. This deluded idiot knows nothing about it. Dump Trump by any means necessary!
Kennedy Center Board votes again to shut main building down — and add Trump's name back — NPR|Anastasia Tsioulcas
The board voted to close the Washington, D.C., arts complex's main campus for a $250 million renovation — three months after a federal judge temporarily blocked a similar closure.
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Stop these crooks.
If you violate a federal law you must be arrested.
These fascist criminals must be arrested, charged, indicted, tried, convicted and imprisoned!
U.S. attorney confirms that FBI tests didn’t find meth in van driven by man fatally shot by ICE in Houston — The Texas Tribune: Main Feed|Alejandro Santos Cid
Aaron Reitz did not reveal what FBI testing found in bags taken from Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s van after his July 7 shooting death. Other men in the van said the bags contained salt.
Tests of a substance found inside the van driven by a man shot to death by immigration officers last month in Houston revealed it wasn’t methamphetamine, U.S. Attorney Aaron Reitz confirmed to The Texas Tribune.
“I can confirm what’s already public: lab testing showed the substance in the baggies was not meth,” Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said in a statement to the Tribune.
Reitz didn’t say what substance was actually in the plastic bags the FBI found in the van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 52-year-old Mexican shot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on July 7....
U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office and a lawyer representing Salgado Araujo’s brother have insisted the substance in the bags was salt that the men mixed with water and lemon to stay hydrated while working construction during the hot Texas summers.
“They made the announcement (about the search warrant) with full intention to cause harm, period. They could have done the test before the announcement, but normally within one or two days you already know if it’s drugs or not,” said attorney Raed Gonzalez, who is representing two of the witnesses, José Trinidad Rojas Pliego and Daniel Tirado Pantoja, for their habeas corpus petitions challenging their detention....
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Not to worry. ICE kept their own stash safe.
Trump Has Dismantled Federal Civil Rights Enforcement, New Report Shows — Truthout Stories|Julia
Conley
The White House has decimated staffing at civil rights offices and redirected enforcement toward ideological causes.
Eighteen months into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, the administration has systematically gutted the infrastructure within the federal government that for decades had worked to ensure that civil rights and anti-discrimination laws were being enforced—and has turned agencies “against the communities they were meant to protect,” as one researcher at Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
In a new report, the organization detailed how four key agencies have been substantially weakened since Trump took office and almost immediately, with the help of tech billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, set about slashing the federal workforce and demanding that the civil servants who remained be “fully on board” with the president’s right-wing agenda.
The report, titled “Remedies Abandoned: US Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Trump Administration,” explains how the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division lost about 75% of its attorneys after the White House told staff that they were not to operate independently from the president; the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education closed more than half of its regional offices and laid off nearly half its staff in one day; the Fair Housing Office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) shrank from 31 staffers to 11; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reached its lowest staffing level in over four decades.
With the federal civil rights enforcement workforce decimated, the White House has abandoned discrimination complaints at the four agencies and has carried out demands outlined in Project 2025, the right-wing policy blueprint put forward by the Heritage Foundation. In addition to pushing for the administration to reclassify civil servants like those who were pushed out of their civil rights enforcement roles, the document called for presidential control of the Justice Department and an end to “disparate impact enforcement.”
In April 2025, three months after taking office, Trump signed an executive order directing all federal agencies to eliminate their analysis of disparate impact—the framework that confronts discriminatory policies based on their impacts rather than their intent—to the “maximum degree possible.”
Disparate impact analysis, said HRW, “allows people to challenge hiring criteria, lending practices, school discipline policies, and housing regulations that produce discriminatory outcomes even when no one can identify a smoking gun like a policy that explicitly says ‘exclude Black applicants.’”...
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Trump is the personification of dispicable dysentery. Evil incarnate!
Lying Mouthpiece Karoline Leavitt Taking Her Broomstick And Flying Home — Wonkette|Gary Legum
It is hard to remember now because it happened 300 years ago, but there was a time when we didn’t think Donald Trump could find a press secretary dumber than Sean Spicer. Then he gave us Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and we wondered if he could find a press secretary who was both meaner and dumber. To say nothing of how Sanders had a way of arching her eyebrow so she looked like she was waiting for a traveler to answer three questions before she let them cross her bridge.
After Sanders, Trump gave us Stephanie Grisham, about whom we can’t say much because she never held a press briefing and barely went on camera at all. Then we got Kayleigh McEnany, who was somehow also dumber than all her predecessors and even more openly and annoyingly self-righteous
But Karoline Leavitt topped them all — in meanness, in dumbness, in the size and visibility of the cross she would wear around her neck so we would know she was very godly while she lied to us. Her willingness to stand up in the White House press room and fire off the most insane lies, to glaze Donald Trump as the greatest president anyone had ever seen, to back up his late-night social media ramblings as if they were the most profound of statements and not the faint sparks of a diseased and dying mind, was breathtaking
Leavitt announced on Wednesday that she will be leaving her role after 18 months as far and away both the youngest and the worst human being to ever occupy the position. It is a remarkable achievement. She made Ari Fleischer look statesman-like. She made Dana Perino look scholarly. She made Spicer look dignified, and that was a guy who might as well have been wearing big floppy shoes and a red nose every day to work.
Leavitt says she is leaving to spend more time with her young kids and her AARP-eligible husband, who at 60 is 32 years her senior. This has always been confusing to us as a middle-aged man. On the one hand, hey, good for you, finding a woman that young to love you in a society that often isn’t particularly kind about May-December romances. (Though we’ll bet his being a millionaire didn’t hurt his chances.)
On the other hand, that woman is Karoline Leavitt....
So, a big one-finger farewell to Karoline Leavitt, a terrible person who has said terrible things that will stain America around the world for decades after she is gone. We will mostly remember her as a giant pair of lips screaming into a microphone about Donald Trump being the most persecuted president ever, but also the most energetic and successful, and he could be even more successful if the press didn’t crap on him all the time and the communists in the Democratic Party didn’t keep voting against his brilliant legislation that will make America greater than ever. And so much more garbage that made you marvel at the fact that any person could do what she did and still look herself in the mirror every day.
Whether Leavitt believed any of her crap herself is irrelevant. Spewing it in the first place is what made her a hideous press secretary and an all-around shit of a human being. Amazing to think that whoever follows her will be even worse..
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So long, it's been hell to know ya!
Trump's psychiatrist niece sums him up in two words — Alternet.org|Matthew Rozsa
...Dr. Trump is not the first one to describe the president’s narcissism as integral to understanding his behavior. Before he was president, he had a long history of being a sore loser, from incorrectly claiming the Emmys were rigged when his reality TV show did not receive nominations to falsely insisting that he had been cheated when he lost the 2016 Iowa caucuses to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and the 2016 presidential election’s popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Shortly before the 2020 presidential election, then-Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee predicted that Trump would never accept if he lost because he would process the defeat as a form of narcissistic injury.
“Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable,” Lee told Salon. “Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality—and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him.”
She continued, “It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death.”...
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Couldn't happen to a crazier dud.
'Not a threat — it's a promise': Judge says he'll hold DOJ in contempt — Alternet.org|Sarah K. Burris
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan told the Justice Department's assistant U.S. attorneys in court on Thursday that he's not afraid to hold them in contempt.
The case involved whether the DOJ fully released all of the documents in the investigation for Jeffrey Epstein.
The judge made it clear that he expected the DOJ to come prepared to answer all of his questions about what documents were withheld from publication and why.
What was ultimately discovered is that the DOJ didn't publish many of the handwritten notes from the interviews with witnesses and Epstein survivors.
It did produce some of them; however, one former prosecutor pointed out on BlueSky.
Sitting in court relaying what was unfolding, legal analyst Allison Gill posted on social media the exchanges capturing the final outcome.
After a short break, the judge returned to the bench and explained, "The court is going to request a proposed order from the plaintiff for an in camera review of the handwritten notes."
He said he wants to know whether they are redundant.
Lawyer Katie Phang has complained that the DOJ should be held in contempt for not following the court's order to release all of the documents.
"Relax," the judge responded. "No one is in contempt. I think now is a good opportunity to discuss that topic in general terms."
"Is ten days sufficient? Thank you. The pending motions will be resolved in due course," the judge said.
That said, the judge told a story that lasted about 30 minutes, "telling a story of the one time he had to hold DOJ lawyers in contempt. He says he's done it before, and he'd rather not do it again, but he will if he needs to....
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It's Trump's Department of Jerkwads. He'll need to.
Former prosecutor says the DOJ lied to Epstein judge — and can prove it — Alternet.org|Sarah K. Burris
Former federal prosecutor Kristy Greenberg was watching the accounting of a court hearing on Thursday over whether the Justice Department released all of the documents in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation as required by the congressional law.
The main dispute between the DOJ and the judge concerned handwritten notes and whether those notes were also released with the documentation. According to the assistant U.S. attorney, the attorney general decided that all of the handwritten notes were "duplicative," meaning the DOJ felt that they already appeared elsewhere in the released documents.
The judge challenged the DOJ on that detail, asking why the DOJ should be believed that the handwritten notes were nothing more than duplicates. The DOJ explained that courts usually just trust what they say. Frequently, when federal agents interview people, they fill out a form called a "302." The agent can handwrite the information from a witness or someone reporting a crime. Those notes can then be entered into computer files etc. So the DOJ is saying that these notes are already typed out, so the handwritten information wasn't necessary.
Greenberg pointed out that she knows with absolute certainty that DOJ's statement "isn't true."
"FBI 302 reports and corresponding handwritten notes were produced in the Epstein files," Greenberg said. "Below is one example. So why did DOJ produce handwritten notes for certain 302s and not others?"
One example she pointed out was the Epstein "victim who made accusations against [Donald] Trump."
She attached the typed and handwritten notes that appear in the Epstein files database on the Justice Department website.
Legal analyst Allison Gill was in court detailing the exchange between the judge and lawyers. She noted that the DOJ's Andrew Block was added as a lawyer to the case just 24 hours before. When he was asked whether there were no handwritten notes released, Gill said he "erred."...
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To err is human, To forgive is negotiable..
Trump's 'exploded' crack problem sends a global crisis spiraling out of control: Krugman — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
President Donald Trump has a crack problem — and America is paying the cost of it, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.
Krugman argued on Substack Thursday that Americans are unlikely to see gas prices drop because, as he put it, "Donald Trump is not a well man. He is, unfortunately, also President, which means that we all pay a price for his inability to accept reality."
That "reality," according to Krugman, is that Iran has outmaneuvered him and the war is lost.
The former New York Times economist argued oil prices are higher than is generally understood because of the difference between the cost of a barrel of crude and that of the products refined from that barrel — or "crack spread."
Since the beginning of the war, that crack spread has "exploded," rising by roughly $35 per barrel, Krugman wrote.
Refining capacity worldwide has been significantly constrained because much of the world's refining capacity is either trapped inside the Strait or offline as a result of Ukraine's drone campaign against Vladimir Putin, according to Krugman's analysis.
Therefore, the shortage of refining capacity has held crude prices down, as buyers are not willing to pay extremely high prices for crude oil they cannot refine, explained the economist.
The cutoff of oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz has required a large rise in global oil prices to ration demand, but much of that rationing has taken place through a rise in "the crack spread" rather than a rise in crude oil prices....
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What is reality? asks Trump.
'Strange' claim in Todd Blanche's speech obliterated by furious legal expert — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
Attorney General Todd Blanche's "strange" address to the Justice Department on Thursday stunned a legal analyst who hurled his own words — and the mounting dangers judges' families face — back in his face.
MS NOW commentator Lisa Rubin took to X to condemn Blanche for a rallying cry to his troops she characterized as blatantly contradictory to his leadership.
"[The] strange part was Blanche's asserted 'respect [for] the role of the judiciary,'" Rubin wrote. "He told the audience, 'We will not engage in or stand for any sort of performative attacks that undermine the institutions that we are sworn to uphold.'"
Rubin was staggered.
"I can think of any number of judges, from district courts to the Supreme Court, who have been attacked -- in ways that imperil their and their family's safety," she wrote, "by people within the administration and its 'outside advisers.'"
Just this month, PBS published a damning report on hundreds of federal judges who have faced threats to their safety.
The U.S. Marshals Service has expressed "significant concern" that threats jumped nearly 60 percent in fiscal year 2025 and are on track to rise again, according to the report.
PBS linked the spike to "a litany of verbal and written attacks by President Trump and members of his administration about judges who have ruled against them."
Rubin also chastised Blanche's praise for Justice Department and FBI employees, who he said were "perfectly comfortable arguing fiercely in the conference room or in your offices about the best strategy or the best path forward."
The legal analyst snapped back: "Why then has this administration punished those who did exactly that?"
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Strange? It's only fascism.
Congress Face-Plants on Surprise Health Care Bills — The American Prospect|David Dayen
Official Washington, and more surprisingly Donald Trump’s administration, is doing something that you almost never see: admitting policy failure. In late 2020, Trump signed the No Surprises Act, which was intended to prevent the intolerable situation of patients getting unexpected and enormous bills for medical treatment undertaken by “out-of-network” providers. Routine practices where patients didn’t have a choice like anesthesia or radiology services could suddenly trigger bills equal to an American’s median income, if not higher.
The No Surprises Act set up a process whereby insurance companies and providers would negotiate over these out-of-network charges, and patients wouldn’t take the hit. It’s succeeded in that respect: People aren’t getting surprise bills. But it’s failed on virtually every other score, merely shifting an overly bureaucratic, wildly extractive, and unendingly wasteful nightmare to another venue. Patients are paying for this, just in overall premiums instead of unlucky one-off bills. Practically everyone else involved in the process is churning out profits, including an entirely new group of middlemen capitalizing on the dispute resolution process.
The situation has been mirrored in U.S. health care so often that yet another layer of extractive bureaucratic waste is, well, no surprise. A confounding administrative system is deemed broken, and a new administrative system replicates the problem in a slightly different way. The solution is well known enough that every industrialized country has adopted it in some form—universal public insurance—but it’s zealously opposed by the very industries benefiting from a fragmented status quo....
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Trump knows he losing it.
Weapons Maker Was Paid $533M in Taxpayer Funds to Produce Shells. It Made None — Truthout Stories|Jesse Coburn
General Dynamics has neither been held publicly accountable nor had to repay any of the money.
A robot was on fire. Again.
It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.
Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But employees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”
Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel 5 feet down to the floor. The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.” To workers, even the factory buildings themselves came to feel doomed, with acrid smoke hanging in 100-degree heat over foundations seemingly sinking into the earth.A press machine at the General Dynamics artillery factory near Dallas Obtained by ProPublica
The situation never improved. The U.S. Army, which funded the factory, ordered work halted on two of its three production lines in August 2025. By then, General Dynamics had blown eight deadlines. Work on the third production line continued, but the facility never produced a single usable shell, according to a report from the Department of Defense’s inspector general in July....
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No one is in control. Being drunk on power corrupts totally.
Todd Blanche Indicts Former SPLC Woman For Defrauding Nazis Or Something — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Donald Trump’s favorite ball-lapping pomeranian Todd Blanche isn’t wasting any time now that the Senate has confirmed him as Trump’s personal lawyer attorney general Trump’s ball-lapping pomeranian.
Yesterday, Blanche and the Middle District of Alabama dropped a superseding indictment in the illegitimate Trump DOJ’s illegitimate case against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), in which the incelmaxxers at DOJ are trying to “prove” that SPLC “defrauded” its donors by using paid informants to infiltrate white supremacist and other extremist groups. In other words, basically exactly what donors pay the SPLC to do. The dumbfuck argument, which they are counting on you to believe, is that the donors didn’t want this, or that, barring that, they can convince a jury that instead of infiltrating Nazi groups, SPLC was, we dunno, taking Nazis to romantic dinners sincerely, because they secretly love Nazis.
‘Kay.
Obviously, this is happening because the Trump DOJ is extremely angry that the SPLC essentially took out the Klan, and has continued to do that with so many extremist groups over the decades, extremist groups made up of white supremacists, Nazis, pedophiles, and rapists, or as some people call it, Trump’s base.
It’s also happening because in order for authoritarians to capture a nation, they have to make it impossible for the good guys to keep operating freely, by whatever means they can manage, and one of the authoritarian playbook’s favorite ways of doing that is to bankrupt them with legal bills.
So, superseding indictment!
They have indicted Heidi Beirich, an extremism expert who ran the SPLC’s intelligence project, on fraud and other charges, because … uh, we’ll just let the Washington Post explain it:
Federal prosecutors accused Heidi Beirich […] of overseeing payments to informants working undercover in a variety of hate groups.
Well, somebody has to do that, we reckon, if you’re going to have informants. Were they supposed to be volunteer informants?
Beirich, 59, of Palm Springs, California, was allegedly involved in a romantic relationship with one of those informants and diverted at least $140,000 to a joint bank account they shared and used to pay their personal living expenses, according to a superseding indictment unsealed in federal court in Montgomery, Alabama.
OK wait, so they’re saying she fucked one of the informants and that she “diverted” the pay for the informant to their joint account, and … wait what?
Was she not supposed to fuck the informant? Is Todd Blanche the arbiter of workplace romances now? And if they were fucking frequently enough that they had a joint account, wouldn’t the money for “informant” that came into that account be known as “paycheck” for “job”? Did that money get “diverted” or did it get “direct deposited”?
Blanche and Assistant United States Attorney Kevin P. Davidson, who is prosecuting this case, gonna need to prove a crime here. Do they know they have to do that? Beirich’s lawyer says it’s bullshit:
A lawyer for Beirich denounced the charges — which include counts of wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to provide false statements to banks — as an attempt by the Trump administration to “silence political opponents.” He vowed she would fight the case.
“Violent extremists have not stopped or intimidated Dr. Beirich from her vital work during her time at the SPLC or in the six and a half years after she left the SPLC,” defense lawyer Michael Proctor said in a statement. “Dr. Beirich won’t be silenced or intimidated by the government’s false and politicized allegations now. She welcomes the opportunity to present the truth in court.”
Yeah, because either they accidentally stumbled upon something real here, or this is just part of the DOJ’s Nazi witch hunt against the people who expose the Nazis, which makes Trump Nazis very, very mad.
Hey, we bet we know which one!...
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The fucking Nazi, of course!
Trump money-grab sets up Truth Social users for criminal charges: ex-DOJ chief — Raw Story|David Edwards
Trading firms paying for early access to President Donald Trump's Truth Social posts could face criminal insider trading charges, a former Justice Department official warned Thursday.
Former Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, during an appearance on CNBC, argued Truth Social users could be putting themselves in danger if they participated — and pointed to a federal lawsuit filed against the social media company to explain why.
"The rub here is that the president is the largest shareholder of Truth Social's parent company and that he is benefiting financially from the early access," Kanter told CNBC. "And so this is effectively — as the argument goes in the lawsuit — the president selling access to government information to traders before the public gets it more broadly."
The Truth Social API was launched on Aug. 1 by Trump Media & Technology Group, charging subscribers between $60,000 and $100,000 a month for millisecond-faster access to Trump's market-moving posts, according to NBC News.
The arrangement is now the subject of a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York by The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, according to court filings.
The plaintiffs argue Truth API violates the First and Fifth Amendments by giving paying customers preferential access to a sitting president's official announcements.
Kanter alerted potential traders to a niche form of insider trading that could be linked to the scheme.
"Insider trading liability doesn't just apply to the person who's giving the information," he said, "it can also apply to the person who's trading on the information — what we call tippee liability."...
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The criminal got his fingers caught fucking around again.
Trump's vicious taunt highlights a severe psychological sickness — Raw Story|Ray Richmond
Sometimes, I sit back in breathtaking wonder struggling to consider what more could possibly be written about Donald John Trump that hasn’t already been said a million times and in a million different ways.
And then, he does something else that leaves me – and any thinking human being – gasping for adjectives to explain the actions of the worst person America has ever produced by a margin so vast it defies calculation.
This was the case last Friday when word filtered out that Joe Biden’s cancer had spread, metastasizing into his bones and causing him horrendous pain. His son Hunter publicly described the debilitating progression and how devastating it is to witness someone he so loves fighting such an unbearable final battle.
News of the former president’s advancing malignancy left anyone with the slightest modicum of empathy feeling immense compassion for a gentleman who has sacrificed so much to serve his country and suffered such significant personal loss along the way.
Anyone, that is, except for Trump.
This smallest and most pitiful of men saw the news of Biden’s pain as an opportunity to pile on. He decided that was the day to humiliate Biden by posting to Truth Social a photo of his longtime rival golfing, hunched over mid-swing with a massive chunk of turf ripping out of the ground. It featured above the picture the message, “Biden isn’t even a 100 Handicap.”
What kind of a heartless SOB posts something like that simultaneous to news filtering out that the guy is in the fight of his life against a metastatic cancer that is slowly taking him? A slimeball without equal, that’s who....
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It's diffucult to comment on such an outstanding compositon as this.
Trump suffers new humiliation as no one signs up for his new Truth Social alerts: MS NOW — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
President Donald Trump’s attempt to beef up income at his money-losing Truth Social platform has been a stunning flop, a new analysis contends.
MS NOW delivered this assessment one day after a new federal lawsuit targeted Trump Media's selling Wall Street traders exclusive access to Truth Social posts for up to $100,000 a month.
“The lawsuit alleges the service offering paying customers sneak peeks of his posts about U.S. policy on war, tariffs and other issues violates the Constitution," the Associated Press reported, "and that official announcements should be made available to everyone at the same time."
MS NOW financial analyst Ron Insana noted the whole matter may be moot because smart financial traders are far too wary of the president’s machinations.
”There's only 6 to 10, apparently, funds that have signed up for this," Insana quipped. “And so it's not really pulling in a lot of money relative to what's being lost at Truth Social.”
Insana also pointed out the embarrassing fact that Truth Social continues to lose hundreds of millions.
“It has not been the most successful effort at social media," Insana said. "I mean, they roughly run revenues that are far lower than the size of their losses and so it's not a great business model.”
Insana argued Trump's efforts to promote the pricy service have largely failed....
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Everything Trump touches dies.
Tubas declared a national security threat as musicians 'disturbed' by Trump maneuver — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump wants to add certain musical instruments to its list of national security tariffs.
According to a notice from the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Trump administration intends to add wood-brass instruments — tubas, trombones, trumpets, French horns and their parts — to the list of imports subject to Section 232 national security tariffs, reported Opera Wire.
"Disturbing news for trumpet, French horn, trombone, tuba players," said Janet Horvath, a cello player for the Minnesota Orchestra.
The administration argued that reliance on imported metals could weaken demand for American-made materials, and diminished domestic production could leave the country short on critical supplies during a national emergency.
If enacted, imported brass instruments and components would face a 25 percent tariff, part of a push officials say is meant to boost American manufacturing and draw foreign investment.
Music industry groups warn the move would compound damage tariffs have already caused. The National Association of Music pointed to a Peterson Institute for International Economics study finding that tariffs drove a 27 percent drop in wind instrument imports in 2025 alone, and cautioned that extending duties to brass instruments would further raise costs for musicians and students nationwide.
NAMM CEO John Mlynczak argued the policy overlooks how the instrument market actually works.
Nearly half of American students — about 25 million children, a participation rate unmatched anywhere else in the world — learn music through affordable, entry-level instruments in school programs, Mlynczak said.
That student pipeline, he said, is what ultimately sustains demand for higher-end, American-made professional instruments, meaning tariffs aimed at protecting domestic manufacturing could instead undercut the very market that feeds it.
The tariffs were proposed three days after the Conn Selmer factory, which produced brass instruments, closed its Ohio factory and moved much of its production to China.
The factory owned by billionaire Trump donor John Paulson had employed 150 workers, many of whom told reporters they had voted for the president.
"If your kid is in the school band and you wonder why instrument prices rise: The Trump admin raises tariffs on imported brass instruments AFTER the US Conn Selmer plant closes and moves to China," said journalist and clarinet player Paul Handley.
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Shit - applebutter; Ass - hole in the ground, he knows not the difference. The total retard!
At least 30% percent of Americans are the same as he. This explains our total failure.
Oprah dumps MAGA fixtures she made into stars: 'Don't have one thing to do with them' — Raw Story|Adam Nichols
Oprah Winfrey publicly distanced herself from two MAGA-world fixtures whom she played a major part in making famous.
The media mogul gave Dr. Phil McGraw a national platform back in 1988, long before he had his own show. Mehmet Oz followed in 2004. Both men rode Winfrey's audience to fame and fortune, launching their own spinoff programs — "Dr. Phil" in 2002 and "The Dr. Oz Show" in 2009 — that outlasted "The Oprah Winfrey Show" itself, which wrapped in 2011.
Now both men are deep in Trump's orbit and Oprah — a famed supporter of Kamala Harris as she took on Trump for the presidency — is scrambling to lose links to her prodigy.
In an interview with Emmy Magazine, she said, “People criticize me for Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, because of their politics or their views,” Winfrey said.
“Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me, and I don’t have one thing to do with them.
“At the time, the reason and intention behind me giving them their breaks was I thought they had valuable information to share that had been meaningful to me.”
McGraw tagged along with ICE agents during a Chicago raid last year and later landed a spot on Trump's Religious Liberty Commission — despite not being a licensed therapist. Oz, meanwhile, is running the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and has become a reliable sidekick to vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
She reserved her warmest words for McGraw, crediting him with being a steady presence when Texas cattle ranchers sued her in 1998 over comments about beef safety, and praised his grounded, relatable style as the reason she thought he'd resonate with viewers.
Her introduction to Oz, she said, came through best friend Gayle King — who, notably, was a guest at Jeff Bezos' wedding last year alongside a roster of Trump-adjacent power players — and Oprah herself....
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Buh-bye!
MAGA’s burrito brawl shows cracks in Trump’s economy — Salon|Sophia Tesfaye
A $20 meal became a right-wing media feud, exposing a party's broken promises<,br>
Amid weeks of compounding foreign policy failures and an economy that lost a revised 103,000 jobs across May and June, conservatives are grappling online with a brutal realization that the Republican Party as a whole is desperate to ignore: What do you tell working-class voters who are drowning under the weight of unrelenting inflation and sluggish job growth, when your entire economic platform is built on a foundation of gaslighting?
The GOP has spent the better part of the last decade telling Americans it is the party of economic populism. Donald Trump was supposed to be the politician who understood the frustration of people who felt left behind by globalization and stagnant wages. But 18 months into the president’s second term, Republicans have arrived at a remarkable place: running the Biden administrations’ failed playbook on inflation. Now conservatives are fighting with one another over whether a $20 burrito is actually too expensive.
The current food discourse is not about the price of avocado toast or organic eggs, but it is a similarly mundane symbol of a much larger problem confronting Trump and the Republican Party heading into the November midterms. It started, as these things do now, with a tweet.
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"For workers at the 50th percentile — the middle class, in other words — wages have not kept pace with fast-food prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics price index for limited-service meals and snacks. "
Pitiful!
'Perilous': George Conway sounds alarm over Trump’s 'dramatic problem' — Alternet|Alex Henderson
During Joe Biden's presidency, right-wing media outlets like Fox News and Newsmax focused relentlessly on his mental acuity — often echoing Donald Trump's "Sleepy Joe" rhetoric and claiming that Biden was mentally unfit for the White House. But MAGA media, on the whole, carefully avoid discussion of Trump's physical and mental health. And according to conservative attorney George Conway, it isn't unreasonable to be asking questions about the fact that President Trump has been falling asleep in meetings.
Conway, in a Thursday, August 13 post on X, formerly Twitter, makes his point by highlighting CNN host Erin Burnett's recent interview with Dr. Jonathan Reiner — who served as the late Vice President Dick Cheney's cardiologist for 27 years.
Reiner is being outspoken about Trump's health, emphasizing that his administration needs to be much more forthcoming about his physical and mental state — and pointing out that Cheney, during his eight years in the George W. Bush administration, was quite transparent about his long history of heart disease.
Reiner, on CNN, candidly told Burnett, "The president doesn't look well. He hasn't looked well for much of the last year. He has perhaps the most consequential job on the planet…. Maybe most disturbingly to me, for the last several months, he has fallen asleep in the Oval Office and in other very public venues over and over and over again."...
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Playing with AI fingerpaint all night long doesn't help.
Despairing US Troops Are Throwing Themselves Overboard In Trump’s Iran War — Crooks and Liars|Newshound Ellen
“I don't think it's the ship is the issue,” one parent said. “I think it’s our president, it’s our government that's not helping the morale.”
One can only imagine how utterly Donald Trump and Whiskey Pete Hegseth have failed the sailors and Marines aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln so as to cause multiple troops to throw themselves overboard in a desperate effort to end their horrific deployment.
But that is how low morale has sunk on the Lincoln. The deployment began on November 21 and was supposed to end in May. But thanks to Donald Trump’s misbegotten war that he can’t figure out how to get out of, the deployment has been extended indefinitely, according to Military Times.
“The Navy has not given a precise number of service members who have attempted to go overboard or harm themselves,” The Daily Beast reported, but “the partners of sailors onboard the ship have spoken of multiple incidents of service members attempting to take their own lives.”...
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If our truops are getting fed up how long until they turn on the source of their problem?
Pee-Wee Goebbels Accuses The Left Of Defending Sexual Abusers — Crooks and Liars|Heather
Projection. It's all these people have.
During yet another of their endless segments on Fox not "news" this Wednesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller went on an unhinged rant on Will Cain's show when asked about some comments by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talking about "Woke 1.0" on ABC's This Week this past Sunday.
After calling "woke ideology" "Marxist", conflating it with communism, attacking the defund the police movement and accusing anyone who pushed for it of "hating America," pedophile-enabler Miller had the audacity to accuse Democrats of being the ones who defend exual abusers:...
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Then the little Nazi begins his vomiting.
Tehran Says Strait Of Hormuz Is “Under Iran’s Control”
CBS News reports:
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Thursday the United States has miscalculated on the Strait of Hormuz.
“The U.S. has long miscalculated due to intelligence failures. Case in point: The war on Iran,” he wrote in a post on X. “Now, an even bigger miscalculation on the Strait of Hormuz.”
His comments come a day after President Trump said the U.S. has “total control” over the waterway. “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. Tehran responded to his comments Thursday, saying the water is “under Iran’s control and management.”
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Calculating isn't one of Trump's strong points.
Texas Gov Chops Brisket For Megadonor Buc-ee’s
Austin’s ABC affiliate reports:
On Wednesday morning, state and local leaders gathered in San Marcos to celebrate the opening of a new Buc-ee’s rest stop. Gov. Abbott highlighted Buc-ee’s contributions to the Texas economy, presenting a proclamation to celebrate the opening of the new San Marcos store. Abbott said he is proud of how Buc-ee’s runs its stores.
Buc-ee’s Founder & President Arch “Beaver” Aplin was at Wednesday’s grand opening. He called Gov. Abbott a friend and praised the Lone-Star State’s business-friendly environment. About a month and a half ago, on June 26, Aplin donated $250,000 to the Governor’s reelection campaign. Abbott is running for a fourth term in office and will face Democrat State Rep. Gina Hinojosa in the fall.
After the press conference, Abbott and Aplin headed inside, where Abbott picked up a knife and joined Buc-ee’s workers behind the counter to slice, chop, and serve up some brisket.
"They opened one in Kentucky a couple of years ago and people travel to it like it is some kind of goddamn amusement park. Like seriously, why? It's a fucking convenience store and gas station and people are waiting in line for it!" -- SisterPettyDavis
(*Ed. note: The only level of entertainment they can find in their world these days. A Nazi Disneyland joy for the throwbacks.)
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Abbott works for Bucks? He sure as hell doesn't work for Texans.
MAGA Pundit Scott Jennings Deceptively Edits Clip In Attempt To Link El-Sayed To Support For Lynchings
Raw Story reports:
MAGA pundit Scott Jennings sparked fury on Wednesday from a talk show segment in which he falsely claimed that left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker advocated for Black lynchings. Jennings brought it up to discredit the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who campaigned with Piker during the primary.
He played a lengthy supercut of clips in which Piker raged against political critics or sparred with his Twitch chat, in which he sarcastically said things like, “It’s because I’m racist, dude,” or “back to a better time when lynchings were happening.”
In context, Piker was criticizing people who reflexively call the past a better time, because things like lynchings were more commonplace in the past — but Jennings deceptively edited the clips to make it seem as if Piker was seriously calling for a return to lynchings.
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The deplorables have no policy except hatred to run on.
Very sick motherfuckers!
Greenland Forces Trump-Linked Firm To Delay Drilling
The Guardian reports:
Greenland authorities have forced a US oil company connected to Donald Trump to postpone drilling wells in the Arctic territory, defying claims by the US president’s envoy that Americans could be extracting crude by next year.
Amid Trump’s imperialist threats, tensions have been rising on Greenland’s eastern coast after the oil company brought drilling equipment ashore in July without permission, drawing a “strong warning” from the government.
Just a week before Greenland Energy intended to sink its first wells into the tundra, the government said on Thursday: “The necessary regulatory process cannot be completed, and the necessary approvals cannot therefore be obtained before the planned start of drilling.” It said that during talks Greenlandic officials had expressed concern that the timetable was too tight to assess the environmental and social impact.
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The colonialist invasion should be met with heavy shelling!
NYT: DHS Paid $464 Million For Planes It Isn’t Using
The New York Times reports:
Starting last fall, the Department of Homeland Security spent $464 million on a no-bid contract to buy 10 used airplanes from a firm in Northern Virginia. That was an enormous price tag, but the department said it had no time to consider other offers. The planes were needed urgently for deportation flights. But since then, the department has barely used this new fleet — for deportations, or anything else.
Three of the aircraft are luxury business jets. Just months after acquiring them, the department sought to loan or lease two to other agencies, including one for the use of F.B.I. director Kash Patel, according to a letter to the department sent Wednesday by top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.
The other seven are older Boeing 737 passenger jets, which the government has left parked at an airport in Lake Charles, La., for months at a time. An internal government document, obtained by The New York Times, said the agency did not have the staff necessary to operate them.
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The Pornography of Power
Newspaper Rips Florida AG For Anti-LGBTQ Hypocrisy
Scott Maxwell writes for the Orlando Sentinel:
Two weeks ago, Ron DeSantis’ appointed A.G., James Uthmeier, sent a letter to the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops that threatened to make their schools ineligible for taxpayer-funded vouchers if they require vaccinations. Apparently, Uthmeier believes he understands Catholic values better than some priests, with Pope James saying he has concluded “there is no religious basis” for church-run schools to enforce this commitment to public health.
Basically, Uthmeier says that, if a parent claims vaccines violate their religious beliefs — at a school that has said vaccines are clearly part of their religious beliefs — the parent’s version of faith should win. Listen, we can debate the bigger-picture issue of whether you believe Florida should be using tax dollars to fund religious schools in the first place. But looking at the rules as they stand — and as Uthmeier wants to enforce them — there’s a blatant and ugly inconsistency here.
Because remember: Florida does allow voucher-supported religious schools to use their faith as a rationale to refuse to admit LGTBQ students and even students who have same-sex parents. Private schools are also allowed to refuse to admit students with disabilities. In other words: Florida believes it’s OK for these schools to use their faith as a bludgeon, but not as a shield.
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The only thing we can get from idiots like this Maxwell, is more of the same retardedness!
Fox Airs Correction After GOP Rep’s COVID Vax Lie
“We want to clarify a segment that aired yesterday with Congresswoman Lisa McClain, where the congresswoman referenced data on miscarriages from an April 2021 study from The New England Journal of Medicine. Now, the Journal later corrected how the miscarriage data was calculated and stated, ‘These percentages are well within the range expected as an outcome for this age group of persons whose other underlying medical conditions are unknown.'” – Fox News host Elizabeth MacDonald, in an on-air correction.
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The Congresswoman may now resign her position!
Never Underestimate a Cornered Rat: Trump’s Election Plot Is Taking Shape — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
From mail ballots to voting machines, his allies are identifying pressure points that could throw November into chaos…
Back in the days when conservatives were so hungry for media platforms that they’d come on progressive shows, I used to regularly debate Wayne Allen Root (here and here, for example). Instead of trying to convince me, though, Root has recently taken to giving Trump ideas about things to do, like stealing the election this fall.
On his show on “Real” America’s Voice, Root told Trump:
“Let me put an idea in your head. Because it’s so hard to get the Senate to do anything, now they’re on recess, they never get anything done. If they never get the SAVE America Act done, you have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. …
“And the Supreme Court ruled in 1983, under Reagan, in INS vs. Chadha that if you declare a national security emergency as the President of the United States, they can’t challenge it. It can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.
“So if you do this in the next month, we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship, and a limit to mail-in ballots, and you don’t even need the Senate’s vote.”
Trump seemed both unsurprised and unfazed, as if this were a regular topic of conversation in the White House.
“Let me just say that stranger things have happened,” he replied, adding, “OK, I’ll leave it at that.”
Since 1968, stealing elections has become a sport for Republicans. That was the year that Nixon was running for president against VP Hubert Humphrey — who had just successfully negotiated peace between North and South Vietnam — when Nixon had his people reach out to the leaders of South Vietnam and promise them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the deal....
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Trump is America's biggest enemy. He will break any law to get his way.
Mike Lindell’s Minnesota Gov. Dreams Smothered To Death By Pillow — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Well, we guess Donald Trump’s endorsement is pretty worthless these days, if not even a pillow-humping election-smothering crusader like Mike Lindell can get the Republican nomination to lose to Amy Klobuchar for Minnesota governor.
But he still has hope!
OK, Mike. Just remember, if it gets too painful, there’s always drugs.
Anyway, a person named Lisa Demuth beat Lindell by 11 points, and now she will lose to, once again, Amy Klobuchar, who will be a perfectly OK governor. Not exciting, but fine.
Darline Graham is going to a runoff in the Republican Senate primary in South Carolina, because neither Trump’s endorsement nor her brother’s dead body could get her over the finish line on primary night. Maybe she just sucks.
So that’s how things went on the Republican side of last night’s primaries. We are sure there were other Republicans who won things — Sean Duffy’s underage-looking son-in-law or something? — but we can’t tell Republicans apart.
Let’s talk about the Democrats!
Peggy Flanagan won her Senate primary in Minnesota, and it wasn’t even remotely close.
Here she is last night talking about how we don’t just need to abolish ICE, “we need to rip ICE apart.”
And that is what we are fuckin’ talkin’ about!
We’ve been saying that the real argument right now, despite what the Beltway media would love us to believe, isn’t between moderates and centrists or liberals and progressives or the DSA or anything else, but rather between Team Fight vs. Team “Say Big Words While Carrying Water For Fascists And Sometimes Voting For Trump Appointees And Sometimes Even Voting For The Laken Riley Act Even Though Any Fucking Moron Could Grasp That Doing So Is Just Playing Into Republicans’ White Supremacist Nazi Fearmongering About Dark-Skinned Men Violating White Women.”...
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All correct1
AOC exposes MAGA’s motherhood hypocrisy — Salon|Amanda Marcotte
The New York congresswoman freezes her eggs, and Republicans show their true feelings
n MAGA’s self-mythology, they are a family first movement that encourages Americans to have more babies. Over the past year, some of the coalition’s most prominent figures have touted a responsibility to pro-create. In December 2025, Lara Trump said on Fox News, “We’re going to be in a pickle if we don’t get more babies coming.” Three months later, in a speech at the 2026 March for Life, Vice President JD Vance congratulated himself for impregnating his wife Usha, saying he “practices what he preaches” when he calls for “more families and more babies.” Katie Miller, the podcaster and wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, used the same wording to announce her pregnancy on X in late 2025: “The White House practices what they preach about increasing the fertility rate.”
Even Donald Trump has gotten in on the act. At a Women’s History Month event in March 2025, he bizarrely referred to himself as the “fertilization president.”
So when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram recently to announce she is freezing her eggs, surely MAGA was resoundingly grateful to her for carrying forward this pro-baby message, right? Not quite. As the 36-year-old New York Democrat was no doubt aware would happen, MAGA commentators lashed out at her for preserving her ability to have kids in the future. Christian right commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said she was “selfish.” Podcast host Matt Walsh called Ocasio-Cortez’s choice “backwards and ridiculous.” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued that the congresswoman’s video was a “sad public performance/display of unnecessarily unwise decision making.”...
Blinded by their own sexism, none of these pundits considered the possibility that Ocasio-Cortez, a savvy politician who is skilled at social media, knew how MAGA would react to posts where she injected the medications on camera or answered people’s detailed questions about the process. She even hinted at this in her video. “Don’t be weird about this,” she said as she gave herself an injection. “Even though I know you all will be.”...
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Can men have it all? Sure. Can women have it all? Negotiable!
May the Nazis all rot.
Paxton Does Not Deny Cheating On His Wife — Crooks and Liars|NewsHound Ellen
“Um, I’m not going to talk about personal issues,” the Republican Senate candidate said.
Normally, I do not care about a candidate’s marriage. Also, I would not expect Paxton or any candidate to go into any marital problems. But there were some details in his brief response that I found telling.
For one thing, Paxton did not deny cheating on his wife. And, by the way, his current mistress, Tracy Duhon, a Christian influencer with whom he lives out of wedlock, is at least his second. The other mistress that we know of was a key figure in his 2023 impeachment.
Second, the “personal issues” about Paxton’s infidelity is about his own unscrupulous behavior and does not have anything to do with his children or grandchildren.
Third, Paxton holds himself up as a champion of conservative, Christian family values. Yet, although he is a seasoned politician, he seems to have no answer for being unfaithful to his wife. He has to know he’ll be asked about this.
He and his campaign must have made the calculation that there is no good way to talk about it. Or to put it another way, he's a hypocritical cad who has either repeatedly betrayed his Christian values or never had them to begin with....
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That issue is only the tip of the corrupt iceberg that is Paxton. Turn him out to pasture. Vote Talarico!
Election Denier Mike Lindell Now Denying His Own Election Loss — Crooks and Liars|Conover Kennard
Go cry into your MyPillow, Mike.
...Lindell told the room to hold on for a new update, claiming his campaign had just picked up 5,000 votes out of the last 13,000 counted — and tried to spin that split (roughly 2,000 to him, 3,000 to Demuth) as evidence he could take the lead within the hour, calling it "big news" and guessing officials had started tallying Election Day votes.
When a reporter pushed back citing the AP's count, he dismissed the AP's credibility, noting there were still 265,000 votes outstanding and that he trailed by 18,000 — though he insisted the gap had just narrowed thanks to that 5,000-vote gain.
He refused to concede before all the votes were in, arguing there was no reason to call the race for himself to lose while ballots remained uncounted, then repeated that roughly 264,000 votes were still left from the last batch of 13,000.
Lindell has gone from claiming that Democrats rigged the 2020 election to claiming his party rigged the Republican primary. Mike needs to cry into his MyPillow in the corner of his room, in a fetal position while sucking his thumb.
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Nazis can never admit defeat!
GOP Rep Spreads Stupid Lie That COVID Vacccines Caused 82% Of Pregnant Women To Have Miscarriages
August 12, 2026 Republicans, Trump cultists
“It’s disgusting, and it’s criminal — in my opinion. As a mother, I can’t imagine being pregnant, listening to the man in charge straight up lie to the American people.
“You try so hard to get pregnant, and then you listen to him — oh! In fact, I think he actually said that there was never a risk to pregnancy. Never a risk.
“When in fact, The New England Journal of Medicine said 82% who got the vaccine in their first or second trimester had a miscarriage.
“I mean, that is criminal, and it’s disgusting, and this man should be held accountable for it.” – GOP Rep. Lisa McClain, repeating an invented statistic that the cult has been feverishly spreading on X in recent days.
McClain last appeared here when she threatened “cross-border action” against Canada over its wildfires. Before that, she appeared here when she called on “communist Democrats” to move to Europe. That was after she called for “evil, fascist Democrats” to stop calling people names.
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Fact Check: New England Journal of Medicine Did NOT Find 82% Miscarriage Rate Among Pregnant Women Vaccinated Against COVID-19
All she has done here is show us she's just another gullible liar as they all are. She doesn't realize she can't accuse someone a fascist when her leader is calling them communists. Whatever education she's alledgely had has failed her.
Mike Collins To J6 Rioter: Yes, You Should Get Paid
Yahoo News reports:
On Tuesday, Collins spoke with voters in Savannah, Georgia. In a video posted online, one of the attendees asked for the congressman’s take on Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion fund for victims of the supposed weaponization of government. The attendee identified themselves as a January 6 rioter who “lost everything.”
“With Todd Blanche being confirmed as the new Attorney General and the victims of political weaponization fund being such a controversial issue that’s important to me,” the attendee said. “I lost everything. I’m a business owner now in Savannah by the grace of God. I lost my home, my car, my entire life savings. To put it clearly, would you support either the victims of political weaponization fund, compensation fund, or some form of compensatory relief not just to January 6ers like myself, but all Americans left, right, and center who have become victims of a weaponized political system?”
Collins immediately voiced his support for the fund. “A lot of things have been politicized and weaponized,” Collins said. “And when the federal government harms you, then yes, they have a liability to you. That’s easy. Yes, sir.”
"All the traitors need to be paid.............in lead" — Thewolflam (comments)
"So, do they get paid by how much they broke, how many feet of feces they smeared on the walls, what they stole, or how many officers they hurt? We need a metric to work from, Mike! Give us dollar values for calculations!" — Makoto (comments)
"Again, I'm sorry the Capital Police didn't use deadly force. They should have killed all the rioters. Still should." — AncientMariner (comments)
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When you commit treason you should get punished, nitwit!
He's all for kickbacks to the traitors! Another Trump criminal supporter.
Ossoff for President 2028.
'This is grotesque': ESPN host rages after his Trump selfie spurs backlash — Tom Boggioni
“What a clown show," Robinson wrote. "You have the privilege of meeting the president of the United States on the tarmac, and you greet him with a backward baseball hat like a child."
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We always knew Pat was "low IQ."
Protesters Arrested After Storming OpenAI Lobbying Office — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
Over 30 student activists came together on Monday afternoon to occupy the Gallup Building in Washington DC, home to a public-facing lobbying office belonging to ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
Once inside the lobby, the demonstrators unfurled a massive banner reading “Stop Stealing Our Future,” while others held signs with messages like “OpenAI bought my Senator.” The demonstration lasted two hours, and ended when police stormed the lobby, arresting 13 protestors.
At the moment, it’s unclear whether the protestors have been released or if they remain in custody pending charges, as the Metropolitan Police Department and District of Columbia Department of Corrections have yet to respond to a request for comment.
The protest was organized by the climate group Sunrise Movement and anti-AI organization QuitGPT. According to a joint statement shared with Futurism, Monday’s action is just one of many across over 20 states in August calling on politicians to “Dump Big Tech.”
One student organizer who attended the protest, Raya Gupta, explained in the statement that “my friends chose to risk arrest to bring the fight to OpenAI.”
“Our generation doesn’t have any guarantees about whether we’ll have jobs after college, or whether there will be clean drinking water for all of us or whether people will have any power left in politics since our elections keep getting bought by Big Tech,” Gupta continued. “We all believe that not taking action now, as the scales slide between the people and the billionaires, puts our future in great jeopardy.”...
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Activism returns in the age of AI!
Purple state stuck with massive tab for Trump's deportations: 'Huge waste' — Raw Story|Leilah Ortega, Nevada Current
Nevada taxpayers paid $2.7 billion on mass deportations in 2025, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Clark County taxpayers accounted for $1.8 billion of that amount, and Washoe County taxpayers accounted for nearly $600,000.
Analyzing IRS statistics of income, an Institute for Policy Studies estimate of the costs of the Trump administration’s deportation program in 2025, and other data, EPI estimates that the deportations cost the average taxpayer $2,421.
That’s money that could have been allocated to other public services and public servants in Nevada, argues EPI, including, SNAP for 1.3 million people, Medicaid for 187,000, medical care for 47,000 veterans, or 10,000 school teachers.
The EPI analysis shows by state how much U.S. taxpayers contributed to mass deportations following the signing of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025. The 900-page One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes provisions that expand the Department of Homeland Security’s detainment budget and quadruple Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s annual detention budget.
The administration promised to remove one million immigrants annually, provide Border Patrol and ICE agents with an annual $10,000 bonus over the next four years, expand detention centers to hold 10,000 immigrants, and further expand the border wall.
While funds for mass deportations increase, cuts to SNAP, Medicaid, and other public assistance programs also occurred under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, leaving thousands locally and millions nationally vulnerable.
Nationwide, the Trump administration used $268.9 billion in taxes to fund mass deportations, totalling $2,358 per taxpayer. Taxes that could fund 118.2 million SNAP recipients, 1 million firefighters, 9.7 million public housing units, or 6.2 million parents with 12 weeks of paid parental leave....
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They must be happy about it.
Trump DOJ Memo Shielding Communications With Prez is ‘Disregarding the Law,’ Warns Ex-Prosecutor — Mediaite|Alex Griffing
Peter Alexander, the host of MS NOW’s State of Play, brought on network legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Paul Butler on Tuesday to discuss Attorney General Todd Blanche’s just-issued memo shielding conversations with the president from Congressional oversight.
“Paul, I appreciate your being here. Help us out here — a 21-page memo just dropped a short time ago. We’re trying to pore through it right now. What are the takeaways? What are the implications of this?” Alexander began.
Butler replied, “It’s completely changing the landscape for when people testify in front of Congress about actions that the president has taken. What this new memo from the Justice Department, brand-new attorney general, says is that conversations with private citizens are immune from being learned about, from being discovered by Congress.”
“So executive privilege is the idea that when the president talks to his top aides, he or she needs a veil of confidentiality so that they can discuss things without knowing that they’ll later be in the newspapers or in front of Congress. But it’s a very limited privilege, and traditionally it only applies to the very top-level aides of the president — the attorney general, the secretary of defense. And now, according to this new memo, it could apply to anybody who President Trump feels like talking to about his decision-making,” he added.
Alexander followed up, “So how big of a departure is this from the way previous administrations have handled conversations of this kind?”
“It is huge. And if you want to talk about previous administrations, how about Trump 1.0? During the first Trump administration, its Justice Department took the position that the privilege only applies to government officials and not to private actors. It said that it didn’t even apply to Steve Bannon, who was implicated in conversations about January 6 with Trump, because he’s a private citizen,” Butler explained....
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So, fascism hits us in the ass again from Trump's toadie AG acting on Trump's behalf and not America's. The Crime Syndicate just got lager thanks to the Republican Nazis.
We All Should Be Very Worried’: John Brennan Panics Trump Will ‘Pull Out All Stops’ During Midterms — Mediaite|Stephanie Kaloi
“We should all be very worried” about the possibility that President Donald Trump will increase his efforts to disrupt the electoral process ahead of this year’s midterms, former CIA Director John Brennan said Tuesday on MS NOW.
“I think we all should be very worried about what the President might do in order to try to interfere somehow in the integrity of the upcoming midterm elections. He has tremendous authority in terms of the President of the United States,” Brennan said during an interview on State of Play with Peter Alexander.
“And if he believes that either House is going to shift to Democratic control, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he’s going to pull out all stops and use, as he says, every tool at their availability,” Brennan continued.
“And with the Department of Justice, as well as with the Republican Congress, willing to support him, again, I think we have very legitimate reasons to be very concerned and worried.”
The president’s fixation on alleged election fraud in 2020 has been a frequent refrain of his second term. In July, Trump insisted the American electoral process is vulnerable to possible interference from foreign adversaries and used a primetime address to push Congress to pass the SAVE America Act.
If passed, the legislation would require proof of citizenship to vote....
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Duh! Besides lying, that's all the criminal has been doing since the retards voted him into office.
Human Rights Groups Sue Trump Over ICC Sanctions
The Washington Post reports:
Four human rights groups filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Tuesday, arguing that President Donald Trump’s imposition of sanctions on the International Criminal Court is illegal.
The groups said the sanctions were a “blatantly illegal attack on international justice” that must be struck down. They alleged that the sanctions infringe on constitutional rights to free speech, association and religion, and that they violate obligations under international law.
The Hague-based ICC is the only permanent international court with the power to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression and war crimes. The United States does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction.
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The United States? You mean the criminal, Donald Trump.
The Charleston Post & Courier reports:
Pawleys Island Community Church shuttered its private school just weeks after the ministry came under fire for allowing a sex offender to work there. Church elders notified members on Aug. 10 that the Pawleys Island Christian Academy had closed after 25 years.
Since the revelation, former pastor Don Williams, his wife Ginny Williams, former school director Niki Howard and director of operations Michael Fields have been arrested, accused of putting children at risk. Seven civil lawsuits have been filed against the church and its leaders.
Church elders cited the ongoing criminal investigation and delays with licensing in their reasons for closing the school.
Read the full article. My first report on this is here.
The Pawleys Island Community Church Pastor Don Williams, his wife Ginny Williams and Niki Howard, the director of the church’s academy, are all being criminally charged in the investigation involving a sex offender allegedly volunteering around children.
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A big one bites the dust.
Trump’s Secret $24 Billion Tax on 401(k) Retirement Accounts — The Smirking Chimp|Dean Baker
You may not have heard about this latest tax from Trump. That could be because he’s not going through Congress to get it. Also, this scam could get buried in the middle of his many other grifting schemes. Trump is starting a new special subscription service to his social media platform, Truth Social, where big investors will pay $100,000 a month for advance access to Trump posts that can move markets.
This means that the next time Trump posts that he will blow Iran off the map and sends oil prices soaring, the people who paid Trump’s fee will have the opportunity to buy oil futures before the jump. The same story applies on the way down, as when he posts that a deal with Iran’s leaders is imminent.
And the inside information goes well beyond oil prices. He may announce a big military contract with Lockheed or one of his sons’ companies, sending stock prices soaring. Or he could announce a big DEI investigation of Disney or some other Hollywood entertainment company, causing their stock to plummet.
There are an infinite number of ways that Trump Truth Social announcements can move markets. This subscription service allows rich investors around the country to get in on the action.
If it’s not clear how Trump’s scheme amounts to a tax on your 401(k), think more carefully. If Trump’s clients get the jump on a big rise in oil prices, that means that they get the money, not you. This is true even if, like the vast majority of small investors, you are not actively managing your funds....
So, 401(k) holders and other small investors are paying a considerable chunk of money through this “tax” to Trump and his enrolled insiders. As I said, this tax is not going to Congress for approval, but we can assume that all the Republicans in Congress approve of it. If not, Trump would be impeached for such a blatantly illegal scheme, but we know the Republican motto: “If Trump Does It, It’s Good.”
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Some rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.
Bombshell Tape Shows The Leader Of The Free World Fleeing In A Catering Truck — Crooks and Liars|Conover Kennard
Bunker Boy is back!
CNN's Kaitlan Collins broke down the whole ruse on Monday's The Source, walking viewers through the timeline: Trump boarded Air Force One at 8:24 p.m., then slipped off it minutes later — out of view of the press corps who thought they were flying with him — and climbed into an elevated catering truck, the same kind used to stock a plane's meals. By 8:30 p.m. it was hauling him away from Air Force One entirely, toward a third, much less conspicuous aircraft: an Air Force C-32A.
Trump escaping on a catering truck, possibly stocked with Big Macs, is ripe for meme mockery. On a serious note, journalists and White House staff unknowingly became a “decoy” for a suspected assassination plot after Trump secretly got off an Air Force One jet flying out of Turkey. Trump has always despised the press, but this puts it at a whole 'nother level.
The whole maneuver went down the night after the U.S. resumed strikes on Iran, while Trump was still in Ankara for the NATO summit. Per The Washington Post, the decoy operation left plenty of U.S. officials — and the public — in the dark about the President's actual whereabouts for hours. And apparently nobody's cleared up yet how Trump got from that decoy plane back onto Air Force One once it touched down in London, before he finally took the Qatari-gifted jumbo jet home....
This is your friendly reminder that Joe Biden visited Ukraine as air raid sirens sounded while the President was on the ground. He didn't hide or escape. He was the Commander in Chief and took that seriously.
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Putting the lives of reporters at risk. Coward.
Trump Goes BALLISTIC After Yet Another Humiliating Failure Gets Exposed — Crooks and Liars|Andrea Thompson
Given the rate at which Donald Trump humiliatingly and spectacularly fails at almost everything he does, you'd think he'd have grown a bit more accustomed to those failures being exposed. Yet here we are, decades into his series of never-ending f*ck-ups, and he's still losing his ever-loving mind every single time he gets called out.
The Center for American Progress (CAP) recently released a new analysis, in which they found that the Trump Administration's attempt at a widespread crime crackdown in the US -- specifically targeting large, left-leaning cities such as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. -- was actually completely and wholly useless, costing the American taxpayers upwards of $1.7 billion while garnering almost no discernible effect on crime rates.
CAP's report accuses Donald Trump of "exploiting" the fact that violent crime and murder were already on a significant decline in these cities when he targeted them with "extreme interventions," including his infamous deployment of National Guard troops against United States citizens....
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Trump thinks we're all suckers.
It’s Official: This Is the Hottest America Has Ever Been — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
It’s not just you — the United States is going through a record-bustingly hot summer.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the contiguous US averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit in July, which is even hotter than the July 1936 Dust Bowl, an environmental and agricultural disaster marked by devastating dust storms.
Much like the Dust Bowl, which was the result of both natural and human-made factors, this year’s record-breaking temperatures are the result of a strong El Niño — a naturally occuring weather pattern — exacerbating the calamitous effects of human-caused climate change.
“It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,” Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters told the Associated Press. “And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the US — just a cataclysmic event in US history.”
“If we’re exceeding records from the Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble,” Masters added....
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It doesn't make it any easier but we were warned. The warning was largely rejected by the ignorant.
AI Investors Are Suddenly Quaking in Their Boots — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
German AI researcher and hedge fund manager Leopold Aschenbrenner became the poster child for the hubris of an AI-obsessed Wall Street last month.
Some $35 billion of investors’ money, in the form of leveraged bets on AI infrastructure stocks, evaporated in front of the 24-year-old’s eyes as tech shares were hit by yet another major sell off.
The humbling couldn’t have come at a worse time. The funds vanished days before his wedding with Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. According to the New Yorker, the two had to cancel their honeymoon as a result.
Aschenbrenner isn’t alone. According to new data from Hedge Fund Research, tech funds dropped by seven percent in July, the worst period for the investments since the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Telegraph reports.
A separate hedge fund, called value Aligned Research Advisors, which shares a similar portfolio to Aschenbrenner’s, similarly slid 44 percent in July as tech stocks reeled from major volatility.
The bruising month has further compounded fears over a massive surge in AI spending with no clear path to profitability in sight. Investors have become wary of big tech companies’ ever-higher capital expenditure forecasts as concerns over an AI bubble continue to mount.
Staying on track and maintaining high profit margins has become a high risk high reward game.
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So sorry for poor old Leopold.
Amazon’s New AI Data Center Is So Enormous That It Appears It Will Become the Largest Single Source of Pollution in the United States — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
Tech Goliaths are scrambling to build as much AI computing capacity as they possibly can, come hell or low water. One of the dominant players in the space, Amazon Web Services, has its heart set on an AI data center so enormous that it could easily become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.
According to the New York Times, Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.
That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria.
It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”
Even without the new Pecos County plant, Amazon’s emissions are staggering. The company recently disclosed a record increase in its total emissions last year, with company-wide electricity usage rising by 34 percent across 2025.
That the company is blatantly papering over its previous climate commitments isn’t a shocker at this point, in other words, as the company reaches new emission highs with each passing year.
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Pollution served with a "smile."
Why Is The Airplane's Catering Truck Farting, Mommy? Because The President Is In It, Dear. — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Cue Donald Trump screaming about prosecuting leakers again, we reckon, because the Washington Post dropped a whoa bombshell story about a recent time when Donald Trump lied to the world, for a reason that almost approaches normal.
Remember when Trump pulled that switcheroo in Turkey and suddenly “decided” not to come home on his gabillion dollar bribe plane from the Qataris, since it isn’t outfitted with the security required to carry an American president, even though it is very beautiful and bejeweled and was a bribe? Remember how he lied about that at the time, some dumb shit excuse for why there was going to be a switcheroo, because they suddenly needed to send the bribe plane to the UK so everybody could “ooh” and “aah” at it? Remember how he lied and said he was taking the old stinky Air Force One that he hates, “for old time’s sake”?
Also keep this in context of how the Trump regime has already been on a witch hunt for leakers regarding the security failures of his bribe plane.
Well, get ready to stack lies upon lies upon lies, because every single bit of that was a lie, and Donald Trump rode home in a secret Air Force plane after they snuck him off the big old Air Force One plane in a catering truck, because of fears Iran was going to try to assassinate him.
He’s always scared Iran is going to assassinate him, it makes him poop his pants.
Mommy, why is the catering truck shaking to-and-fro and making squelchy anus sounds? Oh that’s just the president, darling.
Here’s how it went:
In Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane — an Air Force C-32A — via an airport catering truck typically used to load meals and other supplies preflight, according to the U.S. official and corroborating material reviewed by The Post. That made Air Force One a “decoy” with media and some White House staff aboard, the official said.
The old Air Force One with the journalists aboard? Bait. They didn’t know Trump had been wheeled out of there, and they didn’t know how much danger they were in, according to the assessments of Trump’s security team. He was willing to let Iran murder them.
Invite him to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner again, you bootlicking hacks....
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I, for one, look forward to "The Farting President" video!
White House sides with AOC — warns conservative attacks are 'not helpful' — Alternet|Sarah K. Burns
...The conservative right responded with attacks after the Democratic lawmaker posted behind-the-scenes footage of her egg freezing journey. Daily Wire host Matt Walsh called later-in-life pregnancy “totally backward and ridiculous” in a post on X.
“If she got pregnant now, it would technically be a geriatric pregnancy," Walsh posted. "Instead she’s freezing her eggs. This desire to start having children late in life is completely baffling to me. I’ll have kids in their 20s by the time I turn 50. AOC apparently wants to have a toddler at that age."...
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Hey, genius. Baron Trump is 20, his father Donald is 80. Can you do the math? Apparently not!
Johnson-Backed Candidate: Babies Are “Cum Trophies”
Faith Bugenhagen writes for the New York Times:
Because this is a family newspaper, I cannot quote the piquant term that Brandon Herrera, a Republican House candidate in Texas, used to refer to children in a 2023 video. I can only report that he called them “trophies” for getting a man to ejaculate. Nor, alas, am I allowed to repeat the obscenities that Herrera, a gun influencer, used to explain why the opinions of mothers are without value. I can only say that he argued, essentially, that getting pregnant requires no special skill.
Two weeks ago, ahead of a fund-raiser that Mike Johnson, the House speaker, was holding for Herrera, The Austin American-Statesman reached out to Herrera’s campaign about these resurfaced comments. Herrera’s team responded with a crude visual pun that, once again, is too vulgar for me to describe here.
I can, however, tell you about the Nazi and eugenics stuff. In a 2022 video, Herrera and a buddy in sunglasses and a balaclava tested a Nazi-era submachine gun, then goose-stepped to a Nazi marching song. Herrera called the weapon “the original ghetto blaster.” In a 2024 podcast, after calling for abolishing Social Security, he joked that we should also “abolish old people,” laughing along as his co-hosts riffed about killing them off as in the cult horror film “Midsommar.”
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Is that the way he looks at himself? We can call him "low-self esteem." If he keeps going to bed and getting up every morning, one day he'll wake up and be 80.
Does he know that people paid for their Social Security insurance they collect? Apparently, he's a fuckng retarded shit-fer-brains fool.
Gulf States Worry Iran Has Permanent Control Of Strait
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Persian Gulf energy producers are concluding that Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz will become permanent, disrupting their oil and gas exports and global energy supplies indefinitely. The problem is they worry the alternative—going back to war—would be worse. The conundrum highlights how the war has unleashed a more antagonistic Iran and left a region that is vital to the world’s energy security with no good option for countering it.
Iran’s rivals in the Gulf don’t like the deal now under consideration to crack open the vital waterway that formalizes Iranian oversight of inbound ships. But Gulf officials said the region sees the agreement as preferable to further military action between the U.S. and Iran, which would put Arab states’ energy infrastructure at risk. Negotiations on the deal, which promises to release energy shipments through Hormuz, have stalled in recent days.
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This due to Trump's failure of understanding military tactics and the logistics of war.
Ex-Syrian President Sentenced To Death In Absentia
The Associated Press reports:
A Syrian court sentenced ousted President Bashar Assad along with his younger brother to death in absentia on Tuesday for crimes against humanity and war crimes during the country’s 14-year conflict that left about half a million people dead.
The sentences at the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus are the first against Assad or members of his inner circle since the Assad family’s five decades in power came to an end 20 months ago. “Bashar Assad used state agencies to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity,” said judge Fakhareddine al-Aryan during a court session that was aired live on state TV.
Assad and his brother Maher fled to Russia after the government’s fall in December 2024 and received political asylum. Syria’s new rulers have asked Russia to hand the Assads over.
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Has Trump read this?
Trump Claims US Has “100% Control” Of Strait [VIDEO]
CNBC reports:
President Donald Trump said Monday that Iran should pay reparations for what he labeled “the damage they’ve done” over the past half a century. “They asked for reparations, you might say, or they asked for money for the damage that we’ve done, and I said that’s a good idea, well we’re going to ask for money for the damage they’ve done over a 50-year period,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
He added that compensation could be applied to pay damages for U.S. personnel killed or wounded in the Middle East, as well as to the families of protesters killed in a crackdown on mass unrest by the Iranian regime this year.
Trump also said Monday that the U.S. Navy had swept the Strait of Hormuz clear of mines and now holds “100%” control of the waterway, with reparations emerging as the latest flashpoint between Washington and Tehran. “It’s open now,” he told reporters at the White House, adding that the U.S. was “the only one that has control of the Strait of Hormuz right now.”
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So far, no good, Donnie.
'This is so wrong': Trump's 'astoundingly stupid' claim leaves jaws on the floor — Raw Story|David Edwards
President Donald Trump drew ridicule and alarm after claiming "nothing bad can happen" from his executive order to limit childhood vaccines.
Trump signed the executive order Monday in the Oval Office, calling for the number of diseases vaccinated against to be reduced to 11, according to CNBC.
Decades of scientific research involving more than a million children have found no link between vaccines and autism, according to Autism Speaks.
At Monday's signing, Trump was dismissive of concerns about the order's risks.
"Nothing bad can happen from what we're doing. Nothing bad can happen. We're going to learn a lot," Trump said at the signing.
The reaction from scientists and commentators was swift, with Daniel D. Brown, a senior research scientist at the University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Precision Medicine, among the first to respond.
"He and everyone in this administration is so astoundingly stupid and intellectually incurious," Brown wrote on X....
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The man is a retarded brute. Inhuman as they come.
Insurrectionists Sue The Federal Government For Entrapment — Crooks and Liars|Chris capper Liebenthal
Twelve J6 insurrectionists, including Oath Keeper Roberto Minuto, have filed a lawsuit against the federal government for one million dollars each, claiming that the whole insurrection was "a trap" to give it "the appearance of a riot."
According to the Ticktin Law Group, the law firm representing the dirty dozen, the government was hatching the plan to entrap people for months:
"Long before January 6th, in fact, going back at least to September of 2020," the filing says, conspirators held Zoom meetings and plotted "to turn a peaceful protest of the conservative J6ers...into the appearance of a riot."
"Those seditionists...actually plotted to break some of the windows of the Capitol Building so that their compatriots and foreign participants would enter the Capitol Building to unlock and open the doors of the Capitol so that the anticipated protestors outside would be herded into the Capitol Building," the complaint says.
The complaint also states that an unidentified "instigator," described only as wearing a red MAGA cap with the tag still attached, was the person who broke the first window to gain entrance into the Capitol.
The complaint cites Trump's pardons and commutations throughout as the basis for their demand. However, the report does not indicate whether they acknowledge that Trump was President at the time that this alleged plot was concocted and executed.
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Duh! If it was a "trap" then your motherfucking hero, Trump, set it for you fucking lamebrains!
Flock’s Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Flock had a devious plan to expand its surveillance network past its army of AI-powered license plate scanners.
As 404 Media reports, the controversial company drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to scan the license plates of every vehicle that drove past them — in effect turning hundreds of thousands of rideshare and delivery drivers into a network of what the reporting describes as “roaming surveillance vehicles.”
These plans were first revealed last August as part of an intended partnership between Flock and the AI-powered dashcam company Nexar. Now, a presentation document obtained by 404 Media shows that Flock was actively pitching this partnership to potential customers at the time. The presentation, which was intended to be shown to the Georgia Office of the Attorney General, was obtained by a Georgia resident through a public records request.
Flock told 404 that the partnership never went through, but the presentation still shows the company’s plans to turn rideshare and delivery drivers into mobile surveillance apparatuses — and the sheer scale is astonishing
“Hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA [home owners associations] in GA [Georgia] are part of the network,” the Flock presentation stated. “Plus Nexar partnership which includes 350k Uber/Lyft and other delivery service
devices.”
Expanding to rideshare drivers would’ve added a new dimension to Flock’s already far-reaching surveillance network. Most of its cameras are mounted on stationary poles that survey a fixed area. In addition to providing more coverage, using cars could help Flock keep a lower profile; one of the main problems Flock is facing amid overwhelming public backlash is that protestors are vandalizing or blocking its surveillance pylons....
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Drunks on technology. Futurism has most of the goods on the greed of the garbage. You can read more there.
Scientists Warn That New Satellites Could Cause Eye Damage for People on the Ground — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
Last month, the Federal Communications Commission approved an experimental and controversial new satellite being developed by venture Reflect Orbital to reflect sunlight down onto the Earth to illuminate patches of it at night for paying customers.
The purported goal is to allow solar farms to continue generating electricity even after nightfall and provide illumination during emergencies. Those may sound like noble ideas on the surface, but the concept comes with major downsides as well.
One is that such bright satellites could easily wreck deep space observations. Astronomers were appalled at the news, with the FCC receiving nearly nearly 2,000 public comments criticizing the proposal, as Wired reported at the time.
And it’s not just professional astronomers that could be affected, as experts told The Verge. Amateur astronomers gazing up at the prototype mirror satellite, dubbed Eärendil-1 — continuing Silicon Valley’s obsession with borrowing names from JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” — could easily be blinded. Even looking through a 12-inch telescope, a common type used by enthusiasts, could result in permanent eye damage.
It’s a considerable risk to human health that makes the FCC’s approval “extraordinary,” as Royal Astronomical Society deputy executive director Robert Massey told The Verge.
It’s a risk experts have known for decades now. Case in point, observing a similar proposed Russian prototype, dubbed Znamya, could cause damage equivalent to staring at the Sun around a total eclipse, according to a 2000 research article by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. (Russia launched two experimental Znamya space mirror satellites in the 1990s, but later abandoned the program.)...
Buscombe told The Verge that the company would limit the amount of light being reflected and calibrate brightness to “levels humans and animals already tolerate.” But experts warn there are far too many variables that the company won’t be able to control for, from light scattering in the atmosphere to interactions with clouds.
Satellites in general are an increasingly controversial topic. The number of spacecraft in low Earth has exploded over the past decade, and many are being delivered at lower altitudes that make them appear even brighter.
“The stars above us are a valued part of human heritage – deploying more than one million exceptionally bright satellites would utterly destroy this and permanently scar the natural landscape,” Massey told The Verge.
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Just because we could all play Russian Routette doesn't mean we should.
The Tower of Babel is benig rebuilt.
Trump and RFK Jr. try again to upend vaccines for kids — NPR|Robert Stein
President Trump signed another executive order aimed at trying to upend the way U.S. children are vaccinated against dangerous infectious diseases.
The new executive order, signed Monday afternoon in the Oval Office, calls for reducing the number of childhood vaccines recommended by the federal government.
It also calls for breaking up the shot known as the MMR, which is now given as a single vaccination for measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox. The order advises breaking it up into separate shots.
The order also directs the Justice Department to pressure states to reduce the number of vaccines required for school.
The moves will likely be challenged in court, as previous similar attempts to change the childhood vaccination schedule have been.
At the signing ceremony, the president talked about vaccines needing to be studied in light of rising autism rates, a thoroughly studied and debunked theory.
The news was welcomed by vaccine critics and denounced by many public health experts.
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Global infant mortality rate has dropped from 10% to 4% with the use of vaccines since 1974.
Time will tell when our children begin dying again.
More Than Half the Homes in East Omaha Have Unsafe Lead Levels. That Doesn’t Mean the EPA Will Clean Them Up. — ProPublica|Chris Bowling
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on environmental cleanup, more than half the yards in a section of Omaha, Nebraska, that used to surround a lead smelter still have enough contamination to cause high blood-lead levels in kids, according to tests by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica.
The findings were consistent across the city’s older urban core — in the historically Black neighborhoods north of downtown, the predominantly Hispanic areas to the south and the more white and affluent areas in midtown. However, homes closest to where a lead smelter and other downtown factories operated tended to have slightly higher concentrations than those farther out.
As part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, the federal government and the city of Omaha have been attempting to remove lead from Omaha’s yards since the late 1990s.
The EPA’s cleanup standard for Omaha was set in 2009 and is based on health recommendations from 1994. Since then, research has shown that lower exposures can cause IQ loss in kids and heart attacks in adults. Twice in the last 15 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lowered what it considers a high blood-lead level. An EPA risk model found that to protect most kids according to those new health guidelines, soil levels would have to be below 100 parts per million — about 10 grains of rice in a 10-pound bucket of dirt.
The Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tested 388 homes in the Omaha Superfund site and found that 208 had levels over 100 parts per million.
But the EPA has never required that level of cleanup in Omaha or as a national remediation standard. Current EPA policy for the Omaha cleanup site directs contractors to dig up and replace yards if tests show they contain more than 400 parts per million of lead — about a marble’s worth of the metal dispersed across a 10-gallon bucket of dirt. Last week, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica reported that 1 in 10 of the homes we tested that were remediated still has a lead concentration over that threshold....
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As the U.S. decays, disintegrates, our food and water supply dwindles and our air quality suffers, Trump continues to exploit and aggravate it all to benefit his grifting.
How can humanity survive under these conditions?
'Trump is OUT': President yet again appears to fall asleep in Oval Office — Raw Story|Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump yet again appeared to fall asleep on Monday after he signed an executive order reducing the recommended childhood vaccine schedule.
Trump was in the Oval Office where he was meeting with several administration officials, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, to discuss the overhaul to the vaccine schedule.
People noted that Trump's eyes were closed during the press event, in a moment captured on video.
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar shared a clip of Trump apparently dozing off at his desk.
"Holy s--- Trump is OUT," Rupar wrote on X.
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta shared a meme, "I take a nap right here," with a child lying down in the sand in a post on X.
X account Open Source Intel, which has more than 1.6 million followers, also mocked the president's demeanor.
"The President has been working hard," Open Source Intel posted.
Others sounded off on Trump's apparent snooze.
"Looking very awake and alert sir!" Matt Rein, influencer and creative partnerships manager for the Democratic Party, wrote on X.
"Out like a light," Bluesky account GottaLaff, a progressive political commentator with more than 40,000 followers, wrote.
"I love how they all pretend to not notice him passed the f--- out," author Joshua A. Walker wrote on Bluesky....
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Asleep at the steal.
Private Intelligence Firms Are Selling Dossiers on AI and Data Center Critics — The American Prospect|Daniel Boguslaw
Private intelligence firms are selling dossiers about critics of artificial intelligence and the data centers powering them, including trying to peddle them to federal regulators, according to documents obtained by the Prospect. The offerings show that even as voter hostility toward data centers has emerged as an election-altering, bipartisan issue, corporate spy shops are hawking reports that frame widespread dissent in the language of counterterrorism to both private- and public-sector clients.
The drivers of negative sentiment toward data centers and AI include environmental concerns, fears of job loss, and increased utility prices near the sprawling compounds housing server farms and processing facilities. More broadly, people across the ideological spectrum don’t appreciate Big Tech interests dictating their local economic development. Hundreds of grassroots organizations have emerged across the country, seeking to curb data center construction and limit the negative effects of AI....
In a product offering from the corporate intelligence company RANE Network sent to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the corporate firm offered the federal agency—which regulates the interstate transmission and sale of electricity, gas, and oil—a tailored report on the threat posed by anti-tech sentiment....
The specter of hacktivism continues to haunt RANE analysts. “Anti-establishment” and “anti-capitalist groups” alongside Anonymous were referenced during the presentation before a warning that “anti-tech and environmental protest … groups also have a history of some of them going beyond just protest movements to also include, you know, violent extremism,” an analyst said.
In addition to describing the general patterns of concerning groups, presenters also discussed surveilling “online chatter.” The analysts discussed how movements emerge from online spaces, and warned that things can spiral out of control quickly, which is all the more reason to surveil those spaces.
The push to surveil and monitor techno-skeptics comes at the same time that federal agencies have begun circulating their own surveillance memorandums of a new domestic extremist category: “anti-tech extremism.” As Wired reported in May, this new threat category is being used by the FBI and DHS to target constitutionally protected speech and assembly, regardless of whether or not participants have committed, or intend to commit, a crime. In leaked State Department documents obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein, Secretary of State Marco Rubio informed employees that the agency was monitoring a new alliance of “militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements.”...
Liferaft’s monitoring tracks the ebb and flow of hostility toward AI companies and executives over the course of several months, but also explicitly warns of a shift in so-called organizational intent, “from personal frustration to coordinated rhetoric … [that] is something threat intelligence professionals pay close attention to, because it tracks with how movements organize.”
The same month Liferaft published its report, hundreds gathered in San Francisco’s downtown to protest AI companies and the existential risks they pose. Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI offices were all visited by protesters, including the AI theorist and spiritual leader of the AI-skeptic movement Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose book title “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” has become a rallying cry for critics of sentient AI. The constitutionally protected protest fits neatly in all three firms’ criteria as a surveillance target.
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No good can come of this RANE racket.
Zuckerberg’s Manifesto About the Glorious Freedoms AI Will Bring Was Completely Contradicted by His Own CTO During a Company Meeting — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg just dumped a lengthy manifesto on his utopian vision for an AI “superintelligence”-driven future. Called “The Future is for Everyone,” it’s so breathlessly optimistic about the technology that it ends up belying something that’s, instead, incredibly dystopian.
But among all the deranged things he shared in the 6,500 word document, it’s Zuckerberg’s promise about how AI will unlock so much personal freedom for its embracers that’s the most hypocritical.
According to Zuckerberg, in the future “everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.”
Most importantly, “it will free up time for the things you enjoy, and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise,” he added.
Now contrast this to what Zuckerberg’s own lieutenant, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, is actually telling employees behind the scenes.
According to a new scoop from Business Insider, during a Q&A last month, Bosworth tore into an underling who dared to ask if all the amazing productivity gains AI brings would mean that employees would be able to take more time off.
It’s a fair question: isn’t the point of AI supercharging the workplace making workers’ lives easier, at least in the telling of Zuckerberg and his fellow tech CEOs?
But Bosworth couldn’t help but sneer in reply, clearly showing he thought the idea preposterous.
“I hope that what we do with our extra time is to do even more and cooler stuff for the users who use our products every day,” he told the employee.
“We got billions of people using our products every day,” Bosworth added. “I get an extra hour. You know what I do with it? I put it into that.”
Pulling no punches, Bosworth then sniped at the employee’s character.
“Go to your parents and ask them: hey, like every time I get a chance to talk to my boss, ask me if I can have more days off,” he said. “Ask your parents what they think of that as a career strategy.”
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Your future isn't what it used to be.
Lauren Boebert son hit with child sex abuse charges — she gripes about 'challenging time' — Raw Story|David Edwards
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) described a "challenging time" after her son Tyler Boebert was charged with five felony counts linked to child sexual exploitation.
Tyler Boebert, 21, faces three counts of sexual exploitation of a child and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, according to court records.
All five counts are felonies alleged to have occurred on Jan. 1, 2024.
Tyler Boebert was released on a $10,000 bond and is scheduled to appear in Garfield County District Court on Aug. 19, the Denver Gazette reported.
"I love my son. We take these allegations very seriously and pray for everyone affected during this challenging time," Lauren Boebert told the Daily Mail.
In February 2026, he was charged again with misdemeanor child abuse after his 2-year-old son allegedly wandered away from the congresswoman's Windsor, Colorado home toward a nearby lake, the Daily Mail reported.
"A kind woman quickly and safely secured him, and authorities were called as a precaution," Lauren Boebert said at the time.
That second child abuse charge came while Tyler Boebert was already serving a two-year deferred sentence — a probationary deal allowing him to avoid a felony conviction — after he pleaded guilty in 2024 to identity theft stemming from a string of car break-ins, the Post Independent reported....
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Another mistake just took its place.
Outrage as RNC head shrugs off claims that MAGA rep broke child's collarbone: 'Repugnant' — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
The chairman of the Republican National Committee drew outrage by downplaying the domestic abuse allegations against Rep. Max Miller (R-OH).
Florida state Sen. Joe Gruter, who heads up the RNC, appeared on the right-wing News Nation’s “The Hill Sunday," where he was asked whether his organization would back Miller with resources in his re-election campaign — and he dodged the issue.
“I always tell people that there’s not many things worse than divorce and watching these processes play out," Gruter said. "Nobody’s a winner.”
Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused the GOP lawmaker of holding a gun to her head, breaking their toddler daughter's collarbone and other physical and emotional abuse. But Gruter indicated the RNC would back his campaign.
“We’re going to support our nominees,” the GOP official said. “We need to make sure we hold the majorities. Max, I’m sure, is on that side."
Gruter's comments ignited a firestorm of criticism.
"RNC endorses domestic violence," noted political organizer Melanie D'Arrigo.
"So that's a yes supporting a guy who assaulted his wife and child," said Find Out Media's Tim Fullerton. "Cool party guys."
"Republicans say they're going to financially support the campaign of a domestic abuser," observed "Friendly Atheist" blogger Hemant Mehta. "In case you had any doubt."
"So, the Dem in this race has to pounce on this," urged popular X user Khadija B. Targaryen. "The Republicans are supporting a man accused of abusing the mother of his child and a baby. This should get Dems out to vote bc as per a recent poll, a number of Republicans don't see this as a problem."...
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I'm starting to think that some people still aren't civilized.
'Angered' judge demands Blanche answer for 'flagrant disregard' of Epstein order: expert — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
Todd Blanche was being sworn in as Attorney General Monday — just days before he could be sanctioned by a furious federal judge.
According to former US Attorney Joyce Vance, President Donald Trump's appointee has a court date with Judge Emmet Sullivan to address his foot-dragging in the lawsuit over the Jeffrey Epstein files brought by attorney Katie Phang.
At the status hearing, Blanche must defend his refusal to produce documentation supporting his claims that certain redacted names in published documents belong to Epstein victims and not victimizers, the former prosecutor wrote on her Substack platform.
Additionally, Vance wrote, the court has ordered Blanche to produce underlying FBI interview notes that formed the basis for interview reports with appropriate redactions, or explain why the notes should not be produced.
Blanche will also be expected to discuss his timeline for complying with the Epstein Act requirement that "all redactions must be accompanied by a written justification published in the Federal Register and submitted to Congress." The parties dispute whether a deadline exists for this compliance.
As Vance wrote, Trump's former personal attorney has already been referred to a bar grievance committee by a federal judge in Florida, allowing Judge Sullivan to make a similar case over his failure to comply with court orders, indicative of a pattern of disregard for judicial authority....
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I understand that obeying the law is optional with the Trump Crime Syndicate.
Unsatisfied Trump slaps more demands on Iran as peace talks flounder — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump appended a new demand to his list of conditions for ending the Iran war.
The 80-year-old president laid out demands Monday for compensation from Iran in response to its Supreme National Security Council secretary, who insisted that the U.S. compensate for war damages and end its sanctions as a condition for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump said he would instruct U.S. negotiators to insist on compensation, but he added a new demand a little over an hour later.
"Also, with respect to the Iran negotiations, Iran should be responsible for the damages and death caused to the people of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza!" Trump posted at 1:37 p.m.
Trump claimed over the weekend that the U.S. was only "semi-negotiating" with Iran and indicated that he would allow economic pressure to build on Tehran as leverage to end the war.
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He still doesn't understand that losers don't dictate terms.Who will tell him?
‘Jail time’ calls surge as 'insane' right-wing AI attack ad airs in red state — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
A new political attack ad against Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico left onlookers floored Monday for its use of generative artificial intelligence to depict the Texas Democrat as a doctor preparing to perform surgery on a young child.
“I think using an AI version of a candidate in a political advertisement should result in jail time,” wrote D.C.-based journalist Amanda Moore Monday in a social media post on X.
Put out by the American Principles Project on behalf of GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton, the ad in question depicts a young girl plucking flower petals in a grassy field before transitioning to a shot of the same girl lying in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask. A doctor is shown instructing the girl to “keep counting,” and is later revealed to be a GenAI-generated depiction of Talarico.
A narrator in the ad can then be heard saying the following: “The trans industry preys on confused children,” almost certainly a reference to Talarico’s pro-LGBTQ positions.
Max Flugrath, a Democratic political strategist, called the ad “absolutely insane,” and characterized it as a “desperate” attempt to save Paxton’s sinking campaign.
“Absolutely insane to remake an ad about the threat of nuclear war to spread fake panic about the ‘trans industry,’” Flugrath wrote in a social media post on X. “They’re so desperate to make James Talarico seem extreme they need AI.”...
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Fine, my ass. It should result in a law suit.
VOTE TALALRICO!
'Red lights flashing' as 'historically' unpopular Trump official's job security threatened — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
As President Donald Trump's approval rating on the Iran war sits in the 20s, new polling analysis shows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is faring even worse than his boss.
CNN's Harry Enten broke down net job approval ratings for several top Trump officials and found all of them underwater, but Hegseth stands out as "the lowest of the low."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio sits at minus-8, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at minus-9, and Vice President JD Vance at minus-17, but Hegseth trails all of them at minus-22, a figure Enten said has held true "in every single poll" he could find throughout Hegseth's tenure. Enten noted the comparison to Rubio is notable since both are closely associated with the Iran war, yet Rubio, eyeing a potential 2028 run, has "come out smelling like roses" by comparison.
Enten also placed Hegseth's numbers in historical context, comparing him to Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary who oversaw the start of the Iraq War and was pushed to resign shortly after Republicans suffered heavy losses in the 2006 midterms. At a similar point before midterm elections, Rumsfeld's net popularity was minus 7 — still 15 points better than Hegseth's current standing, making Hegseth's numbers "historically low" for a wartime defense secretary.
"Why is this comparison in my mind so much is because, remember, Don Rumsfeld was essentially forced to resign after those midterm elections, after Republicans got crushed," Enten said....
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Don't forget Rumsfeld and his cohorts were still relatively sane. The current band of Trump cutthroats are all batshit psychopaths!
Torture alleged as detainees claim Trump's ICE deploying 'involuntary medical procedures' — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Speaking with The Guardian, Kurdish asylum seeker Gabar Choli detailed Monday the torture he says he endured while held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Texas, the latest account of brutal conditions migrants face amid the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.
Choli, 40, began a hunger strike in March 2025 to protest the conditions at the facility, and a new investigation from The Guardian revealed that he was “quietly and intermittently force-fed by ICE for nearly eight months” until he was deported in January.
“Two guards would hold my feet; two hold my hands; one hold my head – and they would shove tubes in my nose,” Choli said, detailing his time at the ICE detention center publicly for the first time. “It just broke me, mentally broke me. They would take me to [a] solitary cell and I would just choke on my blood and drink the blood from inside [my throat].”
Force-feeding is widely condemned by human rights organizations as a form of torture, including by the American Civil Liberties Union. Nevertheless, The Guardian’s investigation found that the Trump administration had “used court orders” to subject at least 10 ICE detainees staging hunger strikes to “involuntary medical procedures, including force-feeding.”...
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Trump's concentration camps moving towards Joseph Memgele methods?
El Mercurio. Tabs, Mon., Aug. 10, 2026 — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
At The Moral High Ground on Friday, I examined the question of who has the derangement syndrome: Is it us? Or is it the weird racists who have decided Abdul El-Sayed did 9/11 because he has a Muslim name, or that Zohran Mamdani wants to teach your babies how to cut their weener peeners off? Teach the controversy! You should read that and subscribe to it! [The Moral High Ground]
Speaking of, shall you next just watch this video of Abdul El-Sayed reacting to Donald Trump’s racist post about him, the masterful way El-Sayed flipped it back on Trump? You shall.
And shall you also be wanting the one where El-Sayed said Trump shits his pants in the Oval Office? You also shall.
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There's always much more to read at Evan's site.
It’s Time to Evolve Beyond Nationalism — The Smirking Chimp|Robert C. Koehler
“Nation” equals identity. I’m an American! Hurray!
It’s almost embarrassing to confess this, but yeah, that’s me (or used to be me), sitting back in my easy chair, waving a flag. My “nationality” is such a profound, lifelong part of who I am I rarely actually questioned it. At best I shrugged, then momentarily glared in anger at... the government, the media, whoever. Why do we have a trillion-dollar military budget, or a president who wants to up it to $1.5 trillion? Why do we always have an enemy or two or three, who isn’t as human as we are and must be defeated, or at least arrested?
At least being an American comes with a fair amount of rights—freedom of speech, freedom to question authority, and so-o-o much more—and usually I embrace those rights with a sense of hope that the future will be saner. But that sense of hope has been ebbing lately. I have come to realize over the years that I am no longer just an American. I’m a citizen of Planet Earth.
I say this with a sense of paradox. I love the life this nation has given me, and value much of what it claims to stand for, but I think it’s time for humanity to reach beyond nationalism and borders and connect with a larger god—a larger global organizing principle. And I do not claim that this will be simple or obvious.
But it’s time. “Nation” equals war. It equals “get outa here!” The more power it has, the more it sustains itself with the worst of who we are. This means it always needs an enemy... or two, or three, or 50,000.
And our enemy becomes the norm. Here’s where I truly lose hope that the human race can survive nationalism. We dehumanize our enemies, which gives us “permission” to kill them: to shatter their social structure, to erase them from existence. Ho hum....
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The worst of who we are — Trump has brought it all to the surface!
Darline Graham: “I Live The Struggle” Of High Prices
“Like most South Carolinians, I struggle too. When I go shopping, I’m a bargain shopper. If the steak is not on sale, I don’t buy it that week. I look for the buy one, get one free sale. So I think like most South Carolinians, I live the struggle here too.
“We have to get, you know, the economy booming and cut government spending in order to get the prices down. When I talk to voters, they talk about affordability, they talk about healthcare, they talk about gas prices, they talk about the price of groceries. I have two daughters with serious health issues so I know how it feels to pay outrageous medical bills. It’s a struggle that can easily bankrupt a family.
“I stand with President Trump. National security is more– uh, utmost important. We have to protect our nation. I realize that the price of gas is a little high right now, but I think President Trump is gonna get us through this and the price of gas will eventually come down. So I’m just gonna support him and I believe in him when it comes to dealing with Iran.” – Darline Graham, this morning on Fox.
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Let's see, Where to start with this one. Donald Trump got us into this pile of shit. She thinks he's going to get us out of the problem he owns? She's an example of the retardedness that got us in this Nazi sewer!
Honey, there is NO PLAN to bring prices down.
Trump repeats chilling phrase as admin loses control of Iran war: report — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
...It was Trump’s next remark that bore a striking similarity to his past remarks made just before the war.
“It will work out. It always works out,” Trump said.
The U.S. war against Iran has sent food and gasoline prices soaring in the United States due to disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz, the critical shipping waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil trade flows. The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Trump has privately floated abandoning his top war objective – securing a nuclear deal with Iran – so long as Tehran fully reopens the strait, which flowed freely before he launched the war....
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The loser rides electric carts on his golf course.
Trump official's 'discordant' brags obliterated on CNN with damning figures — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
White House economist Kevin Hassett described a "booming" economy this week, pointing to 83,000 construction workers currently building factories, unemployment claims at their lowest since World War II, and more job openings than unemployed workers.
But the latest government data tells a starkly different story, CNN senior business reporter Matt Egan said Monday.
The economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month, far worse than expected, according to the July jobs report. Egan said it's "pretty hard to square" the administration's booming-economy description with figures showing the U.S. is losing jobs rather than adding them by the tens or hundreds of thousands, as would be typical when the labor market is genuinely strong....
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"Smirky" gets gutted!
MAGA has pandemic nostalgia — Salon|Amanda Marcotte
Renewed harassment of Dr. Anthony Fauci is a sad attempt to reclaim a Covid-era victim narrative
For people outside of Donald Trump‘s MAGA coalition, the renewed Republican harassment campaign of Dr. Anthony Fauci makes no sense. It’s been more than five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns ended. With the November midterms looming, most Americans are far more focused on present-day concerns, such as the high cost of living and a tough job market, than a disease that has faded from a “mortal threat” to a “minor annoyance” for the vast majority of people. But that didn’t stop Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky’s Rand Paul, to haul the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases before a Senate committee in late July to be harangued with coronavirus conspiracy theories — even though Fauci’s tenure ended four years ago.
The good doctor exercised his Fifth Amendment rights in response to most questions, correctly pointing out that Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.” Furious that Fauci wouldn’t give him even minor discrepancies as an excuse to launch go-nowhere perjury charges, Paul and other Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted several days later to hold the 85-year-old in contempt....
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Thank God we have a scapegoat!
Taylor Farms Pulls Multiple Products Over Salmonella
The New York Times reports:
Taylor Farms, which has been linked to a large outbreak of cyclosporiasis associated with iceberg lettuce in the United States, said on Sunday that it was voluntarily recalling several of its products made with fresh jalapeños that have been tied to a multistate salmonella outbreak.
The recalled products include spicy guacamole, mango pico de gallo, taco dip and more than a dozen other Taylor Farms branded and unbranded products, the company said in a statement on its website.
They were distributed across 26 states to major retailers — including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Hannaford and Kroger’s — and have a “Best If Used By” date up to and including Aug. 16, 2026.
"This after Taylor Farms gave *$2 million* to Trump & Republicans as they postponed a rule that could've limited the spread of outbreaks like the ongoing epidemic.
Good old blood money... and since they only care about money, not the deaths or illnesses, has anyone calculated the cost of health care, lost work, etc related to this outbreak? How soon does it overtake their bribe?" — Makoto (comments)
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As predicted, more of the food supply will go bad as regulations cease to exist under fascism.
Trump: “Black And Brown Voters Are Flocking To GOP”
Yahoo News reports:
President Donald Trump kept his all-out assault on socialism going on Sunday by declaring “Black and Brown” Americans want nothing to do with it — and are now turning to the Republican Party because the Democrats are flirting with it.
Those voters are also warming up to the GOP because they suddenly remember Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, Trump added.
Trump’s post comes after he has been railing against socialism and communism over the past few months, after a handful of democratic socialists won Democratic primaries.
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Sure, sure. Pigs can fly and they fill the sky.
Pastor Pleads Guilty To Child Sex, Child Porn Charges
Indiana Public Radio reports:
A former Madison County councilman who was on the run for two years after facing charges of child molestation is now pleading guilty to those charges. Steve Sumner has entered guilty pleas in Grant County Superior Court for charges of possession of child pornography, rape, and child molesting. He was facing 18 charges in total.
Originally, Sumner was arrested and charged in 2020. When he failed to show up in a Madison County court in July of 2023, an arrest warrant was issued. The U.S. Marshals apprehended Sumner in Kentucky last September.
The judge in the case has set a sentencing date of August 14. At the time of his 2020 arrest, the Republican was serving his second term on the Madison County Council, owned a local small business, and was listed as the pastor of Lighthouse Baptist Church.
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Another one bites the dust.
Too bad we can't land the big one.
Dean Cain Steps On Rake In Failed Attack On El-Sayed
The Daily Beast reports:
Former Superman actor Dean Cain’s attempt to discredit a rising Democratic star was put to bed in short order. Cain, 60, fired a jab at Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, on Sunday, trying to disparage the progressive following his brutal roast of President Donald Trump’s marriage to Melania Trump.
“Has anyone ever seen a photo of Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El Sayed (D) playing High School football?” the former actor-turned-MAGA mouthpiece said on X, mimicking Trump’s choice to refer to El-Sayed by his full name. “He says he was captain of the team, but I can’t find a single photo. Internet, please do your thing.”
One X user pointed out that El-Sayed had shared one himself on his Instagram in March, saying that finding it “literally took 2 seconds.”
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Dean who?
The next time some Nazi says "the left is too lazy to work" I'll say take a look at Cain. He's too lazy to do a search on the internet. LMAO at this retard.
GOP Senator who assured Todd Blanche's confirmation makes stunning confession — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) confessed Sunday he doesn't entirely trust soon-to-be Attorney General Todd Blanche to uphold the Constitution — but voted to confirm his nomination anyway.
"There's always an existential anxiety, but I am as confident you can be," said Cassidy. "I can't predict the future."
Cassidy also admitted he was close to tears when he announced he would support President Donald Trump's nominee, despite mounting concerns that Blanche had already managed to make the Justice department a "shambles."
Cassidy said he choked up because it was such an honor to vote.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) refused to vote for Blanche because of his handling of the Epstein files, immunity protections granted to the Trump family and repeated attacks on the president's political rivals, she said Friday.
Conservative former judge J. Michael Luttig said of Cassidy and Republicans who did not follow in Murkowski's footsteps, "They will bear this badge of shame the rest of their lives."...
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"I can't predict the future." He couldn't even make an educated guess? Extremely weak! What a soulless creature. We'll recall his co-conspirator status when Blanche runs off the rails!
The Real Victims of the AI Surveillance Panopticon? Crime Fiction Writers — Futurism|Frank Landymore
AI-powered Flock cameras are blanketing the country. Data brokers are selling veritable dossiers worth of information on everyone to shady government agencies. And your neighbors are all spying on each other, unintentionally or otherwise, with their doorbell cameras.
All this is a nightmare for any of us that care about our privacy, sure. But it’s also quite the headache for crime novelists.
Gone are the days that a fictional criminal could don a mustache and wig to get away with murder. Or wipe the gun they just used to shoot someone and plant it to make it look like a suicide.
To keep their stories grounded, writers of crime fiction have to keep up with the surveillance tech of the times almost as much as an actual master criminal might. If they don’t account for the omnipresence of modern surveillance, they’ve lost their audience.
“Readers will not let you get away with it,” Samantha Downing, author of the bestselling thriller “Too Old for This,” told The Mercury News. “If you’re writing a story that has a murder mystery, you have to consider all that. I try to use it to my advantage. It would be easier if it didn’t exist.”
“When she’s going to go do something bad, she leaves her phone — she has a little note: ‘Leave phone,'” Downing told the newspaper. “Because she’s 75 and she forgets.”
In one book, he described “this tech bro killing another tech bro and framing a third party for the murder using AI to create phony footage,” he told the Mercury News. Personally, he was worried about how surveillance could be used to target protestors, imagining a potential book where a detective tries to exonerate someone framed by surveillance tech.
We’re already seeing how this new crop of AI-powered video cameras are being abused. At least 50 police officers across the US have been accused of using Flock and other license plate scanning cameras to stalk women, according to a Washington Post tally. Flock in particular has become a lightning rod for the public’s discomfort with surveillance, and despite overwhelming backlash from residents, local city leaders are resistant to dropping the tech....
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Since so many of the Flocks are being stolen it appears there will have to be cameras watching the cameras. Where does the redundance end?
Reading the Room Perfectly, Donald Trump Becomes Greatest Defender of Data Centers — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
It’s no secret that data centers have become a massive sore point for a vast swathe of the American electorate.
Poll after poll has found that the facilities are immensely unpopular, a key bipartisan issue that could prove significant during this year’s midterm elections. The situation has become so heated there have already been at least 37 arrests stemming from protests against the projects this year.
Broadly speaking, critics take issue with the sheer amount of space data centers take up, how much air and noise pollution they generate, concerns that they’re driving up electricity prices — all while barely making a difference job creation. Moratoriums on new data center projects like the New York governor Kathy Hochul imposed last month are currently a bipartisan slam dunk.
Yet in his great political wisdom, president Donald Trump is siding firmly with villains of the day.
“I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers,” he told Punchbowl News in a new interview. “I think it’s a mistake.”
Trump was likely referring to the gold rush-like scramble to construct new data centers in the Lone Star State suffering a brutal collision with reality. Last week, governor Greg Abbott announced a pause on new approvals on the projects to save Texas’ already shaky power grid from collapsing in on itself.
The president gushed over data centers being some of the “most incredible buildings I’ve ever seen” — while wind mills with far smaller footprints are “ugly losers” — and argued that they’re “tremendously important for the economics” and “income.” Trump went as far as to argue that data centers “could be bigger than oil,” raging that we “can’t let China beat us at this.”...
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The world the oligarchs envision is a dystopia of the highest order. If life exists for them, even they will have no one to talk to execpt the remainder of the boors.
Protesters Marking 10 Years After Michael Brown’s Killing Face Arrest and Prison — Truthout Stories|Jacqui Germain
“To say, why were we out there, why were we even protesting … is to gaslight an entire community,” said one supporter.
n the afternoon of July 17, 2026, the hallway of the St. Louis County Courthouse’s third floor was mostly empty. The pre-trial hearing for 30-year-old youth minister and protester Elijah Gantt had ended 30 minutes ago, where just over a dozen members of his community support team had shown up. At one of his bond reduction hearings last year, a few of them wore “FREE ELIJAH” T-shirts. The judge positively noted the community support before denying the reduction request.
Gantt’s trial was projected to last 10 days in July 2026 and supporters were signed up for court watch shifts to cover every day. At the pre-trial hearing’s close, they waved at him from across the room. At that point, the state’s case included 12 charges and a sentencing request of 66 years.
“Court is a really intense and isolating experience,” said Erin S., a member of Gantt’s support team who asked Truthout to withhold her last name. “You’re on the state’s turf. Not only do you have the judge, the prosecutor, and in this case, so many police and police-aligned interests in the room — I don’t know how I would handle that if I was alone in that situation.”...
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Just one more case of arrogant fascism in the U.S.
With Blanche Confirmed as AG, Epstein Survivors Say DOJ Continues to Fail Them — Truthout Stories|Anna Maria Barry-Jester
“We have tried countless times to engage the DOJ, and they’ve had absolutely no interest,” said one survivor.
very minute of every day, Liz Stein has to relive the worst thing that’s ever happened to her. She does it during news interviews and when meeting lawmakers on Capitol Hill to demand justice for herself and other survivors of the late disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
And she’s had to do it throughout the attorney general confirmation process for Todd Blanche, a man who rose from being President Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer to the top official overseeing the U.S. Department of Justice. Blanche has served as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 at DOJ, since March 2025. He then became acting attorney general in April after Trump fired his predecessor, Pam Bondi, and officially nominated him to oversee the department in June.
Since that time, Stein and her fellow survivors have consistently urged senators to vote against Blanche’s confirmation, arguing that he has shown no urgency or concern with expanding the Epstein investigation. Despite some initial pushback from two Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Blanche cleared that first hurdle to advance to a full Senate vote, in part by meeting with survivors — something he’d previously declined to do.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins, who is in a tough re-election race in Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska then announced that they would join Democrats in voting against Blanche, raising the tension heading into the final vote. With last-minute support from GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the Senate confirmed Blanche, 50-49, early Saturday morning....
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It's time to remove Collins. She's been feasting at the public trough far too long and is only interested in keeping it coming in.
Content of redacted Epstein email revealed — and it’s not good for Trump: Dem lawmaker — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
After spending hours at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) has revealed the contents of a heavily redacted email from the agency’s Jeffrey Epstein-related files, and claimed it exposes clear "lies" by President Donald Trump.
The email in question was sent in October 2009 by Epstein to “Gmax,” a name associated with Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. The subject line of the email reads: “Trump,” and the majority of the email’s text is hidden behind a large black box.
However, the Justice Department (DOJ) has allowed lawmakers to view unredacted files at the DOJ headquarters, and Dean, pen and paper in hand, took the agency up on the offer in an effort to view what was within the Trump-related email.
Dean shared what she had learned with journalist Tara Palmeri, telling her that the email “reveals lies of the president,” particularly regarding his oft-repeated claim to have thrown Epstein “out” of his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
“Jeffrey Epstein was never expelled from Mar-a-Lago,” Dean told Palmeri, reading from her notes she had taken while reviewing the unredacted email. “No, he was not a member. May have been a guest. He was never asked to leave. [Trump said] ‘I’ve been on a lot of planes, may have been on his plane. No young girls on plane.’”
Dean's revelation is the latest to emerge from the sprawling document dump required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed into law in November after months of resisting its release.
Trump is mentioned more than 1,000 times across the roughly 3 million pages of files made public so far, though the DOJ has maintained that some documents contain "untrue and sensationalist claims" against the president submitted to the FBI ahead of the 2020 election....
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Pedophilia is not an official action of our President. This man must be investigated. Our DOJ can't be trusted with this.
Why conservatives love pretending they’re persecuted — Daily Kos|Oliver Willis
Over the last few weeks, the right-wing media and the Republican Party have fashioned themselves as instant experts on the WNBA.
Usually, the right is dismissive of women’s sports—which it has derided for years as inferior to men’s. But the sudden attention being paid to women’s professional basketball is about what the right truly cares about: bigotry.
The right is currently over the moon over Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham, who has been an outspoken anti-transgender rights advocate. Cunningham echoed the bigotry that’s pushed every day on Fox News and at the White House.
“I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” she said.
Her open hostility toward a minority group that’s currently under attack earned her praise from the Trump administration, including press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Vice President JD Vance.
“I would tell Sophie, ‘Keep going,’” Vance told Fox News.
Of course, these are the people who think that athletes like Colin Kaepernick should simply shut up and play sports when advocating for racial equality, not hate against transgender people.
But if you think you’ve seen the Cunningham playbook before, that’s because you have.
A few years ago, Riley Gaines was a second-tier collegiate athlete who complained to right-wing media about fellow swimmer Lia Thomas, who is transgender. Gaines turned her hate into a whole career, becoming a professional right-wing pundit and activist....
All that matters to the right is feeding the grievance machine—and it’s never, ever satiated.
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As a commenter states, the Nazis do not consider a trans a person. The same goes for any faction or grouping that doesn't fit their narrow-minded views.
Approximately 0.8% to 1.1% of U.S. adults identify as transgender. Additionally, about 5% of young adults in the U.S. say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth.
The U.S. Constitution protects them too or it protects none of us.
FIFA Chief Accused Of Paying Off Employee Lover
The Telegraph reports:
UEFA is considering launching an investigation into Gianni Infantino’s conduct throughout the entirety of his 16 years at the organisation after revelations that his alleged lover was paid off. The Telegraph disclosed how a woman received a six-figure sum after an alleged relationship with Mr Infantino while he was a top official at European football’s governing body.
The newly revealed circumstances and payments have caused considerable concern at UEFA’s headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland, and there is a push among senior figures for a full investigation into Mr Infantino’s spell there.
It is understood that those at UEFA want to know exactly how the payments came about and whether the alleged relationship affected staff decisions while he was general secretary. They also want Mr Infantino’s conduct in his wider tenure to be examined. Mr Infantino joined UEFA in 2000 and spent 16 years there before leaving in 2016 to replace Sepp Blatter as head of FIFA, where he is now fighting for his future.
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With bribery lessons from Trump!
Randy Fine: “The Democrats Will Take Away Your Dog”
First, a reminder from earlier this year:
Congressman Randy Fine introduced the Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act. The bill was filed in response to comments from an advisor to Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York City, who stated that because owning a dog as a pet violates Islamic law, it should be banned.
This legislation would prohibit federal funds from being provided to any state or local government that bans dogs as pets. Islamic law cannot be forced on the United States of America. It is the right of all Americans to own a dog.
“In America, we will not allow anyone to tell us that we cannot have dogs. My bill protects Americans’ right to own a dog and would not allow federal funding to be given to any state or local government that bans them as Haram. There are 57 countries that are Sharia compliant; the United States will not be the 58th.”- Congressman Randy Fine.
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Nerdeen Kiswani is a Palestinian-American activist, whose recent remarks about ‘dogs’ sparked backlash, with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani getting caught in the crossfire. Kiswani had commented “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam. Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets. Like we've said all along, they are unclean.” She later clarified that her post was satirical...
Fine is so fucking reacionary.
Greenland Issues “Strong Warning” Over US Drilling
The Guardian reports:
An American oil company connected to Donald Trump is preparing to sink wells in remote Greenland despite not having received permission from the local authorities. As the US president renews his threats to claim the vast Arctic territory, materials to prepare for drilling were brought ashore in recent days on Greenland’s eastern coast.
That has prompted Greenland’s government to issue a “strong warning” that no approval had been granted to land the kit. “All future logistical matters must be advised and approved by the mineral resources authority – before they are carried out,” the government said in a statement.
Greenland Energy has retained Phil McGraw, better known as Dr Phil, a prominent rightwing former chatshow host who served on Trump’s religious freedom commission, to make a documentary series that will “capture the mission of these modern-day wildcatters”.
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Clearly an act of agression by Trump. This could set off another war with NATO as countries have said they will defend Greenland.
It is both arrogant and stupid because NATO has nuclear weapons and would use them on us. Who would blame them against a terrorist like Trump. They must respond by military action against this!
Iran Issues List Of Demands Before Reopening Strait
The New York Times reports:
A top Iranian national security official delivered a sweeping set of demands on Saturday that he said the United States must meet before the Strait of Hormuz can reopen to maritime traffic, throwing the fate of the critical trade waterway into question.
Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, issued a statement carried by state media laying out multiple requirements for reopening the strait. He called for the United States to lift its naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, withdraw the U.S. military from around Iran, pay war reparations and release frozen Iranian assets, as well as end attacks on Iran’s allies in the region and threats against the country.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Iran’s demands. A previous cease-fire between Iran and the United States, agreed to in June, had said that sanctions would be fully lifted only in the event of a final deal regarding Iran’s nuclear program. And U.S. officials have said in the past that Iran could access its frozen funds only if it committed to giving up its highly enriched uranium first.
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Iran dictates terms of surrender to Trump.
Everything Trump touches dies.
Medicaid Work Requirements Leave Unhoused People Out in the Cold — Truthout Stories|Katheryn Houghton
“You can’t really worry about getting paperwork done when you don’t know where you’re eating today,” said one advocate.
MISSOULA, Mont. — Tywon Pugh has seizures that make it hard to find and keep a job.
“They called me a ‘liability to the job site,’” Pugh said, recalling the words of his manager when a seizure cost him his last job at a fast-food restaurant in this western Montana city.
When the 46-year-old lost work in the past, his wife of 10 years covered their rent and he tended to their home until he found another job. But his wife died last year. Soon after, Pugh became homeless. His problem with alcohol became worse, which made managing his seizures more difficult.
“When she died, my whole base was depleted,” Pugh said.
Medicaid pays for the prescriptions that keep Pugh’s seizures at bay. The government-subsidized health coverage would also pay for an addiction treatment program that Pugh said he has tried to get into, but he was told there’s a waitlist....
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The failure of Trump's fascism to help Americans when we need it.
AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
The amount of pollution spilling out of fossil-fuel generators is astounding. In the United States, this explosion of emissions is led by states like Texas, which on a global scale is comparable only to China in terms of new infrastructure powered by dead dinosaurs.
And as more data centers crop up throughout the US, that problem — of rising emissions linked to the accelerating demand for any kind of electricity — is only going to get worse.
According to reporting by the New York Times, the US currently has at least 82 data center-linked gas generators either in development or in the proposal stage. These are massive facilities which rival public electrical generators in size and power, only they’re not managed by the government, and the power they generate isn’t meant for citizens.
Instead, these are private generators, developed by big tech companies like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta or Elon Musk’s xAI. The electricity they’ll supply is intended only for data centers, which grow ever-hungrier for power as new iterations of AI chips and energy-hungry large language models enter into production.
Assuming all 82 of those plants come online as planned, the NYT notes they could spew enough emissions in one year to rival the output of half the passenger cars in the US.
That’s an astonishing amount of pollution, made possible thanks to industry-friendly state regulators in places like Texas and Ohio, where permits for behemoth fossil fuel fired generators are approved in as little as 18 days, often without public disclosure....
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I don't want a slow death. Don't want none of them slow deaths. But we brought death on ourselves this time.
State Dept Accused Of Meddling In British Politics
The Guardian reports:
The US embassy in London is offering grants of up to half a million dollars for new “public education” programmes in what has been criticised as interference in British domestic politics. Using language that the pro-Trump Maga movement has sought to appropriate, a funding notice identifies a goal of fostering a “national conversation” about “shared civilizational values” underpinning US-UK ties. Priority will go to applicants aiming to celebrate “freedom of speech” and “limited government”.
It comes after senior Trump officials voiced sharp criticism of British authorities and repeated misinformation on a range of fronts including abortion and digital regulation, and allied with European far-right movements in attacks on hate speech and immigration policies. The grants appear to be separate from other grants of $12m which the US State Department is planning to allocate to organisations in the UK founded by the prominent Conservatives Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young.
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The dumb shit wants to start a war with England when he already has one he's lost?
Retired Judge Says Senators Will ‘Bear … Badge of Shame’ for Confirming Todd Blanche as AG — Mediaite|Kathianne Boniello
U.S. Senators who voted in the pre-dawn hours Saturday to confirm Todd Blanche as U.S. Attorney General will “bear the badge of shame for the rest of their lives,” a retired conservative judge proclaimed.
Michael Luttig took to MS NOW Saturday to deride the Senate, which voted 50-49 to confirm Blanche, whom he ripped as “the symbol of Donald Trump’s corruption.”
Luttig, 72, who retired from the bench in 2006, then made a dire prediction about what Blanche’s installation as head of the Department of Justice could mean for the November elections:
No, unfortunately, nothing will change. Todd Blanche now becomes the symbol of Donald Trump’s corruption of the rule of law in America and the actual ruin of the Department of Justice of the United States.
This is another shameful act of acquiescence, if not obeisance, by the Senate Republicans, they will bear this badge of shame the rest of their lives.
Never before in American history has an attorney general been confirmed who was as corrupt as Todd Blanche. The Department of Justice is already in shambles. And to your question, he will further ruin the Department of Justice.
Now, the irony of former Attorney General Bill Barr’s support for Todd Blanche is this.
Todd Blanche will now be Donald Trump and Mike Johnson’s point man on November 3rd, when the Republicans claim that the Democrats who were elected to the 120th Congress will not be seated because of fraud in their elections.
That’s the overarching significance today of this confirmation of this man....
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I can't believe there's a soul alive that think these bastards can ever know shame for any vile and dspicable sin they've committed.
'Remarkable': Trump DOJ slams courts with twisted take on 'Jim Crow' era law — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
President Donald Trump's Justice department keeps slapping U.S. courts with a twisted take on Jim Crow-era law they refuse to abandon, according to a new political analysis.
A 22-case losing streak hasn't stopped the Justice department from telling judges nationwide they don't understand Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, Democracy Docket reported Saturday.
The law is meant to stop states from destroying election records — which courts keep pointing out as the Justice department argues over and over again it grants them the right to grab state voter roll data.
During a hearing in the state of Washington, U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson — who has yet to rule on the case — noted the DOJ's losing streak and asked what made the case it brought to her court any different.
"By my count, this is the 20th court to address this exact issue," Evanson said. "Is there any meaningful basis on which to distinguish this case from many other district courts and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals across the country that have dismissed the government's complaints or denied their motion to compel?"
"No, your Honor," DOJ attorney Raymond Yang responded. "Relevant facts are similar to all the other cases."
Yang, however, insisted that previous judges from around the country had "misconstrued the text, context, structure, history, and original understanding of Title III."
According to elections reporter Yunior Rivas, the DOJ keeps coming back to this argument to answer for a "remarkable judicial consensus." The DOJ says the law should force states to hand over live state voter data, including driver's licenses, Social Security numbers, and full birthdates.
However, courts have rejected DOJ's argument "again and again," Rivas noted, in particular denying a DOJ argument that states have to hand over that voter data because states have "come into" possession of election records....
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The treasonous Land of the Happy Negro racism rears its ugly head!
When the Deployment Doesn’t End — The Bulwark|Mark Hertling
ACTING SECRETARY OF THE NAVY HUNG CAO traveled to San Diego to meet with families of sailors who are part of the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group. On Thursday night, he walked into a room filled with people who were angry, exhausted, frightened, and looking for answers about when their loved ones were coming home.
I know something about walking into that room.
In April 2004, the 1st Armored Division was preparing to return to Germany after a year in Iraq. Families had been counting the days; ribbons and ‘Welcome Home’ banners decorated our bases in Europe. The lucky soldiers who would be the first to leave were packing their gear and helicopters were receiving shrink-wrap. Then, by the time some of our troops had already been home a few days, came word that we would be extended in Iraq for an indeterminate number of months to counter the uprising of Muqtada al-Sadr’s militia. His group’s uprising was spreading across Baghdad and central Iraq, the security we had fought for over the last year was rapidly deteriorating, and the Pentagon believed we should stay to provide additional combat power.
Our twelve-month deployment would become fifteen months. Worse, because some units had already begun returning home, we had to recall back to Iraq roughly a third of our 20,000-person force that had already been reunited with their families in Germany.
In announcing the extension to our team, our division commander, Maj. Gen. Marty Dempsey, gathered his commanders. He told us something I have never forgotten. We could be disappointed, he said. We could even be angry. But we were leaders, and we had been given a new mission by the secretary of defense. Our responsibility was to explain that mission to our soldiers, prepare them for it, and lead them through it.
Then Marty gave me another mission that night: “We need to send a senior leader back to Germany to talk to the families. I want you to do it.” He kidded that it would likely be tougher than combat. To a degree, he was right.
Over three days, I traveled to the seven communities where our soldiers and families lived. At every stop, I walked into an auditorium filled with spouses and children who had expected their soldiers to be home within days or weeks. Instead, they had just been told that husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers would remain in combat for another few months....
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Someone knows nothing about managing our military. I wonder who it could be?
A Requiem for America’s 250th Birthday — The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good
Once upon a time, on the Fourth of July, a group of wealthy, white, aristocratic enslavers declared their independence from England’s monarchy by creating a foundational document that declared: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Two hundred and fifty years ago, this document birthed the country known as the United States of America.
Unfortunately, those “unalienable Rights” were reserved exclusively for white men, depriving women of the right to vote and eventually declaring Black people to be three-fifths of a human being. The country’s original sins of racism, misogyny, and capitalism were never truly acknowledged or uprooted. Instead, the United States sold itself and the world a romanticized and sanitized story of it being a beacon of freedom—symbolized by the Statue of Liberty holding a torch with one hand, welcoming immigrants and dreamers to her shores, while fending off homegrown rapists trying to lift her skirt and grab her private parts.
Donald Trump was the inevitable result of a country that has spent its existence profiting from slavery, economic exploitation, and a military-industrial complex fed and fattened by forever wars against brown and Black people across the world. He represented the story of America that MAGA wanted erased from history books, museums, and government websites to avoid confronting harsh truths that would inspire reconciliation and reformation.
It’s only fitting that Trump was the criminal vulgarian elected by a plurality of Americans to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday, which is more akin to a requiem for a country that chose to voluntarily kill itself....
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Death by ignorance and stupidity.
Census Proposal Would Stop Counting Undocumented Immigrants—and Ignore Race and Sexual Orientation — Wired - Technology|Vittoria Elliott
A draft rule reviewed by WIRED would prevent the census from counting undocumented immigrants. To protect against “distortions,” it would also bar questions about race and sexual orientation.
The US Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, is circulating a proposed rule that would cease the collection of demographic data on racial minorities and LGBTQ+ people and prevent undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2030 census, according to documents viewed by WIRED.
The decision could have far-reaching implications for federal funding, particularly in states where there are substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as on immigrant communities across the country.
The proposed rule, which is being circulated across government agencies for review, says the census will eliminate questions about race and sexual orientation “to protect from any distortions created from the inclusion of personal questions.” The memo also states that “illegal aliens (among others) should not be included in the apportionment count, they are not true inhabitants, members of the body politics [sic], or persons with ‘usual residence’ in the United. States.”
This would likely require the reintroduction of a census question about a respondent’s citizenship. During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Republicans attempted to add a citizenship question to the census for the first time since 1950. The effort was struck down by the Supreme Court, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Court’s then-larger liberal bloc on the grounds that the justification for adding the question was “contrived.” The decision did not, though, find that citizenship questions are inherently unconstitutional.
The Department of Commerce did not reply to requests for comment.
“This is about the Voting Rights Act,” says Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, referencing the landmark voter protection legislation that the Supreme Court dismantled earlier this year. Eliminating the collection of these data, she says, would make it difficult to make basic assessments, like whether a congressional district is predominantly made of minorities.
“If we don't know certain things, we can't challenge them politically,” says Boyd. “If we don't know that certain peoples live in a particular geography, we can't say, ‘Oh my gosh, here's some massive inequality.’”...
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As we have stated since the country elected Donald Trump a second time, we have made a huge mistake. Now we must correct it or die as a nation!
We must not bring back slavery and second-class citizens!
Blanche Suggests DOJ Could Use Victorian-Era Law to Ban Mailing Abortion Pills — Truthout Stories|Amy Goodman
Reproductive rights activists are alarmed over a pledge by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to institute nationwide abortion restrictions. Blanche, whose confirmation for attorney general is currently before the Senate, made the remarks in a private call with anti-abortion activists that was later posted online. According to the audio recording, Blanche said the Trump administration is pursuing policies “so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,” referring to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to abortion and left the matter to individual states.
Amy Littlefield, The Nation’s abortion access correspondent, says the administration is likely to focus on limiting abortion pills delivered by mail, perhaps by invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, which banned the mailing of “lewd” and “indecent” materials through the mail. Littlefield calls it a “zombie law from the Victorian era” that reflects the frustration of the anti-abortion movement’s inability to reduce abortions despite victories at the Supreme Court.
“Abortion bans do not stop abortion. What they do is they kill and harm the people who need them,” she says....
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Maybe the retarded Trump toadie could take a long walk off a short pier?
Palantir Paid No Federal Income Tax. Its Global Tax Rate Is Just 1.4 Percent. — Truthout Stories|Brett Wilkins
alantir Technologies, one of the world’s most influential — and controversial — surveillance tech companies, enjoyed an effective tax rate of just 1.4% globally last year while paying no US federal income tax despite recording substantial profits, an analysis released on Wednesday revealed.
The study, Who Pays for the Surveillance State?, was written by the Center for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) in partnership with the European Federation of Public Services Unions. The report “examines how Palantir is capturing ever-larger government contracts while paying no US federal corporate income tax and shifting much of its foreign profits back to the US, avoiding taxes in Europe.”
“In 2025 the company reported $1.657 billion in pre-tax profit, booked $22.7 million [in] corporate tax paid globally, and paid $0 in US federal income tax, resulting in an effective tax rate of just 1.4% globally,” CICTAR found.
“The report’s core claim of profit-shifting is based on the gap between revenue and profit location: 26% of Palantir’s revenue came from outside the US, but 96% of pre-tax profit was booked in the US,” the analysis states.
“The Trump administration has not only been granting record amounts in new contracts to Palantir but is running a global protection racket to help it — along with larger US tech giants — avoid paying tax both in the US and globally,” the report contends....
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Add another fraudulent con on the planet.
Wildfire Smoke Now Threatens Prenatal Health More Than Harmful Human Emissions — Truthout Stories|Liza Gross
Increasing wildfires are offsetting the gains from reducing vehicle and industry sources of air pollution.
n 1965, a presidential advisory panel issued a report warning that pervasive chemical and carbon pollution was harming environmental health and changing the climate. Five years later, President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act.
Since that 1970 law and its amendments were passed, combined emissions of a half dozen harmful air pollutants from vehicles and industrial sources have decreased by nearly 80 percent.
But mounting evidence shows that pollution from wildfire smoke is eclipsing those air-quality gains. The unchecked burning of fossil fuels is creating warmer, drier conditions that make wildfires more intense and destructive, and blanket communities in toxic smoke that is more harmful than pollution from other sources.
Now, a new study shows that smoke from wildfires is also reversing the health benefits of reducing air pollution for society’s most vulnerable population: babies in the womb.
Increasing wildfire activity is “systematically offsetting prenatal air quality gains” from reducing emissions from vehicles, refineries, factories and other human sources, researchers from the University of Maryland, College Park, report in the study, published Thursday in Frontiers in Environmental Health....
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Ignoring an inconvenient truth is kicking us in the collective ass! We were warned and ignored it like dumbasses.
Who Is the "Third Way" and Why Are They Fighting Progressives Instead of Republicans? — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
Third Way's multimillion-dollar offensive threatens Medicare for All, labor rights, climate action, and the progressive movement driving the party's energy.
Who Is the "Third Way" and Why Are They Fighting Progressives Instead of Republicans?
Third Way's multimillion-dollar offensive threatens Medicare for All, labor rights, climate action, and the progressive movement driving the party's energy...
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Oh, joy! Just as we were waking to fascism and fighting back we get some assholes who want to fuck us up with any progress we've made. Why are we such a hopeless lot?
Factionalism doesn't win battles!
MAGA Prophet: God Will Soon Kill People I Don’t Like
Peter Montgomery reports at Right Wing Watch:
“Prophet” and MAGA propagandist Kent Christmas hosted a July 26 “Revival at Ryman” at the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville with a cast of characters that included MAGA “prophet” Hank Kunneman and FlashPoint’s Gene Bailey. Christmas prophesied that God is getting ready to kill a bunch of people.
Purporting to be speaking on behalf of God, Christmas said God is going to judge and purify the church, including “every woke preacher, every seeker-friendly preacher, and every church that kicked me out and stuck the Holy Ghost in the back room, and was ashamed of speaking in tongues and praising the Lord.”
God is also apparently preparing to go after singers and authors whose creative output does not please him. What’s remarkable about Christmas claiming that God is preparing to massacre “wicked” people is just how often Christmas makes such a prophecy.
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Does he know that killing solution works both ways? We have a message for him.
WSJ Wonders About Trump’s New “Lustrous Locks”
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Over the years, Donald Trump has compared his hair to a “work of art,” describing it as “perfect” and declaring of his hairline, “when you think about it, it’s not bad.” This week, Trump’s hair has become, well, the mane event.
It started on Wednesday when Trump took the stage in Las Vegas with hair that looked different from his usual style. It appeared brighter than it had a day before and had more volume. Trump’s hairstyle prompted an avalanche of online memes. There were AI-generated images of the president taking questions near Marine One with a massive blonde bouffant.
Senior White House officials chuckled at the internet’s reaction to Trump’s hair. They said his hair looked different under the unique—and more flattering—LED lighting at the Red Rock Casino, which hosted his speech. “Lighting is everything,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
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Who is the group? "The Wayne Cochrans?"
So gay.
Mace: Every Muslim In Office Is A Threat To America
The Independent reports:
Rep Nancy Mace is drawing new criticism after she claimed on X, “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse and a threat to both national security and our republic.” She posted this a little less than two months after she finished fifth in the Republican primary race for South Carolina governor.
Mace followed it with another post warning that New York City was being “overrun” by people who, she said, wanted to “see this country burn.”
“This is an invasion. There is no other way to put it,” Mace wrote. “Every American who watched this country get attacked on its own soil and said ‘never again’ deserved better than this.” This isn’t an outlier for her, either; it fits right in with her recent political messaging.
"If someone made this exact same statement -- but replaced "Muslim" with "Jew" -- their career would not only be instantly and permanently destroyed, but their families, banks, communities and employers would be relentlessly hounded until they were denounced, disowned and banned." — Glenn Greenwald (comment from X"
(*ed. note: And why is that? We care more about the second coming of Jesus Christ proving that we base our hate on a usurped form of Judaism.)
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Spreading hate and division wherever she goes.
Judge: Trump Admin Discriminated Against The Blind
The Huffington Post reports:
A federal judge has ruled that an effort by the Trump administration to boot blind vendors from Army bases was carried out illegally. Education Secretary Linda McMahon moved late last year to waive a contracting priority for blind entrepreneurs in Army dining halls, part of a broader attack on disability rights in the workplace. She claimed with little evidence that the program “adversely affects the interests of the United States.”
The fight revolves around a 1936 law, the Randolph-Sheppard Act, that requires the government to give priority to the blind to operate snack bars, gift shops, vending machines and cafeterias on federal property. Advocates say the law has been crucial to giving blind people economic opportunities since the New Deal.
Trump’s Army Secretary, Daniel P. Driscoll, has described the Randolph-Sheppard requirement as wasteful, claiming it forces the government to overpay on contracts. “It’s been interpreted over the years to basically mean we have to prioritize blind people when we go out for our chicken contracts,” he complained on a podcast last year.
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Vicious motherfucker!
Senate Confirms Todd Blanche As AG In 50-49 Vote
The Washington Post reports:
The Senate narrowly voted to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general early Saturday morning, cementing President Donald Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer as the head of the Justice Department despite rare pushback from Republicans that had left his nomination in doubt.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) provided the crucial vote for Blanche as two other Republicans — Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — sided with Democrats against the nominee. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who has been absent from the Senate since he suffered a fall in June, missed the vote.
The 50-49 vote at 4:31 a.m. — right before the Senate left for a five-week recess — gives Blanche the imprimatur of Senate confirmation in a job he has held on an acting basis since Trump fired former attorney general Pam Bondi in April. But it hardly amounted to a full-throated endorsement. Cassidy, despite voting in Blanche’s favor, joined Murkowski and Collins in publicly raising questions about the politicization of the Justice Department under Trump.
""Cassidy said no other nominee may be able to run the department better under Trump and suggested Blanche's role as Trump's former criminal defense lawyer can make him more effective at pushing back on the president's demands.
Um. At what point in history did Blanche push back against Trump about anything that would convince Cassidy of this?" — Makoto (comments)
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And one more criminal takes power over us. America fails again.
MS Trainee Priest Gets 15 Years On Child Porn Charges
Jackson’s ABC affiliate reports:
A seminarian in Nesbit, Mississippi, has been sentenced to serve 15 years in prison after being convicted on one count of child sexual exploitation. Jonathan Tu Nguyen-Vuong has been convicted on one charge of child exploitation involving the possession, uploading and downloading of child sexual abuse material.
Nguyen-Vuong was sentenced to serve 25 years in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections with 10 years suspended. He must serve the remaining the 15 years of the sentence. When he is released, he will be subject to a 15-year post-release supervision and must register as a sex offender.
In the course of their investigation, DCSD said that deputies were able to trace the illegal activity to a device at St. Michael’s Community House in Nesbit, Mississippi. Investigators said that they discovered his computer actively uploading and downloading child sexual abuse material while the investigation was happening.
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Another one bites the dust!
Both Parties Boycott Cruz’s Hearing On Abdul El-Sayed
NOTUS reports:
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) used the authority of the United States Senate — specifically, his Judiciary subcommittee — to hold a hearing purporting to demonstrate that there has been a decades-long Muslim conspiracy, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, to undermine and control the United States. And that El-Sayed is its crowning achievement.
Cruz had his aides put up a poster showing El-Sayed alongside the Muslim Brotherhood’s emblem of crossed swords and the Quran. “FROM THE MIDDLE EAST TO THE MIDWEST,” it announced. “COMMUNIST EL-SAYED, LINKED TO THE BROTHERHOOD, WINS DEM SENATE PRIMARY IN MICHIGAN.”
Democrats on the panel, accusing Cruz of “scapegoating Muslims,” boycotted the hearing, saying they had “no intention of indulging this political creepshow.” Cruz’s fellow Republicans also skipped the hearing — though probably less because of the subject matter than because Cruz is so singularly disliked.
The result was a one-man show of religious bigotry and conspiracy theories, an awkward development that Cruz attempted to conceal. “You may notice that there are empty chairs on the Democrat side of the dais,” he said, without mentioning that the seats were equally empty on the Republican side.
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It's high time to show this moron creep his walking papers, Texas! He's the damned conspiracy he yelps about!
Fox guest: Social media post from TPUSA spokesman highlighting affordability was pushing a socialist agenda — Media Matters Staff
Fox host: “Let's be honest, the squeeze is real, prices are higher right now”
JUSTINE BROOKE MURRAY (GUEST): My wonderful intern, she got me this burrito from Taco Bell, it's under $6, and that's with tax. I know Taco Bell is a sore subject, don't worry I made her eat all the lettuce. I don't believe this burrito brawl is being held in good faith like most social media arguments. This comes with an agenda, and the agenda is honestly, in my opinion, to push socialism. There are no -- they are not trying to ameliorate the problem. You don't hear of any solutions, the problem with mass migration -- nobody wants to talk about that, nobody wants to talk about the problems that even legal immigration brought, or the fact that raising the minimum wage, the minimum wage here in D.C. is $18. That's only shifting the cost, it's not reducing the cost. The problem is the right wants to reduce unaffordability, but they can't do that by starting to sound like the socialists....
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None dare call this treason.
Fox Business celebrates July jobs report showing a loss of 23,000 jobs: “This is great news” — Media Matters Staff
The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also showed a downward revision for May and June of 103,000 jobs
BARTIROMO: All right, thank you Lauren. 23,000 jobs lost in the month of July. Louie, you wanted a weak report, you got it. Was this too weak?
LOUIS NAVELLIER (NAVALLIER AND ASSOCIATES FOUNDER): No, not at all. You know, when Palantir announced their earnings, they basically had record earnings by decreasing their sales force. So, there's this AI productivity boom underway and it's obvious what's happening. But no, this is great news, that's why the market's up, and now the Fed has an unemployment mandate, and so this is great news. And obviously, a lot of people disappeared from the work force if the unemployment rate dropped.
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None dare call this treason.
'Democracy in danger': MS NOW busts GOP senator for dark admission as he caves to Trump — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
Sen. Bill Cassidy's showy announcement that he would vote to confirm acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's nomination included a disturbing admission about President Donald Trump's administration, a political analyst said Friday.
Cassidy (R-LA) claimed he was voting for Blanche despite concerns about "apparent lawfare" and lawsuits against Trump's political enemies.
"All considered, I will vote for Mr. Blanche," he said. "I'll be criticized for this vote."
He was.
"This is a referendum on Donald Trump's second term which has unprecedented corruption," said national security reporter David Rohde during MSNBC’s postmortem analysis. "I think this vote puts our midterm elections in danger and our democracy in danger."
MS NOW business analyst Ron Insana jumped in to note another concerning takeaway from the Louisiana Republican's speech.
“If I heard Senator Cassidy correctly, he said that the president will now be in charge of the Justice department and not the other way around," said Insana. "It will not be independent.”
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As stated earlier. Cassidy is a traitor.
'Weak, cowardly, unprincipled': Bill Cassidy hit by onslaught of fury after Blanche speech — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) announced he will support Todd Blanche's nomination for U.S. attorney general — and critics immediately hammered him as a "coward."
The Louisiana Republican announced ahead of time that he would reveal his decision from the Senate floor, where he gave a speech Friday morning outlining his concerns about President Donald Trump's former criminal defense attorney serving as the nation's top law enforcement official, but ultimately Cassidy said he would cast the deciding vote to confirm.
His was the deciding vote that could have tanked Blanche's nomination.
“Mr. Blanche is not perfect, and he will tell you this,” Cassidy said.
However, he argued the choice was between Blanche and a different acting attorney general who might not run the Department of Justice as effectively.
“All considered, I will vote for Mr. Blanche,” Cassidy said. “I’ll be criticized for this vote. What’s new?”
And criticized he was.
"Coward," jeered former GOP congressman Joe Walsh.
"This is the only reason Susan Collins voted no," sighed "Friendly Atheist" blogger Hemant Mehta. "She knew her vote wouldn’t make a difference. Vote out every single Republican."
"Cassidy is a yes on the Epstein coverup," noted TV writer Erica Wernick.
"The spineless man who gave the country RFK Jr. will now give the country Todd Blanche," noted SNY's Danny Abriano.
"Just a despicable human being."
"Esteemed Senator wept tears of pure loyalty as he pledged unwavering support for the Dear Leader’s brilliant choice of AG," mocked Army veteran Bruce Crossing.
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As stated earlier. Cassidy is a traitor that backs criminals in our wheelhouse!.
'Decade' of Trump attacks recoil on Todd Blanche as Don Lemon case faces dismissal — Raw Story|David Edwards
Nearly a decade of President Donald Trump's attacks on journalist Don Lemon have recoiled on Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, as Lemon's lawyers moved to throw out his criminal case.
Lemon was charged in January with two felony civil rights counts after he livestreamed an anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest inside a St. Paul, Minnesota church. He has pleaded not guilty, according to CNN.
The motion, filed Friday in federal court in Minnesota, argues the prosecution was retaliation for journalism — not a legitimate law enforcement action. The case was personally managed by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi before Trump fired her in April. It now belongs to Blanche.
"The record could not be more clear that Mr. Lemon has been a persistent target of President Trump's ire before the events in Minnesota," Lemon's lawyers wrote in the motion, "and that the Justice Department acted on the President's animus by filing unprecedented charges against a journalist for doing his job."
Trump's attacks on Lemon in the filing span nine years. He first called Lemon "the dumbest man on television" in a 2017 post.
"WHAT TOOK THEM SO LONG?" Trump asked on Truth Social after CNN fired Lemon in 2023.
When Lemon flew to Minneapolis in January 2026 to cover Operation Metro Surge — the Trump administration's ICE crackdown that deployed more than 3,000 federal agents and left two people dead — the attacks took on new significance, the filing said.
The same day the government sought Lemon's arrest warrant, Trump singled him out at a White House press conference, the filing said....
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What does it take for America to see we are being run roughshod by a criminal mob? How many of us must die before we can see it. What the fuck has happend to our cognitive ability?
Kick the Trump Crime Syndicate out of DC and arrest everyone of the crooks!
Who's the World's Worst Billionaire? — Robert Reich
This week's video
Friends,
Who’s the world’s worst billionaire? Is it Elon Musk — for buying an election, dismantling the government with DOGE, and spreading anti-immigrant racism around the globe?
No. He’s disqualified, because — at least in recent weeks, he’s been a trillionaire.
What about Mark Zuckerberg, for sowing division with his Meta platforms? Almost, but there’s an even worse billionaire.
Or perhaps Larry Ellison and his son, David, for turning the great CBS News into a Trump propaganda machine? They’re bad, but not as bad as the worst.
Or maybe Peter Thiel, for hating democracy? You’re getting closer. But no.
The winner is …...
"Soooo, Thiel is on the lookout for the Antichrist, who will be evil given their interference with his ability to do whatever he wants for profits...Musk is a consistently hypocritical and endlessly procreating nutjob who takes those children still willing to speak to him and holds them on camera as political props when he's not busy "accidentally" displaying perfectly executed Sieg Heil salutes...and Bezos has yachts for his yachts while making employees so afraid of breaks they don't go to the bathroom. Oh, and all of them regularly take billions of dollars from the government while lobbying to ensure the government doesn't spend on wasteful things like hungry kids, school funding, and healthcare.
What a contest!
I gotta say man, I feel like maybe America's greatest contribution to the world will be demonstrating that letting the wealthiest and creepiest people alive control everything can take down even the mightiest superpower." — Ian (comments)
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See the video on Bob's site.
The Equity Docket: ‘Colorblindness’ on the Court — The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good|Wali Khan
The Supreme Court’s logic of colorblindness leaves Black and brown people behind.
It’s said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But what happens if one of those boats is left riddled with holes, while another is patched and repainted? The tide may lift them both—but one will rise as a result, and the other will sink.
This is the inevitable outcome of the current U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to interpreting the Constitution in what is considered a colorblind manner. Under the Court’s colorblind jurisprudence, the government should apply laws equally to all individuals without considering or making distinctions based on race or the history of racism in this country.
Unfortunately, centuries of racist policymaking have resulted in the need for direct intervention. Some laws must inherently be focused on race to address harms of the past. While a truly equitable approach would allow for laws that explicitly confront past harms based on race, the Court’s colorblindness all but ensures that those descended from formerly enslaved and disenfranchised people are at risk of being continually left behind, left to sink in the metaphorical leaky boat.
While a neutral approach can sound fair, it oftentimes is anything but. Historically, many Constitutional decisions were attributed to originalism, a method of interpretation that supposedly honors the original intention of the drafters of the Constitution and the original meaning of the document. Debates over jurisprudence grew during the 1980s, led by former Justice Antonin Scalia. The most common debates within the Court were between justices with an originalist approach and justices who subscribed to a textualism approach, focusing their interpretations on the plain, literal meaning of the words on the page. While the originalists looked to history, requiring that laws be interpreted based on what they would have meant to the public at the time they were adopted, the textualists want to ensure their decisions are viewed as true to the literal letter of the law.
Current Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett actively make clear their disdain for the inclusion of historical context or intent. These justices often point out how while they may agree with an opinion of the Court on an issue, it had nothing to do with any outside historical context. An example of this is in Biden v. Nebraska in which Barrett agreed with the decision to not allow then President Joe Biden to cancel student debt, but she wrote in her concurring opinion that it was purely based on the text itself, and not any outside circumstances. She explained her view of plain text reasoning using the analogy of a parent leaving a credit card for a babysitter and saying to make sure the kids have fun. Her argument was that the parent’s statement most likely means ice cream and a movie, not permission to take a two-day road trip to an amusement park with that credit card. In general, and in her concurrence, she points out the only time context is helpful is to get to the most plausible plain text reading. So it may be acceptable to think about who wrote something, but not outside factors such as Congressional speeches or political pressure when deciding the meaning of text....
Until we build the collective political will to repair the structural design of the court, the tide will continue to rise while our boats are left to sink.
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When oligarch racist supporters control our SCOTUS we all suffer!
Andy Ogles Lost His Primary In Tennessee. Mashallah, Motherf*cker! — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
The Tennessee primaries were last night, and there was good news, there was funny news, and there was Tennessee news. In Tennessee news, Marsha Blackburn won her primary to be the governor, and we are sorry for Tennessee’s loss there, because she will likely win the general. Tennessee gonna Tennessee.
In wonderful news, Justin Pearson, the member of the Tennessee Three from Memphis who has lately been crusading against Elon Musk’s foul data centers in the Memphis area, won his primary in the new version of the Ninth Congressional District, which was drawn earlier this year in a Republican effort to ban Black/Democratic voting representation in the state, after the white supremacist partisan hack Supreme Court ruled that doing that was just fine with them.
National Democrats think TN-09 is winnable. As it is the district we personally vote in, we agree. Especially since Pearson will be running against an incredible buffoon named Brent Taylor, a true walking “Kick me” sign of a man. But more on him some other day.
Hands down the funniest thing that happened last night happened in the primary for another one of those districts that now spans from Memphis to the Nashville suburbs. Tennessee’s Fifth District — truly a masterpiece of clownass racist gerrymandering — is currently represented in Congress by one of the stupidest, most bigoted, most inbred-looking buffoons on the planet, a man named Andy Ogles.
He is the man who recently tweeted that “homosexuality has no place in America.”
Who tweeted in March that “Muslims don’t belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie.”
And last night, voters decided to deport Andy Ogles’s bitch ass out of Congress.
Allahu akbar, asshole!
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Think of it! Always!
They're Not Voting for Karl Marx, They're Voting for a Damn Raise. — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
Americans aren't embracing socialism—they're rejecting 45 years of Reaganomics, billionaire rule, and an economy rigged against the middle class
Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan, declared yesterday morning, seems to have broken the brains of Republicans and the chattering class.
Donald Trump’s pathetic bleats notwithstanding, people voting for progressive Democrats and “democratic socialists” aren’t voting for communism or even socialism; they’re trying to get America to the same sort of economy and form of government that works for everybody — a system somewhat like the one a majority of us had before Reaganism —that most other developed countries enjoy right now. That includes:
— A healthcare system that covers every American as a right of citizenship, where injury or illness won’t break a family. A half-million of our families lost everything to bankruptcy last year just because somebody got sick; that literally does not happen in any other developed country on Earth, just America. And wanting to free us all of that fear isn’t “communism.”
— An education system that really works for young people, instead of barely maintaining 70-year-old schoolhouses and slapping the Ten Commandments on the wall as if “Thou shalt have no other gods before me … for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” is going to incentivize students (it won’t).
— A college system like in every other developed democracy in the world where everybody, if they’re capable of handling the work, can get an education and graduate into the working world without debt. And an end to the existing ~$2 trillion in student debt, a crime visited on the generations coming up today by a handful of rich bankers and their Republican buddies.
— A political system where a foreign government, massive corporation, or a greedy billionaire can’t simply buy elections, legislators, and judges. Where citizens can easily vote without having to jump through a million hoops designed to drive down the participation of low-income people and women. Where people can trust that the government and its spokespeople are telling the truth under all circumstances.
— An environment where we can breathe the air and drink the water, the food is safe, and our collective actions have reduced the methane and CO2 that are driving climate change.
— An immigration system that reflects America’s embrace of diversity as “the great melting pot,” a phrase that was popular in the mid-20th century and is now derisively called “DEI.” No more masked secret police, no more concentration camps that lock up children and brutalize people who’ve never committed a crime (immigration violations are civil, not criminal). No more violations of the 4th and 5th Amendments, no more killing Americans for protesting, and no more arrests based on the color of a person’s skin.
— A tax system where the morbidly rich pay their fair share, instead of throwing that burden on working class people and the upper middle class — who often are now seeing their combined federal, state, and local tax rates run over 50% — while billionaires pay a fraction of 4% and absolutely nothing on literally trillions in unrealized wealth gains.
— Respect for international law, particularly the laws against violently attacking countries like Iran, Venezuela, or individuals in boats in the Caribbean who haven’t attacked us first. Defense of those countries who are under attack by Trump’s owner, Vladimir Putin, and his buddy President Xi. And respect for the human rights of Palestinians and acknowledgement of the criminal, genocidal slaughter they’ve faced under international war criminal Netanyahu.
— An economy where at least two-thirds of all American families can have what they had in 1981: the ability to buy a home, a car, take an annual vacation, put their kids through school, and have enough for a comfortable retirement. Instead, as Robert Reich points out:
“Household electricity costs are up 18%, ground beef prices are up 22%, gas prices are up 40%, ACA out-of-pocket premiums are up 58%, [and] inflation is at a three-year high.”...
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Please consider what fascism has brought upon us. Shitcan it, by any means possible. It's time our country recognized oligarchy does not work!
Fast fashion is terrible for the planet. Can wardrobe cataloging apps help? — Vox|Constance Grady
The influencers have started to promise me that they know how to get me to stop shopping: I just have to enter every garment of clothing I own into an app, one by one. “I digitally cataloged my ENTIRE wardrobe,” they swear on videos, routinely pulling in hundreds of thousands of views.
The selling point of these apps (Indyx, Whering, ACloset, OpenWardrobe, and many more) is seductive; they promise to help users understand exactly what they already own so that they shop less. In theory, that means saving money — and slowing the steady damage the fashion industry is wrecking on our planet.
That idea appealed to me. I am not a fashionista, but I enjoy clothes enough to buy more than I really need, despite what I know about fashion’s impact on the planet. My intellectual understanding of climate change can’t always stop me from clicking “add to cart” when I see a dashing pair of wide-legged trousers, even though there’s a hard limit on the number of times a person can wear wide-legged trousers in one week.
Still, to make these apps work, you have to individually enter photos of everything you own now and everything you buy in the future, which sounds like a tedious, laborious process. (You can take the photos yourself or hunt down product pictures from the brand.) And because so many influencers are pushing this, it’s hard to tell how life-changing it really is and how much is just marketing speak and hype. So, I decided to test one of these apps — Indyx — for you. I also talked to wardrobe cataloging enthusiasts and experts on sustainable consumption to see what I could learn from them. I wanted to know: Could cataloging our wardrobes actually make us shop less? And, if it can, would it be worth the effort?
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Always amazed when I see that people really do things like this. Turning their lives over to an app.
We Are Risking Developing AI Beyond Human Supervision, Expert Warns - Truthout Stories|Amy Goodman
David Krueger says AI’s integration into warfare makes international agreements halting development ever more urgent.
Is AI superintelligence inevitable? AI safety researcher David Krueger says it doesn’t have to be. Krueger, an assistant professor at the University of Montreal and founder of the nonprofit Evitable, warns that “we need to mitigate the risk of extinction” with regulation and moratoriums to halt the development of AI’s computational power and complexity, which he says is progressing at a rate much faster than current levels of human supervision can manage. Public statements from AI companies that their models have circumvented test constraints and broken into other systems are “what we should expect to happen with the way that we’re building AI, with how little we understand it and how primitive our techniques are for controlling it,” Krueger says. “We just don’t know how to build it safely. End of story.”
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Facebook and Instagram owner Meta admitted Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked another company during security testing after it was accidentally allowed access to the internet by independent testing company Irregular. This comes on the heels of similar admissions by rival companies OpenAI and Anthropic.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the “godfather of AI,” warned Wednesday at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas, quote, “I don’t believe we’re going to be able to keep control of them in the simple way of just outthinking them so they can’t escape,” he said, and said he is “very worried” we could lose control....
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We should be in control. But are we? We should remain skeptics
Appeals Court Orders Halt To Ballroom Construction
Reuters reports:
A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to stop construction on a $400 million ballroom on the site of the White House’s demolished East Wing, dealing the Republican leader a major setback in a case testing his presidential authority.
The Washington-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a divided 2-1 order upheld a preliminary injunction won by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sued last year after the administration tore down the East Wing and began building a 90,000-square-foot (8,360-square-meter) ballroom without seeking authorization from Congress.
The appeals court placed its ruling on hold for 14 days to allow the Trump administration to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court..
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Shut the eyesore down and rebuild our White House, you traitor1
Trump: “Voters Are Angry At Republicans, Not Me”
Politico reports:
President Donald Trump said voters may seek to punish Republicans — but not him — in the November midterm elections, as GOP lawmakers sweat that affordability concerns and the war in Iran could mean Democrats flip the House and perhaps even the Senate.
“They’re angry at Republicans,” Trump said in an interview with Punchbowl News that aired Friday. “But they’re not angry at me. They’re not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.”
Trump has a massive war chest at his disposal. His MAGA Inc. super PAC reached $400 million in June. The president told Punchbowl he plans to use it to “help Republicans,” but he stressed that he faces no pressure in this campaign cycle. “I said to somebody, ‘Wait a minute, you don’t understand, I won,’” Trump said, referencing his 2024 presidential election victory. “I’m not campaigning.”
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So he thinks. He's a few cards short of a full deck.
'Grim' New jobs report a 'kick in the guts': economics expert — Alternet.org|Sarah K. Burris
Economics and public policy professor Justin Wolfers called the Friday jobs report a big disappointment.
Writing on social media, Wolfers, who teaches at the University of Michigan, explained, "That's a big kick in the guts. Payroll is much weaker, and the U.S. lost 23,000 jobs in March, well below expectations of plus-80,000. Huge downward revisions, too: May now plus-63,000 (instead of plus-129,000), June now plus-20,000 (down from plus-53,000). Very bad news. Revise down your views substantially."
"Here's why this is so grim," he continued. "Folks expected jobs growth to slow to plus-80,000, but we got minus-23,000. Also downward revisions to the last two months subtracted a total of -103k. So over the past three months, the US economy created about 200,000 fewer jobs than we had thought."
CNBC called those numbers the "second worst number of the year."...
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Trump will say this is best ever!
Sen. McCormick's Denial Is Insane: We 'Delivered For Working Families' — Crooks and Liars|John Amato
The country is suffering; polls show it, but Republicans believe they delivered the goods.
Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick erroneously claimed Americans are better off with Trump than Biden's economy, and then listed the problems Trump has caused that are fueling people's anger at his policies, which is reflected in all the major polls.
Are you with me?
Sen. McCormick's explanations to Fox Business host Stuart Varney sound like the denial an alcoholic uses during an intervention so they can continue drinking and destroying their lives....
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Do any of these nitwits live on the same planet as the rest of us?
Ag Sec Rollins Repeats ‘Luxury Cars’ Whopper To Justify Starving The Poor — Crooks and Liars|NewsHound Ellen
Just like the Trump administration lies about our elections in order to justify stealing them, they are lying about SNAP recipients in order to justify starving them.
On Thursday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins pulled out the old “welfare queen” trope about struggling Americans receiving benefits. For extra MAGA points, she suggested fraud is worse in blue states.
“What we have found in those states that have more guardrails than Minnesota or New York or California – a couple hundred thousand dead people, half a million people getting more than one benefit – I mean, people driving luxury cars,” she told Fox Business viewers.
I noticed she did not use the word “fraud,” although Fox producers did that for her in a full-screen graphic. The truth is, as Civil Eats explains in great detail, the amount of household-related SNAP fraud is minuscule. The system “already has extensive fraud prevention and quality control in place,” it reported. Not only that, the site points out there is a difference between payment errors, which are usually unintentional mistakes, and fraud....
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Apparently, liars are now 5-cents a baker's dozen. The one thing Trump has lowered the price on.
Free-Speech Advocates Mark Out Brendan Carr's Trail of Corruption — Freepress|Timothy Karr
The history of Donald Trump’s campaign of media censorship begins at the doorstep of the Federal Communications Commission.
On Aug. 6, activists and advocates marked out this history with “Brendan Carr’s Corruption Walk,” an informational trail connecting a nearby subway stop to the FCC’s Washington headquarters.
The Corruption Walk exposes the FCC chairman’s role as President Donald Trump’s censorship czar, detailing Carr’s many transgressions against First Amendment freedoms enjoyed by the press, advocates and everyone in the United States.
This shameful history, recounted on a series of 11 signs, details the chairman’s corrupt attempts to silence and bully any media that refuse to bow to Trump’s anti-democratic White House agenda. The signs were displayed as the FCC convened its monthly open meeting, allowing attendees en route to read about the ways in which Carr has violated his oath of office....
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It will serve him right to get popped!
Better Hope You Don’t Need an Ambulance in New Orleans, Because the City’s 911 Operators Are Now AI — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
If you thought AI customer service bots were bad, just wait until you need to convince a large language model that yes, you have been involved in a car accident, actually.
According to new reporting by the Shreveport Times, officials at the Orleans Parish Communication District — the emergency dispatch agency for the city of New Orleans — are now integrating AI answering agents into its workflow.
The new tool is called AI Emergency Call Triage, offered by a company called Carbyne. Its function is essentially to triage incoming calls to dispatchers, bumping high-priority emergency calls to humans, and automatically handling repeat calls related to ongoing incidents, the Times explains.
Starting in April, New Orleans experimented with implementing the AI for 311 calls, a phone line meant to connect callers to local government information and non-emergency services.
That the AI will now be sorting incoming emergency calls is a significant escalation for the city’s dispatch agency. New Orleans will now join other major cities including Seattle and Atlanta, which have also implemented AI into their emergency dispatch services in recent weeks.
Though officials claim the new tech will help cut through the hundreds of calls inundating human dispatchers, it nonetheless represents an added layer of friction between callers in distress and trained dispatchers who can connect them with help....
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Just think what it will be like when get an AI President!
Sen. Bill Cassidy Says He’ll Vote To Confirm Blanche
The Hill reports:
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) will give remarks from the Senate floor on Friday morning announcing his stance on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination to lead the Justice Department.
GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) have already indicated they will vote against confirming Blanche to succeed former Attorney General Pam Bondi. With the absence of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), it will take only one more “no” vote to block the confirmation.
Cassidy, who has at times been at odds with President Trump, has thus far been mum on which way he leans.
Read the full article.
Cassidy just concluded his speech. He caved.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., says he will vote YES to confirm Todd Blanche for Attorney General.
Huge decision here. He might be the deciding vote.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) August 7, 2026 at 10:51 AM
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A traitor in the end. Like Blanche and the rest of the mob. What a pitiful scumbag.
'MAGA paradox' unravels as White House leaks expose Trump’s weakness — Alternet|Sarah K. Burris
...Sargent said that because Trump truly believes because the United States has "limitless strength" and "unlimited power," he also believes he has those powers "because he couldn't possibly be weak in any way."
"So, you can really see how he goes from there to not really paying close attention to little details, like what the war that he started is doing to our weapons stockpile," Sargent added.
The Washington Post on Thursday reported that Trump got into a heated exchange last week with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, saying he thought the depleted stockpile problem was fixed.
"He has a very childish vision of what American military might is," said Marcotte. "We definitely have a large military — one of the most expensive in the world. But it's not limitless."...
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Low IQ?
Kudlow Yells At Tuberville: Why Don't People Know 'There's An Economic Boom?' — Crooks & Liars|John Amato
Wrong way Kudlow actually dissed Trump's tariffs.
Larry Kudlow, Trump's former head of his National Economic Council in his first term, blasted Sen.Tommy Tuberville over the terrible economic polling numbers while exclaiming the GOP is doing nothing. His beef? There is an economic boom going on and nobody knows about it.
Kudlow was one of Trump's minions that claimed the COVID pandemic was mostly contained in early 2020 -- a vicious lie.
Kudlow introduced Tommy, then scolded the Senator over the many shortcomings of the GOP. Tuberville agreed.
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It's an economic boom for the oligarch class only, stupid.
Florida Men Fight With Machetes In Publix Parking Lot
Sarasota’s ABC affiliate reports:
Two men were taken to the hospital and later arrested after getting into a machete fight in a Publix parking lot. The Washington Sheriff’s Office said Everette Krichbabum and James Tristian Gay were arrested after the fight on Tuesday. Investigators said Gay, 35, was the primary aggressor.
The arrest affidavit said witnesses claimed Krichbabum was in his car when Gay drove up and stopped near him. Gay admitted he intentionally stopped his car to confront Krichbabum regarding alleged prior harassment, according to the affidavit. Both men received injuries to their hands.
Krichbabum said Gay hit him in the head, leaving him unconscious. Gay admitted to stomping Krichbabum while he was on the ground, according to the affidavit. Both men were taken to the hospital. The men were charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon.
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Devo rears its face again.
And you think the use of the word "retarded" doesn't fit?
Trump Claims Birth Tourist “Had 98 Children” [VIDEO]
The New York Times reports:
When a reporter noted that the president’s own solicitor general had been unable to tell the Supreme Court precisely how many people were benefiting from birthright citizenship, Mr. Trump replied, “I’ll tell you right now, hundreds of thousands, OK? Hundreds of thousands.” (Pennsylvania State University scholars released a study about the time of the Supreme Court ruling that found that fewer than 0.3 percent of all births in the United States were to tourists, in any year.)
But Mr. Trump pressed on, “You have one man came in with a family head said he had 56 children. Another one came in. They said they had 98 children. This was not what it was for. This was meant for the babies of slaves. It was, it was right after one week or two weeks after the Civil War ended.” In fact, birthright citizenship was ratified as part of the 14th Amendment more than three years after the war ended.
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Because it's never enought to say "10."
Trump: If El-Sayed Wins, I’ll Be “Last GOP President”
“For our Great Republican Senators, friends of mine ‘all,’ please be advised that the Communist Dumocrat Senate Candidate from Michigan, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, is touting, as perhaps his single most important point, the Termination of the Filibuster. I watched yesterday, and he’s gone Termination CRAZY. If he succeeds, the Dumocrats will gain 4 Senators, 8 Congressmen, many Electoral and Popular Votes, a stacked Supreme Court with 23 Justices, and I will be, sadly, despite the great job we are doing, the last Republican President!” – Trump, on Truth Social.
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No. We only hope you will become the last evil, punitive, dumb shit President.
Republican Georgia Mayors Endorse Sen. Jon Ossoff
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:
Two Republican mayors from the reddest parts of Georgia are breaking ranks to back Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff’s reelection bid, telling The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Democrat’s work for their communities outweighs partisan differences.
Valdosta Mayor Scott James Matheson and Tifton Mayor Julie Smith aren’t household names. But their willingness to cross party lines signals a weakness for Republican U.S. Senate nominee Mike Collins, who has struggled to unite his party and broaden his appeal following a bruising primary fight.
Matheson and Smith praised Ossoff’s approach to constituent service and his efforts to steer federal resources to South Georgia.
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Ossoff for President 2028.
Meta Ordered To Pay $942M In New Mexico Lawsuit
The Wall Street Journal reports:
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay more than $900 million and limit the time young people in the state can spend on its apps, significantly increasing the cost of the landmark child safety verdict against the Facebook and Instagram parent.
The judge said Thursday that Meta must create a new $567 million abatement fund in addition to paying $375 million in civil penalties that a jury previously ordered.
The company must also enact certain safety features such as limiting the amount of time underage users in the state spend on Facebook and Instagram, hiding by default the number of “likes” on photos for such people and disclosing to users there the risks of its platforms.
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Not much for a gazillonaire asshole. And like Trump, he'll probably never fork it over. Deadbeat!
Scientists Use AI To Create “New Kinds Of Viruses”
The New York Times reports:
For the first time, scientists have used artificial intelligence to create new kinds of viruses, raising hopes for medical advances while also raising the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens.
Synthesizing viruses from scratch is hardly new. Researchers long ago learned how to manufacture viral genomes; they are used to investigate antiviral drugs and vaccines, as well as to learn how viruses work.
But the new study, published Thursday in the journal Science, goes well beyond duplicating viral genes. Scientists at Stanford University and the Arc Institute, a research organization in Palo Alto, Calif., taught A.I. to recognize patterns of DNA structure in nature, and then to use that data to write recipes for entirely new viruses.
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What could possibly be wrong with this?
Max Miller tests GOP tolerance of terrible men — Salon|Amanda Marcotte
A wave of abuse scandals in Congress have started to worry even Republicans
...But Miller is also confronting a party that seems increasingly weary of dealing with the alleged sex pests and predators that have flooded the Republican ranks, welcomed by a president with boundless sympathy for men who, like himself, face credible accusations of violence against women.
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They are nowhere near their limits with their scumbaggery!
Trump's new 'hamster' hair secret revealed by biographer — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
President Donald Trump has been sporting what appears to be more hair in a slightly different color, and one of his former biographers has a good idea why.
In an interview with the Daily Beast's Joanna Coles, author Michael Wolff reminded his host that the president is, for all intents and purposes, bald on top and that his new look is a new attempt to keep that a secret as what he has left thins even more.
Wolff revealed the reality beneath Trump's carefully maintained appearance.
"Well, I can tell you what's... under Donald Trump's hair," Wolff said. "Nothing. That's actually what the top of Donald Trump's head is like."
Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter, reportedly mocked her father's elaborate hair maintenance process to friends, previously, he noted.
According to Wolff's account, Ivanka described the follicle mechanics covering "an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray."
Wolff characterized the new comb-over as "a very central component' to Trump's identity and career.
"He's a performer. Fourteen years as the star of a top-rated reality television show," Wolff said. "It is about people looking at you. He understands that, as so many politicians, by the way, do not."...
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Is that so? He thinks looking at wearing a gold bowl crown that doesn't match the colored sides is cool! Alright then, wise guy. The laugh's on you too. Most of us in show biz think it's the look of buffoonery!
Is Todd Blanche Going to Drop the Cold, Dead Hand of Anthony Comstock on America’s Women if He's Confirmed? — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
So, what the heck is the Comstock Act and why is Todd Blanche so enthusiastic about it?
Todd Blanche is campaigning to become our real, confirmed Attorney General, presumably so he can better help Donald Trump, his corrupt family, and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make off with as much of our money as they can.
Most recently, his campaign took him to the rightwing “religious” group Intercessors for America. When he was asked about progress in totally ending legal abortion in America, or at least Red State America, he told them:
“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and and it will be permanent.”
He added, later in the call:
“If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that. They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs.”
So, how’s he going to pull this off? His sworn testimony before Congress may offer us a glimpse into the plan.
Ted Cruz asked him:
“18 USC 24 Section 1461, the Comstock Act, provides that every article or thing designed or adapted or intended for producing abortion is declared to be non-mailable. I have to admit that statutory text to me looks quite straightforward. It is not subtle. It is not difficult. It is straightforward. …
“[W]ill you commit that the Department will carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act and other Federal pro-life acts?”
Blanche answered: “Yes.”
How does he plan to “protect every life from the moment of conception”? Apparently, with the Comstock Act. And he may well have the backing of the six Republicans on the Supreme Court as their next step after their Dobbs decision.
Back during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in March of 2024, the Comstock Act was invoked repeatedly by Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Erin Hawley, the wife of Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who was the lawyer arguing before the Court that the abortion drug, Mifepristone, should be banned nationwide....
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Nazis at work. As usual. Stop them forever!
Regretful MAGA voters: Trump 'destroying jobs' and looking 'out for himself' — Alternet.org|Sarah K. Burris
Voters who elected President Donald Trump are not happy.
John Gannon, a lifelong Republican and Texas businessman, who voted for Trump, told CBS News the president's administration is "destroying families, jobs." His fiancée was detained by ICE. "They are picking up law-abiding citizens," he told the report.
The couple was headed to Las Vegas for a convention when Gannon's fiancée was nabbed by plainclothes federal agents.
"After leaving the United room, eight officers, ICE agents, swarmed Yasmin and detained her. (They) didn't tell us why and wrestled her off into a car," he recalled of fiancée Yasmin Suarez Reyes.
Trump said throughout the 2024 campaign that he was only going to deport the "worst of the worst" and "criminals." The reality has been something different. Top Trump advisor Stephen Miller, at one point, put a quota on ICE to arrest at least 3,000 people daily. Politico reported that the White House then began to backtrack on the demand.
"Go after the criminals. We're all for that. But leave the mom and pops and the kids alone. Man, he's destroying families," Gannon added.
Suarez Reyes entered the U.S. legally; she has a pending immigration case and does not have a criminal record, the couple's attorney told CBS.
ICE told the couple her permission to be in the U.S. expired, and she'll be deported. She would have been eligible for a Green Card if she married Gannon.
But Gannon isn't the only one upset with Trump, according to a report from MS Now One voter in Los Angeles on Tuesday complained, "It seems like everything's going up. You know, and I voted for him, so..."
A woman in Pittman, Ohio told MS NOW the president should "start thinking of the little people instead of the rich people."
But another Ohio Trump voter went further, telling the reporter that he's being left behind amid the blatant corruption.
"He's looking out for himself. He's putting money in his pocket, building his wealth up, making sure he can take care of what he needs to. And then it doesn't matter what happens because he's — he's set. He don't have to worry about it," the man said.
When asked whether he regrets his vote in 2024, he confessed he did.
"I have the past two years. Yeah, I have," he said.
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Trump's game clock is running out.
Liabilities exposed as allies flee 'declining and fickle USA': war historian — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
As President Donald Trump’s war with Iran creeps into its sixth month, it’s become clear not only that the United States has lost and Iran has been empowered, but that “the American Age in the Persian Gulf is over.”
This is according to distinguished war historian and security scholar Phillips P. O’Brien, who wrote on Thursday how since the end of World War II, "the USA has become the dominant outside security player in the region. It overthrew governments, it made massive military sales … it established military bases and it also fought shorter wars (First Gulf War) and decades-long wars (War on Terror/Afghanistan) to impose its influence. The USA even had one of its most important, if less well-known, foreign policy doctrines aimed precisely at the region: the Carter Doctrine. Announced in the State of the Union address in 1980, the Carter Doctrine made it American policy to resist any other power interfering with trade into and out of the Persian Gulf and stated that the USA would use military force to keep the Gulf open.”
With all this in mind, writes O’Brien, “It is ironic, then, that the USA, in using military force, caused another power to close the Gulf and led to the demise of its own doctrine. For the states of the region, this is also a transformational development that will (or at least should) lead to massive changes in their security architecture. For many decades … they based their security on making vast and expensive purchases of military equipment from the USA, housing US military forces, and acting as US allies. That entire paradigm is gone.”...
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It appears we are losing allies as fast as we have lost our missles. Failure by a failure.
Newsmax's Racist Attack Only Focuses On El-Sayed's Name — Crooks and Liars|John Amato
Newmax host Rob Finnerty attacked Abdul El Sayed for winning the Democratic nomination for US Senator in Michigan. His attack was not over his policies or beliefs, but on his Muslim name.
It's amazing how quickly Finnerty turned into KKK Grand Master without a hint of self-awareness.
FINNERTY: And then you see this, what's happening tonight, right now.
A man named Abdul El Sayed is about to become the first Muslim socialist (he's a Democrat - Ed.) ever nominated for the United States Senate in Michigan.
And does he kinda look like somebody you might be familiar with?
Maybe that other socialist Muslim who's always smiling, the one in New York City.
But that's not Zoran Mandami, this is Abdul El Sayed, which isn't even his full name.
El Sayed: My whole name is Abdul Rahman Muhammad El Sayed.
That's my whole name.
FINNERTY: Yep, that's terrific.
Senator, that, what he just said from the state of Michigan in November, maybe.
This is happening in Michigan, by the way. Think about that, Michigan. You ever look around and ask yourself, what is happening in this country? Abdul El Sayed is not a symbol of progress, he is a symbol of what the left has done to this country.
An immigrant from another Muslim country who could become a senator.
Abdul El Sayed is not an immigrant, asshole.
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He is not a symbol of what the left has done to this country as only Nazis like this asshole have been running it all for the past two years, you lamebrain!
The retards haven't a clue! If your name isn't "Joe Smith" you are a foreign enemy.
The reckoning coming for Trump's secret enablers — Alternet|Robert Reich
The New York Times says the “Justice Department struggles” with Trump’s demands that it prosecute his enemies.
But who exactly is struggling? Career lawyers whose professional ethics are being compromised? Trump-loyalist appointees who presumably knew what they were getting into before they joined the regime? Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who desperately wants to be the real thing?
The same ambiguity crops up when the media reports that the “White House” wants this or that, that the “Department of Homeland Security” is taking some action, that the “Department of the Interior” is undertaking or undoing something, and so on through the squalid chaos atop this regime.
These are buildings and departments, not people. We need to know who.
In normal times, the White House and federal departments are also institutions containing professionals with expertise hewed over decades of experience, guided by institutional norms for making decisions and the insights and perspectives that come with their unique roles in the federal government. (I should know. I headed one.)
But we’re no longer in normal times. Trump and his sycophants are actively destroying the professional integrity, expertise, norms, and unique insights and perspectives of all these institutions....
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It as if we put Vladmir Putin in charge of our government.
How racist are GOP voters? This Michigan primary result says it all. — Daily Kos|Emily Singer
If you want to understand just how racist Republican voters are, look no further than Tuesday night’s result in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District primary.
Both President Donald Trump and the National Republican Congressional Committee had endorsed veteran Amir Hassan to face off against Democratic Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet in this seat that Trump carried by 2 points in 2024.
“Amir Hassan is a Flint native, Navy veteran, and former federal law enforcement officer who fought for nation and will fight for Michigan in Congress. Hassan is set to secure victory in November and deliver real representation for hardworking Michiganders,” NRCC spokesman Zach Bannon wrote in a July 15 post that added Hassan to the committee’s “MAGA Majority” program for candidates national Republicans deem as top-tier recruits.
And Trump posted a lengthy endorsement of Hassan on July 28, writing in a Truth Social post: “From bravely fighting for our incredible U.S. Navy, to protecting his Community as a Federal Law Enforcement Officer, Amir has served our Nation with distinction, and will bring that same Fighting Spirit to the U.S. Congress.”
Yet as of Wednesday morning, Hassan badly trailed no-name Republican Thomas J. Smith, who wasn’t even actively campaigning as he had dropped out of the primary in July. As of press time, Smith led Hassan 50% to 33%, with 95% of precincts reporting—a margin so wide it’s unclear why the Associated Press has yet to call the race....
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Racist, to be sure but also xenophobic. Disgusting.
Bessent: The Gap Between Rich And Poor Is “Over”
The New York Times reports:
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent downplayed the impact of inflation on lower-income Americans, declaring this week that the “K-shaped” economy — shorthand for the divergent fortunes of the rich and poor — is a thing of the past. The comments came at a moment when consumer sentiment remains low and voters continue to give President Trump negative marks on his handling of the economy.
With midterm elections in just three months, Mr. Bessent has continually tried to talk up the economy. But despite promises of lower prices, the U.S. has continued to confront inflationary pressures that have been amplified by tariffs and the war in Iran, which has increased the cost of gasoline. Mr. Bessent suggested that those economic concerns are overblown.
“I got sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy,” Mr. Bessent said on CNBC on Tuesday. “I can say here definitively, the K-shaped economy is over.”
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I can say here definitively, he's full of shit.
I'm afraid many will disagree with this former employee of George Soros.
Trump Claims Drivers Of Electric Cars “Have A Disease”
Electrek reports:
President Trump went on another rambling tangent about electric cars at a Las Vegas rally Wednesday night, telling the crowd he “ended the electric mandate” and mocking EV owners for worrying about range – claiming they have a “disease.”
Speaking at the Red Rock Resort, Trump pivoted from a riff about the “radical left” trying to ban gasoline straight into his usual EV material. “I ended the electric mandate. I don’t want to talk about it because Elon wasn’t exactly thrilled with me, but I had to do it,” he said. “We love Elon.”
No federal law has ever required Americans to buy an electric car, by 2030 or any other date. We walked through this back in 2024 the first time he started saying it on the campaign trail. The policies he’s actually referring to are federal tailpipe emissions standards and California’s clean-car rules.
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More proof of his insanity.
Erickson: Ossoff “Gets It Done” For His Constituents
“You talk to farmers in South Georgia, they can get him on the phone. They can get his staff on the phone. They can get help. You talk to Republicans in Houston County, very Republican part of the state, they know they can reach out to Ossoff, and he doesn’t care that they’re Republican. If they need something, he’s going to get it done.” – Right wing commentator Erick Erickson, in a video that has gone viral thanks to outrage by the cult.
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"...If they need something, he’s going to get it done.”
Isn't that what a government office holder is supposed to do?
We have lost sight of this as Americans.
Ossoff for President 2028
Trump Rally Crowd Boos Name Of Killed Police Officer Because They Thought NV Gov Named Abdul El-Sayed
Yahoo News reports:
Supporters of President Donald Trump on Wednesday booed upon hearing the name of the Las Vegas police officer who was shot and killed by an armed suspect Tuesday, causing Nevada’s Republican governor to admonish them at the campaign rally.
Gov. Joe Lombardo was speaking at the rally when he referenced how an earlier speaker spoke about Officer Austin Abdelnabi when a loud chorus of boos erupted from rally attendees who were apparently unaware that Abdelnabi was slain.
“No, no … we’re not booing him,” Lombardo told the crowd at the event in Las Vegas. “He’s the officer that passed away here recently.” Audible gasps could be heard from the crowd. Lombardo then asked the crowd to participate in a moment of silence for Abdelnabi, whom he referred to as “Officer Austin.”
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Just more evidence of retarded and hateful America.
Internet Wonders If Trump Was Wearing Wig In Vegas
The Mirror reports:
President Donald Trump made a Wednesday appearance in Las Vegas at an event championing his administration’s push for additional tax cuts — but it was his hair that quickly became the main attraction.
During the visit, Trump’s hair left many observers stunned, looking noticeably fuller than in recent public outings. Social media users wasted no time spotting the change and unleashing a barrage of witty commentary.
“Either a chinchilla landed on Trump’s head or he’s workshopping a toupee to see if anyone will notice,” quipped one observer. “Trump’s hair has more volume today than his approval ratings,” another chimed in, taking a swipe at the president’s declining poll numbers. Another person cracked that the president’s fresh look came courtesy of a “gender affirming hairpiece.
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Of course it's fake. Like Trump. Its shade doesn't match the sides and is much fuller than the thinning hair his has.
Deployed Troops Complain Of Food Shortages, Fatigue
MS Now reports:
Moldy showers. Food shortages. Sailors running out of toothpaste, deodorant and soap. Families of the sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are sounding the alarm that their loved ones are so exhausted they fear it could lead to deadly mistakes, as the carrier enters its ninth month at sea and its fifth consecutive month of combat operations against Iran.
MS NOW spoke to a dozen family members who say they are extremely concerned with the morale, safety and conditions on the ship. They described a crew straining under the demands of an unexpectedly long deployment, as President Donald Trump continues to extend his military campaign against Iran with no clear end in sight.
The families told MS NOW there is no indication of when their loved ones are going to return home, as the routine seven-month deployment for the 5,000-plus crew members appears to have been extended for a second time.
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Hogsbreath seems to be in a bind with this. Is he this inept or is it his stupid boss?
Texas Data Centers Suffer Brutal Collision With Reality — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
Texas is tripling down on the construction of AI data centers, at any cost.
But there’s a glaring problem that’s grinding construction plans to a halt: a woefully inadequate power grid that won’t be able to support all of these new facilities.
As The Texas Tribune reports, governor Greg Abbott announced a moratorium for all new data center approvals on Monday. It certainly wasn’t a response to the spiking bipartisan opposition to data centers that has gripped the nation. Instead, Abbott’s goal was to give regulators time to perform an audit on how to hook up new data centers to the Texas grid without melting it down.
“Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” Abbott said in a statement.
The scale of the proposed data center buildout is staggering. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) alone has a queue of over 1,800 projects that would draw over 474 gigawatts of electricity. According to the regulator, that’s over five times the Texas grid’s record for peak demand.
The news highlights major headwinds in the Lone Star State’s efforts to go all-in on AI, a construction frenzy that’s now experiencing a brutal collision with reality. Even before the AI gold rush, the state’s grid has struggled to keep households warm during unusually cold winters. Major cryptocurrency mining operations have also risked bringing the grid to its knees....
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Who in the world thought Texas has brains?
Kalshi Defends Plan to Bet on Lives of Cancer Patients — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket have long garnered a reputation for allowing users to make all kinds of ethically dubious bets, from the outcomes of deadly conflicts to raging wildfires.
And as the New York Times reports, Kalshi will even allow users to bet on whether clinical trials for potentially lifesaving drug trials will succeed.
But to researchers, it’s yet another morally bankrupt concept that could put real people in danger. There’s even risk that those enrolled in these trials could choose to drop out if the market were to bet against a positive outcome.
“Turning loose a betting market in an ongoing randomized clinical trial really is a breach of scientific conduct,” Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner in the Biden administration, told the NYT.
Kalshi first announced its “biotech prediction markets pilot program” last month, the same day president Donald Trump’s teleprompter guy was busted for winning more than $100,000 on Kalshi by betting on what he would say.
The company argued in the announcement that a “publicly listed contract on a trial or regulatory outcome produces a continuously updated, public probability that reflects the weight of the evidence rather than the preferred messaging of the trial sponsor.”
In a statement to the NYT, spokesperson Jack Such argued that these bets wouldn’t undermine research integrity, but instead cut through the hype surrounding biotech companies and the drugs they’re working on.
But those enrolled in drug trials were left appalled by the news.
“We’re literally trying to stay alive,” metastatic pancreatic cancer patient Walter Ingaharro Jr. told the NYT. “It’s not a game. The introduction of gambling into the process really creates an ethical mess.”
In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Boston University humanities professor Joshua Pederson talked about how his 12-year-old son has a “very aggressive tumor growing inches below his heart.”
“If Kalshi has its way, you could soon be able to bet on health treatments that could be essential to his survival,” Pederson argued....
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The gambling addiction is similar to any drug addiction and just as deadly. And we thought Fentanyl was disasterous.
Top conservative magazine calls it: Trump should be impeached — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
On Wednesday, the National Review – the preeminent conservative magazine since 1955 — called it: President Donald Trump has done the “impeachable.”
“There is no plausible defense of Trump's TruthSocial scheme,” declared National Review Senior Editor Charles Cooke. “It is flagrantly corrupt. It is impeachable. Congress should intervene. (It won't, I know.)” He posted this assertion over his latest article, entitled “Truth Social’s Early-Access Scheme Is Indefensible.”
As he explains, over the weekend, the Trump Media & Technology Group announced the creation of a “real-time feed on the Truth Social website that will give paying institutions early access to certain high-profile posts for between $60,000 and $100,000 per month.” Cooke doesn’t hold back with his assessment of the scheme, writing, “There is no credible defense of this. The only reason that anyone would want priority access to Truth Social is to gain priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform. And the only reason that anyone would want priority access to President Trump’s pronouncements on that platform is to act on them for pecuniary gain.”
As Cooke elaborates, “Trump often uses Truth Social as the primary forum for his announcements — announcements that include changes to personnel, the imposition or rescission of tariffs, key foreign policy decisions, and more. These announcements are extremely useful to financial institutions, and, in the age of high-speed trading, the faster those financial institutions can obtain them, the more money those financial institutions can make. Facilitating this access is not a byproduct of Truth Social’s API offering; it is its core — perhaps its sole — purpose. Simply put: President Trump is charging Americans a fee — a fee that, in part, goes into his family’s pockets — for the privilege of receiving news about his official actions earlier than those who do not pay.”
According to Cooke, it is “obvious how unequivocally corrupt this setup is. Technically speaking, the beneficiaries will not gain the information they seek directly from Trump himself, but indirectly, via an API (Application Programming Interface) whose output will be processed by a bunch of semi-autonomous servers and acted upon according to a set of predetermined parameters. But the results will be the same as if Trump had personally picked up the phone.”...
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This is why we must remove Trump's protection from our Congress. The crook must go!
Demands grow for facts on how Trump's Reflecting Pool lie was 'cooked up' — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
On Tuesday, following the dramatic collapse of President Donald Trump’s case against Olympian David Hearn and others accused of vandalising the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, top Senate Democrats on two committees that oversee the Interior Department demanded that the agency’s inspector general investigate how the vandalism lie was “cooked up” in the first place.
According to exclusive reporting by the Washington Post, “The Interior Department had publicly blamed damage to the pool’s new liner on ‘vandals,’ a claim echoed by Trump and prosecutors who pressed charges against several people. The Justice Department on Friday said that Interior officials did not share relevant internal information that indicated the problems were due to contractors’ mistakes and has dropped the cases.” Now Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) of the Environment and Public Works and the Energy and Natural Resources committees, respectively, called for an “immediate investigation” into whether Interior Department officials misled the president about the cause of the damage.
“Numerous questions remain: How was the vandalism lie cooked up? How did it get to President Trump’s desk? Or did it originate from the White House?” Whitehouse and Heinrich wrote to the inspector general’s office. In the letter, they demand to know “what employees of the Department of the Interior knew — and when they knew it — regarding the peeling of the coating and other engineering issues at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.” While Trump had been vocal about his demands for the prosecution of Hearn and others accused of vandalism, the Senators noted that the Interior’s own documentation acknowledged the damage was caused by “a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout.”...
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America demands the truth.
Judge sits in silence as senator corners her for backing Trump’s election lies — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
On Wednesday morning during Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings, a judge nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals by President Donald Trump had her disqualification explained on no uncertain terms: her clear “lack of independence.” This is according to HuffPost Senior Politics Reporter Jennifer Bendery, who posted from within the hearing, “Right on time, another Trump court pick – Anna St. John, nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit – will only say Biden was ‘certified’ president in 2020.”
This is in reference to a common tactic that has been used by a wide range of Trump nominees hoping to avoid the president’s ire when asked about the 2020 election during confirmation. A number of Democratic senators have taken to regularly asking nominees questions regarding who won the 2020 presidential election and the January 6 insurrection as a test of their unswerving loyalty to Trump, and routinely, nominees refuse to admit that former President Joe Biden won the election, saying only that he was “certified” the winner.
According to Bendery, St. John was also asked by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) whether the Capitol was attacked on January 6, 2021. The nominee struggled to respond, saying, “I want to be very careful with my language.”
“‘You are... continuing to adopt the president's distorted and inaccurate illusion’ about J6 and the 2020 election, Blumenthal scolded St. John, who sat silently,” posted Bendery. “‘It indicates a lack of independence,’ he says. ‘That lack of independence is disqualifying for you to be a judge.’”...
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No place in our judiciary for election deniers!
Or our White House either!
Trust Regular Guy David Ellison with Our Democracy? No Thanks! — Free Press|Timothy Karr
Billionaire David Ellison wants us to see him as an everyday person looking out for everyday people … like him. But critics aren’t buying it.
The reviews are in. And media critics from coast to coast are rating David Ellison’s New York Times Op-Ed a dud.
Zero stars for the Paramount Skydance CEO who took to the paper of record to convince us everyday Americans that his billionaire touch at CBS and (maybe) CNN will be good for the people and fact-based journalism — as he loosely defines it.
Never mind that a recent Harris Poll found that 53 percent of Americans believe billionaires like the Ellisons threaten U.S. democracy. The Times Op-Ed is Ellison’s feckless attempt to win popular support for his company’s $111 billion bid to take over Warner Bros. Discovery after suffering a number of setbacks in the courts of law and public opinion.
Building propaganda machines
In a piece titled “The Critics Are Wrong About My Politics,” Ellison wants you to think he’s not a billionaire with a political agenda, but a regular guy — just the man to make news media like CBS and CNN way, way better.
To make his point, Ellison cites his own poll, a Gallup survey finding that only 28 percent of people in the United States trust the news. He’s buying Warner Bros. Discovery to win back that trust for all of us, or so he says
Ellison acts as though the low level of public trust in news media “has something to do with ‘journalists [who] haven’t always helped their case by refusing to engage with critiques,’ and not with members of his cohort turning the networks they own into propaganda machines,” writes The Defector’s Patrick Redford. “Ellison’s proposed solution to that problem is to purge CBS and CNN of journalists who would rather not pretend that vaccine denialism is a valid political position.”...
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Thanks, but no thanks, baby. We've seen this shit before.
Mike Lindell: “I’m Stepping Down As CEO Of MyPillow”
The Minnesota Star-Tribune reports:
Mike Lindell is stepping down as chief executive of MyPillow and will no longer be a majority owner of the company he founded in order to focus on his run for Minnesota governor. “I want the state of Minnesota … to know I’m all in,” he said on his streaming platform, LindellTV, on Tuesday afternoon.
Lindell has been leading in polls ahead of the Aug. 11 primary after he won President Donald Trump’s endorsement in July. “I am putting Minnesota above myself, my title and my business interests so I can give this campaign and the people of our state my full time, energy and attention,” Lindell said in a statement.
Lindell founded MyPillow in 2004, and it went on to become a direct-sales sensation due to the ubiquitous infomercials he starred in. The company took a major hit after Lindell attached himself to Trump’s disproven claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Major retailers stopped carrying MyPillow, resulting in millions in lost revenue and a cascading financial crisis at the company.
Read the full article. Some of those major retailers got death threats from the cult for dropping MyPillow.
Mike Lindell announced that he is “stepping down as CEO of MyPillow so I can devote 100% of my time and energy to my campaign for Governor of Minnesota.” pic.twitter.com/1pYjROGxNt
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) August 5, 2026.
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The fact that Lindell is leading in polls certainly shows the gullibility of stupid.
New Mexico’s AG Sues DOJ For Epstein Ranch Files
NBC News reports:
New Mexico’s attorney general sued the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday, accusing it of blocking the state from investigating sex crimes at Jeffrey Epstein’s sprawling ranch near Santa Fe.
The lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., said the department and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stonewalled New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s criminal investigation into Epstein and others, taking steps that “actively harms victims and undermines the public interest.”
The lawsuit seeking judicial intervention to force the federal government to turn over materials to New Mexico’s investigators was filed the same day that the state released a report saying “those directly responsible for protecting New Mexicans relied on others to do their job,” including federal prosecutors in New York.
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The Trump cover-up will be cracked.
NYT: Cost Of New “Trump-Class” Battleships Soar 50%
The New York Times reports:
A new class of warships that President Trump says will anchor a “golden fleet” for the Navy is expected to cost at least 50 percent more than estimated earlier, according to a government report released on Wednesday.
The first planned Trump-class battleship, the U.S.S. Defiant, is likely to cost $23.4 billion, $8 billion more than the Navy initially indicated. The cost of each of the 14 additional vessels is expected to jump to slightly more than $18 billion from $10.2 billion, for a total cost of $275 billion for 15 ships.
The estimates were calculated by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which said that the first of the battleships might take eight years or longer to build.
Read the full article. At the ceremony unveiling renderings of the ships, Trump declared that they will be “one hundred times more powerful” than their predecessors. No other classes of US warships have been named for a living president.
Of Course. The Cost of Trump’s Namesake Warships Are Likely to Rise by 50 Percent or More
www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/u…
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If you have read The Pornography of Power by Robert Scheer you will know what a con on America this is.
"This indictment of the military-industrial complex explains why any president committed to preserving our Republic must end a policy of permanent war. It is also a reminder, as is Jonathan Schell's Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, of the insanity of our nuclear strategy and the arrogance of our hypermilitarized foreign policy."-The New York Times Review of Books.
Loomer: Fox News Is “Basically TV For Stupid People”
August 5, 2026 Extremists, Trump cultists
“I was supposed to go on a Fox podcast the other day, and then they canceled 20 minutes before I was supposed to go on because management at Fox News says I wasn’t allowed to go on.
“But then this bullshit, this is a real, this is a real segment on Fox, can AI fix your boyfriend? So, whatever. I mean, look, we’re not going to take back our country when our mainstream media is talking about AI boyfriends, and they don’t want to talk about how Muslim candidates are trying to Islamify America. We’re just not. We’re totally cooked as a country.
“And if the Democrats take back the House and the Senate, it’s over. Trump is going to be a lame duck president if the Democrats take over. They’re going to impeach him. They’ll try to throw him in jail. They’ll try to throw his family members in jail, and that’s it. It’s done. It’s over.
“Look, these people, like, nobody — nothing serious comes out of Fox News. Okay? It’s basically TV for stupid people. It’s TV for stupid people.” – Laura Loomer, on her podcast.
"What does it say about Laura that she cant even get on TV for stupid people?" — Mickey (comments)
"Well, it is an expert appraisal." — band (comments)
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She seems so so sad she has become irrelevant.
Notorious NYC MAGA Troll In Critical After Suffering Cardiac Arrest While Attempting To Confront Mamdani
The Staten Island Advance reports:
Staten Island artist and activist Scott LoBaido remains in critical condition following a medical emergency at the NYPD’s National Night Out Against Crime event Tuesday in Midland Beach. A spokesperson for Northwell Staten Island University Hospital confirmed LoBaido’s condition on Wednesday morning. The message came about 12 hours after the hospital confirmed that he had experienced cardiac arrest.
According to a bystander who witnessed the incident and requested anonymity, LoBaido, 61, attended the event with a group intending to confront Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who was also in attendance. This annual community-building event brings together residents, police officers, firefighters, EMS personnel, and local organizations. His administration touted historically low crime numbers during the first half of 2026.
Read the full article.
LoBaido has appeared here multiple times, most recently when he called for hanging Sen. Mark Kelly for treason.
He appeared here last year when he was arrested after screaming abuse at “communist” then-mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani over a bullhorn.
LoBaido first appeared here in 2022 when he used tactics similar to those above in a failed attempt to stop a Staten Island drag show.
Also in 2022, failed US House candidate and Capitol Riot attendee Tina Forte, who was endorsed by the Log Cabin Quislings, displayed a LoBaido-made banner depicting Nancy Pelosi with blood-dripping fangs.
LoBaido’s stunts have included releasing hundreds of penis-shaped balloons featuring the face of Manhattan DA and Trump nemesis Alvin Bragg.
In 2024, he affixed dozens of traffic signs above “one way” arrows around Manhattan featuring Trump’s silhouette.
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Crazed Nazi seems to go into convulsions.
Parasite Outbreak Expands To Six Additional States
NBC News reports:
A massive cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce has expanded to an additional six states, according to a source familiar with the matter. The outbreak, caused by a microscopic parasite found in human feces, is responsible for hundreds of hospitalizations and two deaths since early May.
The newly linked states — Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire and North Carolina — join Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The Missouri Department of Health has reported 1,095 cases as of Sunday — nearly double the number of cases it reported last week. More than 22,000 people have confirmed or suspected cyclosporiasis, and 517 people have been hospitalized in the multistate outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said late Tuesday.
Read the full article. Last month Sec. Brain Worms declared that the outbreak was “under control.’
A massive cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce has expanded to an additional six states, including New Hampshire, according to a source familiar with the matter. on.nbcboston.com/lLW9sHB.
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Has Trump said this started in a lab in China yet?
It appears he has another pandemic.
Out of Sight and Out of Mind — The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good|Mike Ervin
he administration of the squatter currently occupying the White House may have just stepped on a hornets’ nest.
Most disability rights activists consider the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Olmstead v. L.C and E.W. to be one of the most important civil rights victories in the nation’s history. In this case, two disabled women who were being held against their will in a mental institution in Georgia filed a lawsuit asserting that this sort of involuntary institutionalization of disabled folks violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); it urged that states be required to provide more community support options.
And by a majority of 6-3, the Justices agreed.
But on June 18 this year, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued an opinion memo stating that neither the ADA nor the Olmstead decision compel states to provide any community support options for people with disabilities.
The American Association of People with Disabilities put out a statement in response to the memo that says “courts across the country have consistently held that the Court did in fact mean for disabled people to be as integrated as possible.”
Several other organizations also issued statements denouncing the memo....
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The increasing inhumanity of the Trump regime.
Progressives Make Major Gains in Michigan — The American Prospect|David Dayen
Abdul El-Sayed earned a narrow victory in the Michigan Senate primary on Tuesday, coming from third place and withstanding a $62 million onslaught from his main opponent, Haley Stevens. He won a statewide primary in a swing state on a message that prominently featured Medicare for All. He won despite the party’s sitting governor and sitting senator endorsing Stevens. And he won despite Stevens’s outside backers using an eight-year-old quote from the most popular politician in the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, praising her for being part of his administration.
Those facts and that framing do not necessarily reflect the way a lot of progressives are feeling right now. But if the past two weeks of bad polling had not appeared and the last survey of the race was the mid-July poll showing Stevens up by seven, that mood would be markedly different. Expectations setting can really take one’s eyes off the 50 percent-plus-one nature of American elections. El-Sayed was outspent and had the bulk of the establishment against him, and he won.
Progressives had a near-sweep in Michigan, in fact. Will Lawrence took advantage of establishment infighting and used his focus on data centers in a mid-Michigan toss-up district to romp to victory. DSA member Donavan McKinney won a primary challenge in Detroit, defeating millions of dollars from incumbent Shri Thanedar, who finally got into a one-on-one race his money couldn’t talk him out of. The co-founder of the Uncommitted movement, Abbas Alawieh, won his primary and is on track to become a state senator. There were other significant gains up and down the ballot.
A perceptive piece in Drop Site News pointed out that discontent with the way that Michigan’s legislative trifecta turned out led to progressive energy and eventually these victories. I wrote about that at the end of 2024, actually, and one of the discontented I talked to was a housing organizer named Will Lawrence. “People have fought for decades to realize this,” he told me. “A lot of people are really pissed off. Because they feel like it’s been squandered.”...
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During the presidential election of 1952. Truman was out campaigning for the Democractic nominee, Adlai Stevenson, who was running against the Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Truman was in Syracuse, New York, on October 10th, 1952, during a whistle stop tour across the north-east. Speaking from the rear platform of the last car of the train (as was often done in those days), Truman complained that Ike and other powerful Republicans “opposed almost all our programs to help the economic life of the country” and that they “blindly turned [their] backs on the tradition of public action for the public good.”
Truman then specifically targeted powerful Republican Senator Robert Taft, who had said that the biggest danger facing the country was “creeping socialism” promoted by the Democrats.Truman shot back at Taft and Ike with:
“Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power.
Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan ‘Down With Socialism’ on the banner of his ‘great crusade,’ that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is, ‘Down with Progress — down with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,’ and ‘down with Harry Truman’s Fair Deal.’ That is what he means” —
Harry Truman, 33rd President of the United States.
Most Americans know this to be true!
Republicans Livid As Missouri And Kansas Vote For Democracy And Abortion AGAIN — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
If one thing is clear from last night’s primary results — aside from all the other clear things — it is that the Republican fascists who control red states absolutely loathe their voters. We don’t just mean the woke voters who live in cities and coach men-in-women’s-sports teams either. They hate their own voters too.
Last night in Missouri and Kansas, it was yet another night of ballot initiatives that really pissed Republican electeds off. And wouldn’t you know it, but their voters told them to fuck off anyway.
Here is a clip of Rachel Maddow talking last night about how Missouri voters gave their politicians a “one-finger salute” in the results of Amendment 4.
As Maddow explained there — and Wonkette explained yesterday — Amendment 4 was essentially an amendment asking voters to take power away from themselves to make it harder to put initiatives on the ballot. Missouri Republicans don’t like these initiatives because gross fucking voters use them to make sure people can get abortions in Missouri and get healthcare in Missouri and legalize pot and other cool, we mean totally sinful stuff like that. (Because lots of times there is a disconnect between the policies people actually like and the people Fox News has brainwashed them to vote for and/or against.)
So this new Amendment 4, a brainchild of the Republican Legislature, would have made it so that not only must proposed amendments get a certain number of signatures to get on the ballot, they have to get a certain number of signatures from each congressional district, which sounds as pointless as it is, unless your point is just to make citizen-led democracy harder. As Maddow noted, though, the rules would have stayed the same for the Legislature; if they wanted to get something on the ballot, they could use the older, easier way.
Voters in the Show Me State responded by saying show me your dick so we can kick you square in it....
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The liars will start their usual lying but will add more vitriol to their money hoarding greed.
Sen. Wyden Report: Banks Systematically Ignored Jeffrey Epstein’s Crimes — The American Prospect|Whitney Curry Wimbish
Key executives at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase routinely ignored the suspicious activities of convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein because he was among their most profitable clients, paying millions in fees and holding influence over other wealthy people, according to a new investigation released on Tuesday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
The cover-up should prompt lawmakers to strengthen anti–money laundering laws and pass new legislation to hold individual bankers accountable, said Wyden, the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee. The Oregon senator used his report on the multiyear investigation to put the financial services industry on notice that he’s preparing to do just that.
“My investigation showed conclusively that the bankers who served Jeffrey Epstein and his ultra-wealthy friends were far too motivated to protect their cash cow, and had far too little respect for the law,” Wyden told the Prospect via email.
The report looked at thousands of suspicious activity reports, or SARs. Those are confidential documents that banks and other financial institutions must file with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, the U.S. Treasury’s financial intelligence division, when they identify unusual transactions. Executives have 30 days to file a SAR when they suspect things like money laundering or payments to terrorists.
According to Wyden’s report, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase failed to do so for millions of dollars in cash withdrawals that had “no clear business purpose.” Instead, bankers let them ride, and together facilitated more than $1.4 billion worth of suspicious wire transfers over two decades—transactions they only flagged retroactively in 2019, after authorities arrested Epstein on federal sex trafficking charges....
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Eventually there will be a bottom to this. And we know who we will find there.
Ranting Trump smears 'Communist loser' after progressive's narrow win — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
“Great news for the Republican Party," Trump wrote. "El-Sayed, a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel, is the projected winner in his race with the Socialist.
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Just to clarify for all the believers of the position that certain candidates are Jew haters. It is perfectly correct to oppose the terrorist, Netanyahu and still support his country. Just as the world does aganist Trump.
'Missteps occurred': Trump lawyers flip as looming charges spark DOJ upheaval — Raw Story|David Edwards
Federal prosecutors in Chicago face the threat of criminal contempt charges in a case stemming from President Donald Trump's Chicago immigration crackdown, and the Justice Department is begging the judge to back off, according to court records and reports.
U.S. District Judge April Perry, in Chicago, found in May that prosecutors vouched for the charges, dismissed skeptical grand jurors, and held private conversations with panel members outside the jury room, court records show.
They had also redacted more than 80 pages of those proceedings from what she received, according to court records.
Defense attorneys have since asked Perry to appoint an independent outside counsel — one who would not report to the attorney general — with authority to bring criminal contempt charges against the prosecutors involved, according to WTTW.
Allowing such a prosecutor, the Justice Department warned in a new court filing, would "amount to criminal proceedings against federal prosecutors."...
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Nazi fuck-up now exposed!
US Is Not Winning Actual Individual Consumption Either — People's Policy Project
When arguing that the US is much richer than Western Europe or other peer nations, there is one class of people who point to measures of Gross Domestic Product (addressed yesterday) and then another, higher, class of people who point to something called Actual Individual Consumption (AIC). This latter group seems to think that AIC paints a truer picture of the difference between these economies and that this picture is even rosier for the United States. This is also wrong.
What Is AIC?
Officially, AIC is defined as household and non-profit consumption plus government services provided in-kind (e.g. healthcare and education). As a matter of accounting identity, AIC can also be calculated by taking GDP and subtracting from it capital investment, collective government consumption (e.g. police spending), and net exports. The graph below illustrates these two different ways of arriving at AIC in the United States....
The reason the US has a higher AIC/GDP ratio than its peer nations is almost entirely because the US has a large trade deficit while its peer nations typically have trade surpluses.
So when someone switches the conversation from GDP measures to AIC measures, all they are really saying is that we should credit the US for importing more than it exports and ding other countries for doing the opposite. What the proper balance of trade ought to be is a worthwhile topic of debate, but covertly burying a pro-deficits position in a discussion about relative economic performance is a pretty silly way to have it....
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Pretty silly descibes the Trump facist regime.
How Elon Musk Is Re-Engineering the World — Mother Jones|Reveal
Elon Musk is an avatar of digital capitalism: He both embodies and defines it. In “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” co-author Quinn Slobodian examines how Musk’s actions have altered American capitalism by changing its relationship with the federal government while ushering in a new, technologically driven political economy that’s upending our lives.
On this week’s More To The Story, Slobodian talks with host Al Letson about how the world’s richest person exploits government investment to his own financial benefit and the many ways this intersects with his views on race and technology. It’s nothing less than a futuristic vision of a frightening new world order.
“What is the social contract of Muskism?” Slobodian asks. “You will be locked into a kind of cult of Elon and so ideologically bolted onto him that you’d never question his decisions.”
Slobodian also touches on the ways Musk fused himself to the American economy—and our imagination—and how growing up in South Africa shaped Musk’s white supremacist worldview.
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Just what we need. Another motherfucking goon ruining our lives!
Anti-abortion advocates push to ban mifepristone under the guise of protecting women from abusive partners — Media Matters for America|Helena Hind
A recent Senate hearing and subsequent right-wing media coverage have highlighted anti-abortion groups' latest strategy in their push to ban the abortion medication mifepristone: claiming telehealth access to the abortion pill enables abusers to force their partners into having an abortion. In reality, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says forced pregnancy is the most common form of reproductive coercion, and restriction to abortion access has been linked to higher rates of intimate partner violence-related homicide.
During a July 15 confirmation hearing for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Senate Republicans repeatedly referenced the legal battle over mifepristone, with Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Katie Britt (R-AL) arguing that access to mifepristone makes women more vulnerable to abusive partners who would force them to undergo an abortion against their will. MS NOW guest Joyce Vance summarized the tactic: “Senate Republicans are coming for mifepristone, and it’s interesting how they’re doing it. They're telling stories that aren't indictments of the drugs, they're indictments of other behavior.”
Right-wing media echoed the coercion narrative following Blanche's hearing. Referencing the hearing in a July 17 article for The Washington Stand, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins wrote, “More proof was presented that unborn babies are losing their lives through the abortion drug mifepristone, and increasingly, the drug is being obtained through the mail by men who secretly administer it to the mothers of their unborn children.” The Washington Examiner published an op-ed titled “Abortion pills don’t empower women. They empower abusive men.” Anti-abortion podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey hosted a woman who was poisoned by her husband with abortion pills to highlight this narrative.
Anti-abortion advocates have been toying with the strategy for a few years. The Heritage Foundation has maintained a list of publicly documented instances of alleged abuse involving medication abortion since 2023, and anti-abortion campaign 40 Days for Life also tracks instances of alleged abuse and coercion by “people who took advantage of the proliferation of abortion pills.” ...
The proliferation of the narrative by right-wing media and anti-abortion advocates that access to medication abortion puts women at risk of abuse does not demonstrate a genuine concern for women's safety. Rather, it betrays the anti-abortion movement's willingness to cynically weaponize progressive rhetoric about protecting women from abuse in order to advance its goal of ending abortion writ large....
It speaks volumes that the anti-abortion movement’s first instinct was to collude with abusers—only pivoting to pretend to care about some victims when this didn’t work.
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The bastards have no interest in women's health. Only their own rightousness crown.
Demented Senior Melts Down Over El-Sayed’s Win
“Wayne County (Detroit) in Michigan is one of the most corrupt voting areas in the United States, if not the World. It is strictly Third World!
“Miracles happen in Wayne County, including more votes being cast than there are voters, by a lot. Therefore, the Communist, who is not liked in Detroit, is potentially in ‘Vote Counter’ trouble.
“The Radical Left Socialist has a real shot, and don’t discount all of those fake mail-in ballots that will ‘surprisingly’ show up at the last moment.
“Get ready for another Rigged Election. In November we must VOTE FOR MIKE ROGERS, and make Michigan TOO BIG TO RIG. God Bless America!
“Great news for the Republican Party. El-Sayed, a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel, is the projected winner in his race with the Socialist.
“As usual, the Polls were way off on this one. She was not expected to do nearly as well as she did. Now, the Dumocrats crazy policies will only get worse!” – Trump, in a pair of Truth Social posts.
"I will be so happy when we have a president who doesn’t write like a 14 year old mean girl - and that’s stretching it" — Brooklyn Joe (comments)
"14 might be generous.Hell, 8 would be generous." — Šcott C - Vive la résistance (comments)
"Show me the proof of voter fraud? You demented fuck! Your always screaming about voter fraud in blue states and districts, but never in any red state, where most of the fraud takes place or where you or your endorsed candidate wins! FRAUD. And FYI, there has been no illegal voting in the country ever, with a few exceptions, like .00001%." — Dick518 (comments)
"He's only got a few stock phrases. "Fake news." "Voter fraud." "So unfair." "... like a dog." I would say that his reading skills are at a 3rd grade level, but that would imply that he actually reads." — teeveedub (comments)
"Trump's calling El-Sayed a "Communist, Radical Left Socialist, Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel, and a Socialist" all in the same post. Which one is he?!!!" — Refugay (commentsO
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Great Googa Mooga! Trump's a dumb shit and doesn't mind showing everyone he does't know that a Socialist is not a Communist! He has never recovered from his stroke last year.
Game on, you fat fuck!
Judge Dismisses Sedition Cases Against Oath Keepers
The Washington Post reports:
A federal judge on Tuesday agreed to dismiss the seditious-conspiracy case against the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, and seven other members of the extremist group who planned to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The ruling by U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta is the last step in the legal process to wipe out penalties from the Jan. 6 riot, cementing President Donald Trump’s bid to unravel the largest federal investigation in U.S. history.
Mehta had sentenced Rhodes to 18 years in prison and imposed lesser prison terms on other top Oath Keepers who were convicted at jury trials. Trump commuted those prison sentences on his first day in office last year, and he pardoned more than 1,500 rioters.
In a written ruling Tuesday, Mehta said he was dismissing the Oath Keepers’ charges reluctantly at the request of the Justice Department. He criticized prosecutors for claiming in a court filing that wiping out the most serious convictions from the Jan. 6 riot was in the public interest....
"What bullshit. I know that it was mainly because of the weight of the DOJ, but still. And Rhodes' family needs to go into hiding. They're unfortunately unleashing that psychopath back into society." — jimbo65 (comments)
"Sedition is a GOP platform plank." — OlyGregg (comments)
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Trump's Department Of Jerk-0ffs excuse their criminals again.
Abdul Sticks It To 'Em — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Oh boy, that was not supposed to be that close! Thanks pollsters again for your service, you still haven’t quite figured it out.
The AP hasn’t called it yet, and neither has the New York Times, but NBC News and Steve Kornacki’s saucy khakis got out ahead of the pack late last night and called the damn thing. With over 95 percent of the vote counted, Abdul El-Sayed maintains almost a 20,000-vote lead, and will be the nominee for Michigan’s US Senate race.
Congresswoman Haley Stevens hasn’t conceded yet, which El-Sayed acknowledged on MS NOW this morning, but he’s pivoted to the general: “We understand that she still wants to hold onto a path. We’re focused on trying to figure how we bring the party together to defeat Mike Rogers in November.” He expressed a similar sentiment in his speech to supporters: “Tomorrow, we begin to mend fences,” said the presumptive nominee. “Whatever happens tonight, we have a responsibility to assure that we unite to make sure that Mike Rogers never sees the inside of the US Senate.”
A lot can be said about last night, but wherever you personally landed on these candidates, it’s undeniable that, against approximately 75 gajillion dollars in outside spending for one candidate, the other one — the Arab Muslim progressive candidate — came out on top. Despite any narratives people try to put forth, that’s the story. (And if the pollsters hadn’t fucked it up yet again, that would even more clearly be the story in the media. Maybe if the PACs had just spent 150 gajillion bazillion dollars!)
But we want to share with you something we noticed about this race last night as we were watching returns, which we posted as a note on Substack and will now paraphrase for you. An alternate theory, if you will, to all the DEMS IN DISARRAY! narrative we’re supposed to be feeding on, an alternative to the quite frankly kind of worn-out narrative that’s been going since 2016 that everything in Democratic politics is progressive vs. moderate, outsider vs. establishment/AIPAC, and so forth.
What if that’s all bullshit, or at least more bullshit than those who set these narratives would like us to believe?...
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The revoloution is being televised.
It’s Worse Than You Think for the Middle Class — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
Since Nixon, Republicans have shifted wealth from working Americans to the morbidly rich. Dems should repeat that simple affordability message everywhere, every day, without apology or hesitation
“Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.” — old proverb
A July 2026 CNN/SSRS poll found that 71 percent of Americans believe Trump and his regime have not gone far enough to lower the price of everyday goods, leaving the middle class screwed.
A Trump-voting caller to my show yesterday, along these same lines, tried to mansplain to me that things really aren’t that bad, and that the numbers I’ve been using to describe the economic destruction by Reaganism are exaggerated.
For years I’ve been documenting the destruction of the American middle class at the hands of the GOP and neoliberal politicians (including some corporate Democrats).
I wrote about it extensively and did a deep dive into the problem and its causes in my books Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, and, just last month, Who Killed the American Dream?
As a result of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society “socialist” programs, about two-thirds of American families were in the middle class with a single paycheck by 1973 as reported by The New York Times; today that number could be as low as a third of us, depending on your definitions.
And that’s where things get confusing, with statistics flying fast and furious (although everybody agrees Reaganomics has whacked working people), raising the question: What actually constitutes the middle class?
Pew, for example, uses the definition of middle class as people falling in the middle of the bell-curve of income distribution. By that definition, Pew says 61% of Americans lived in middle-income households in 1971 and by 2023 that had declined to 51% of us. This skewing of statistics is driven in large part by the massive wealth being accumulated by a few thousand American families, particularly the morbidly rich billionaire class.
Pew defines middle income as household income between two-thirds and twice the national median, adjusted for household size, and its historical figures are based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey data.
But does being “in the middle of the income distribution curve” mean that people in the “middle” today — even if it’s a smaller percentage of Americans — enjoy the same “middle class” lifestyle and opportunities as they did at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution?...
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Both the elderly and the middle class are targets of the Nazis. We must defend!.
Dozens of Military Spouses and Parents Detained Under New Trump ICE Policy: Report — Mediaite|Zachary Leeman
More than 50 parents and spouses of active duty military members have been detained during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in his second administration, according to the Associated Press.
The AP dropped a lengthy report on Wednesday, revealing that dozens of military members’ family members have been detained, and some deported, leading to concerns about military readiness during the Iran war, as well as branches like the Army continuing to advertise the immigration benefits of service.
AP compiled its list of detainees, at least six of whom have been deported, “by analyzing thousands of federal court records compiled by Habeas Dockets, a project run by the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative; by reviewing existing media coverage; and by verifying information with family members and attorneys.”
The report notes the actual number is likely higher than 50, but the Department of Homeland Security does not specifically track these cases.
The crackdown on military families is due to a new policy implemented in Trump’s second term that declares “military service alone does not exempt aliens from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws.”
What’s led to confusion for some soldiers is that branches like the Army still promote the “parole-in-place” program, which allows family members of soldiers to change their legal status.
Some parents and spouses, however, have been detained and even deported while in the process of changing their legal status, which now takes months longer than it did before Trump returned to the White House.
Army Sgt. Hedar Leonel Turcios Juarez, who was stationed in Fort Bliss, Texas, said his wife was detained outside of a Walmart in front of their 6-year-old child.
“How can I even focus on my military career because I have to worry about how my wife is doing?” he asked....
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More failure by Trump and his Gestapo hoods.
Max Miller Stuns Newsmax Host With Claim His Ex-Father-in-Law Offered $5M to His Ex-Wife to Ditch Family — Mediaite|Sean James
Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) claimed his ex-wife was such a violent menace that his former father-in-law, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), offered her $5 million to “go away” and leave her own family alone.
The embattled lawmaker made the stunning accusation during a Tuesday night Newsmax interview.
A source close to Moreno shot down the claim soon after, telling Semafor’s Burgess Everett it was “totally false” and Miller had “totally made up” the story.
Miller’s claim was so incendiary— and his wording was so confusing — that host Rob Finnerty had to stop the interview to ask him to explain it further.
During the same interview, Miller also claimed his former wife, Emily Moreno, had bipolar disorder and was once committed to a mental institution.
“In his own words, he told me that I could leave his daughter if I wanted to and he offered her $5 million to go away,” Miller said. “These are private conversations that we’ve had together, and unfortunately him and I were very close—”
Finnerty then jumped in to clarify, “Bernie Moreno offered his own daughter $5 million to leave you?”
“No, no, no. Bernie Moreno offered his daughter $5 million to leave him and the family,” Miller said....
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Send these miscreants out to pasture as soon as possible.
Google’s AI Is Telling Users That Flock Cameras Are Filled With Valuable Gold and Copper — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
Google’s notorious AI Overview just handed would-be Flock vandals a perfect excuse to carve into the company’s controversial AI-integrated license plate readers (ALPRs).
ALRPs are wildly unpopular, especially online, where privacy-minded communities trade memes and videos cheering on destruction of the surveillance equipment. One of the more popular bits in this space centers on the idea that Flock’s ALPR’s are supposedly packed with valuable metals like gold, copper, and zinc — so, the tongue-in-cheek riffing goes, why not crack one open and cash in at the nearest scrapyard?
Clever or not, the meme hinges on a spurious claim. ALPRs do contain trace amounts of gold and other metals, just not enough to be worth the trouble. Unless you’re well versed in breaking down circuit boards, you’d be hard pressed to earn enough to buy a Big Mac, let alone recoup your labor costs.
Google, itself an exemplar of AI-enabled surveillance, apparently missed the joke.
Search “how much gold does a Flock camera have” and Google’s AI Overview doesn’t even push back a little bit. Instead, it flatly asserts that a “Flock safety camera contains about 1 to 5 grams of gold used in its internal circuit boards and wiring.” (At today’s gold prices, that would mean each Flock camera contained up to $650 of gold.)...
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It appears to me that AI is a dangerous drug.
Anthropic CEO Says His Employees Are a Bunch of Untrustworthy Rats — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei apparently can’t believe that not everyone at the company is as noble-minded as he is.
According to new reporting from Axios, which cites a source familiar with the matter, Amodei is concerned that the new hires at the $965 billion AI firm are joining for the money instead of its greater mission.
Shocker, right? Anthropic pays some of the best salaries in the business, and now Amodei fears it’s becoming a victim of its own success. Being the most valuable AI firm in the world sure sounds tough.
But it’s also a sentiment tinged with irony. Anthropic’s professed mission is to safely build advanced AI systems. When Amodei left OpenAI to pursue this goal, part of his gripe with his old company was that it was getting too commercial by partnering with Microsoft.
Now, seemingly contrary to this “safety-first” mission, Anthropic has been moving to take itself public in an anticipated trillion-dollar IPO. This would rake in untold billions of dollars for the company — and all but ensure that its lofty, moral duty would forever be subjugated the money-making whims of Wall Street....
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More on the root of all evil.
Trump: Blue Cities And States Are “Threat” To Nation
Yahoo News reports:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday named what he considers to be the real threat to the United States. It’s not Iran, the nation he’s been at war with since February. It’s not China, a country he frequently attacks verbally and recently accused of election interference. And it’s not Russia – or any other nation at all. It’s American states and cities with Democratic majorities.
During a Fox News interview, Trump defended data centers and attacked the communities that have restricted or outright blocked the massive, power-hungry facilities behind AI, cloud platforms and more. “Data centers, if you look at the stats, everything’s good around them,” Trump said. “Now, the thing they should look at is, blue states and blue cities. Cities run by Democrats. Because that’s really the threat to the country. Because they’re a disaster.”
Trump was just fundraising in a “blue state” he calls a “threat” — our “blue state” and “blue cities” are keeping “his” government afloat right now. https://t.co/sMnPXzgcir
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) August 5, 2026
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Sorry, Don. They are a threat only to you and not our country.
Missouri Sec Of State Blocks Redistricting Referendum
NBC News reports:
Missouri Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins said Tuesday that he wouldn’t certify a referendum seeking to undo the state’s new GOP-drawn congressional map, arguing that the effort was unconstitutional. “After careful consideration, I have determined the challenge to the new ‘Missouri First’ congressional map to be insufficient based on its unconstitutionality,” he said in an interview ahead of his public announcement.
A group called People Not Politicians Missouri said it gathered more than 300,000 signatures to force a veto referendum. Missouri law allows voters to block a law if they gather enough petition signatures — this year, that number is around 106,000 spread out around the state — and then win a majority of votes in a statewide election.
But Hoskins said he believes state and federal law prohibit such a repeal, adding that Attorney General Catherine Hanaway and Gov. Mike Kehoe, both Republicans, agree with him....
"It is unconstitutional for citizens to vote on stuff we don't like!" — Gustav2 (comments)
"Missourians are held captive by hostile minority rule." — WaveMotionGum (comments)
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This is typical Nazi behavior.
Now we can say with certainty that Missouri is a state run by Nazi totalitarianism. Boycott the state. Sue the state. Overthrow them.
Staggering lawsuit backfires as judge threatens to expose Trump's finances: report — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
One of President Donald Trump's own lawsuits is forcing him to expose his finances, according to new reporting.
A federal magistrate judge in Florida ruled on Tuesday that Trump has to turn over detailed financial information to the BBC, according to reporting by Politico. Trump is suing the BBC for defamation because of how a documentary framed his January 6 speech.
After a three-hour hearing, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett found that Trump's financial information was fair game for the BBC to explore because his lawsuit put his businesses' reputation at issue. The ruling opened the door for the BBC to look at the financial information of more than 400 companies owned by a Trump family trust, Politico reported.
"All of President Trump's brand, properties and businesses are impugned or said to have been impugned," Lett said. "Reputational, economic damages, all of that is now at issue in this case."
Politico noted that Trump can still appeal the decision to U.S. District Court Judge Roy Altman, who is a Trump appointee, but Trump attorney Alejandro Brito declined to comment on whether they will appeal.
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Leading crime boss threatend with exposure.
Sinister deliveries and death threats hound judge each time he rules against Trump: report — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
U.S. District Judge John McConnell received an unordered pizza delivery to his Rhode Island home addressed to a name that sent chills down his spine: Daniel Anderl.
The name belonged to federal Judge Esther Salas's son, who was shot and killed in 2020 by a disgruntled lawyer targeting his mother, and he told the Washington Post that he called his fellow jurist to warn her.
"I don't think anything disturbed me as much as that did," McConnell recalled.
The sinister delivery was one of many intimidation tactics targeting McConnell after he began issuing rulings against President Donald Trump and his administration. Similar deliveries were sent to federal judges in at least seven states, signaling an alarming new climate for the judiciary.
McConnell, a Barack Obama appointee and chief federal judge in Rhode Island, worked in relative obscurity for 15 years before his security situation drastically changed in early 2025. After he granted a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration's sweeping freeze on trillions in federal funding, the threats began.
Far-right activist Laura Loomer posted about McConnell on social media, accusing him of abusing judicial power. Elon Musk, then heading the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, amplified the post to millions of followers — including a photo of McConnell's daughter, who worked as a political appointee in the Department of Education....
Security incidents of "significant concern" at federal courts jumped 57 percent in fiscal year 2025, with 564 threats to federal judges — up from 509 the previous year. The Marshals Service requested additional funding, warning that "the current and future threat environment [is] expected to intensify."
The threats intensified after each ruling against the administration. When McConnell ruled in June that the Trump administration's freeze on immigration-related applications for citizens of 39 countries violated federal law, a Republican member of Congress moved to impeach him — the second impeachment attempt.
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Considering the number of deaths attributed to mob boss Trump, one must take his death threats seriously.
Trump Goons’ Explosive Oval Office Shouting Match Revealed — Daily Beast|Ewan Palmer
Two officials at the center of the Reflecting Pool fiasco went to war in front of the president.
...Pirro also accused Burgum of deliberately suggesting the pool had been targeted by vandals in order to cover up the botched workmanship of the contractor hired to oversee the renovation.
The former Fox News host came prepared after being summoned to the Oval Office by the 80-year-old president. Pirro arrived for the showdown carrying boxes of evidence that she said showed Burgum’s department had known all along that Hearn did not vandalize the reflecting pool.
Pirro had previously announced that documents eventually produced by the Department of the Interior revealed the liner had already been damaged before Hearn visited the pool on June 19. Her office also noted that an inspection found damage throughout the reflecting pool, including in the middle of it, where “a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining.”
Had Hearn been convicted of the felony property destruction charge, he faced up to 10 years in prison.
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Burgum is not fit for any office.
Trump keeps failing to crush free speech — Oliver Willis
President Donald Trump has been on a tear attacking First Amendment rights ever since he returned to office, and a new analysis reveals that judges have overwhelmingly rejected his administration’s crusade against free speech.
Reuters analyzed 93 cases heard before the federal judiciary on First Amendment grounds, and in 75 of them, the judges found that the Trump administration had infringed on one of America’s oldest rights. The judges had been nominated by presidents of both parties.
Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School and an expert on the interactions between presidents and the First Amendment, told Reuters that Trump has taken more action against speech than any president since Woodrow Wilson, who held office over a century ago when the boundaries of the government’s power over speech were more unclear.
“Trump is operating in this situation where the First Amendment’s boundaries are very ?clear,” Zick told Reuters.
In all of his presidential campaigns, Trump claimed to be a champion of free speech. He and other conservatives frequently said that their right to speech had been infringed, citing alleged censorship on social media platforms. In reality, these claims were almost always bogus. For instance, Trump was banned in 2021 from using Twitter (now X) not for his right-wing views but because he used the platform to incite violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021....
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Trump hates America because he can't dictate control over us. We run this country.
Oregon Senators: Ban Prediction Markets From Taking Bets On Wildfires As This Could Incentivize Arsonists
Portland’s Fox affiliate reports:
A public coalition, including Oregon’s senators, has formally urged the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to block prediction market platforms from offering bets on destructive wildfires, raising alarms over public safety, potential arson, and the ethics of profiting from natural disasters.
The demand follows recent reports that Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, accepted more than $1.2 million in wagers on the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in January 2025. Those Southern California blazes killed 31 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures.
“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” the senators wrote in a letter to CFTC Chair Michael Selig. “There’s also the heightened risk—according to state and local fire officials—that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful.”
The pushback also targets a newly launched prediction platform that allows users to place simulated bets on California wildfires under the slogan, “You can’t predict fire, but you can trade on it.”
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The easiest bets to rig, stem to stern. Outlaw the practice!
Johnson Shrugs At Miller Scandal: “Not My Business”
Politico reports:
Speaker Mike Johnson broke days of silence on explosive allegations of domestic abuse by Rep. Max Miller, calling for investigations to play out as Miller’s former father-in-law, a GOP senator, calls him unfit for office and Republican operatives fret about losing his Ohio House seat. “I haven’t spoken to Max about this in the last few days. Of course, I will,” Johnson said in an interview for POLITICO. “There’s all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time, it’s not my business to get engaged in it.”
Johnson called the allegations “serious” but said he would let an Ethics Committee investigation run its course. Miller denies any wrongdoing and called the claims “politically motivated” Tuesday. Hours later, in a CNN interview, Miller said, “Speaker Mike Johnson, everyone else — they’re standing behind me.” Asked about his name being invoked, Johnson said, “I think what Max is suggesting there is that I’ve been intellectually consistent. We don’t take disciplinary action against members for allegations.”
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So this is the "Xianist?"
Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! Ja! - Ja! ...
Kansas Voters Reject Anti-Abortion Ballot Measure
The New York Times reports:
Kansas voters on Tuesday rejected a ballot measure that would have required state Supreme Court justices to be popularly elected rather than appointed by the governor, dealing another setback to Republican lawmakers trying to overturn a decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.
That ruling in 2019 has preserved Kansas as a significant abortion provider for women in a wide swath of middle-American states that banned abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
The Republican-controlled Legislature put the amendment on Tuesday’s ballot, arguing that the court had repeatedly failed to represent the will of the state’s voters. Lawmakers disagreed with other court rulings, including one requiring the Legislature to spend more on public schools. But Republican leaders made clear to anti-abortion groups that the measure was mainly aimed at abortion.
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Nazis fail again.
Election-Denying Rep Wins Michigan GOP Gov Primary
The Huffington Post reports:
Two-term Rep. John James (R-Mich.) and his endorsement from President Donald Trump on Tuesday appear to have held off self-funding businessman Perry Johnson in the Republican primary for the Michigan governor’s race.
James, 45, a recently converted adherent to Trump’s lie that he won Michigan in 2020, will face the winner of the Democratic primary, which on Tuesday evening appeared to be Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state.
James had previously agreed, accurately, that Democrat Joe Biden won Michigan in 2020, but during a Trump appearance in Oakland County last week, lied that Trump had won the state in all three of his presidential runs.
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Black man joins the Land of the Happy Negro!
The Reflecting Pool story is about Trump’s grip on reality, but the press corps won’t go there — Press Watch|Dan Foomkin
What should journalists do when Donald Trump continues to insist on the existence of something that is entirely imaginary? When he says something happened that didn’t? When he tells them a video shows something that it doesn’t?
I’m talking, of course, about Trump’s preposterous, entirely unsupportable claim that vandals – not his own shoddy contractors – were responsible for the botched renovation of the Reflecting Pool.
From the get-go, Trump’s version of events was wildly, transparently untrue and absurd in light of the nature and extent of the damage and the complete lack of evidence of any vandalism whatsoever.
Most of the Reflecting Pool coverage in the mainstream media has at least provided some indication that his vandalism claims are unproven and disputed.
But that’s not telling the public what’s really going on....
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Subjecting innocent American citizens to pesecution is not becoming to a so-called leader of our country!
Judge carves up DOJ for moving to dismiss Oath Keeper charges — Alternet.org|Matthew Rozsa
The Oath Keepers are a far right group who played a key role in President Donald Trump's attempt to overthrow the government during the January 6th insurrection. Although some of the Oath Keepers have since then turned on the Trump-run state, from opposing snitches to the president's war in Iran, Trump remains loyal to them — and now a judge appointed by President Barack Obama is letting them off the hook.
As first reported by All Rise News, Trump's Justice Department moved to dismiss charges against the Oath Keepers for their violent actions on January 6th, and Judge Amit P. Mehta "reluctantly" went along with it.
Judge Mehta, who was appointed by Obama, expressed his dismay in his ruling.
"After securing vacatur of the convictions of eight Defendants in this case—all members of a group known as the Oath Keepers—the United States now moves pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 48(a) to dismiss the indictment," Mehta wrote. "Reluctantly, the court grants the motion."
He proceeded to point out that the guilt of the accused seems beyond reasonable doubt. At the same time, he felt he did not have the authority to force the Justice Department to proceed with a prosecution it wished to dismiss, regardless of their seemingly partisan reasons for doing so.
"This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6. That book is now closed," Mehta wrote. "Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle."
He concluded, "The court cannot write a different ending."
The Oath Keepers are a far-right, anti-government militia founded in 2009 by Stewart Rhodes, a former U.S. Army paratrooper and disbarred attorney. The group primarily recruits current and former military personnel, law enforcement officers, and first responders, capitalizing on their specialized training. Members pledge to fulfill the organization's core mission: disobeying orders they deem unconstitutional, a philosophy that frequently manifested in heavily armed deployments at volatile civil standoffs, including the 2014 Bundy Ranch dispute...
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Their precepts are reflected in the Trump regime.
They’re done: Families are dumping MAGA relatives for good — Alternet.org|Thom Hartmann
The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last month, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening.
A few weeks ago, Louise and I were having coffee with an old friend who’s known us since the early days of the radio show, and somewhere between the second cup and the muffins she said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Her sister, a three-time Trump voter, had finally called — after months of silence — and demanded to know why our friend had stopped returning her calls.
“It’s just politics,” the sister said. “Why are you taking this so personally?” Our friend, who is queer and married, listened for about 30 seconds and then said, very quietly, “Because you voted for the people who want me to disappear, and you knew that when you did it.”
Then she hung up. She told us she felt awful about it for about an hour, and then she felt nothing at all, and the nothing was almost worse than the guilt would’ve been.
I’ve heard variations on that story dozens of times in the past year, and apparently so have a lot of other people, because a piece making the rounds on Daily Kos a few weeks ago by the writer Vyan put words to something that’s been building in millions of American households since January of 2016.
The piece is bracing and worth reading in full, but the core observation is one that the right-wing media ecosystem genuinely can’t process: their voters are suddenly discovering that their daughters and sons and nieces and old college roommates no longer want to come to July 4th, Thanksgiving, and other holidays.
They’re treating this as some inexplicable “progressive cruelty,” as if the rest of us simply woke up one morning and decided to be petty.
Greg Gutfeld did a whole monologue on it on Fox “News.” The framing, of course, is that you’re the unreasonable one for refusing to “look past” a single political choice your father or your uncle made:
“Can’t you just love them anyway? Why are you being so hateful?”
Here’s the thing they can’t quite bring themselves to say out loud, because saying it out loud would require admitting what they actually did: they didn’t vote for lower egg prices, although that’s the cover story most of them have settled on by now.
They voted for a man who descended an escalator in 2015 and called brown-skinned Mexicans rapists, who described non-white immigrants as “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language historians of fascism noted at the time was lifted almost verbatim from Mein Kampf.
They voted for him again in 2024 knowing exactly who he was, knowing what he’d promised to do, knowing that Stephen Miller had spent two years describing on podcast after podcast a deportation operation that would, in Miller’s own words, require building “very large staging facilities” and deploying the military against the civilian population.
They knew.
The Heritage Foundation published a 900-page blueprint to, in my words, “Make America White Again.” Miller did the interviews. JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” before he became his running mate, and then ran with him anyway, and the voters knew that, too.
So what they got is exactly the hate and racism they voted for, and now, 17 months into the second Trump administration, more than 675,000 people have been deported, the ICE detention population has swelled to over 68,000 — a 70 percent increase over where it stood at the end of the Biden years — and people are dying inside those facilities at a rate this country has never seen before....
Gutfeld and his colleagues want to frame all of this as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as a kind of emotional incontinence on the left. But there’s a much older word for refusing to extend warmth and intimacy to people who’ve signed off on the persecution of your neighbors and those who stand for democracy against authoritarianism, and it’s not derangement.
It’s conscience.
The Germans who quietly stopped inviting their Nazi-sympathizing brothers-in-law to dinner in 1934 weren’t being dramatic. They were doing the only honest thing left to do, and most of them, looking back from the rubble in 1946, wished they’d done it sooner and louder.
We’re not in 1934 yet. The midterms are five months away. The country still has somewhat functioning courts (other than SCOTUS), a free press that’s bruised but breathing, and the kind of organized opposition that can flip a House and possibly even Senate majority if enough of us show up.
Look up the local organizations doing rapid-response work for detained families through groups like the Detention Watch Network.
And when the MAGA friend or relative in your life asks why you’ve gone quiet, you don’t owe them a fight and you don’t owe them an apology. You owe them, if you choose to give it at all, the truth: that you saw what they helped build, and you’ve decided you’d rather associate with someone else.
The rest of this year is going to demand more of us than ever before. Pretending otherwise is no longer an option.
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That man they voted for is robbing the country blind with the help of an oligarchy.
Racism, sexism, patriarchy, spite and stupidity, and the big one, FASCISM, will not be tolerated by the people here and of the world who are striving to live according to the precepts of humanity.
They will refuse to read this and if they do read it they won't get it anway. These people are lost and hopeless.
'Golf was cool': Famed sportswriter unloads on 'greasy orange splotch' Trump — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
On Tuesday, in the wake of allegations that President Donald Trump cheated during a golf tournament at his New Jersey course over the weekend, famed sportswriter Rick Reilly delivered an unreserved assessment of the commander-in-chief’s performance — not only at golf, but generally speaking.
“Notice how Trump f—— up everything?” Reilly posted. “Reflecting pool was fine. Now it's fenced off. Kennedy Center was fine. Now it's closed. WH was fine. Now it looks like a 99-cent Thai joint. Boats sailed thru Hormuz. Now Iran owns it. Golf was cool. Now there's a greasy orange splotch on it.”...
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The game that Trump plays is not golf. Not the way he plays it.
Exonerated ex-Olympian just put the Trump administration on notice — Alternet.org|Elizabeth Preza
David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist who recently found himself at the center of a legal firestorm thanks to President Donald Trump, is reviewing “all options” after the Department of Justice on Friday admitted the charges brought against him were based on a false claims.
Hearn was charged on July 2 with one felony count of vandalism after U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro claimed he inflicted “widespread damage” at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Last Friday, Pirro dropped the charges against Hearn, acknowledging the damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by “a botched installation and not vandalism.” Pirro’s motion on Friday directly contradicts Trump’s oft-repeated claim that vandals slashed the pool lining.
An attorney for Hearn told the Guardian “all options are on the table” as he seeks legal recourse for the arrest.
According to the Guardian, “Hearn ‘has a number of potential remedies’ after being prosecuted in connection with pool damage now attributed to faulty work by a contractor, attorney Steven Levin said in a statement. Levin added that those could include ‘civil suits, bar referrals for the prosecutors involved, request for sanctions and reimbursement of attorneys’ fees and expenses,’ and requests for investigations by various government entities, including Congress.”
As the Guardian reports, Hearn’s attorney have previously demanded a public apology from the Trump administration.
“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should have never been brought,” Levin and attorney Norm Eisen wrote Friday on X. “Its dismissal … does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong.”...
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Sue Trump for everything he's "stollen!"
Senate Judiciary Republicans Advance Blanche Nomination, Co-Signing His Scandalous Record at DOJ — Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community|Newswire Editor
Today, Republicans on the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary voted to advance Todd Blanche’s nomination to be U.S. Attorney General to the full Senate.
Stand Up America’s Managing Director of Policy & Political Affairs, Brett Edkins, issued the following statement on Blanche’s confirmation:
“Every Senate Judiciary Republican just endorsed Todd Blanche’s extreme agenda for the Department of Justice: politically motivated prosecutions of the president’s perceived enemies, defending and giving taxpayer-funded settlements to January 6th insurrectionists, burying the Epstein files, and shielding Trump and his family from the IRS.
“Now it’s up to the full Senate. Are there still Republicans willing to stand up to the president—willing to say they’re against weaponizing the Justice Department, against shielding Trump and his family from accountability, and against protecting predators in the Epstein files? The Senate doesn’t need unanimous courage to block Blanche—it needs a few Republicans willing to put country over party.”
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They now may be proven co-conspirators in Blanche's crimes.
BMW Suddenly Blasts Its Cars’ Internal Screens With Aggressive Advertisements — Futurism|Frank Landymore
For certain BMW owners, enormous car payments aren’t the only rude reminder that they don’t actually own their ride yet: now, irritating in-vehicle commercials will send them the same message.
Starting last week, the German automaker started blasting a promotion for the new Spider-Man movie into its customers’ cars without warning — because nothing says riding in luxury like a full-vehicle pop-up ad. BMW, showing that it was about as in-touch as its drivers are familiar with turn signals, teased the promotion as a “special surprise.”
According to The Autopian‘s coverage and the heaps of complaints online, the ad appears on the center console screen when you start up the car. When the ad’s done playing — a cheap looking animation that doesn’t come close to warranting all this hubbub — it even has the gall to ask you to scan a QR code.
While it does give you the option to play or skip the “festive animation,” it’s still an annoying extra step drivers have to take before pulling up the map they need or the music they want to listen to. It’s also a breach of trust: drivers keep their cars connected so they receive critical software updates, not unexpectedly see ads hen they’re trying to hit the road.
Few owners were pleased. Enthusiasts in the r/BMW subreddit had a veritable meltdown when someone posted footage of the ad playing on their infotainment system.
“BMW should stop with this sh*t,” one user fumed.
“F*ck everything about this,” another said....
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Greed and avarice have taken root here and in world culture. Like the goddamn loud ads that run on gas pumps everytime you have to fuel up. This must be stamped out!
This isn't hell yet but we can see it from here.
Parents Horrified as Boomer Mawmaws Gift Children Blatant AI Slop Picture Books — Futurism|Frank Landymore
Nothing escapes the sloppifying tentacles of AI. Not even precious parent-child reading time.
As Wired reports, moms and dads across the country are having AI-generated children’s books inflicted on them by the tots’ well-meaning grandparents, sometimes creating tensions within the family.
Grandma and grampa think it’s cute to use AI to churn out a picture book with their grandchildren in it. But the parents often aren’t impressed, on top of being horrified by the implications of their kids being fed into an AI model in the first place.
One parent fumed about this scenario in a Reddit post spotted by Wired, distraught that their mother wouldn’t take the hint.
“I have reiterated countless times that I do not support AI-generated art, and drew a hard line that she is absolutely not to feed any of our photos into AI or use our identifying information in any way,” they wrote. “However, she is creating these storylines based on experiences with my kid and modeling her characters to have similar attributes as my kid, and us[ing] our family’s first names so that they represent us and my kid will ‘see her family reflected.'”
An entire industry has popped up to support — or AI-generate — this niche, Wired noted. Multiple services like Imagitime, StoryWonderBook, and Childbook.ai, all offer an easy way to insert kids straight into an imagined AI story.
Like their parents, the kids don’t seem impressed by the AI creations, either. One dad with a seven and three year old kid told Wired that the tykes were “bored” by the “personalized” AI-generated books they received from friends and family members.
“They are so long and wordy that, after one time through, each of my kids was like, ‘Yeah, OK, let’s read Little Blue Truck,'” he says, naming a best-selling children’s series by author Alice Schertle.
For Daozhi Xu, a researcher at Macquarie University who published an analysis of the “AI children’s book boom,” this isn’t surprising.
“Children do not love a storybook simply because their name or image appears in the story; they love the book because the story itself is interesting,” Xu told Wired.
“Compared with human-authored books,” Xu adds, the AI-generated versions “often lack humor, memorable characters, and dramatic tension.”...
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Shiny objects attract a certain level.
Court Upholds FL Ban On Drag In View Of Children
The Tallahassee Democrat reports:
Florida’s law meant to prevent children from attending “sexually explicit” drag shows doesn’t violate the First Amendment, according to a majority of federal appellate judges who weighed in on the contentious measure.
The case now heads back to a trial court in Orlando; the appeals court struck down what’s called a preliminary injunction that prevents enforcement of the law while the case is pending, saying that the plaintiff, the Hamburger Mary’s restaurant of Orlando, “failed to establish a substantial likelihood” that it would ultimately win its case.
On Aug. 4, an 8-5 majority in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the state law was constitutional; critics had warned its enforcement imperiled the free expression of LGBTQ+ and drag communities. James Uthmeier, Florida’s attorney general, promptly celebrated the state’s victory on X, saying that “after 3 years of litigation, the full court affirmed the constitutionality of Florida’s ban on children attending sexualized drag shows.”
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Clearly indicating they've never seen a Pastor child molester they didn't like! Drag queens still pitching a shutout!
Florida Pastor Arrested On Child Sex Charges [VIDEO]
Tampa’s Fox affiliate reports:
A 42-year-old Winter Haven pastor faces numerous charges after investigators said he lured a 14-year-old boy he met on a dating app and exposed him to HIV during multiple sexual encounters. Investigators said Chaneyfield connected with the teen on a dating app before moving their communications to Instagram. Chaneyfield, according to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, picked up the boy three times in front of the child’s neighborhood and drove him to his home in Eagle Lake for sex.
Deputies charged Chaneyfield with three counts of lewd battery of a minor, three counts of interfering with custody of a minor, unlawful use of a two-way communication device, three counts of traveling to meet a minor, four counts of an HIV-infected person having sex without informing their partner, possession of cannabis and five counts of possession of drug paraphernalia. Authorities said they gave the teenage victim an HIV medical treatment cocktail.
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Florida seems to recognize them. Maybe they can get in touch with Tennessee on their problem.
Reuters: US Has “Used Up” Its Long-Range Missiles
Reuters reports:
The U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s ?readiness for future conflicts. The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.
The ?degree to which the military is running out of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles has not been previously reported. The long-range munitions are an important part the military’s arsenal, allowing accurate strikes from a safe distance. U.S.-supplied ATACMS have played a key role in the war in Ukraine, allowing Ukrainian forces to attack targets inside Russia. The PrSM is a newer, more advanced generation that will replace the ATACMS, which have a shorter range.
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Oops! Were they keeping track with a database? Not to worry. Pete still has some nuclear bombs left.
Western Europe Is Richer Than the US — People's Policy Project
There has been a weird debate over the last few months about whether the United States is better off than Western Europe. The participants of this debate tend to operate under the shared premise that people in the United States are richer than people in Western Europe, and then quibble over whether that means it is better. But this shared premise is incorrect. Once you adjust typical economic aggregates for hours worked and inequality, Western Europe clearly pulls ahead of the United States....
To account for differences in leisure time across countries, you want to look at GDP per hour worked, which is a figure the OECD also provides....
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Take a look at the chart. There are choices here for the youngsters looking to escape a facist U.S.
Outrage as GOP senator caught red-handed standing up Epstein survivors: ‘Beyond cowardly’ — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) sparked outrage Tuesday after being captured on video agreeing to meet with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein – only to snub them moments later.
In a video published Tuesday by Cheyenne Hunt, a progressive attorney and political activist, Tillis could be seen confronted by prominent Epstein survivors requesting a meeting.
“I want to meet not with the attorneys, but with the survivors and have a discussion,” Tillis could be heard saying.
“We would love that!” an Epstein survivor off camera could be heard saying.
As he made his way to an elevator, Tillis then instructed the Epstein survivors to go to his office, which he pointed to and described as being “just around the corner.” As relayed by Hunt, however, those Epstein survivors later claimed Tillis was a no-show.
“We caught Tillis on camera and got him to agree to meet with the Epstein survivors ahead of a vote on [Acting Attorney General] Todd Blanche. They sat in his office for 45 minutes before his staff told them he wasn’t coming,” Hunt wrote Tuesday in a social media post on X.
“He clearly agreed to meet with them, only to stand them up in his office. Beyond disrespectful and cowardly.”
The ordeal occurred as Epstein survivors continue to press lawmakers not to confirm Blanche as permanent attorney general. The Justice Department, headed by Blanche, has faced intense scrutiny for revealing the personal identities of Epstein survivors, as well as withholding millions of Epstein-related files and redacting those it did release beyond what law permitted.
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Tillis and Cornyn. They are not men. They are the devolvement of men. The souless failed.
'No way to assuage them': Cornyn blows off Epstein survivors after giving Blanche a pass — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) dismissed the concerns of survivors of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein just moments after he voted to allow acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to get a full vote on the Senate floor.
After explaining during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that he has no problem with the controversial Blanche becoming President Donald Trump’s next attorney general because of a compromise on the president’s IRS immunity deal, he was cornered in the hallway by reporters.
Telling the assembled reporters he was pleased that he got Blanche to agree with him on the so-called “slush fund,” he was asked, “Survivors said that your vote was going to have a chilling effect on survivors of sexual assault and things like that. What's your response to them? They were frustrated that you didn't meet with them in person.”
“Well, what happened to them is, is a tragedy,” he demurred. ”There's — we know that people have been convicted of trafficking in the crimes and Epstein is no longer no longer with us.”
“But I don't believe there's anything we could do to assuage them at this point,” he stated. “But we need to continue to help them every way we can, but I just think that's one of those things that cannot be remedied with a no vote.”
Cornyn did not address the fact that, as attorney general, Blanche can sit on the Epstein files as he and former Attorney General Pam Bondi have been accused of doing since the DOJ took control of them.
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He's right. There's nothing a spineless coward like him can do. He's a total failure as a human.
Vote for Talarico!
Now They've Defeated 'Biological Men In Women's Sports' They Can Move On To Defeating Women's Sports — Wonkette|Denny Carter
The American political press, defanged and traumatized by 50 years of right-wing attacks as well as captured by oligarchs who want a quick and tidy end to democracy, was either unable or unwilling to report honestly on Project 2025 in the final months of the 2024 election, and today we pay a steep and escalating cost for that.
That includes, naturally, the increasingly tenuous role of women in American society. Pete Hegseth is firing any and every woman in the military who has ever been so much as considered for a promotion; state-level Republicans are pushing new and sadistic ways to punish women for seeking — or god forbid, obtaining — abortion services; women professors are being targeted for merely existing; and regime-aligned media appears more and more interested in the prospect of eviscerating women’s sports in the US.
Ladies can’t be barefoot and pregnant and making sandwiches if they’re shooting hoops or dribbling downfield or dodging defenders on the football field, after all. Try to drill a 15-foot jumper while putting together a ham sandwich. You can’t. I’ve tried....
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Malignant sexism in a backward America. Total disgrace.
Ground Control to Major Don — The Bulwark|William Kristol
The United States, Reuters reports today, has used “virtually all” its stockpile of long-range precision missiles during five-plus months of conflict in Iran. But we probably won’t be needing them anyway—after all, you only need missiles when you get involved in wars, and our peace-loving president wouldn’t do a thing like that.
Here’s something you DO need: a Bulwark+ membership. It’ll let you access our locked content, watch videos without ads, and join in the comments sections. Our two-week free trial offer expires tonight, so sign up today!
President Spaceman
by Andrew Egger
It’s been stranger than usual, watching Donald Trump operate this week. The president has long lived on a different planet from the rest of us—a world defined by his own personal information bubble of yes-men and online fans shouting his praises. But it’s rarely been so clear just how far Trump’s planet is from our reality.
Take Iran. To hear the president tell it, America is forever on the verge of total victory. He is perpetually giving the mullahs one last, last, last chance to surrender before he turns their country into a parking lot—then inventing some pretext to call off the attack, pretending Iran has waved some secret white flag and is ready to make a deal.
Now, however, Iran is barely bothering even to participate in this charade. Which leaves the president performing a strange one-man play: After threatening to level Iran with “Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II,” Trump announced Saturday he would hold off because “the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to.”What did this deal involve? “The Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran’s nuclear threat.” Talks on such a deal, he said, would get underway Monday.
We’ve seen this movie before: What Trump is describing is essentially the memorandum of understanding that he signed back in June, which has been out of force for weeks. This time, however, his assertions are even more fanciful: No such deal exists, and no talks are ongoing.
Iran said as much yesterday, insisting its only current direct negotiations are with Oman to work out joint control of the previously open strait—exactly the opposite, in other words, of what Trump claimed. This contradiction led to another tantrum from Trump, who called Iran “unbelievably duplicitous” in a post yesterday, but declined to resume his threats of devastating military action....
Trump has spent a decade trying to drag us along the path of his own suspended reality. But something has snapped; the real world has moved back onto its own course. Trump’s planet—where America is the hottest country in the world, Iran has been brought to its knees, vandals who destroyed the Reflecting Pool will be brought to justice, and he is extraordinarily popular and oh so good at golf—is so far from Earth it can no longer be seen with the naked eye. And as more and more people begin to wake up to this fact, the president is making no effort to reverse thrust. Already his world cannot be seen except through our most powerful telescopes; soon we may be unable to see him at all.
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Trump will waste a great deal more of our money!
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The GOP’s Blind Eye to Abuse
by William Kristol
Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and nominee for attorney general, Todd Blanche, will most likely be reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning on a party-line vote. He’ll likely be confirmed later this week on another party-line vote by the full Senate. So the man who directed the Trump administration’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup, who flew to Florida to meet with Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell right after the notorious Trump birthday card to Epstein became public, and who a week later presided over her move to the low-level federal prison facility, will become attorney general of the United States.
There are major figures in both the Democratic and Republican parties who were closely tied to Jeffrey Epstein. The whole Epstein story sheds a terrible light on a not insignificant part of the American elite. But right now, it’s only the Republican party that’s voting to continue the coverup. It’s only the Republican party that’s voting to ensure that there will be no further federal investigation of the Epstein matter nor prosecution of—or even accountability for—other wrongdoers.
Which brings us to Representative Max Miller, the former Trump White House aide, now a Republican congressman from Ohio’s 7th congressional district. Miller has been unconvincingly, to say the least, defending himself against spousal and child abuse charges from his ex-wife, whom he married in 2022 at Donald Trump’s golf club in New Jersey. For now, at least, Miller says he’s not resigning from Congress, or even giving up on his re-election bid this year....
So some Republicans like Max Miller. Some are concerned because they think he may lose the seat. Some are concerned because the daughter of a fellow senator is involved. But if Miller had abused someone who wasn’t the daughter of a senator, and if there were no electoral repercussions, would any of them have spoken up to condemn his behavior?
No.
It would be unfair to say the Republican party is pro-abuse. But it might be fair to say they seem to be anti-anti-abuse. They seem happy to turn a blind eye to abuse. They certainly don’t seem to get too upset about the abuse of women.
But we shouldn’t be surprised. It is, after all, Donald Trump’s party.
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Still abusing after all these tears?
'Insane!' GOP nailed by shouting senator for ignoring Trump's 'mountain of excrement' — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) lashed out at his Republican colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee for ignoring what he called a mountain of evidence of corruption involving President Donald Trump and his family.
Moments before acting Attorney General Blanche was approved by a party-line vote to advance to a full Senate vote on President Donald Trump’s appointee, the exasperated New Jersey Democrat yelled at his counterparts and the administration over their blame game aimed at former President Joe Biden while Trump rakes in billions.
"They have become so obsessed with the millions that the Bidens have made that they have ignored completely the billions of dollars that the Trump family is making,” he accused. “That is like being obsessed and using a magnifying glass to study the stain on the living room carpet when behind you is a mountain of excrement covering the living room couch and coffee table.”
“This is so outrageous, the lack of proportionality going on — it is laughable. This is absolutely insane that we have a president of the United States who has now made $2 billion doing what?” he shouted.
“Wow, he is such a shrewd businessman, let me create my own crypto coin and have four nations invest,” he added sarcastically. “Oh, and by the way, if you are a corporation, America? Put my children on the board; they will get no-bid contracts!"
“This is a judiciary committee,” he lectured. “We are supposed to be checking and balancing this nation. Why have people on both sides of the aisle given up on any trust in government? It is because we are surrendering any shred of integrity.”
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Preaching to the guilty. And they all know it.
Please Read The Letter. Tabs, Tues., Aug. 4, 2026 — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Judge Boxwine Firing Watch. Donald Trump is VERY MAD at Jeanine Pirro for failing to successfully pursue fake/made-up charges against people for touching his precious Reflecting Pool that he fucked himself by being a bad developer. Will she get fired? Don’t know, but if you bought some extra stock in box wine companies today anticipating a surge in sales, we wouldn’t think that was crazy. [New York Times / New York Times / CNN]
Donald Trump’s little pomeranian ass-sniffer Todd Blanche promised on a call with a bunch of Christian Nazi types last week to make abortion illegal in every state. Not sure how he thinks he can do that, but if he does, we can thank Thom Tillis and John Cornyn for caving and voting to make him Trump’s personal lawyer, we mean attorney general. [Politico]
You will be shocked, by the way, but there are LOTS of loopholes in the pomeranian’s “rollback” of Trump’s slush fund for his favorite terrorists and kid-touchers. Surprise! [New York Times]
Gaudy trashy Dear Leader is very upset that he doesn’t get to keep the baubles people give him.
Grandma Wrestlemania over there at the Education Department is trying to force colleges to hire MAGA faculty, AKA stupid people, so in case your kids come home from college sounding like they have head injuries, that could be why. [Politico]
The Trump regime also wants to cut off student loans for people who major in brainy things MAGA doesn’t understand, like “social work” and “religious studies” and “music.” There’s even right-wingers who are pissed about this. [New Republic]
Alleged Republican Pervert Of The Day: Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina! [TPM]...
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More crap on the Trump fail.
Killing Unions: The Greatest Political Heist in American History — The Hartmann Report|Thom Hartmann
They didn't rob a bank. They robbed entire generations by dismantling the one institution powerful enough to stand up to corporate America
Yesterday I published Chapter 9 from my new book Who Killed the American Dream? detailing how nearly a half-century of Reaganomics have left the middle class in this country in tatters.
— Houses in 1981 — when Reagan was sworn into office and kicked off the neoliberal Reagan Revolution — cost about 3 times an individual worker’s annual paycheck; today it’s roughly 10 times
— It was that decade when productivity stopped tracking payroll for the first time in almost a century; if workers today were paid based on the same productivity formula as they were that year and for most of a century before, the average salary would be $100,000 a year, about twice what it is today. If the federal minimum wage had simply tracked inflation since 1964 it would be around $14 nationally now, also about twice what it is today.
— Drugs were cheap, hospitals and health insurance companies were non-profits, college was free or cheap, and because anti-monopoly laws were enforced until Reagan stopped the antitrust cops in 1983 both suburban malls and downtown main streets were filled with local family-owned businesses.
All of these changes — literally every single one — has come about because Republicans working in service to America’s morbidly rich oligarchs were successful in using treason to seize political power in 1980, and then used that power to gut the Democratic Party’s single largest source of funding.
And the biggest factor in facilitating all of these decades of GOP rule since was that single variable: the 1980s destruction of America’s labor unions.
Mention unions today and the media will yawn, but they were the key component to building the world’s first middle class that reached more than half a nation’s population by the 1960s.
In 1981, two-thirds of us were in that middle class with a single paycheck; today it’s between 41 and 47 percent of us (depending on whose numbers you use) and it requires two full-time paychecks. The single largest reason for this change is Reagan’s intentional destruction of America’s labor unions....
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Union now! Union forever!
Blue States Warn SCOTUS On Trump’s Mail Ballots Edict
NOTUS reports:
A group of states told the Supreme Court on Monday there would be “extraordinary consequences” if the Trump administration is allowed to move forward with an overhaul of mail-in voting rules so close to the midterm election.
The filing responded to a Trump administration request that the justices allow federal agencies to implement two parts of an executive order that directed the U.S. Postal Service to create mail ballot rules and the Department of Homeland Security to compile a national database of eligible voters.
A lower court order has blocked those parts of the order in nearly half of all states and the District of Columbia. Those states told the Supreme Court there would be a limited window to correct errors, which could disenfranchise the voters that rely on mail-in voting, such as older Americans and people with disabilities. Other voters would be confused about getting their ballots or whether the USPS would deliver them.
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Stop Trump's attack on U.S. voters!
Pentagon out of ideas to end Iran war after Hegseth killed ‘woke’— Daily Kos|Oliver Willis
As President Donald Trump’s war in Iran rages on, the Pentagon is seeking suggestions on how to deal with it.
According to CNN, a senior military officer at U.S. Central Command sent a request to military analysts, asking “for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran”—which comes after the Trump administration purged and suppressed diverse voices in the armed forces.
Sources told CNN that the request was unusual because it was sent via email.
The request comes months into the Iran war, which Trump has been unable and unwilling to justify—bouncing between claims of destroying Iran’s military arsenal, pushing for regime change, and other arguments.
Iran has been able to use Trump’s war to restrict traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, causing global energy prices to skyrocket. Both Americans and Iranians have been killed, and the Trump administration has been withholding information on the deaths, casualties, and attacks.
The military’s plea for assistance comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the advancement of Black and women military members who were slated to be promoted. Hegseth has also been pushing rules on grooming that would disproportionately lead to more Black soldiers being removed from service....
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Trump is leading the Land of the Happy Negro, not the USA!
Trump Backs Anti-LGBTQ Missouri Rep For US House
Brattin appeared here several times last month for his crusade to defund a “grooming” local library over its Rainbow Reading Time.
He appeared here in 2024 when he objected to a rape exception in Missouri’s abortion ban because “giving birth is God healing” the victim.
Brattin first appeared here in 2017 when he declared that there’s a “distinction” between human beings and LGBTQ people. That earned him a scathing rebuke from the editorial board of the Kansas City Star.
In December 2023, Brattin appeared here when he authored or co-sponsored nearly two dozen anti-LGBTQ bills. One of his bills would make it a felony to perform drag in the view of children, another would institute a K-6 “Don’t Say Gay” law.
In 2014, Brattin introduced a bill that would require women seeking abortion to get written permission from the father of the fetus. In 2022, Brattin ran for the US House, finishing second in the GOP primary.
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If America wants to reach its aspirations it must stop putting retarded sexist throwbacks in office.
CNN Runs Side-By-Side Clip Of Trump Boasting About His Pool Contractor, Then Denying That He Knows Him
Washington DC’s NBC affiliate reports:
Trump said in April that he had consulted with a trio of firms that had worked on swimming pools at his properties and that the one he picked for the Reflecting Pool project had done work at his golf course in Northern Virginia.
That firm was Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was awarded a $14.7 million no-bid contract to repaint and waterproof its concrete floor. “I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools,” Trump said then. “He looked at it. He called me up. He said, ‘Sir, we can do something on it.’”
But the president insisted Monday that “I didn’t know the contractor” and for the first time hinted that he wasn’t pleased by the work that was done to get the Reflecting Pool ready in time for Independence Day celebrations. “I’m not saying I was 100% thrilled with the contractor, but the contractor was rushing. We wanted to get it open for July 4th,” he said.
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The fool on the hill.
Idaho Mass Shooter Revealed As Ardent Trump Cultist
The New York Post reports:
The In-N-Out gunman who killed two people and wounded seven others during a rifle-wielding mass shooting in Idaho was a college dropout who previously railed against crime in chilling X posts, The Post can exclusively reveal. “Last month a man pointed an AK-47 at the door of a house only streets away from my childhood home,” he wrote in a Nov. 14, 2024 post. He mostly commented on news of the day, and often wrote about crime and immigration — supporting tougher enforcement.
Williams expressed concern about random violence in New York City, and blamed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. “Bragg downgraded 60% of felony cases last year, including violent crimes…New Yorkers don’t feel safe in their own city,” reads a message he re-shared on X in November 2024. “Meanwhile, in Trump’s case, he elevated 34 charges to felonies…It’s time for DAs that prioritize public safety over politics,” it said.
Williams also posted about protecting the First and Second Amendments. “Thank you to [Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna] for cosponsoring HR 9534, the National Constitutional Carry Act. No one should have to beg the government to exercise a constitutionally protected right anywhere in the country,” read another post he re-shared.
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Like Trump. a killer.
Critics: Blanche’s Slush Fund Docs Aren’t Binding
The New York Times reports:
A pair of documents issued by the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, that narrow or dissolve aspects of a deal to resolve President Trump’s lawsuit against the I.R.S. have met the demands of two Republican holdouts. Critics, however, say the written assurances are a political solution to a political problem, rather than a legally binding document.
“This case was flagrantly illegal from the start and they’re clearly trying to find a political way out of it that gets the attorney general confirmed without giving up their legal rights to actually enforce this illegal settlement,” said Matthew Platkin, a Democratic former New Jersey attorney general. He is now in private practice, representing various people suing over the fund.
One of the two documents Mr. Blanche released stated that the order creating the fund “is rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” The second document limits a provision that gave broad protection to Mr. Trump, his relatives, and “related or affiliated individuals” from tax audits. The new written order from Mr. Blanche says that the provision only covers the president, two of his sons and his company, and that it applies “only retroactively.” Mr. Platkin said that was clearly not the case.
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Since when do criminals care about something they do being legal?
We are so fucked by these hoods.
Missouri Is Taking The Scenic Route To Killing Old And Poor People — Crooks and Liars|Andrea Thompson
Tomorrow, Missourians are slated to cast their votes on Amendment 5, a proposition that seeks to increase taxes on seniors and middle-class citizens in an effort to fund massive tax cuts for the highest earners in the state.
The Amendment would effectively dissolve the state's individual income tax; money that makes up approximately 64% of Missouri's general fund and serves as the main pool for everything ranging from infrastructure and schools to healthcare and public safety -- all in favor of giving the rich a bit thicker lining in their pockets.
As if that weren't already bad enough, Proposition 5 seeks to close the gap in lost revenue for the state with a steep hike in sales tax, in a state where low and middle-class citizens already pay a wildly disproportionate lion's share of the taxes required to fund public services. If passed, this Amendment would only serve to pile more of Missouri's fiscal responsibility onto the shoulders of middle, working-class citizens -- teachers, truck drivers, farmers -- who already barely manage to keep roofs over their heads and food on their tables, while further unburdening anyone who actually has the money to spare.
The Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy reports that Missourians with incomes ranging from $50,000-$80,000 will be expected to pay $535 more in taxes if the amendment passes.
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Take all their money and hope that kills them all soon. Joining the Retarded States of American, eh? Cease any and all traffic and seal all borders to the area. There are zombies at work here.
Trump: I Should Be Entitled To Keep Gifts From Public
“We have Desiree, who’s been with us for a long time. She basically responds to the public when the public — they send things. Sometimes they send gifts. Actually, it amounts to millions of dollars in small money, and I said, ‘Well, what happens to that money?’ They send it back, or they do charitable work. It’s literally millions. They send it to me. I should be able to get it. She won’t give it to me. I should be entitled to it.” – Trump, pretending to joke with the White House official in charge of gifts. Trump will be keeping the $400 million jet “gifted” to him by Qatar.
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Anyone that sends the moron a "gift" does'nt know shit from applebutter.
Sec. Roadkill: “I Will Literally Eat Anything” [VIDEO]
The Daily Beast reports:
“I will literally eat anything. I don’t have uhh, I don’t have umm, I don’t have a gag reflex. Let me put it like that,” Kennedy said when asked about the most exotic food he has tried. “I will eat anything,” Kennedy repeated—an eyebrow-raising admission from a health secretary who has spent much of his tenure challenging Americans to rethink what they put in their bodies. “And, I’m, uhh, I love experimenting with foods. I love all different kinds of food.”
He continued, “When I travel, I’ll eat, you know, even stuff I find on the street, you know, street vendors.” The interview took an awkward turn when USA Today’s Swapna Ramaswamy asked what foods Kennedy had eaten that “may be gross for others.” Kennedy laughed sheepishly and looked off to the side before offering a telling response. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Yeah, I’m getting a signal not to answer that question.”
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The one thing he refuses to eat is humble pie.
Trump: I Was Chosen By God, Send Money At Once
From Trump’s latest money beg:
I was never supposed to be President. I was never supposed to survive the bullet of an assassin, BUT I DID.
I was never supposed to be President of the United States again, BUT I AM. I was never supposed to Make America Great Again, BUT I WILL NEVER SURRENDER!
The great behemoth known as the Democrat Party threw everything at me: Hoaxes, Witch Hunts, Impeachments, Election Interference, Raids, Arrests, and so much more!
But the steady compass of Faith has guided my hands through it all. NOW, the government is completely shut down, and they think MAGA IS DONE. We can’t take our foot off the gas!
I was saved for this one reason: to Make America Great Again. I was made for this, BUT MAGA IS POWERED BY YOU.
That’s why I’ve launched a 24 HOUR TRUMP FUNDRAISING BLITZ, and I’m asking everyone to chip in $15 to make it one for the record books!
Every time they count us out – count YOU out – we come back bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.
This is our moment to show the world that we will NEVER back down, NEVER give an inch, and NEVER SURRENDER in our fight to save this country.
So if you’re with me all the way to the end, join with MILLIONS of your fellow PATRIOTS by chipping in $15 to keep the wins rolling in!
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Replies to bullshit in order:
(Of course not. He means the wrestling stunt he pullled with the blood cap he broke on his ear while the gunman committed murder to show it was all not an act.)
(He has never made America anything but a failed country. He surrenders every 10 minutes)
(The Democratic Party told nothing but truth to lies)
(He has no faith and he knows we know it)
(Redundant. Did he forget?)
(His fundraising scam is worse than flushing it down the toilet)
(A cash hoarder? Don't count me in on his cons.)
(He has already surrendered in Iran)
(Redundant again. This also proves the suckers are still stuckers)
Anyone who believes Trump's bullshit needs total remedial education.
Trump 'doesn't know what’s going on' and is incapable of figuring it out: niece — Alternet.org|Nick Hilden
President Donald Trump’s confused response to questioning last week was a sign that he “doesn’t know what’s going on” in the face of grave threats from U.S. adversaries. This is according to his niece, psychologist Mary L. Trump, who responded on Monday to her uncle’s surprise at reports that China is sending weapons to Iran.
Trump was speaking with reporters in the Oval Office last week when he was asked about a new report that Iran was expected to receive its first shipment of hundreds of Chinese-made shoulder-fired air-defense missile launchers. "Well, that would be surprising,” responded Trump. “I mean, things like that happen, but that would be surprising. He [Chinese President Xi Jinping] told me very ?strongly he wouldn't partake, but he knows I'd be quite disappointed.”
“What’s he telling us there?” asked Mary Trump. “He doesn’t know what’s going on.” If this is the case, she says, President Xi lied to Trump, and the latter bought it or is simply oblivious altogether. Another possibility, according to Mary Trump: her uncle knew that he was being lied to, and is now pretending otherwise.
But there’s another key thing to consider: “Iran is about to get more weaponry with which to attack U.S. troops and our allies,” notes Mary Trump. President Trump, however, doesn’t seem to care, shrugging it off as a disappointment.
As Newsweek explains, “A Chinese company is set to supply Iran with hundreds of portable anti-air missile systems as the Islamic Republic seeks to rebuild air defenses devastated by United States and Israeli strikes, according to Reuters. The report comes just days after U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated that Chinese leader Xi Jinping had assured him Chinese firms would not arm Tehran.”...
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Our out-of-whack leader whom only about 1/3 of voters or less support now.
Trump's Approval Rating Hits A New Low. He Calls It His Best Ever — Crooks and Liars|Conover Kennard
Donald J. Trump took to Truth Social this morning to declare that his "REAL Polling Numbers" are "the best they have ever been," which is quite a flex for a President currently posting the worst approval ratings of either of his terms.
Trump's poll numbers are bad, and deservedly so.
Quinnipiac has him at 32-58. AP-NORC's late-July poll was the lowest the pollster has recorded since he returned to the White House. And Nate Silver's aggregate puts him underwater further than his post-January 6th low in his first term.
And in one recent poll by CNN, Trump's iron-clad grip on his own party appears to be loosening. Finally.
None of that stopped Trump from crediting the (fictional) numbers to "the biggest tax cuts and employment numbers EVER," a "totally secure Border," a "giant Victory in Venezuela," and the "Denuclearization of Iran" — a greatest-hits list of claims that exist mainly in the same Truth Social post where they're used to explain away the polling.
The actual explanation, per the pollsters themselves, is a lot less flattering: voters citing inflation, cost of living, and an economy that is far from delivering what was promised. But sure—must be Fake News....
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Cognitive corrosion.
Are Trump And Iran In Peace Talks? Apparently Nobody Actually Knows... — Crooks and Liars|Andrea Thompson
It seems Donald Trump and Iran can't even manage to get on the same page about whether or not they're even talking about a new peace negotiation.
Over the weekend, Trump stood aboard Air Force One in that leaning tower of bullshit way that he does, and told reporters that negotiations with Iran would begin "tomorrow afternoon," with a specific focus on reopening the Strait of Hormus and guaranteeing that Iran never acquires or accesses nuclear weapons, as Trump's illegal war with the country rages well into its sixth month
The US President went on to claim that he had originally planned to launch "the biggest attack since World War II" but abandoned that plan after Iran and other regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, allegedly made appeals to avoid it.
Trump told reporters on the matter, "I’m not looking to kill people, ’cause people die. A lot of people die. And we don’t want that."...
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Then he should stop making decisions that lead Americans to their deaths. What IS wrong with him. No moral core.
US Troops Hit With BIZARRE Request As Trump Fails To Find A Way Out Of His War — Crooks and Liars|Andrea Thompson
Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran is now well into its sixth month, with no conceivable end in sight, and it appears that US Central Command has grown desperate for ideas, now calling on American troops to brainstorm "creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran."
CNN broke reporting on the truly bizarre and unsettling request that was sent out to US military analysts last week.
According to a source familiar with the message, a CENTCOM intelligence branch officer pushed out a message reading, "We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran," to United States troops.
This unsettling news breaks just one day after Donald Trump stood aboard Air Force One and told reporters and the American public that an end to the war was underway, claiming that negotiations with Iran would begin "tomorrow afternoon," with a specific focus on ensuring that the Strait of Hormuz was reopened expeditiously.
Trump further claimed that he had scrapped his plans for what he personally described as "the biggest attack since World War II" after desperate appeals from Iran as well as regional allies.
"Now what we’re doing is we’re talking to them in the form of a negotiation," Trump told reporters over the weekend. "It begins tomorrow afternoon."...
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Sounds like he just lost his war and the world is much less safe now.
Poll Finds Overwhelming Majority Disgusted by Trump’s Relationship With AI Industry, Saying He’s Using the Tech to Tear Down Democracy — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
Even before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second stint in the White House, he was promising to unleash “AI innovation” on an unprecedented scale.
Despite grumblings from the populist Republican sect, the billionaire-in-chief soon made good on those promises, cozying up to AI moguls like Sam Altman and promising to flip the US power grid on its head in order to feed the growing demand for AI data centers.
Now a year and a half into his second term, a growing number of Americans are clearly fed up with the president’s pandering to the tech industry. A new poll conducted by Upswing Research and Strategy in cooperation with the AI accountability group Guardrails Action surveyed Americans in New York’s 12th congressional district, a diverse tract encompassing parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
Respondents, broadly, are very skeptical of Trump’s AI regime, with an enormous 79 percent saying their “top concern” with AI is that tech companies are “too close to Trump and helping him erode democracy.”
A further 81 percent flagged AI companies stealing data and private information as either their “top concern” or a “major concern,” while 71 percent said AI-integrated surveillance of Americans is a top or major concern.
While New York’s 12th district is one of the bluest voting blocks in the United States, Trump’s AI strategy wasn’t the only thing catching flack. Nearly half of all respondents also dogged Democrats, saying party leadership sold out to big corporations and special interests to fund their campaigns.
Sure enough, Democratic party leadership has accepted millions of dollars from AI super PACs in 2026. The tech industry spigot is evidently so lucrative that incumbent Democratic candidates have been warned by party strategists not to antagonize the tech industry, though an adversarial stance would clearly be massively popular with a huge swath of voters.
“With their absurd lobbying spending, PR budgets, and corporate super PACs, these Big AI goliaths think they can buy off our government, our elections, our leaders, and our future and nobody will notice,” Guardrails Action executive director Shaunna Thomas said in a statement....
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The point here is everyone is a whore for power!
Education Dept Pushes Colleges To Hire MAGA Faculty
Politico reports:
The Education Department is asking university leaders to publicly commit to a series of institutional changes, many of which are in line with the Trump administration’s higher education agenda, by the end of the year.
The agency’s letter asks these leaders to address grade inflation, improve transparency about the costs of attending their schools and curb foreign donations. It also asks them to hire faculty of “all relevant perspectives,” with the Trump administration previously arguing schools are too left leaning and suppress conservative voices.
The letter contains some similarities to the college compact the administration sent to a select group of universities last fall, none of which agreed to sign the compact. The department is asking schools to post these statements “prominently” on their websites before the end of 2026.
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Hire Nazi motherfuckers? Fuck off and die!
Michigan Reports First US Deaths In Parasite Outbreak
The Associated Press reports:
Two people have died in the cyclospora outbreak in Michigan in the first confirmed deaths in the U.S. related to the microscopic parasite, state health officials announced Monday.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services said both people had underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by the intestinal illness and dehydration. The department said it will not be providing additional information about the deaths.
Federal health officials have identified lettuce from Mexico served at Taco Bell locations across five U.S. states as a source of the widespread outbreak. Overall, cyclospora cases have set a U.S. record. Since May 1, the CDC has received reports of more than 4,100 confirmed cases and is investigating more than 7,400 other likely cases across 41 states.
Read the full article. Two weeks ago Sec. Brain Worms declared that the outbreak was “under control.”
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Kennedy looks as if he's shit his pants over the news.
ND Gov Declares Emergency Over “Gas Station Heroin”
The North Dakota Monitor reports:
North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong on Monday declared a public health emergency banning all kratom products and called a special session of the Legislature for September to further address enforcement. Kratom is a substance derived from a tropical tree in Southeast Asia that officials say can be synthesized into highly potent forms and put into products readily available at gas stations and smoke shops. They have linked those products to overdoses and deaths.
“Doing nothing is not an option,” said Armstrong, flanked by Attorney General Drew Wrigley, top lawmakers and others at a Capitol press conference. Kratom has been used as an energy booster, for pain management and to cope with withdrawals from drugs such as fentanyl and heroin. Two psychoactive ingredients known as mitragynine and 7-OH are found in kratom leaves. State officials point to rising calls to Poison Control and a “health crisis” of deaths resulting from the substances.
Read the full article. Armstrong last appeared here when he signed a ban on lawsuits against pesticide makers.
DHS Secretary Mullin invested between $500,001 and $1 million in a company that produces Kratom, also known as gas station heroin.
And now instead of cracking down on Kratom, the Trump admin is promoting it.
This will only lead to more addiction & death.
— Public Citizen (@publiccitizen.bsky.social) August 3, 2026 at 10:55 AM
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JohnWayne Mullin? Hmmm? Does using promote anger issues?
TSA Privatization Returns Airport Security to a Dangerous Past — The American Prospect|Whitney Curry Wimbish
It was easy to get knives and box cutters past security on September 11, 2001. The men simply walked them through the privately managed checkpoints operated by Argenbright Security, Globe Security, and Huntleigh USA. At the time, security was the responsibility of each individual airport, which tended to give contracts to the lowest bidders.
Some of the contracted security workers stopped a few of the men for additional screening. But as the 9/11 Commission documented, the extra checks were “marginal at best,” and their carry-on bags, which contained the weapons, weren’t examined. All 19 hijackers made it through to their planes, and they all took off, no problem. Then they used their little blades to execute the deadliest attack on American soil in history, killing nearly 3,000 people....
Now, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Trump administration wants to edit “permanent” to “temporary.” Under the new privatization program TSA Gold+, private contractors will next year run security at airports in Charleston, South Carolina; Des Moines, Iowa; and Tampa, Florida....
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Trump keeps wanting to get us all killed.
A Blistering Critique of the Roberts Court, From Hawaii’s Supreme Court — The Bulwark|Kim Wehle
THE HAWAII SUPREME COURT issued a stunning opinion last month that said explicitly something that many other judges across the country have been thinking: Donald Trump is not the only snake in the garden. The justices in the majority on the United States Supreme Court are a danger to democracy too.
Anyone worried about the future of American democracy should take some time to read the opinion....
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Our corrupt SCOTUS.
Away We Go. Tabs, Mon., Aug. 3, 2026 — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
First off, your Moral High Ground Friday recap! New really good polls keep coming out in that Texas Senate race. So it’s time to call James Talarico a gay transgender vegan potato taco some more! Also to try to make it into a thing that he knows how to read. Burn him for a witch! Come read and subscribe to that! [The Moral High Ground]
Donald Trump’s butthole polisher Todd Blanche has fornally rescinded plans for Trump’s slush fund for Trump’s preferred terrorists and kid touchers, one of the main sticking points stopping John Cornyn and Thom Tillis from supporting him for permanent Trump’s Personal Lawyer at the DOJ. We are sure his slimy fingers weren’t crossed in any way whatsoever. [Washington Post]
Oh weird there’s still somebody out there investigating Trump family crime and money laundering?
Re: Trump’s continued babble-lying about vandals tearing up the Reflecting Pool, Republican Senator John Kennedy says Trump “grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought.” Which is one of the more insulting things we’ve heard said about Trump in the last few months
Trump really is so upset about that, really thinks it was vandals and not his own shitty, bad-at-everything work. [JoeMyGod]
Doug Burgum, the interior secretary who looks like he’s trying to get a job as George Washington’s porn stunt double, also is pretending to be so stupid that he thinks it was vandals, but that’s because he’s required to do so for his paycheck. [JoeMyGod]
What does it sound like when a man who speaks entirely in burps raises his voice? Somebody on Bluesky said it was like that split second before a hot dog explodes in the microwave, but anyway, RFK Jr. had a fight with Dana Bash on the Sunday shows yesterday. [Mediaite]...
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Evan always has a cheery message!
Bari Weiss’s CBS News tries to ‘cover their tracks’ after retracting false smear: report — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
After CBS News New York was forced to amend a report that included a “baseless” smear of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Bari Weiss-run outlet later “tried to cover their tracks” with subsequent moves, journalist Judd Legum reported Monday.
On July 27, CBS News New York published a report about an online petition with the following headline: “Thousands of 9/11 victims’ families are asking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend this year’s solemn remembrance ceremony.”
The issue, as Legum flagged last week, was that the organizer behind the petition claimed that only 300 9/11 victims’ families had signed the petition. When pressed by Legum as to how they came up with the 300 figure, the petition organizer admitted it was an estimate and that they did not actually “go through the list and look at the names.”
CBS News New York amended its headline after being contacted by Legum for comment, and amended it a third time on July 28 to: “Petition from 9/11 families asks NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani not to attend remembrance ceremony.” CBS News New York's latest amendment, Legum argued, was also false.
“This version, which remains in [place] today, falsely suggests that the petition represents the view of 9/11 families as a group,” Legum wrote....
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What happens when the filth of fascism takes over your news sources.
Bari Weiss's own hire warns she may 'crash and burn' at CBS NewsOpen link in new tabRaw Story|Daniel Hampton
One of the veteran broadcasters Bari Weiss personally recruited to help salvage CBS News publicly warned that his new boss could "crash and burn" in vivid color.
Sir Trevor Phillips, the U.K. broadcaster tapped in June as CBS News's senior global affairs correspondent, sat down with The Daily Telegraph for an interview published Monday, days before he officially starts. Asked about the walkouts, firings, and infighting that have defined Weiss' tenure so far, Phillips didn't soften the blow.
"Bari and her team have a huge tanker of a network news organisation to turn around, and they are assembling a little team on the bridge," Phillips told the newspaper, according to Variety. "The great thing about her is that she's one of those people who will either change the world or crash and burn."
"But when they crash and burn, it's in technicolour," he added....
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We'll be sure to watch when that happens
The “Hoax” That Fried Planet Earth — The Smirking Chimp|Jaime O’Neill
Before the town of Paradise was mostly swept away by fire in 2018 and before Trump would later show up in his usual graceless way to suggest it was all the fault of the residents who failed to rake our forest as he was told they do in Finland, I was still writing a weekly column for the Paradise Post, a rather pathetic excuse for a newspaper that had once been left/liberal but later became right/reactionary. There were churches beyond the patience to count them there and most seemed only nominally Christian. To me, anyway....
In any event, the "Global Warming is a Hoax" argument was quite popular among Know Nothings who had been told what to think by Rush Limbaugh and a nationwide web of right-wing call-in radio show hosts who did ceaseless work to keep as many people stone stupid as they possibly could. Like Mr. Little, they laid the groundwork for those who were marginally literate by carrying the hoax message to small rural newspapers which have mostly gone extinct since those quaint old days about a decade ago when we were not yet living in a post-literate world. Now, of course, humanoids write with their thumbs and read nothing that would consume more than a few seconds of precious time they could better spend searching out things to worry about.
"Global-warming-as Hoax" was among Dick Little’s favorite hobby horses and he rode that nag to death, endlessly repeating the same thin talking points with only minor changes from the previous column he’d written to warn his readers about the threat to America caused by anti-capitalist scientists who didn’t know what in hell they were talking about. As it turned out, hell is what those scientists were trying to warn us of what was to come. Guys like Dick Little (and there were hordes of them, alas) couldn’t tell the difference between climate and weather. They labelled those of us who believed climate change was real as “snowflakes,” scared all the time about almost everything....
Or, like believing that man-made climate change is just another commie plot in the left’s unending campaign to bring down the greatest place that ever was or ever could be. Trump, they decided, was the only one who could fix it and make it great again. They knew that because he told them so himself.
And he fixed us good, didn’t he? France is ablaze. Canada is exporting smoke from the burning north, and here in the U.S. we are moving into August, which promises to be a living nightmare of heat and fire which might have been prevented if only the fascists, the corporate execs and the Republican Party not blocked every plan for more sustainable and less polluting sources of energy and ways of living.
Not all your fault, Little Dick, not by a long shot, but I hope you'll forgive me for saying I told you so. "I'm not mad at you," though. Those were the last words of a recent victim of fascist hysteria when she said them to an ICE agent. A capital offense, apparently.
Anyway, the fascists have largely shut the fuck up on the subject of global warming being a hoax. They've got bigger fish to fry now.
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Again: — "Burn, baby, burn!"
‘The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding — Futurism|Frank Landymore
It takes a lot to get your typical white-bread American riled up enough that they’re willing to go to jail. Getting arrested is a massive pain, bringing court dates, fines, and a record that can shadow your job and housing prospects for the rest of your life.
For most folks, just the threat of jail time is enough to keep them on their best behavior. Yet in 2026, data centers have become one of the rare issues pushing more and more of Americans to risk it anyway.
So far in the US, Futurism has counted at least 37 arrests stemming from protests related to data centers this year. There were an additional 12 cases where police intervened to prevent protestors or speakers from confronting civic leaders, though in reality that number is likely much higher, as these cases aren’t as likely to make the news.
Unlike in other moments of political unrest in recent memory, it’s hard to pigeonhole these anti-data center activists demographically. They range from landowning farmers to physics teachers, zoomers to boomers, rural townspeople to suburban parents.
Despite their differences, the arrestees all have one thing in common: they each felt the actions of democratically elected officials are failing to reflect the wishes of their constituents, instead deferring to massive tech corporations....
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Just another twist in our new Civil War.
Supreme Court handed a midnight election bombshell — Alternet.org|Dion Nissenbaum, Votebeat
Elections are back before the U.S. Supreme Court: The Trump administration is asking the justices to quickly lift an order blocking its efforts to put new restrictions on mail-in voting for the fast-approaching midterm elections.
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
It’s unclear how the justices will rule, but the case focuses on a narrow question of whether or not the lower courts issued premature rulings rather than the broader questions about the legality of the executive order.
But no matter what the court decides this time, a series of practical and legal challenges make it increasingly unlikely that the federal government can impose new rules giving the U.S. Postal Service the power to block Americans from voting by mail in November’s elections.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the justice designated to handle emergency appeals from the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, ordered the plaintiff states to respond by Monday to the Trump administration’s filing, and a decision could come any time after that. But there are already fewer than 100 days left until the election, and the U.S. Postal Service itself said in July court filings that it is running out of time to carry out the changes the president is demanding in time for this election....
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The Nazi keeps trying to suppress our vote!
Trump creating the most 'obvious target' possible for his enemies — Alternet.org|Thomas Kika
Writing in a piece for MS NOW Monday, reporter James Downie argued that President Donald Trump's brazen and blatant corruption has created the most "obvious target" for his enemies to exploit.
Despite once campaigning heavily on "draining the swamp" of corruption in government, Trump's second term has emerged as one of the most corrupt and self-serving in the nation's history. As Downie noted in his piece, "the president reportedly keeps close track of which companies contribute to his presidential library, ballroom, political action committees and other entities," with major companies like Apple, Meta and Microsoft each donating at least $10 million. According to a Wall Street Journal report, "Several top Washington lobbyists have been asked to raise $50 million or more, including from their clients, for Trump projects."
Recent financial disclosures revealed that Trump pulled in over $2 billion in his first year back in office. The majority of that money came from his family's cryptocurrency ventures, which have emerged as the epicenter of his most corrupt dealings as president.
In conducting all of this grift in broad daylight, Downie argued that Trump has created a clear target on himself for Democrats to target, especially so given the recent poll findings about voters' distaste for political corruption across the board.
"This 'Trump Transaction Tax,' as one Wall ...
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History will not be kind to this crook.
Unbelievable’: Epstein recruiter found dead secretly ran pro-Trump account -- Raw Story|Alexander Willis
A Jeffrey Epstein-linked French modeling scout who was discovered dead at his home last month was quietly operating an anonymous online account devoted to praising President Donald Trump, according to two researchers who say they traced the account back to him — a finding they called "unbelievable."
“I know that sounds unbelievable. So let’s walk through it,” reads a report published Saturday co-authored by Princeton University associate professor Katie Chenoweth and writer Bekah Day.
Daniel Siad worked for MC2 Model Management, an international modeling agency that operated out of New York, Florida and Tel Aviv, Israel, that was founded by Jean-Luc Brunel, a French model scout who launched the agency with considerable financial backing from Epstein. Brunel was later accused of being involved in sex trafficking in association with Epstein, and died by apparent suicide while awaiting sex-trafficking charges in 2022....
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The Trump Crime Syndicate is associated we will find. Not unbelievable.
'Horrific' abuse revealed after Trump DOJ drops 'botched' indictment: expert — Raw Story|Robert Davis
The Trump Department of Justice revealed something truly horrifying about itself last week after it dropped a "botched" indictment, according to one expert.
Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor, argued on a new episode of his podcast, "Justice Matters," that the Trump DOJ's decision to drop its indictment against David Hearn, an Olympic canoeist, for allegedly vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool suggests that the department is in "ready, fire, aim" mode.
For instance, Kirschner noted that the Trump DOJ didn't take responsibility for the facts it presented to the judge in the case. Instead, the department blamed the Department of the Interior for the information it presented.
"Talk about finger-pointing," Kirschner said. "Talk about the refusal to take responsibility for your botched indictment. That is ugly. That is unseemly. As a career federal prosecutor, including decades that I served in that very office, the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office, you don't indict first and investigate later. Nor do you take the word of another agency of government."
Kirschner also noted that the prosecutor in the case, former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, appeared to be investigating a foregone conclusion rather than applying facts to the case....
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Trump always shoots first. If his orders aren't obeyed then firing comes next.
'Don Of Dung' Becomes Unlikely Hit At Art Show — Crooks & Liars|Ed Scarce
A portrait of U.S. President Donald Trump made from horse manure has become one of the most talked-about pieces at this year’s Sooke Fine Arts Show.
"The medium used is one I have concocted from water and horse manure, which seemed appropriate considering the subject," wrote the artist Wendy Chartrand.
Source: CHEK News
A portrait of U.S. President Donald Trump made from horse manure has become the most talked-about pieces at this year’s Sooke Fine Arts Show, and it didn’t stay on the market for long.
The artwork, titled “The Don of Dung,” was created by Vancouver Island artist Wendy Chartrand using dried horse manure as its primary medium. The unconventional political portrait sold on the opening day of the exhibition for $1,800 to an anonymous buyer....
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"But it's really great shit, Mrs. Presky." — Firesign Theatre.
Aka Portrait in Poo.
Park Service: Arch Would Detract From Historic Sites
The New York Times reports:
President Trump’s proposed 250-foot-tall triumphal arch would change the skyline of Washington to such an extent that it would intrude on views at dozens of historic sites around the capital, according to an assessment by National Park Service staff. It would disrupt the symbolic relationship between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, obstruct sightlines from the Kennedy Gravesite and Robert E. Lee’s home, and alter what official documents call “one of the most magnificent” views in Washington at the National Cathedral four miles away, the Park Service said.
The assessment of the arch’s impact on surrounding historic properties is a key step the administration must complete before the project can receive final approval by the National Capital Planning Commission, which could come as soon as its next meeting on Sept. 3. The Park Service is supposed to seek ways to reduce such “adverse effects” on historic sites under the National Historic Preservation Act. But the arch is expected to move forward with little change given that Mr. Trump has shown no interest in the most obvious remedies — scaling down the project, or building it somewhere else.
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Like a gigantic swastika looming over the land!
Ugly Details Released In Arrest Of Arkansas GOP Leader
Little Rock’s ABC affiliate reports:
An Arkansas state representative bonded out of the Benton County Jail on Sunday after his arrest on Saturday. Arkansas State Representative and Republican candidate for Benton County Judge, Austin McCollum, was arrested on charges of battery and assault on Saturday morning. Court documents show that McCollum’s wife said she preferred to sleep in a separate bedroom, but McCollum refused to let her leave the room.
When McCollum’s wife tried to get away, the probable cause report said McCollum punched her in the face, which split open her brow. Law enforcement officers said she was then thrown to the ground and McCollum climbed on top of her. Authorities said McCollum grabbed his wife by the hair and slammed her head against the ground repeatedly.
Court documents accuse McCollum of attempting to coerce his wife to clean herself up and hide the blood. However, another family member in the house called 911 and other family members. Investigators said McCollum was intoxicated when officers got to the home.
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The darkness of Arkansas.
'Man who eats road kill' slammed for calling CNN anchor 'flustered' — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
An epic CNN shouting match earned scathing rebuke for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday after he "barked" unsubstantiated facts then accused his interviewer of being "flustered."
"I am not flustered," host Dana Bash replied. "I am frustrated."
Bash's frustration was shared by CNN viewers who professed themselves shocked by Kennedy's response to repeated questions about President Donald Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, a U.S. measles outbreak and the legitimacy of his anti-vaccination rhetoric.
"I don’t think she was the one who was flustered," replied New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush.
During the interview, Kennedy nearly lunged across the table, jabbed his finger at Bash, interrupted her questions and hurled insults.
"You probably don't understand this because you're not a scientist," Kennedy told Bash.
"You're not, either," Bash replied.
Added X influencer Covie, "She just pointed out at he's not a scientist while he's been yelling lies about vaccines and someone she is the one who is flustered?"
Kennedy also dodged Bash's questions about why he wanted Americans to get the measles vaccine if we felt vaccines for infants up to six months old had not been properly vetted.
"It's the only one that has been studied," Kennedy claimed, falsely, and not for the first time.
In January, Kennedy's Health and Human Services department released a new childhood immunization schedule that reduced the number of universally recommended vaccines from 17 to 11, cutting hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, flu, RSV, and COVID immunity shots.
Bill Hanage, professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said at the time, "The bottom line is that if fewer people are protected, there will be more preventable illness, suffering, and death."...
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Kennedy is such a sick and pitiful creature. It's a disgrace that he's permitted to take it out in public on fellow Americans.
The weak arguments he spouts are very similar to the January 6th coup lie that those rioters were just trying to be patriotic by overthrowing our election!
Trump is sneaking in new laws that will literally make it harder to breathe — Alternet.org|Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump’s anti-environmental philosophy has led to many controversies, from his rejection of the scientific consensus about man-made climate change to spreading misinformation about wind turbines.
“During its first year, the second Trump administration used a “shock and awe” approach to environmental deregulation,” wrote Slate's Richard L. Revesz on Sunday. “In an effort to erase climate policies, the Environmental Protection Agency claimed that climate change was not a serious problem, pointing to a report by hand-picked climate skeptics.”
Revesz added, “The criticisms of the National Academy of Sciences and other prominent scientific organizations were so devastating that the EPA abandoned its reliance on the report when it eliminated key greenhouse gas standards, instead basing its decision primarily on shaky legal arguments.”
Slate goes on to explain how Trump has deregulated everything from greenhouse gas emissions to other forms of pollutants, all in the name of creating a more business-friendly environment at the expense of a healthy natural environment.
“The EPA is now routinely determining that the benefits of reducing air pollution—that is, life-saving health benefits for Americans—are too uncertain to quantify or value at all in regulatory decisionmaking,” Revesz wrote. “The administration is doing this without any analysis or citation to scientific studies. Extensive peer-reviewed science has used sophisticated techniques to quantify the impacts of pollution reductions and account for related uncertainty.”
Revesz continued, “And the EPA has relied on these findings for decades, including during the first Trump administration and other Republican administrations. But, beginning this year, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has decided that every health benefit from air pollution reductions is too uncertain to count—and every regulatory cost dispositive.”...
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When you can't breathe nothing else matters.
Trump stretches the law to the breaking point to raise taxes on Americans — Alternet.org|Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump’s tariffs have been linked to manufacturing employment declining by roughly 80,000 jobs since the start of his second term. Yet despite their failure to revitalize the very industry that is now in decline, and which Trump promised to aid, the Republican leader is doubling down on tariffs — to the point of stretching the law beyond what it was intended.
Specifically Trump is relying heavily on “section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which is the law that choked global trade in the 1930s and helped sink the world into the Great Depression,” wrote The Guardian’s Eduardo Porter on Sunday. “Section 338 is particularly dangerous because it offers cover for the president to slap trade levies on whatever country he wants under some fairly hazy arguments.”
Porter added, “Specifically, it grants the president authority to retaliate against countries that do anything to put the United States ‘at a disadvantage compared with the commerce of any foreign country.’” As soon as the president decides this is going on, he is authorized to “declare such new or additional rate or rates of duty as he shall determine will offset such burden or disadvantage”.
He continued, “Until Trump, section 338 was never invoked to impose tariffs. It was mostly used as leverage, to guarantee that other countries treated American products the same as imports from anywhere else. If some country offered preferential access to a neighbor or ally, the US could demand the same terms, or else.”
One of the chief rationalizations for Trump’s tariffs is that they will resolve a crisis in trade deficits between America and its economic rivals. Yet according to Porter, this concern misunderstands fundamental truths about modern economics....
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Think of the years of progress Trump has destroyed. Think of how much destruction he has yet to do.
Behind America’s 'true' religion: Why millions are quiet quitting Jesus — Alternet.org|John Stoehr
America is not a Christian nation. Yes, I know what they say. But we're not, and it's not because history and the Constitution say so. It's because the people who call themselves Christian, especially the supporters of Donald Trump, are often so ignorant of their religion. How can we be a Christian nation when Christians here don't know much about Christianity?
The question occurred to me while reading an essay by Hannibal Hamlin in the Pittsburgh Review of Books in which the Ohio State English professor said that though we're called the most religious nation on earth, "Americans are ill-informed about even their own religion."
According to a 2010 Gallup poll, only just over half of Americans knew that the Golden Rule was not one of the Ten Commandments, and just under half could name the four Gospels. A meager 16 percent knew that salvation through faith alone is a Protestant rather than Catholic doctrine. I once had to point out to a student, a Catholic school graduate, that I didn’t think belief in transubstantiation was optional for Catholics. A number of evangelical pastors have recently reported shrinking congregations, as their parishioners discovered, to their irritation, that Jesus asked them to turn the other cheek.
But ignorance of Christianity and the "Judeo-Christian tradition" are only one reason we are not a Christian nation. More important, I think, is the fact that so many Christians do not mind it when Donald Trump does something spectacularly obscene. I don't mean his rampant womanizing, bottomless greed and breathtaking corruption. Those are topics for later. What I mean is actions that are tantamount to slapping the Christian God in the face.
For instance, in a recent rally in Michigan, in support of the Republican Senate candidate there, and for reasons that are still unclear to everyone, the president addressed the youth in the audience in order to say: "I've done more for you than your parents, OK? Your parents are good. I'm not gonna knock your parents. But I have been better to you than your parents."...
To Christians, there should not be anything casual about Donald Trump's blasphemy, but here we are. No worries. We're not really a Christian nation. We just like to say we are....
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Only the most intellectual study the history of religion and humanity on our planet. The same for the history of the "God" concept. Only the most inquistive can know anything about the religion known as "Christian."
Trump isn't the disease — he’s just a boil on the American system — Alternet.org|Robert Reich
...The whole system seems to be collapsing in on itself.
The word “ensh---ification” has been officially incorporated into major lexicons like the Merriam-Webster dictionary because of people’s increasingly common experience of being crapped on by big corporations, big hospitals, big energy, and big insurance, and of being bogged down in seemingly endless legal quagmires of corporate and government bureaucracies. As the New Yorker put it, we live in the “Age of Ensh---fication.”
The advent of AI has highlighted the possibility of mass unemployment and also the growing impossibility of boosting workers’ share of both corporate and national income.
The oligarchs who are now spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing AI — with funds funneled to them by Jamie Dimon and others on Wall Street — have done everything in their power to keep workers’ wages low, prevent them from organizing or joining unions, and stop them from having more political power, and they’re now funding campaigns to protect their fortunes against higher taxes on capital income and wealth.
This mammoth, systemic dysfunction is generating a great deal of heat — anger, frustration, and outrage. That anger is a major reason why Trump became president, twice (even though he has further ens----fied America and much of the world).
Trump exploited those tensions for his own malignant ends. But even if Trump is replaced by someone who’s noble, humble, and talented, and who cares more about America than himself — in other words, someone who’s the opposite of Trump — we’d still be in trouble.
The system is out of whack. It needs fundamental change.
If you want to understand why the American system has become so dysfunctional, and what you might do to help it to meet the needs of average people, you need to reassess many of your likely assumptions about it....
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So, will we take this oportunity to correct our system failures or keep descending to extinciton?
Unwise, Unworkable and Unlawful: Families USA Urges Trump Administration to Withdraw Medicaid Work Requirements Rule as Comment Period Ends — Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community|Newswire
Today, Families USA, along with hundreds of other consumer, patient, community, and health stakeholder groups submitted comments by today’s deadline to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regarding CMS’s interim final rule to implement work reporting requirements. Our comments warned of the impacts on Medicaid and the millions of people who rely on the program for health coverage. In response, Families USA Executive Director Anthony Wright issued the following statement:
“Just over one year ago, Congressional Republicans passed the biggest cuts to Medicaid in history, and now the administration is making a bad budget bill worse with additional restrictive regulations. Our comments submitted today spotlight how these Administration rules are unworkable and unlawful, and how they undermine these key public coverage programs. The regulations are a tragic way to mark this week’s 61st anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid — pillars of our health care system that millions have relied on for generations.
“In a health care system that is already overstretched, inordinately expensive, and wildly complex and confusing, these new paperwork requirements will push patients off coverage – not because they aren’t working or not eligible, but because of bureaucratic burdens. While many in Congress promised they would protect the vulnerable and medically frail from these paperwork burdens, the new requirements to get such an exemption are now exponentially more burdensome for both patients and providers.
“By tacking on “capacity to work” to the definition of medically frail and phasing out self-attestation, CMS has handed states an unwise and unworkable program without the resources or structure to implement it.
“The requirement that a patient doesn’t just need to have cancer or another condition but must produce the equivalent of a doctor’s note with a finding that the conditions leave them unable to work—is nowhere in the underlying statute, and unworkable....
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It's a critical condition we must treat.
'60 Minutes' legend Scott Pelley knifed in the back — by his own partner — Raw Story|David Fagin
When history looks back on the unraveling of 60 Minutes, one question will loom larger than all the others: What do you do when the institution you love is no longer the institution you joined?
Scott Pelley answered that question with clarity. Others who resigned — or were shown the door after refusing to compromise the editorial independence that made 60 Minutes the gold standard of television journalism — answered it with courage. They understood that there comes a point when staying no longer preserves an institution. It merely legitimizes its decline.
Lesley Stahl chose a different path.
By the time Pelley made his stand, the damage to 60 Minutes had already been done. Editorial independence — the program's defining principle for nearly six decades — had already been called into question. Once viewers begin wondering whether powerful interests are influencing what appears on screen, the magic is gone. Trust is journalism's only real currency. Once it's spent, no amount of prestige, ratings, or famous correspondents can buy it back.
That's why the notion of "saving" 60 Minutes from the inside feels so detached from reality. Especially if she was witnessing the same implosion the rest of us were. You don't save a house on fire by dusting the furniture.
If the foundation has been compromised, staying behind to straighten the paintings on the wall isn't preservation. It's denial....
But if viewers no longer believe the newsroom is willing to risk everything to defend its editorial independence, then the program's defining promise has already been weakened.
In the end, the greatest irony may be this: by trying to save 60 Minutes, Stahl may have helped normalize the very transformation her departing colleagues were desperately trying to stop.
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Stahl made her bed. Now she has to lie in it.
The ICE Agent Behind Me Grabbed the Back of My Shirt and Just Threw Me Like a Sack of Trash” — Mother Jones|Sophie Hurwitz
A 68-year-old nurse who brought her mobile clinic to serve visitors at an ICE detention center, only to be thrown to the ground by ICE agents. A pair of cemetery workers who were maced and handcuffed at work after ICE agents broke through a gate to reach them. A family of six wrongly detained for a month. A trans man forced to labor without pay in ICE detention, and a legal observer beat with a baton at the scene of Alex Pretti’s killing.
These are some of the 54 people who filed tort claims against federal agents this week as part of a nationwide ACLU push for ICE accountability. 32 are US citizens, 22 are immigrants. And they’re all seeking monetary damages for harm sustained during Donald Trump’s ICE surge.
Under US law, it is near-impossible for a person to file a civil rights lawsuit against an individual federal agent, the way someone who’s been hurt by a local or state police officer could. But an increasing number of people harmed by ICE and DHS agents are filing tort claims: demanding monetary compensation from the federal government for what has been done to them.
Two US citizens who work as groundskeepers at a cemetery outside Chicago, were maced, handcuffed, and detained after masked officers broke into a gated area of their workplace.
Norma Bowe, the nurse attacked outside a detention center, is suing in New Jersey. For years, Bowe has operated a mobile health clinic out of an RV, traveling to underserved areas of the state to provide vaccines, diabetes screenings, and stroke assessments....
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It's time to bring Trump's Gestapo hoods to their end and him along with them.
Trump's big brag is being tripped up by reality — AlterNet|Matthew Rozsa
...“In a career as a real estate developer, TV personality and purveyor of small-time grifts, the president learned that there is power in lying about the facts and promising the moon,” Waldman said. “But an administration can only get away with that for so long. And since people experience the economy in their own lives, the picture the White House paints has to have at least some relationship to reality. “
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Reality is difficult for some. This idiot can't handle it.
Todd Blanche Shoveling Big Bucks Out The Door To Extremists — Crooks & Liars|Lisa Needham
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche busy moving your taxpayer dollars out the door for the poor victims of weaponization by the Department of Justice.
...The whole move highlights that President Donald Trump doesn’t really need his treasonweasel slush fund to pay off his supporters. He can do it by these sorts of sham settlements with a friendly litigant, which is also how you have given seven figures to Michael Flynn and the family of Capitol insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt. The DOJ can also make payouts via the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is what Trump tried to use to say he was owed $230 million for the extreme pain and suffering of being investigated for his myriad open and obvious crimes....
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The Trump Criminal Syndicate is falling on its criminal ass.
Why Republicans wasted so much time yelling at Fauci — Daily Kos|Oliver Willis
Conservatism is an anti-intellectual movement. On a host of issues, from education to healthcare to finance and world affairs, conservatism has prioritized right-wing outcomes then worked backward to try and make the science and facts fit into a convenient narrative. A figure like Fauci is a repudiation of that world view, and to the right it is even worse that Democrats like former Presidents Biden and Barack Obama frequently deferred to experts like Fauci.
To conservatism, this is weakness: How dare a “strong and powerful” leader be expected to defer to a nerd in a lab coat?
Under Trump, we saw precisely what happens when these cultures clash: People die. Trump was blamed for the deaths and disruptions that occurred on his watch, and this week’s display was further evidence that six years later they still have not accepted the public’s verdict on their behavior....
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Stubborn and stupid. Usually gets you a bloody nose.
Demented Senior Goes On Another AI Slop Spree
The Mirror reports:
Donald Trump and Elvis Presley’s famous dazzling white jumpsuit collided in a bizarre AI-generated post on Saturday as the president goes on another Truth Social posting spree.
In another social media meltdown, Trump shared over 25 posts in an hour on his Truth Social account on Saturday. One of which was an AI-generated image of Trump wearing Elvis Presley’s skin-tight American Eagle jumpsuit, famously featuring a deep collared V-neck to display his chest.
Trump offered no caption to explain his thought process behind his AI photo, which depicts him as the “King of Rock and Roll.” This comes after Trump also posted about the war in Iran, Bruce Springsteen, and renovations at the White House.
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Our deluded child.
Court: Arkansas Can Criminally Charge Librarians
The Arkansas Advocate reports:
A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that Arkansas’ 2023 law restricting access to library materials can go into effect, three years after a judge blocked two sections of the law on First Amendment grounds. The three-judge panel from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled that the 18 plaintiffs had no standing to challenge one section of Act 372 and failed to prove that the other section was unconstitutionally vague.
The two sections create criminal liability for librarians who distribute content that some consider “obscene” or “harmful to minors,” and give city and county governing bodies the final say over library content. Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin praised the ruling, saying it “allows Arkansas to move forward in enforcing a law that protects children from obscene materials while increasing accountability for public-library curation decisions.”
"I’m a librarian. This is fucking fascism. I know some of my fellow librarians are willing to make grave sacrifices to fight this. We’re now at the point where journalists and librarians are facing jail time under this regime." — David Holt (comments)
"'protects children from obscene materials'
Say goodbye to your bibles!
'Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.' - Psalm 137:9" — Bungee (comments)
"'Fucking "no standing.' This twisted government loves the chilling effect of laws that make it impossible to find standing. The First Amendment is everyone's business." — KnownDonorDad (comments)
"You can't convict people of distributing 'obscene' material if it's just a matter of opinion whether it's obscene or not. Why did we go through those trials about Lady Chatterley's Lover (D.H. Lawrence) and Howl (Allen Ginsberg) back in the 1950s-1960s if that distinction is not clear to these people?" — Franciscan (comments)
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Retarded, sick as all hell and unconstitutional. Sue the state.Too bad Arkansas will waste time and money with this criminal activity.
The uneducated backwoods morons want to re-litigate everything as they have no knowledge of our legal history. So stupid they don't even know they are stupid. They are the problem.
Boycott the stae if you haven't already.
Graham’s Sister Goes Anti-Trans In First Ad [VIDEO]
The Hill reports:
Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-S.C.) posted her first campaign ad in an effort to win her late brother’s seat permanently in November after a temporary appointment from the governor.
“I’m honored to serve South Carolina and grateful for President Trump’s endorsement, and I’ll work hard every day to earn it,” Nordone says in the video clip. “I’m a conservative Republican and I believe this: Every life is precious. Men don’t belong in women’s sports and only American citizens should vote in our elections,” she added, referencing Trump-backed conservative legislative priorities.
Nordone is currently running against nine other candidates, including South Carolina Republican Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman, and former Rep. Mark Sanford. Currently, Darline Graham trails Norman by 3 percentage points, according to a recent poll from Emerson College.
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Fuck all the way off, Nazi cave dweller.
TN Gov Candidate: Execute Women For Abortion
Nashville’s NBC affiliate reports:
State Representative Monty Fritts has focused heavily on Christian issues and has called for banning mosques, claiming Islam is not a religion. When asked how such a ban would be constitutional, he pointed to his Christian faith. “As a Christian I think there is no other answer, right? Because I think Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and no man cometh to the father except by him,” Fritts said.
Fritts argued the First Amendment applies to Congress and not to the states and went further in his characterization of Islam. “Islam is not simply a religious movement. It is a political movement that forces its strategy upon everyone. It is counter to the constitution, Islam is,” Fritts said.
Fritts also addressed abortion and did not rule out the death penalty for people who obtain an abortion. “Under Tennessee law, if you commit murder there is an opportunity for a death penalty, right? And so, if you provide equal protection under the law for the unborn, there would be an opportunity for that.”
"Jesus was Jewish.
Those who follow his teachings, or rather claim they do, support the Jewish religion, as Jesus taught that.
Nothing He taught agrees with this evil person's ideas." — Tietokone Opettaja (comments)
"Dude is pinging the gaydar big time.
Great, another Nazi closet-case trying to out-Nazi the other Nazis to keep his secret safe." — Judas Peckerwood (comments)
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"Fritts self-identifies as a Christian nationalist. In May 2026, Fritts again gained attention for saying he would like to ban the beliefs of Islam, along with Buddhism, Hinduism, and "other pagan religions," from being practiced in the state of Tennessee. He also stated he would outlaw same-sex marriage and criminalize some sexual acts between consenting adults of the same sex. Fritts additionally said he would criminalize abortion in all cases, including pregnancies resulting from rape, and compared the punishment to that given to murderers. He also said he opposes allowing rape victims access to the morning-after pill. In late July 2026, he stood by his previous statements and pledged to ban mosques and "other non-Christian religions" if elected governor. He also argued that the First Amendment does not apply to state governments...." — Wikipedia.
There was a time I thought Florida was the most retared state. I was wrong. Tennessee holds this position without doubt with this bag of shit.
I wouldn't think his chances of survival would be worth a dime if the women who have read this recognize him anywhere.
Such is the coward who doesn't know how to be a man. The women I know say "Bring it, little boy!"
Education Department Will Stop Tracking Bullying, Harassment, Assaults Of Nonbinary/Trans Students
Education site The K-12 Dive reports:
The U.S. Department of Education is abandoning the collection of key civil rights data on the nation’s LGBTQ+ students, cutting out data and definitions related to the harassment, bullying and assaults of a student group that has been found to be more at-risk of such incidents.
Changes to the 2025-26 survey questions — approved by the Office of Management and Budget in July — include eliminating schools’ reporting of how many students identify as nonbinary, how often they are victims of harassment and bullying, and whether school districts have policies prohibiting those incidents.
The changes also eliminated the mention of “gender identity” from the definition of rape and sexual assault. Whereas previous collections defined rape as something that could be done to “all students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation, or gender identity,” the proposed collection says, “All students, regardless of sex, or sexual orientation can be victims of rape” — explicitly striking “gender identity” in the new definition.
"Their willful ignorance will not give them plausible deniability." — clay (comments)
"I refer to them, collectively, as 'demented self-loathers.'
It really is analogous to being a Jewish supporter of Adolf Hitler in 1939 Germany." — another_steve
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These Nazi bastards are worse than Hitler's
The next thing we'll see is Nonbiary/Trans people being rounded up for their concentration camps. Then next witll be the gay community. This will happen and all hell will set the country to flame!
"In time you're gonna pay..." Funny How Time Slips Away, Willie Nelson.
Trump-backed industry 'completely blindsided' by growing revolt: report — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
An industry backed by President Donald Trump is worried that his support can't save it from a growing revolt, per Politico.
According to reporting by Politico, Trump's vocal support for building AI data centers hasn't "stanched the bleeding" faced by companies that build and run them. They haven't even seen his backing make a difference in red states.
"I don't think the problem is the way that we engage with communities," Kirk Offel, CEO of OVERWATCH Mission Critical, which operates data centers, told Politico. "I think we just haven't."
Trump has told states they "can't fight" the spread of data centers, but Politico described the rising revolt, even in red states. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has called for moratoriums on new data centers. A push for moratoriums has halted a project for new data centers in Ohio, and nondisclosure agreements between local officials and data center companies led to backlash in Indiana, according to Politico.
"We were completely blindsided," said Roshan Shah, the CEO of Decimal Digital, which had to pause a project in Ohio because of a one-year ban on data center construction. Shah told Politico about the fallout of a New York Times report that uncovered a deal where Louisiana officials offered Meta a secret tax and public land use to build a data center.
"That sets all of us back," Shah said. "It adds fuel to the fire and adds to the local distrust that we're already facing."
Polling by Politico has found that majorities of Americans side with key arguments from the data center industry's opponents, including that the facilities make electricity more expensive.
According to Politico, the "political firestorm" facing data centers is so hot that executives are scared of getting burned....
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Burn, baby, burn!
Trump kisses gold Jesus as AI dump draws scorn: 'Now I need brain bleach' — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
President Donald Trump kissed a golden Jesus Saturday in a bizarre AI-generated dump of images on his social media site.
Trump's Truth Social posts included pictures of him kissing the gold cross in front of an American flag and what he'd look like as Elvis wearing a jacket with sequined American eagles. He also recycled posts that showed him peeking over a mountain at Greenland.
Another featured a map of South America with Venezuela colored over with an American flag and a header reading "51st State."
The image dump quickly drew scorn.
"Grandpa is hallucinating again," journalist Aaron Rupar wrote in an X post reacting to Trump's latest series of AI images, which included images of gold Abraham Lincoln statues, among other oddities.
"So I just went over to check @realDonaldTrump on Truth Social and now I need brain bleach," added Kathleen Tyson. "James Waterman Wise — ‘When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.’"
"It's bad enough when Donald Trump slobbers over the American flag," replied Bill Addis on Bsky. "Of course, the cross and Jesus are all gold. That's what Trump worships, not Jesus. This depiction is just unforgivable."
Even as the scorn mounted, Trump continued to post.
One post was an image of George Washington's face split in half, with Trump's face covering the other half and "250 YEARS: IN GOD WE TRUST" written overhead.
Another post depicted Trump as a shouting Revolutionary War commander in front of soldiers raising bayoneted rifles and an American flag over a smoky battlefield...
.
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Much is revealed of Trump's psysche with these "AI finger paintings."
'Deranged': Trump cabinet member rages at 67-year-old canoeist — Raw Story|Kathleen Culliton
A member of President Donald Trump's cabinet hurled angry threats at a 67-year-old canoeist on Saturday.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took to X to air his grievances after U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro dropped her Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool vandalism case against Olympian David Hearn — and blamed Burgum's department for it.
"Vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool," Burgum wrote. "We won't back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments."
Burgum's words echoed Trump's claims, made earlier on his Truth Social network.
"I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro," Trump wrote. "I don’t know what she was thinking?"
Pirro's thinking, as revealed in a 20-page court filing Friday, was that there was no evidence to support her case.
The damage was the result of a "flawed installation by the contractor" and "the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026," the filing stated.
"Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt."
Pirro also accused the Interior Department of misleading her prosecutors and withholding the fact that the pool lining began to peel within two days of the project’s completion.
This did not sit well with Burgum, who doubled down on his insults....
"'Intentional damage done to the Reflecting Pool is no different than defacing any one of our other national monuments. We won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments.'
**Smearing shit on the walls of Congress is not defacing or degrading - which is why 100% were pardoned and will receive a cash bonus." — DaddySnark (comments)
"The evidence is clear,
There is no evidence.
vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool.
This didn't happen.
Some of these acts were even caught on camera.
Nope." — Ross (comments)
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Produce the "vandal" or shut the fuck up. You're a long way from the hills and don't have much time left in your 15 minutes! If you want to know who the "dernaged" is take a look at your criminal boss, Dufus! Apolgize or resign!
Hollywood legend triggers Trump ambassador with defiant act: ‘Another dim-witted actor’ — Raw Story|Alexander Willis
Mike Huckabee, the Trump administration’s ambassador to Israel, lashed out Saturday at Hollywood icon Javier Bardem after the Spanish actor pushed back against narratives promoted by the Trump administration and right-wing figures surrounding the recent Moroccan refugee crisis in a Spanish territory in Africa.
As many as 60,000 migrants crossed into Ceuta, Spain's North African enclave, from Morocco starting Thursday, in one of the largest border breaches in the territory's history. At least 48,300 “had returned to Morocco by Friday afternoon,” The New York Post reported, and at least 60 people had died trying to enter the Spanish territory.
Right-wing figures such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have seized on the crisis to bolster their anti-immigration positions, and on Friday, Bardem pressed back on their characterization of the incident by sharing an online post on Instagram, according to British author and television personality Oli London.
“Ceuta is in Africa, not Europe. This isn’t an ‘invasion’ of the West – if anything it’s the reverse, given Morocco functions increasingly as a Western-aligned client state,” reads the post shared by Bardem Friday.
The post shared by Bardem was written by author and columnist Miranda Vidak, who went on to admit that while she didn’t “know who engineered this crisis,” Israel – which Spain has increasingly criticized on the world stage for its military bombardment of Gaza – stood to “benefit from a weakened, destabilized Spain.” She also flagged online comments from Yair Netanyahu, the son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he called on “Arabs and Muslims” to liberate Spanish territories in Africa, including Ceuta.
“This has nothing to do with Islam ‘invading’ Europe, and everything to do with punishing the loudest European government still willing to call a genocide a genocide.”...
"Grifter Huckabee calling someone else dimwitted; because he's such a good KKKristian too. You can't make this sht up." — Cynthia Lyman (comments)
"Huckaphuck and his fat fascist daughter Saruh Huckabeast Slanders has been and still are gubbanah of ArkansASS, one of the worst and most corrupt states in the Confederate States of Trumpisstan . . . ." — Vladonaldimir Trumputin (comments)
"Huckabee is one of the American Zionist crowd who would like to jump-start Armageddon and bring about the second coming. The Jews they pander to will be given the chance to convert or be dispatched to hell for all eternity. The right people, as defined by people like Huckabee, will zoom off to heaven while Jesus ends the world. Such an uplifting world view." — Lonesome_Coyote (comments)
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The "Huckster" is an evangelical so we know how his world view is narrow. Someone like Bardem would appear unworldly to him. Bardem knows more than the "Huckster" thinks.
OpenAI’s Escaped Models Were Allegedly Rampaging More Extensively Than Previously Reported — Futurism|Victor Tangermann
Last week, OpenAI claimed that a group of its AI models had broken containment, successfully hacking into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark test.
In the wake of the announcement, two very distinct narratives have emerged surrounding OpenAI’s claims. Some say it was essentially a publicity stunt, with the company setting parameters for the test that pushed the models toward outrageous behavior. But others, including certain prominent researchers, warn that the hack should serve as a warning shot for an even more severe AI-enabled cybersecurity disaster that’ll inevitably take place as models become more sophisticated.
“This is the first time, to my knowledge, that an AI system has autonomously committed a crime,” said New York Times journalist Kevin Roose of the event. “If a human did to Hugging Face what OpenAI’s models did to Hugging Face, they would be charged with computer fraud, and potentially sent to prison or fined or prosecuted.”
Debate will surely continue to rage among wonks and skeptics. And new details aren’t exactly tamping out the sense of alarm: on Tuesday, OpenAI issued an update to its ongoing investigation, claiming the incident was worse than initially thought. In addition to hacking Hugging Face, the company now says, its models “used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly available services,” totaling “four accounts on four services.”
“We’ll continue to notify service owners directly, and have not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services,” OpenAI wrote, without elaborating on which services were affected.
The news further raised alarm bells among some cybersecurity experts, highlighting ongoing concerns over the tech’s ability to evade protective measures. It’s a possibility that researchers have warned about for years, and the incident suggests that the threat is now turning from a possibility into a reality....
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Not ready for prime time or testing for criminal purpose?
Scientists Forced to Go on OnlyFans After Their Funding Was Cut — Futurism|Frank Landymore
When you’re a scientist relying on government funding to conduct your research, and that government suddenly yoinks all your money in the name of “efficiency,” you have to get creative to keep the lights on.
Such has been the experience of Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, renowned for his work on studying the ground-dwelling rodents known as marmots. After the Trump administration cancelled billions of dollars in federal research grants last year, he and his colleagues decided to start creating content dedicated to the charming mammals — on OnlyFans.
As SFGate reports, their account, called “OnlyMarms,” promises near-daily “unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies.” Subscribing is free, but users can leave tips on the cute photos and videos they post, which goes towards funding the research.
It’s a win for everyone: shy gooners have a convenient explanation for all the OnlyFans transactions in their bank accounts, and the scientists get to keep doing the work they’re doing. Thank you, marmots, for being so adorable.
“Sometimes I’m just posting the videos I think will get the most ‘aws,'” Emily Renkey, a student in Blumstein’s lab who started the account, told SFGate. “But my favorite is when I find footage of a particular behavior and I can use that to educate people.”
The Trump administration’s cost-cutting regime has crippled scientific research in the US. In efforts led by Elon Musk’s now defunct Department of Government Efficiency, it cancelled more than 1,700 grants worth some $1.4 billion at the National Science Foundation in 2025. In 2026, the NSF has so far awarded just a fraction of the $9 billion grant money it has typically distributed in recent years, and the White House has proposed slashing its budget by nearly half for the 2027 fiscal year.
Many of the grant cancellations were clearly politically motivated, targeting research into climate change — and even research that simply contains the word “climate” — something Trump has called a “hoax.” Even more flagrantly, the administration recently admitted in court documents that it canceled research grants in certain states “based solely” on whether they supported Trump in the 2024 election....
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One more reason Trump cannot be trusted.
The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor — Futurism|Joe Wilkins
When the United States ratified the 13th amendment in 1865, federal lawmakers very nearly outlawed slavery for good — but not entirely. Tucked within arguably the most important corner of the US constitution is a massive caveat: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States” (emphasis added.)
In the 160-some years since that amendment, a quieter type of forced servitude has lived on in the US: prison labor. From the debt peonage of the post-Civil War reconstruction era to the privatized contracting of the 21st century, prison labor is a massive money maker, generating $11 billion worth of goods in 2022 alone.
As horrifying a thought as it is, one of the companies still benefiting from the practice is in the news for another reason: spreading a gut-busting diarrhea parasite through mass-produced shredded lettuce in grocery stores and fast food outlets.
It turns out that Taylor Farms, the agricultural company widely believed to be behind the cyclospora outbreak currently raging throughout the US, is also heavily involved in modern-day forced labor....
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Capitalist crime!
The Cover-Up Has Begun: First They Put Fauci on Trial, Then They Put History on Trial — Thom Hartmann|The Hartmann Report
The goal isn't to prove Anthony Fauci lied. It's to convince Americans that the racist decisions that cost hundreds of thousands of lives were somebody else's fault.
Republicans went totally nutso on Dr. Anthony Fauci this week, trying to catch him with a perjury trap before the US Senate. They called him names, citied lies and pseudoscience, and attacked his integrity.
He withstood asinine statements like Josh Hawley, in an extraordinary bit of projection, saying:
“You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar! You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime!”
Throughout it all, he retained his composure and refused to take any of their bait.
But the larger story here is what these white supremacist MAGA Republicans were trying to cover up with this deflection strategy.
Libertarian crackpot and fake science fan Rand Paul led this attack, ostensibly designed to sweep the headlines away from dead and dying Americans in Iran, the price of food and rent, and the allegations that Trump was raping children. But the real goal was even more monstrous.
What happened in 2020 can only be called an intentional, racially-based mass murder of American citizens, planned and executed by Donald Trump and Jared Kushner for purely political purposes, and virtually ignored by the American mainstream media.
And these ongoing attacks on Fauci — led by proponents (like Rand Paul) of the discredited, pseudo-science theory that “herd immunity” could have solved the crisis if we only let enough people die from Covid — are part of the effort to whitewash that history.
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The shit has hit the fan with this garbage. Trump is failing badly and will be overturned.
The surreal plot behind Trump’s new Smithsonian labels — Alternet.org|The Conversation
...The simple reality is that in democracies it’s historians, journalists, courts, archives, universities, and scholars who write history and can challenge official narratives. Debate is expected, and interpretations can change as new evidence comes to light, like we saw here recently with the 1619 Project.
In dictatorships, on the other hand, the state typically monopolizes education, media, and archives, suppresses competing interpretations of history, and punishes those who publicly contradict the official version.
All of which is why it’s so important that we don’t treat the efforts by Trump and his neofascist lickspittles to rewrite America’s history into a sanitized white male supremacist mold as if it’s just some sort of aberration or sick joke.
This is serious stuff, and serious people within this administration are dedicated to destroying our and — particularly — our children’s understanding of the truly revolutionary and progressive history of this nation.
They’re trying to induce a national amnesia, stretching back through the history of the Klan, the Civil War, and even the American Revolution.
We must push back against them boldly and loudly, and when they’re gone we’re going to have a huge job cleaning up the fascist mess they’re making.
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America helped win WWII. We will do this as well.
Airline Bans “Sky Evangelist” For Annoying Passengers
The Washington Post reports:
Florida evangelist Whitney Lynn uses most of her flights as an opportunity to share her faith, a trend that was featured in a recent Washington Post article. On Thursday, she said, her sermon got her kicked off a San Diego-bound jet before it even took off from Orlando International Airport. She documented the removal in a series of videos she posted on social media, one of which had racked up 3 million views on Instagram by Friday afternoon.
Lynn, who said she had planned to attend a follower’s funeral in California, said she was able to rebook her flight but later got an email from the airline saying she was not allowed to travel on Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines or Horizon Air while reports about her recent travels were under investigation. She received a flight credit but said there is no way for her to use it now. She said she wants to contact an attorney and intends to continue preaching on planes.
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Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth? The one that the Jews are accused of crucifying? Funny, stoning was their method of execution. Crucifiction was Rome's method. Or did you know that?
The world’s most vocal racist will be the Republican Party’s biggest donor again. But don’t mention it. — Dan Froomkin|Press Watch
Elon Musk went public on Wednesday with the news that he intends to spend at least another $100 million of his own money to help Republican candidates in the November midterm elections.
The news coverage dutifully noted that the richest man in the world would once again be the largest Republican donor.
But it left out another key superlative: Musk is also the world’s most vocal white supremacist and advocate of ethnic cleansing.
Something about that ought to have been at the top of the articles. But it was nowhere.
So why do our top news organizations consistently fail to mention this very obvious and important fact when they write about him?...
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Another one who is not on America's side.
Pirro Blames Interior Dept For Pool Vandal Humiliation
Fox News reports:
Federal prosecutors moved Friday to dismiss a felony vandalism case against former U.S. Olympian David Hearn, after he was accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., as seen in a court filing obtained by Fox News Digital.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office said the Department of the Interior initially provided prosecutors with “barebones” reports and failed to disclose records documenting extensive problems with the coating’s installation. “Had DOI been forthcoming with the information clearly in its possession, the government would not have sought a grand jury indictment,” prosecutors wrote.
“It was not until after the return of the indictment, that the DOI provided additional documents to the USAO-DC indicating that damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in June 2026 was the result of flawed installation by the contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coatings (‘AIC’), and the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.”
"Pirro and the rest of them chose to make this a public spectacle. Sue the fuck out of them. $10Bn sounds about right." — Battery Males (comments)
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These idiots live in a seperate reality!
They work for a madman and have taken on his madness!
His Vileness!
Trump: I Was Abused More Than Anyone In US History
The Advance reports:
President Donald Trump is being branded as “the biggest crybaby” by his critics after he claimed Friday that no one else has taken more abuse “in the history of our country.” Trump made the bold claim as he hosted a cabinet meeting at Camp David.
The president’s assertion came in response to a reporter’s question on the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” designed to compensate victims of federal “lawfare” that critics say will reward Trump’s allies and Jan. 6 defendants.
“I wasn’t covered by that fund. I don’t want to be covered by the fund. I probably was abused more than anybody in the history of our country, but I wasn’t looking for that” money, the president contended. “I tell you something,” Trump continued. “Todd Blanche is a very, very good man, and he shouldn’t be in the middle of this. He should get approved because you will never get anybody like him.”
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Trump speaks the truth about Blanche. He's the biggest crook since John Mitchell. Did he already forget slavery here in the Land of the Happy Negro. Oh, right...they were happy negroes! Trump has been grifting and looting shitloads of our money and he's being abused? America is the brunt of his revenge for not being God of the Universe!
Anthony Fauci’s Senate hearing proves we’re still living in 2020 -- Heather Digby Parton}Salon
Rand Paul's vendetta against the former chief medical advisor shows how we can't move beyond the year from hell
Six years ago, Match.com released an ad in which the devil met his true love: 2020. The couple spent their courtship sharing fun Covid-era activities, like stealing toilet paper, enjoying empty cinemas and stadiums, and taking selfies in front of dumpster fires, all to the tune of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” In a memorable tagline, Satan said, “I just don’t want this year to end.” Released in December, only weeks after the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, it reflected the national mood perfectly: horror at what we’d all been through, and vast relief that it was almost over.
Sadly, it seems we are destined to live in that damned year until the end of our days.
The year ended on a high note. Biden was elected president, the new Covid-19 vaccines were about to become available and we felt we could look forward to a day in the not-so-distant future when going to the grocery store didn’t come with a potential death sentence. Many people were back at work in one way or another, and the government had managed to get the American people through the crisis without suffering economic ruin. But it soon became clear Trump was unable to admit he had lost his reelection bid, and by January he and his army of surrogates and influencers had worked his MAGA followers into such a frenzy that they stormed the Capitol to stop certification of the election results....
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Watching the arrogance of Paul walking away from a reporter without commenting is sickening. He is a total arrogant asshole and must be taked down.
Trump’s final rope is 'snapping strand by strand': analysis — Alternet.org|Adam Lynch
Conservative Dispatch columnist Nick Catoggio says non-MAGA mutiny is finally burying President Donald Trump and his Republican machine, and of course Trump has only himself and his venal personal interest to blame.
Well … that and war.
Interpreting polls is usually a “fool’s errand,” said Catoggio, but there’s no denying the numbers when they’re splashing one bucket of slop after another on your head, as Trump’s personal popularity appears to be doing. Trump’s job approval frequently dips below 40 percent, but it’s very unusual for him to fall as low as 35 percent — and he’s done it three times in the last nine national surveys.
This, said Catoggio, means some “meaningful segment of his base appears to have left him,” and Fox News knows exactly who it is.
“I’m tempted to speculate that the mutineers are … Reaganite conservatives whose tribal tether to the GOP has been snapping, strand by strand, over the past 10 years as the weight of their disgust at the state of the right has grown. At last, perhaps, the final atavistic strand has broken,” said Catoggio, pointing to 18 percent of conservatives preferring Democratic Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico.
“It ain’t just the RINOs who are tilting Democratic this time,” Catoggio said. “GOP operatives are worried about it too.”...
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Trump's failures and crimes have caught up with him. We all know it.
Trump alarms with 'massive gutting' of program meant to pull kids out of poverty: NYT — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
The Trump administration's threat to a program meant to pull kids out of poverty is alarming advocates, the New York Times reported.
According to reporting by The Times, the Trump administration is teeing up a "major rollback" of the federal requirements for Head Start, an early education and antipoverty program created in 1965. Advocates and experts told The Times that the rollback threatens to upend the 60-year-old program.
Ruth Friedman, a child care policy expert, told The Times that the proposed changes to Head Start are a "massive gutting." The Times noted that the program currently serves about 700,000 kids under the age of 6 and has served more than 30 million children since 1965.
The White House is eyeing changes that would remove most of Head Start's requirements for math and literacy curricula, class sizes, medical screenings, home visits, and even that children brush their teeth after meals, according to The Times, which spoke with three anonymous sources familiar with the plan.
"Eliminating Head Start's performance standards guts the science-backed standards that ensure our youngest learners get what they need to arrive at kindergarten ready to succeed," Friedman said....
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I heard Trump say that the kids were our future. Looks like he wants to keep them as stupid as he is.
Wisconsin Lawmaker Calls For Fauci To Be Publicly Executed — Crooks and Liars|Chris capper Liebenthal
Waukesha County Supervisor Robert Kolb made a Facebook post calling for the public execution of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
When people started to call or send emails to him, he made another post saying, "I stated that Fauci should be executed for his crimes…. I guess these people think I am going to be upset & bothered by these phone calls. I couldn't be laughing any harder."
Despite his bravado, Kolb deleted his original post. When TMJ3 reporter Rebecca Klopf called him about his posts, all Mr. Tough Guy would say was "no comment."
The reporter then attempted to call all of the other county supervisors as well as the county executive. Of the people she was able to contact, most condemned Kolb's statement, but not one of them took any action to censure him.
The county's lawyers said that Kolb did not violate any laws since he made the comments on a private account. That may or may not be accurate. It depends on when he made the comments, where he was when he made them, and what device he used. If he made those comments in the evening, with his own phone while in the comfort of his momma's basement, he's fine. But if he made those comments while he was on the clock, or while he was on county property, or if he used a county computer to prove that he was an idiot, well, that's a whole other story.
Considering how many people had lost their jobs because of a social media post after Charlie Kirk's death, the fact that this asshat can make a threat on a person's life and not receive the slightest consequence is completely outrageous....
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What goes around, comes around, Mr. Arrogant Asswipe.
RFK Jr. On Trump’s High Grocery Prices: 'You Can Buy Liver!' — Crooks and Liars|NewsHound Ellen
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has some words of advice for Americans struggling with the skyrocketing cost of groceries thanks to Donald Trump’s unnecessary tariffs and his unnecessary war with Iran: It’s fine, make do.
On Thursday, Kennedy basically told Americans Trumpflation is no biggie. “This is true all over the country. … Most of the cheap cuts of meat are very inexpensive.”
He went on to lecture Americans who may want to eat a steak. “If you buy a porterhouse steak … it’s gonna set you back. You can buy liver or the cheaper cuts instead that are very, very affordable.”
First of all, liver is not recommended for everybody. Kennedy has no medical qualifications for his Health and Human Services secretary position. So maybe he doesn’t know.
Or maybe he does, and it’s yet another part of his plan to endanger Americans’ health.
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You can eat shit, too. As he well knows, many people do.
'Holy wow': Experts dumbstruck as Trump DOJ forced to fold Reflecting Pool case Raw Story|Matthew Chapman
In a motion to withdraw the case, flagged by Meidas Touch's Scott MacFarlane, prosecutors threw the Department of the Interior under the bus and claimed they now have evidence the damage to the beloved Washington, D.C. landmark was done by contractors working on Trump's renovation project, and that signs of the damage were seen over a week before David "Davey" Hearn was ever seen in the vicinity.
The end of the case, which followed a series of prosecutorial blunders and national ridicule of Trump for his failure to properly renovate the pool, drew immediate reaction from commenters on social media — with many calling it a monumental failure for Trump's hand-picked D.C. U.S. Attorney, Jeanine Pirro.
"Oh you don’t sayyyyyyyy," wrote political commentator Molly Jong-Fast.
"Holy wow," wrote former Pentagon special counsel and New York University law professor Ryan Goodman. "We've been tracking the DOJ withdrawals of indictments, dismissals by judges, rejections of subpoenas, no bills by grand juries and more ... Add this one to the list."
"How absolutely embarrassing for US Attorney Jeanine Pirro and this Administration," wrote national security attorney Mark S. Zaid. "I trust at least a public apology is forthcoming to all of those adversely affected by these frivolous prosecutions."
"The judge would have forced the prosecution to provide the grand jury instructions/transcripts to the defense," wrote Alex Cole of Newsitics. "Pirro knows she would have been caught red-handed."...
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Trump, the world's biggest loser!
Texas Pastor Arrested On Multiple Child Sex Charges
The Houston Chronicle reports:
A South Texas pastor was arrested and charged with multiple counts of indecency with a child earlier this week. Jorge Gonzalez Martinez, 49, was arrested at Iglesia Internacional Poder y Gloria in Edinburg, Texas, on Monday, according to ValleyCentral. The alleged incidents occurred between March 2025 and April 2025.
According to ValleyCentral, multiple children have come forward with accusations against Martinez. Edinburg police Chief Jaime Ayala said the investigation was prompted after one girl came forward with allegations. The initial report was filed earlier this month.
On Tuesday, Martinez was charged with one count of indecency with a child – exposure and three counts of indecency with a child sexual contact. A judge set Martinez’s bail at $300,000.
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Another one bites the dust.
Whitney Lynn will endorse this.
Neo-Nazi Leader Admits Civil Rights Violation In 2023 New Hampshire Drag Queen Story Hour Protest [Video]
The Boston Globe reports:
The founder of a neo-Nazi group that sent masked men to protest outside a 2023 drag queen story hour event in Concord, N.H., has admitted their anti-LGBTQ intimidation tactics amounted to a civil rights violation, the New Hampshire attorney general’s office announced Thursday.
Christopher R. Hood Jr. of Newburyport, Mass., and his group, the Nationalist Social Club-131, or NSC-131, will be permanently barred by court order from engaging in any further unlawful discriminatory practices, if a judge accepts the deal. Anyone who violates those terms could face further sanctions.
Hood, 27, will be required to complete 250 hours of community service and pay $2,500 in civil penalties, plus another $7,500 if he violates the terms of the court’s order, according to a motion filed by prosecutors. He’ll also be barred from coming within 250 feet of the eatery where this occurred or any other Teatotaller Café location.
The core allegation in this case was that Hood, his organization, and 19 unnamed co-defendants — who directed intimidating chants and homophobic slurs at those inside the establishment, performed Nazi salutes, and banged on the cafe’s glass windows — had sought to compel a place of public accommodation to engage in unlawful discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
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Seig hell!
Paxton-Backed Law Cited In Ten Commandments Suit
The Texas Tribune reports:
Three Houston mothers are suing to stop displaying the Ten Commandments in Texas public school classrooms, arguing that it violates the state’s religious freedom law and a voter-approved parental rights amendment. Their lawsuit is the latest challenge to Senate Bill 10 — this time under Texas law. Other attempts to prohibit the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools under federal law — primarily the First Amendment’s guarantee of separation of church and state — have been unsuccessful so far.
The mothers’ suit, filed in Harris County, demands that the displays be taken down and that the court act before mid-August, when the school year begins. The parents are suing under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the Legislature passed in 1999 and declares that “a government agency may not substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion.”
They are also suing under the recently approved Texas Proposition 15 — also known as the “Parental Rights Amendment” — which ensures parents have the right “to exercise care, custody, and control of the parent’s child, including the right to make decisions concerning the child’s upbringing.”
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Nazis love control devices.
FBI: Water Systems Hacked In At Least Seven States
NBC News reports:
Cyberattacks targeting municipal water systems have been reported in at least seven states this week, prompting the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency to warn utilities nationwide that hackers are trying to disrupt critical water infrastructure. In a public service announcement Thursday, the agencies said water and wastewater utilities have reported incidents to the FBI, with some malicious activity degrading water operations. The announcement does not name the states.
The warning comes after hackers targeted more than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota in an attack that had hallmarks of Iranian meddling, according to a law enforcement official. It is still under investigation. The new federal advisory said the malicious cyber actors, or MCAs, targeted specific brands of control systems used by municipal water utilities, though the FBI and the EPA urged operators of all systems to take precautions.
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Our defenses are ignored on this front because we are preoccupied with deporting people of color.
China is having a good laugh at our ineptness with this.
Can the internet survive rogue AI? — Vox|Sean Rameswaram
The internet may no longer be solely the domain of humans. Last week, OpenAI disclosed an “unprecedented cyberincident”: An experimental AI agent successfully hacked its way into the open internet.
Specifically, the agent was assigned a task; in order to complete it, the agent broke out of an isolated research environment and hacked into a third-party platform called Hugging Face. It’s a move that many experts deemed inevitable, given the speed and scale of advances in AI technology — and it raises serious questions about AI safety.
But for Konstantinos Komaitis, a senior fellow with the Democracy and Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council, it wasn’t the unexpected behavior of the AI that was significant. It was what that behavior could mean for the internet’s fundamental, decentralized infrastructure and whether it would spur calls to build new barriers against autonomous AI agents.
Komaitis argues that such barriers are not the solution, however. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why an open internet is actually key to combating AI cybersecurity threats.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify....
We are talking about networks that exchange data literally based on trust. So what really concerns me right now is that in many ways, we are asking 21st-century AI systems to operate on 20th-century assumptions about trust. And unless we figure that out and we realize it, we will continue having these problems. And of course, the knee-jerk reactions that are coming with this, which are, “Let’s fragment the internet, let’s restrict it, let’s restrict access, let’s take control over it.” That is never the solution....
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AI can cook your supper then kill you in your sleep.
That Sign in Front of the Smithsonian is More Dangerous Than You Think — Thom Hartmann|The Hartmann Report
Trump's Smithsonian purge follows the same roadmap used by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and every strongman who came before
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
— George Orwell, 1984
It seemed so trivial. Trump ordered the Interior Department to post signs along the walkways leading up to several of the museums that make up the Smithsonian system in Washington, DC warning people that they’d find “inaccurate information” therein. It was based on a bizarre “report” written by the White House’s Domestic Policy Council and released without fanfare on the 4th of July.
The Council itself was packed with Trump with leftovers from rightwing think tanks and activist groups like American Compass, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute.
It claims that the American Museum of American History has displays that cover the fights for women’s and civil rights and to end slavery along with the positive role immigrants, women, and queer people have played in our country, which it finds deplorable and un-American. It wrote that Smithsonian leadership and museum curators:
“…have directed the museum’s mission away from historical education and scholarship of a shared national inheritance to be celebrated, and toward extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit and discourage Americans. … [And have] denigrated and displaced whites, males, Christians and Americans” while focusing on “race in areas where it has little to no historical relevance.”
Wild, over-the-top bullshit complaints that our museums are accurately portraying American history notwithstanding, this is far more sinister and dire than it seems....
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Stalin, Mao, HItler, Mussolini are Trump's idols!
Why in hell is he our president?
Trump State Department Can’t Find [YOUR COUNTRY HERE] On Map — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
You know, maybe Marco Rubio’s State Department should spend a little less time prissing at longtime allies who dare to suggest that our credibility on human rights is fully shot, and a little less time humping Nazi parties in Europe, and a little more time looking at a fucking map of the earth.
This is so embarrassing, you are going to die, this is one of those moments where you are going to die of embarrassment for what a clown country the United States of America has become.
Marco Rubio’s State Department marched its too-big Florsheims down to Brazil for an AIDS conference, which is weird because Elon Musk’s woodchippering of USAID and the rest of the Trump regime’s cuts to AIDS funding, not to mention its obsession with forcing any remaining recipients to comply with Trump’s bigoted, inbred anti-DEI rules, is likely already killing people with AIDS all over the world.
(To be fair, the Guardian notes that PEPFAR’s main work has “largely resumed” after initial Trump pauses, but this brand new study says PEPFAR disruptions “hobbled global HIV care.” Also to be fair, that Guardian link doesn’t say “kill” or “die,” we are just sloppily extrapolating what happens when poor people who were getting HIV/AIDS treatment suddenly can’t get it anymore, or if it suddenly “pauses” without explanation. For fairness’s sake, perhaps we should simply say the Trump regime is Making AIDS Great Again. Here’s more about how Trump and Elon Musk and Marco Rubio are Making AIDS Great Again, especially for kids.)...
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If the shoe fits (or not) wear it!
Trump's bizarre question to foreign leader revealed: 'Do people jump off it?' — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump's obsession with memorializing himself often spurs strange outbursts to world leaders about arches, a New York Times journalist revealed Friday.
The 80-year-old president spends most of his time focused on personal retribution and renovating Washington, D.C., to his own preferences, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who told her colleague Ezra Klein.
"This I will say about getting into his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations," Haberman said. "It’s a legacy thing... It’s, 'What am I leaving behind so the world can’t kick me off the world — or deplatform me or take my name off buildings in Manhattan or take away my Bronx leased golf course?'"
Haberman reported that official meetings are often interrupted by Trump's abrupt outbursts on said buildings.
"In a meeting, one of the things he was musing about was what should go on top of the arch," Haberman said. "It was, like, should he put a gold version of the 'fight, fight, fight' fist from Butler up there?"
In another meeting, Trump called up French President Emmanuel Macron to pepper him with bizarre questions about a major monument he intends to build in Washington, Haberman said.
"He calls French President Emmanuel Macron in the middle of another meeting and starts asking him about the Arc de Triomphe in France, asking, 'What’s it like,' and, 'Does it have a visitor’s desk? Do people jump off it?'" Haberman added.
"This was the conversation that he was interested in, and he’s still talking about this kind of thing — but calls up a foreign leader to inquire about what his arch to himself should look like."
Trump has become so consumed by these personal projects that he simply doesn't care about legislative priorities, according to Haberman.
"He is playing for history, capital-G great man of history — to be remembered by one name, to have left a mark on the world that is just different than a typical president," she said.
"That doesn’t involve the boring work of trying to pass a bill," Haberman added. "That doesn’t involve the boring work of going to Iowa...This is fundamentally less interesting to him."
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Scatter-brained megalomaniac asks pretty, pretty, pretty stupid questions.
Karoline Leavitt selfie backfires into Trump-shaming Nazi blunder — Raw Story|Tom Boggioni
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt opened herself up to a wave of ridicule by holding up a newspaper featuring a cartoon depicting President Donald Trump dressed as a Nazi.
Leavitt was photographed in the White House Thursday holding up a newspaper while appearing to be taking a selfie — seemingly unaware of the Pat Oliphant Nazi cartoon emblazoned across the page.
But it did not skip the notice of sharp-eyed critics
According to the Daily Express, "Leavitt's photo was taken for a piece published in the Independent Women's Forum spotlighting the work of White House makeup artist Brittany Danielle, who is responsible for the press secretary's makeup."
But the Nazi putdown left the celebration of the make-up artist forgotten.
“Karoline Leavitt is reading a newspaper with an editorial cartoon of Trump as a Nazi. She explained, ‘He only wears that uniform at Mar-a-Lago,’” joked noted humorist Paul Rudnick.
Popular X account PatriotTakes commented, “Karoline Leavitt holding up a political cartoon by Pat Oliphant depicting Trump as a Nazi,” as an account follower quipped, “Such a natural pose, the photographer must've been delighted with the result."
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Trump's Nazi press queen, wannabe Eva Braun, looks puffy in photo.
Trump thanks deeply loyal red state by planning massive dump of nuclear waste — Raw Story|Marc C. Johnson, Idaho Capital Sun
Here we go again, Idaho.
While most Americans have been preoccupied with rising food and fuel prices, an ongoing war in the Middle East and the various comings and goings of the Epstein Class, the Trump administration – and accomplices in a few very Trump friendly states – have been quietly concocting a plan to make three “willing” states home to the vast stockpile of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste.
The plan, in the works for months, was finally publicly revealed this week by the U.S. Department of Energy, innocuously described as a “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus.” The “campus” designation is promising billions in pie-in-the-sky economic benefits to states “lucky” enough to be named to the Trump administration’s short list.
But like all things from this administration, the breathless hype conceals an ill-conceived and reckless science-devoid blackmail scheme that seeks to entice Idaho to accept one-third of the country’s now homeless nuclear waste cache for a “promise” of a big payday.
Yet as audacious as the Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus plot is – and it is truly and nakedly risky in its ambitions – it is even more outrageous that Idaho’s governor, its U.S. senators, eastern Idaho congressman and most of the state Legislature have embraced an Idaho nuclear waste disposal scheme masquerading as an economic windfall.
As the Idaho Statesman’s Mark Dee succulently reported this week: “Idaho is on the shortlist to become the center of America’s nuclear energy industry — and a warehouse for much of its radioactive waste.”...
If this were a nuclear waste version of “The Apprentice,” the Idaho politicians endorsing this nonsense would be fired since they clearly have no idea what they are doing.
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And they thought the summer was hot! LMAO!
If they were fired, Trump would hire them!
'Brazenly corrupt': Rage mounts as GOP pushes Trump tax protection — Raw Story|Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee voted Thursday to block a Democratic amendment that would have prohibited the Internal Revenue Service from giving sweeping tax audit immunity to President Donald Trump, his family, and their businesses.
If passed, the amendment would have nullified a central element of the deal that the US Justice Department cut with the IRS in May to settle Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the tax agency. Experts have argued that such broad audit immunity is unlawful, and Democrats have warned the agreement could leave the IRS with no recourse if Trump decided to dodge taxes on the billions of dollars he has pocketed during his second stint in the White House.
Democrats on the Finance Committee sought to attach their amendment to bipartisan legislation aimed at streamlining tax administration. The amendment failed in a 13-14 vote along party lines, and the bipartisan bill passed out of committee 26-1—with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) the lone opponent. Warren told Politico that she “cannot support a bill that rubber stamps Donald Trump’s corruption.”
“Senate Republicans blocked Democrats’ proposal to end Donald Trump’s IRS sweetheart deal,” Warren wrote on social media following Thursday’s vote. “This deal gives him FULL IMMUNITY from audits on tax returns he’s filed. It’s corruption on steroids.”
The vote on the Democratic amendment came as Trump’s attorney general nominee, Todd Blanche, remained stalled in the Senate, in large part due to the Justice Department’s failure to commit to sufficient limitations on the IRS audit immunity deal, which Blanche signed....
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How crooked is Trump? This crooked. Some deal, eh, America? OK for he, but not for thee!
Fire his ass!
State Department Mislabels Every Country on Map of Africa at Global Conference—|Sharon Zhang , Truthout
A watermark indicated that the map was made using AI.
The U.S. State Department presented a map of Africa at a global AIDS conference this week in which every country was mislabelled and its borders jumbled.
The map, as first reported by Substack writer and AIDS expert Emily Bass and confirmed by Reuters, “caused a stir” when it was presented by a top official from the foreign affairs agency.
The graphic shows an outline of Africa with six areas highlighted, and lines that match the areas to the supposed country names. Next to the country names are figures indicating potential grant amounts....
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Since when does the U.S. want morons representing our best interests in the world?
'Last days!' Sky preacher removed from flight during 'demon' tantrum — Raw Story|David Edwards
Florida evangelist Whitney Lynn declared "we're in the last days" as flight crew escorted her off a flight out of Orlando for preaching the gospel, according to her latest social media posts.
Lynn — whom the Washington Post recently reported preaches on planes rather frequently — shared footage on TikTok Thursday, tagging @alaskaair and claiming she was removed for sharing her faith with fellow passengers.
"The passengers don't feel safe with you," an airline employee tells her in the video.
"They don't feel safe? Oh my gosh. I didn't know the message of Jesus Christ was unsafe," Lynn fired back in the footage. "It's called spiritual warfare. You know why? Because demons don't like the name of Jesus."
"Is it against the law to preach the gospel?" Lynn demanded, as footage showed.
"I don't need to answer any questions," the employee replied.
"Last days, people! Can't talk about Jesus anymore!" she announced, footage showed.
She then turned to the employee as he handed her a rebooking slip and shut the door.
"God have mercy on your soul, because hell is real, my friend," she told him.
After the incident, Lynn turned to TikTok.
"I'm telling you, demons are real," she wrote in one post. In another, she said, "I truly believe there were demonic influences at work."
The Washington Post noted plane preacher posts are frequently met with mockery online.
“That would be my nightmare,” one person replied. “Can’t even walk away.”
“The way I would open that emergency exit,” another person wrote. Someone else added, “This is why I drive.”
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She's correct about demons. We have one in our POTUS and more in our Nazi Congress. Even she is now suspect in that catagory.
I guess she lives a sheltered life because all the fuck we hear these days is "JESUS!"
Trump’s big boasts backfire in his court battle with ABC — Sarah K. Burris|AlterNet
President Donald Trump has been after the ABC network as part of his ongoing feuds with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel and the co-hosts of "The View." Now, it appears Trump's own vainglorious boasts have put the whole thing in jeopardy.
Chatting with Greg Sargent for his morning podcast for The New Republic, law school professor Leah Litman walked through why Trump has completely undermined his own case.
Sargent explained that Trump's own social media posts have become exhibits in ABC's case, which argues that he's using the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to go after his political foes. Leading the FCC is who Sargent called Trump's "slavishly devoted accomplice," Brendan Carr.
"This captures something really essential about Trump's open corruption and whether our institutions are capable of constraining it," said Sargent....
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The arrogance of fascism will be slapped until Trump's shit runs out!
CNN rolls tape of Trump energy secretary appearing to lie to Congress — Elizabeth Preza|AlterNet
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright may have lied to Congress about the role politics played in cancelling energy grants to Democratic states, according to a CNN supercut that aired Friday.
CNN’s Victor Blackwell rolled the tape after lawyers for the Trump administration admitted in a July 15 court filing that “the inclusion of grants in the October notice was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient state, i.e., whether the recipients location was in a blue state or a non blue state.”
“But that is not what the energy secretary said to Congress a few months ago,” Blackwell noted.
The host then played a clip of Wright speaking with the House Appropriations Committee. In that April 15 meeting, Wright insisted “our project review process did not take into account any politics in the evaluation of these projects.”...
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If they work for Trump the "will lie for boss" box was checked "yes" on their application for the job.
Trump Vowed Private Donors Would Pay For Freedom 250; Taxpayers Just Got The Bill — Conover Kennard|Crooks & Liars
Oh, hell no!
Turns out "Freedom" isn't free — and neither is Trump's sparsely attended 250th anniversary bash.
The Department of the Interior is going back to Congress with its hand out again, this time asking for another $10 million to cover costs from this summer's Freedom 250 festivities: a Christian prayer service, the Great American State Fair, and the July 4th fireworks show that tried (and failed) to set a world record. That's on top of the $150 million Congress already handed over — money the administration swore private donors would supplement.
Instead, taxpayers are footing more of the bill. According to Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees National Mall funding, the administration first tried to slip the request into a more extensive stopgap spending bill without specifying an amount, The Independent reports....
"I don't understand...,
America250: The non-partisan, bipartisan national celebration originally mandated by the U.S. Congress and overseen by the United States Semiquincentennial Commission.
Freedom 250: A separate public-private partnership and White House task force established by the trump administration to execute its own slate of executive-branch events.
I was OKAY with the former but knew the latter was just a grift." — surfjac (comments)
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Our commission was working on our celebration far over a year ago. Remember our 200th birthday celebration? What a wonderful time! Trump decided he could do everything better. Now we get the bill for his failures! OUT WITH THE RETARD!
Brewery That Promised Free Beer on the Day Trump Dies Is Stripped of Alcohol Permit — By Janey Wetzel|PEOPLE
The owner of Minocqua Brewing Company, who also runs a progressive super PAC, described his alleged violations as “laughable” as he claims to be the target of political retribution.
Wisconsin state officials confirmed on Wednesday, July 29, that a small-town brewery with plans to celebrate President Donald Trump’s death will soon lose its alcohol permit.
Minocqua Brewing Company, owned by outspoken progressive activist Kirk Bangstad, is scheduled to have its license revoked on Aug. 4. The revocation comes months after Bangstad vowed to host a Free Beer Day for customers whenever Trump dies.
Bangstad has repeatedly garnered attention for using his business platform to criticize the Trump administration and other Republicans with whom he disagrees.
Operating a liberal super PAC and selling “progressive beer” frequently themed around Democratic politicians, Bangstad has long claimed that his liberal politics have made him the target of unfair treatment within the state’s heavily conservative Northwoods region.
“Our brewery is very popular among progressives throughout the Upper Midwest because we actively fight against right-wing authoritarianism and corruption. As a result of our political activism, we’ve been boycotted by beer distributors and major grocery chains,” Bagstad wrote on the company’s Substack account.
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So much for our 1st Amendment. Wisconsin government cheese brains.
FIFA’s Top WH Advisor Quits Over Kushner Bro Deal
The Associated Press reports:
Senior FIFA adviser Carlos Cordeiro, who represented the soccer body on the White House Task Force for the World Cup, resigned Friday in protest at its private equity plan.
“I cannot stand by while FIFA considers selling a stake in the World Cup,” Cordeiro, a former Goldman Sachs banker, said in a statement resigning as adviser to FIFA President Gianni Infantino that urged other senior FIFA staff to speak out. Cordeiro often joined Infantino on working visits to meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in recent years.
Infantino has proposed spinning off FIFA’s commercial businesses — including World Cups and Club World Cups for men and women — into a $20 billion subsidiary with 20% owned by private investors. The “anchor investor,” described by FIFA, is a New York-based investment firm created by Joshua Kushner, the younger brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
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Too much grift for an honest crook to tolerate!
Trump: “Great Patriot” Rioters Deserve To Be Paid
“John Cornyn never had a problem with the so called ‘Fund,’ which will not benefit me, but rather the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration, until after I decided to Endorse and Support his Republican Primary opponent in Texas, who easily won the Nomination for the United States Senate.
“Perhaps there has never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history. They are suffering still, many ruined, and I felt that they should be given compensation for what has been done to them.
“I gave up any payments for myself, which would have been substantial, including for the illegal and unprecedented raid on Mar-a-Lago, my home in Florida, even though many legal experts, and others, including John Cornyn, said it was a shocking and disgusting display of ‘weaponization’ against me.
“Such an event has never happened before, and hopefully will never happen again! I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure, their lives have been ruined!
“Millions of people agree with me, as was proven in my landslide Presidential win, where this was a major subject of debate, and so did John Cornyn, until he lost his Election to an opponent that I Endorsed.
“Todd Blanche, a good man, should be immediately approved as U.S. Attorney General. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” – Trump, on Truth Social.
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Our corrupt POTUS.
Sen. Bernie Moreno: Fauci “Cannot Stay Free” [VIDEO]
Fox News reports:
Appearing on “Hannity” Thursday evening, Sen. Bernie Moreno argued Fauci’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic was driven by a desire for power rather than public health. “This is about controlling American people,” Moreno said. “He treated us like lab rats.”
“You want to give power to Democrats, socialists and communists in this country? They will take away your freedoms, they will take away your liberties, they’ll control you, they’ll replace you,” he said. “They want to systematically destroy this country, and that’s why Fauci is their hero. He got to do what they only fantasize about, which is total and complete control of the American people.”
“I asked Anthony Fauci to turn around and look at the people he harmed and just apologize. He would not even look at them. That’s how despicable this guy is. So for the attorneys out there, sue the crap outta this guy. This guy cannot stay free.”
"Next they’ll be attacking Jonas Salk for polio" — Todd20036 (comments)
"This is not the hill you want to die on, Senator." — Gustav2 (comments)
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Says the guy who doesn't mind his daughter being beaten like a rug!
Mentally unfit!
Trump aide busted on Fox as big economic bet blows up in his face — Alexander Willis|Raw Story
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett scrambled Friday after being confronted by Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo about the “way lower than expected” economic growth that fell far short of his previous predictions.
In early May, Hassett told Bartiromo that he “personally would make a bet” with his “friends” that U.S. economic growth would be 4% for the “rest of the year.” He doubled down on that prediction in early July.
And yet, on Thursday, the Commerce Department reported “weaker than expected” GDP growth – a broad measure of economic activity – of just 1.5% for the second quarter of 2026, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
“Yesterday, the GDP was slower than expected; last time we spoke, you told me you were expecting 4% growth in the second half of the year,” Bartiromo said. “We got a growth number yesterday, but it was way lower than people expected – how would you assess the macro story today?”
Rather than admit his prediction was widely off, Hassett attempted to reframe his past remarks as referencing a narrower interpretation of economic growth....
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"Smirky" Hassett is one of my favorite Trump Crime Syndicate stooges. Always good for a laugh.
Trump suffers double blow in court as 'the dam has broken' — Raw Story|Bennito L. Kelty
The Trump administration suffered two losses in one day, with a Trump appointee delivering one of the blows, per a legal reporter.
According to Politico senior legal affairs correspondent Kyle Cheney, the Trump administration's "unprecedented mass detention policy" aimed at immigrants suffered its fifth straight appellate court loss hours before a Trump appointee handed it a sixth.
"The dam has broken," Cheney wrote in a post on X reviewing the losses so far. "Six federal appeals courts in a row have now shot down ICE's mass detention policy, along with a 469-54 split against the administration among district judges."
The latest loss came from the California-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled 2-1 against the Trump administration's mass detention policy carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The Trump-appointed Judge Daniel Bress wrote the opinion in "the most significant rejection yet of the Trump administration's unprecedented mass detention policy," as Cheney described the ruling in his reporting for Politico.
According to Cheney, Bress found that the Trump administration had misconstrued a 1996 immigration law to justify its mass detention policy. The Trump administration's interpretation "has resulted in detained aliens filing thousands of habeas petitions in federal courts across the country, seeking bond hearings and possible release from detention," Bress wrote.
The other setback came from the Illinois-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled 2-1 and found that the Trump administration "defied logic" to justify mass detention. Biden appointee Judge Joshua Kolar noted the volume of prior judicial writing in his opinion, stating, "We add but a few more drops of ink to the gallons already spilled."...
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Definitely not winning.
The Great ‘Made in the USA’ Fraudyssey — The American Prospect|James Baratta
Perhaps you’re feeling patriotic during America’s 250th anniversary, and you just want to treat yourself to some fine American-made goods. It almost feels natural these days to start by browsing Amazon or Walmart, two of the largest retailers in the world, to see if there are any good deals on, say, fly-fishing reels.
Hoping to save time on Amazon, you turn to the retailer’s Alexa for Shopping AI chatbot to find a reliable, U.S.-made reel. “Sorry, I don’t have access to that information,” Alexa says. That’s weird. You adjust the query and remove the U.S.-made condition. At that point, Alexa comes through with an extensive selection. What that search did not yield, however, were the American-made products you were hoping for.
You figure you’ll give it another shot, adjusting the query once again. Instead of “Made in the USA,” you go with “in USA,” and sure enough, Alexa shows you what you had been looking for this whole time.
Erie Meyer and Zachary Harris, senior fellow and program manager at Columbia Law School’s Center for Law and the Economy, respectively, ran this exact query sequence as part of the methodology for a report investigating the capabilities of Amazon and Walmart’s chatbots to identify where the products on each of their platforms originate. According to the findings of that report, Amazon and Walmart, despite having the technical ability to detect which products are U.S.-made, suppress those products in search results generated by the retailers’ respective chatbots.
“In other words,” the authors write, “the AI has been tuned to protect the visibility of Chinese-manufactured goods over American ones.”...
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Is this alright with all of you people?
Here Are the Republicans’ Biggest Lies From Their Fauci Show Trial — The Bulwark|Will Saletan
REPUBLICANS HAVE BEEN TRYING for five years to rewrite the history of Donald Trump’s two biggest moral crimes. One was his violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The other was his deadly mismanagement of COVID.
Yesterday’s Senatehearing on COVID—which saw Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the government’s response to COVID, subjected to hours of lies and insults—showed that the GOP has now fully embraced the other revisionist story: the one about the pandemic. In this twisted narrative, the villain isn’t Trump, China, or even the virus. It’s Fauci.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), the second-ranking Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, insisted that the COVID vaccines were “experimental gene therapy.” (Theyaren’t.) As evidence of their putative lethality, he cited a poll in which 24 percent of Americans supposedly claimed to know someone who had died from the vaccines. That’s 82 million people. Hiding such a colossal death toll would be, to put it politely, impossible....
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Scapegoats and liars.
Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller, in the Original German — The Bulwark|Jonathan V. Last
1. Political Violence
Because irony is dead, two weeks ago, the Trump administration hosted an international conference on “The Resurgence of Political Terrorism.”
This would be the same Trump administration whose first act was to pardon hundreds of political terrorists who attempted a violent coup. The administration headed by a man who summoned thousands of people to Washington for the express purpose of carrying out a coup. A man who, on January 6, 2021, after being warned that members of his mob were armed, directed them to march on the Capitol where Congress was attempting to ratify the results of the election and said:
[Y]ou'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. . . .
If we allow this group of people to illegally take over our country because it's illegal when the votes are illegal when the way they got there is illegal when the states that vote are given false and fraudulent information. . . .
And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
An administration headed by a man who has expressly called for violence against his opponents over, and over, and over:
But this conference—the administration tried to class it up by referring to it as a “ministerial”—wasn’t about all political violence. It was about one very specific sub-class: “Left-wing” political violence.
I know. You are not shocked by this.
What will shock you are the words spoken by Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller in their prepared remarks to the “ministerial.” Because they weren’t just shameless, or hypocritical.
Oh no. These two men went full Nazi....
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This is facsism fucking around with our country.
Trump Regime Having Big Hissy Over French Calling Human Rights Abuser A Human Rights Abuser — Wonkette|Evan Hurst
Despite Pete Hegseth’s “war on drugs,” cocaine prices haven’t gone up, just saying.
Oh, how the Trump regime and its one or two friends in the world want to have their cake and bomb it too!
Any American who’s traveled abroad for more than nine seconds during the second Trump regime can tell you — assuming they’ve spoken to anyone in the countries they’ve visited who isn’t currently being bribed by the administration — that the rest of the world is pretty much fucking through with the United States. They pity us for what we’re going through, but they’re not about to go through it with us, nor are they going to hold our hair back while we throw up all over the planet. Not this time, not anymore. Oh, and they don’t want to visit, especially now that the World Cup is over.
As one person told this writer during a trip back in the fall, “What a way to squander your entire reputation forever.” You will be shocked to hear he wasn’t talking about men in women’s sports or Dylan Mulvaney’s Bud Light can or school libraries being allowed to carry books Southern Baptist parents might not approve of.
And today, we can talk about US Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Token Spanish Knower Marco Rubio and the rest of the US “diplomacy” team having a reaaaaaaaal huffy pissy bitchy poopy pantsy rabieta because a French diplomat dared to say out loud that the United States has lost all credibility on the issue of human rights, like a common Russia or North Korea.
Which it has.
Sorry, is that a controversial thing to say, Little Florsheim?
Fuck off....
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The madness that is Trump. End it please.
The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Spreading Globally — Cathy Rogers , Saul Levin , Philip Eubanks| Waging Nonviolence
One of the clearest victories happened in a Dutch town that few people outside the Netherlands had heard of before 2021.
Earlier this year, Gallup asked a national sample of Americans whether they would support an AI data center being built in their local area. Seventy-one percent opposed it, 48 percent of them strongly. Opposition to living near a nuclear power plant was markedly lower, at 53 percent. Republicans, Democrats and independents all rejected data centers. Asked why, respondents most often pointed to environmental concerns: water, energy, land use, noise and air pollution — and the lack of community consent.
At Social Change Lab we recently ran a randomized controlled trial with 3,467 participants to answer a question the AI accountability movement has been wrestling with: Which of AI’s many harms actually move people from concern to action? We tested 11 different arguments, from environmental effects to job losses and the harms of algorithmic bias; from AI enabling more pervasive surveillance to the risk of superintelligent AI leading to human extinction.
The results showed that AI’s environmental impacts were the strongest predictor of willingness to act. Job displacement — the issue people mention most unprompted, ranked much lower. Extinction risk came last. And the emotion most strongly associated with action was not fear or anxiety, but anger.
hese findings should concentrate the minds of climate organizers and funders alike. Data centers have become a focal point for public anger not just over AI but over climate policy around the world. Unlike abstract metrics such as “CO2 parts per million,” every data center is tangible; it requires a planning application, a zoning decision, a water permit and elected officials willing to approve — or reject — it. These local decisions create concrete opportunities for organizing.
In the United States, the movement to halt data centers has grown with remarkable speed: The New York State Assembly recently passed what could become the country’s first statewide moratorium; Seattle became the largest American city to adopt one after residents generated more than 96,000 emails to the city council; and more than 500 organizations from 47 states have joined the Stop Data Centers Coalition....
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Stop them from polluting our country and stealing our resources!
Texas is banning several THC products. Find out what will still be legal on July 31.— Katlyn Ma|The Texas Tribune
Although several synthetically derived cannabis products will be banned on July 31, delta-9 THC products will still remain legal.
Texans’ access to a variety of hemp-derived THC products will significantly narrow on Friday.
Texas will ban several hemp-derived THC cannabis products, including those containing delta-8 and delta-10 THC variants, punishing people in possession of them with jail time and fines. However, delta-9 THC, the most commonly sold THC product in Texas, will remain legal.
This is the latest blow to the state’s hemp industry, which has been consumed with uncertainty over the last several months as flurries of court of actions have ripped products off shelves and then put them back on.
The recent change stems from a Texas Supreme Court decision in May that allowed the Texas Department of State Health Services to reclassify all hemp-derived THC, except for low-dose delta-9 THC, as a schedule I drug, prohibiting its possession and sale in the state. The ruling ended a 2021 injunction that paused DSHS from enforcing the new classification, which effectively allowed stores to stock different kinds of THC for the past five years.
Cannabis experts say Friday’s ban could remove more than half of the THC products off some stores’ shelves.
“It’s a pretty big blow, and it’s recriminalizing a lot of cannabis products that have been completely legal and allowable in the state for many years, so we’re taking steps backwards toward prohibition,” said Sarah Todd, media representative at Texas Cannabis Policy Center....
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Texas: Quckly returning to the irrelevant past.
Trump to End Medicare Part D Subsidies After Vowing to “Protect” Program in 2024 — Chris Walker| Truthout
Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, justified the change by citing “stabilizing” markets.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced its plans to end a subsidy program for Medicare Part D, which has helped lower prescription drug costs for tens of millions of enrollees in the program for the past two years.
The Biden-era program provided subsidies to insurance companies, which in turn lowered the cost of drugs for seniors in Medicare. If repealed, many enrollees in the program could see their prescription costs increase by hundreds of dollars annually.
The announcement comes at a time when other costs, including for everyday consumer goods, have been increasing, too. The changes to Medicare Part D will go into effect at the end of this year.
According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which made the announcement, a recent review of prescription drug bids from insurers purportedly shows that they will more accurately price their plans without the need for the subsidies. There don’t appear to be any more assurances, other than that determination, that costs won’t go back up.
“We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no ?longer needed,” agency director Mehmet Oz said in a statement....
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The biggest lies:
And we'll get it in the mix...
Your check's in the mail...
I promise I won't cum in your mouth....
And now..."I won't touch Medicare!"
And you still think Trump doesn't want to kill all the non-wealthy elderly Americans? How did we get so fucked?
'This is wild:' CNN analyst stunned by young voters' dramatic shift on Trump — Raw Story|Travis Gettys
A dramatic reversal among a crucial voting bloc is emerging as the defining story of the 2026 midterm landscape, according to new polling analyzed by CNN's Harry Enten.
In the fall of 2024, voters under 50 gave Kamala Harris only a narrow three-point edge over Donald Trump, but today, the president's net approval rating among that same group has collapsed to negative 41 points in CNN's polling average — a swing of roughly 38 points against the president. By contrast, voters 50 and older have moved against Trump by less than half that amount, a shift of under 15 points.
"How big is this shift?" Enten said. "Yeah, I mean, we are talking about an absolutely huge shift, a 180 – young voters are fed up and they're taking their anger out on President Trump."
That shift is now bleeding into congressional races even though Trump himself isn't on the ballot. In the fall of 2024, Democrats led Republicans by four points among under-50 voters in generic House matchups.
That lead has since more than quadrupled to 17 points. Among voters 50 and older, the picture is essentially unchanged, with Republicans holding a six-point edge, down only slightly from an eight-point lead.
The trend looks even starker among the most motivated voters, a group pollsters watch closely given midterms' historically lower turnout. Democrats held just a two-point lead among extremely motivated under-50 voters in 2024.
That lead has since ballooned to 46 points, a shift Enten described as the kind of swing that produces genuine wave elections.
"That's wild," said CNN's Kate Bolduan.
"This is wild," Enten agreed. "This is a wild shift – taking the words right out of my mouth. We're talking about a 44-point shift amongst those who are extremely motivated to turn out and vote."
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It's just another rig, Trump will say.
Florida 'has not been hacked': Trump election claim crumbles as states start to speak up — Raw Story|Matthew Chapman
President Donald Trump's grand claims of a Chinese conspiracy to undermine U.S. elections in 2020 is already falling apart, according to a new report.
Twelve out of the 15 states listed as "compromised" in documents declassified by the president "said officials never notified them of a data breach," The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
“Florida voter registration data has not been hacked,” Gretl Plessinger, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State, led by a Republican appointee, told the Post.
"The states’ responses and newly declassified intelligence reports suggest China obtained voter data from other sources," the report states, "such as political parties or companies that compile and combine it with other information to target voters or consumers."
This contradicts Trump's claims, made during a primetime address earlier this month, that he had proof China interfered in the election by obtaining voter information.
Experts reviewing the evidence said these activities "appeared aimed at collecting data on Americans for intelligence purposes, not interfering with voting."
Verified Voting chief Pamela Smith bluntly told The Post, “They haven’t changed data. They haven’t modified data. They haven’t deleted data. They just have some data.”
This is not the first time Trump's new election fraud claims have faced fact checks.
Even as he delivered his speech, experts pointed out the documents Trump was declassifying didn't indicate any substantial foreign plot to compromise voting systems.
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The chickens are coming home to roost.
Trump folds on Blanche as GOP senators hand him devastating defeat — David Edwards
President Donald Trump conceded Thursday he may pull his own attorney general nominee rather than give two outgoing Republican senators what they are demanding.
Trump made the admission on Truth Social after the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a vote on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's nomination Wednesday night. The vote was canceled when it became clear two Republicans would block it.
Those two senators — Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) — are leaving Congress at the end of the year.
"Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it!" Trump wrote on Truth Social. "He has the potential to go down as one of the Greatest Attorney Generals of All Time."...
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We go no further than that last dump of bullshit.
Civil Disobedience Is Coming to Springfield — William Kristol
As evidence mounts that the Iran war is strangling the economy—new Commerce Department data shows that annualized growth slowed to 1.5 percent in the second quarter of this year—the war itself continues to expand. Saudi Arabia joined in striking Iran for the first time yesterday, while Iran continues to lash out around the region, including in missile strikes against Jordan and Kuwait and an apparent drone attack in Egypt. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remains practically closed, and threats of Houthi attacks have slowed shipping through the Red Sea. Happy Thursday.
Springfield Needs Your Help>
by Jim Swift
Springfield, Ohio—Most of the routes from Cincinnati to Springfield, Ohio pass by Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport, home to the region’s general aviation traffic and the Ohio Air National Guard’s 178th Wing. I stopped by on my way to Greater Grace Temple, where members of the G92 coalition, a network of churches that support the local Haitian community, were going to address the media about the imminent expiry of temporary protected status (TPS) for more than ten thousand Haitian immigrants in the region.
As probably always happens when a stranger shows up to a small half-military airport with no luggage and starts taking pictures, an airport employee asked me, politely, what I was doing. I told him I think this quiet airport could soon become the setting of one of the biggest stories in America: deportation flights carrying Springfield’s Haitians. He shakes his head. “I seriously doubt that,” he says. I tell him I hope he’s right.
The consequences of TPS expiring are already rippling through Springfield. Rick, a reader I met earlier this month, texts me about tearful conversations with friends whose Haitian coworkers and neighbors are suddenly being let go.
“People can’t believe this is happening to their friends and neighbors,” he says.
I got to Greater Grace a few minutes early. TV cameras were already lined up. Clergy mingled with reporters, waiting for the event to begin. Before long, eight Christian pastors and a Cincinnati rabbi took turns making the case that Springfield’s Haitian community deserves compassion.
Rev. Carl Ruby of Central Christian Church set the tone: “We’re here to respectfully ask Homeland Security and ICE to do what President Trump has repeatedly promised, and that’s focus only on the worst of the worst.”...
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Then start with Trump..
America Ended the Slave Patrols. Trump Is Bringing Them Back. — Thom Hartmann.
The uniforms have changed. The technology has evolved. But the mission remains the same: protect power through fear and intimidation
“The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” —President Woodrow Wilson, who screened the Klan recruiting film “Birth of a Nation” in the White House
Trump and the GOP are desperate to hang onto the oligarchy they’ve created, particularly in the face of the upcoming elections. Increasingly — as oligarchies usually do when they decide it’s acceptable to use violence to hang onto power — they’re turning to hate, fear, and terror as their tools. To this end, Trump and his lickspittles are reinventing the old Confederate slave patrols in modern form.
Most recently, ICE has begun violently force-feeding and catheterizing people in ICE concentration camps when they protest conditions or the absence of due process by going on hunger strikes.
Being tied down and having a tube shoved up your nose and down your gagging throat to your stomach is painful and degrading, as is having a catheter pushed up through your urethra and into your bladder because you’re now tied to a bed (to prevent you from pulling out the feeding tube) and can no longer get up to use the bathroom.
Force-feeding like this is a violation of the 1975 Treaty of Tokyo and condemned by the World Medical Association. It is considered torture by the international community
Citing the example of Mahatma Gandhi’s successful hunger strike against the British government then occupying India, the Red Cross and United Nations have recognized an absolute right to hunger strike as a legitimate form of legal protest. ICE doesn’t care.
ICE has also turned its attention far beyond immigrants. It’s buying surveillance and hacking services from companies like Palantir, Cellebrite, and Paragon, and drawing on sprawling surveillance networks that include Flock license-plate reader systems, facial recognition, cellphone forensics, and commercial data brokers, creating an infrastructure capable of tracking virtually anyone in America.
This is how nations or regions turn into police states to protect their oligarchs from popular rage and unpredictable elections, and the key to the transition is expanding the reach of the fascist regime’s internal enforcers by getting both local police departments and even volunteers to cooperate or participate.
This is not new in America.
By the 1840s when the Confederate states had pretty much ceased to function as democracies but had turned into overt oligarchies run by a few thousand fabulously rich families, slave patrols were their main means of controlling the population, including white people.
The slave patrol groups cut deals with local police departments to reimburse them when they helped arrest runaway slaves or punished white people opposed to either slavery or oligarchy. The system went national with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
That law allowed police seizing persons accused of being fugitive slaves to ignore the Constitution’s requirements for proof in court and a trial by jury as well as largely abandoning many Fourth Amendment protections for people suspected of harboring enslaved persons. It also paid a “commission” of $10 (about $450 in today’s money) for every enslaved person the local police or the federal commissioners successfully sent back into bondage....
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Trump's mob racism is real.
Republicans Spend Day Having Angry Ivermectin Orgasms At Dr. Fauci — Evan Hurst
Dr. Anthony Fauci didn’t not want to answer the Senate’s questions yesterday. It’s just that he and his lawyer know Rand Paul is a sniveling clownpiss little anal carbuncle, the type of guy whose neighbors try to run over them with lawnmowers, and they knew Paul was trying to use yesterday’s hearing find a way to gin up a fake perjury referral to send to Donald Trump’s team of ass-suckers at the Justice Department. Fauci explained in a short opening statement that Paul’s “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution” was what brought us all together yesterday.
“The sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”
Therefore, “Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.” He said it over 100 times
It’s not like they can find anything else to charge Fauci with, unless US Attorney Boxwine gets drunk and asks Grok to make a movie of Fauci licking the Reflecting Pool.
So Fauci pleaded the Fifth, and he exercised that right with every single question those thatches full of ingrown grundles asked him.
What was left was just Republican Dickhole Theater, footage for MAGA voters who say “You sound vaccinated” in comments sections.
The Theat-uh!
There was Rand Paul, of course, who raged from the beginning that his little genius plan wasn’t working. At the beginning of the hearing, Dr. Fauci’s attorney David Schertler was trying to speak, and it made Rand so mad he had his body physically kicked out of the room.
It should be noted that before the hearing, Rand put out 1,100 pages of Dr. Fauci’s diary. We guess Hunter Biden’s laptop shop keeps that in stock too. Just kidding, RFK Jr. had it lying around, because if there’s anything RFK Jr. likes more than whale semen, it’s libelslandering Dr. Fauci.
Anyway, Rand was so mad that now he’s going to call a vote to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, for invoking his constitutional rights, for refusing to tell him and moron Republicans what they want to hear about how Fauci secretly created COVID in a lab and then gave it to everyone for fun and profit....
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It is astonishing how these fools don't mind showing us just how moronic they are.
Nebraska town hall descends into chaos as crowd boos GOP rep — Elizabeth Preza
Voters demanded answers about cuts to healthcare while costs continue to rise and Republicans passed legislation delivering a tax cut to the wealthy and corporations.
When confronted with it, Flood asked his audience, "Why do I work so hard to pay my taxes for somebody that can work but chooses not to work?"
"That’s never come out of my mouth," one voter said.
Another voter who said she was a CPA attacked Flood as telling half-truths to the people at the event. "Don't lie to these people," she said. "We’re losing democracy in this country and you don’t answer anyone's questions … you guys are cowards."
She noted that a lot of the policies that people like that came out of the GOP's "Big, Beautiful Bill" passed in 2025 sunset in two years. Tax cuts to the wealthy are permanent.
"I’m sorry you feel that way," Flood said, only to be shouted down by the room as he tried to talk over her, claiming he was "treating her with respect. Answering your questions. But you didn't have one, so we'll move on to the next one."
"Don’t cut her off!" they yelled.
Flood's excuse for the bill that has grown increasingly unpopular with voters was that it was "something that President Donald Trump wanted."
The audience booed.
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Typical Nazi arrogance in the heartland.
'Exasperated' Trump 'yelling expletives' at officials as leakers reveal turmoil in West Wing — Elizabeth Preza
President Donald Trump is “exasperated” by the ongoing war in Iran — and taking it out on his staff, according to an ally of the president who spoke with NBC News,
“I don’t think he believed it was going to be this difficult to get the Iranians to agree to a deal,” the ally told NBC News. “There was not a real strategy for how long or what they should do to get to the endpoint.”
“He did not intend this to be a long, drawn-out war,” the person said.
Trump, according to NBC, is “angry about his military options and frustrated that he can’t close a deal with Iran." The president's flailing foreign strategy is especially evident as the war, which he originally described as a “short-term excursion” drags “into its sixth month." Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth estimates the war has so far cost $37.5 billion. A Telegraph analysis puts the "true bill" at $151.3 billion.
“Trump erupted during a meeting last week with some of his top national security officials, yelling expletives, according to the U.S. official and another person familiar with the discussion,” NBC News reports.
“After all this time, there is no unity,” one U.S. official familiar with the discussions told NBC.
Another U.S. official, described as having “knowledge of the discussions around the war,” told reporters the military lacks “clear guidance” from the president — even as the military prepares to resume major combat operations in Iran....
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5-year old has to wear his red hat at meeting.
GOP Has Settled On A Stupid, Unpopular Midterm Message — Oliver Willis
Republicans, grasping for an issue to attack Democrats over as they head to expected losses in this fall’s midterm elections, have inexplicably decided to embrace President Donald Trump’s widely unpopular tariffs.
...Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on multiple nations has led to increased costs that have been passed on to companies, which in turn have raised prices for consumers. That has led to a jobs slump, reversing the trend of growth that Trump inherited from former President Joe Biden.
The conservative majority of the Supreme Court found that Trump overstepped his authority with much of his tariff policies but combined with rising gas prices thanks to his decision to attack Iran, the idea has been a drag on the economy—hurting many of the workers the NRCC is asserting are pro-tariff.
The other component of the Republican argument isn’t true either. Trump’s choice to raise tariffs has led many nations to reconsider their trade with the U.S. and they have instead turned to China. China has seen its economic fortunes improve during Trump’s second term and has been assisted by his attack on universities and colleges, where a “brain drain” has benefitted China.
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America made a wrong turn and got lost.
Alex Jones goes from kissing Trump’s ass to calling for impeachment — Oliver Willis
Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has spent more than a decade promoting and protecting President Donald Trump, has now joined the chorus of voices calling for Trump’s impeachment and removal from office.
“The big issue is how to stop Trump. This is a war,” he said during “The Alex Jones Show” on Wednesday. “This is absolutely out of control. I’m calling for it right now: the 25th amendment. Impeachment. Whatever needs to happen to get this front and center, to get control of our country.”...
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The disenfranchised fascists.
Voldermort’s Wife Calls For Jailing Fauci (He Assisted Her After She Tested COVID Positive While Pregnant)
NOTUS reports:
Former White House official and conservative influencer Katie Miller heralded the release of Anthony Fauci’s diaries as a bombshell discovery that outed him as a calculating attention-seeker. “The most disturbing part of Fauci’s diary — is what he decided to memorialize versus what he kept out of his diary,” she wrote in a post on X on Monday. “It’s almost like he knew this diary would one day become public. He wanted to cast himself as the hero, as famous, as the savior.” Katie Miller, who is married to Trump adviser and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, has called for Fauci to be jailed.
Excerpts from Fauci’s diary indicate his relationship with Katie Miller was not always this way. He writes that he counseled the family after Katie Miller tested positive for COVID-19 while pregnant in 2020, when Stephen Miller tested positive and when their newborn child experienced a medical episode later that year. “I am calling katie frequently to check on her couple time per day. She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone,” Fauci wrote in an entry dated May 9, 2020. In another entry, Fauci writes that he called the doctors of Miller’s child directly to discuss the infant’s medical care.
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What else do you expect from sewer rats?
Ingraham Roasted For Making Faces Behind Fauci
The Huffington Post reports:
Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s past mockery of others came back to haunt her on Wednesday’s episode of “The Daily Show.”
The Comedy Central program aired a supercut featuring footage of Ingraham making exaggerated facial expressions as she sat near Dr. Anthony Fauci during a fractious congressional hearing on the origins of COVID-19.
The clip was paired with audio of Ingraham criticizing other people for doing exactly that. The montage ended with Ingraham appearing to take a selfie during the hearing, as audio of her saying, “Taking a selfie like a junior high school girl,” played over the footage.
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Eva Braun covers the clown parade.
GOP Senator: Everybody Knows A Victim Of Vaccines
“He was so drunk with his own fame, that he was emotionally conflicted since he funded this virus, and he overcompensates. But again– and then at the end of the day, he destroys the trust of the American people for the government and created all this vaccine hesitancy, as well. He even himself — it’s now being reported — took the vaccine and he had some type of a pulmonary infarction. I mean, who didn’t have a friend that took this vaccine and had some type of complication? A stroke, a blood clot, a young man getting some type of heart inflammation, as well. That’s what destroyed the trust in the American people for our government.” – Sen. Roger Marshall, going full QAnon for Fox News.
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We know that people had side effects. There were individual reasons for it. There are always individual side effects from any vaccinations. No one I know was hospitalized or died as a result. The reactions were gone in a few days.
He's showing us he's just another coward. Here are the records of deaths from the vaccine against the deaths from Covid, retard.
You cowards would have been on Fauci if he had done nothing to fight the epidemic. You are as bad as the virus and must be stopped the same way!
California Does Medicaid Home Care Well. They’re Being Punished For It. — Julia Métraux
On July 21, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who heads Medicaid programs federally, announced they’re deferring over $850 million from the state of California over its Medicaid-funded home and community-based services program called In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS). The Trump administration has attacked IHSS for the program’s growth over the past decade.
Their argument: the program is so successful there must be rampant fraud.
Home and community-based services got started under President Ronald Regean to help disabled people remain in their communities with the assistance of paid aides, including family members, instead of being institutionalized. From a purely economic standpoint, home and community-based services care is cheaper than care in hospitals or nursing homes. And disabled people find the right to remain in their communities to be so crucial that it has become an essential tenet of disability rights activism.
Hagar Dickman, who directs California-focused long-term services and support at Justice in Aging, told methat disabled people “are entitled to the life that we expect to have of independence, of autonomy, of self-actualization, and agency.”
As of May 2026, nearly a million disabled and aging Californians are authorized for home and community-based services through IHSS. Unlike in some states, like Texas, where people can lag on waiting lists for over a decade, once a disabled Californian goes through the process of qualifying for IHSS, they are able to get services to help them live independently immediately.
The program’s growth, according to Tyler Sadwith, who directs Medicaid services in the state, is proof that it’s working. In February, Sadwith wrote a letter to Dr. Oz’s agency defending it against allegations of fraud. “Outcomes that CMS has repeatedly endorsed and promoted through federal approvals of California’s IHSS and [home and community-based services] programs, because they deliver care at a fraction of institutional costs.”
Experts I spoke with are concerned that the attacks specifically on California could be used to make an example of paid caregiving, which Kennedy has attacked profusely. Attacks on paid caregiving are also happening at the same time that the Department of Justice is trying to undermine Olmstead, a Supreme Court decision which granted disabled people the right to remain in their communities, in addition to brutal federal Medicaid cuts....
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And if you think healthcare is expensive now just wait until 2027 when the drug prices go up even more. Many of us won't be able to go on. Their death plan is in place.
Florida AG: “I’m Launching An Investigation Into Fauci”
Politico reports:
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced a state investigation into Anthony Fauci on Wednesday amid continued GOP scrutiny in Washington.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote in a Wednesday X post the former White House adviser cannot claim the Fifth Amendment since he received a preemptive pardon by Biden, and he should be held in contempt for not answering Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul’s questions about U.S. funding going to a lab in a region of China where the first Covid cases were reported.
When asked by another X user about options, DeSantis said only a state attorney general or prosecutor can bring a case due to his pardon. “It would require either a state AG or local state attorney to bring a case, which would need to establish violations of state law as well as personal jurisdiction over the defendant,” DeSantis wrote.
'A lot of noise but no charges will ever be filed because there were no crimes committed.
Meanwhile, still no release of the remaining Epstein Files." — Houndentenor (comments)
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Do all the Nazis hideout in Florida?
Why? Is he bored playing pocket pool and needs some headlines to show he's relevant?
Hawley Attacks Fauci: “No Honest Person Pleads The Fifth” (Trump Invoked The Fifth Hundreds Of Times)
The Daily Beast reports:
Sen. Josh Hawley, 46, accused Fauci, 85, of trying to enrich himself during the COVID-19 pandemic, but melted down on X after Fauci invoked the Fifth and refused to participate in his witch hunt. After the hearing, Hawley posted a clip of him and Fauci’s exchange on X and wrote, “Hint for you: no honest person pleads the Fifth.”
Hawley may have forgotten that Trump, 80, has done the same hundreds of times. Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 400 times while being questioned by lawyers from New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office in a deposition for a civil fraud investigation in 2022.
Trump later posted, “I once asked, ‘If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?’ Now I know the answer to that question. When your family, your company, and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt supported by lawyers, prosecutors, and the Fake News Media, you have no choice.”
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Hawley just called Trump dishonest! Fauci, like all citizens, has the protection of the Fifth Amendment. Even Trump knows this. Josh Hawley, the little cowrd shit, does not. "OK for me, not for thee" — The Nazi Mantra! They really showed how perverse they are with this one.
Eric Trump’s MAGA Prophetess: Trump Will Release Video Proving Election Was Stolen When God Says To
Eric Trump regularly appears on Green's show, most recently to agree with her that his father has been "anointed by God to rule this nation." Green has also appeared with Eric Trump at QAnon conventions hosted by Trump resorts.
Green last last appeared here to declared that God has warned her that JD Vance, Pam Bondi, and Mike Johnson are all part of the Deep State.
Green appeared here last year when she declared that God told her that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will be imprisoned for helping steal the 2020 election.
"It's 6 years after the 2020 election. 'Secret evidence' is great for secret courts meeting at secret times in secret places. But, it has no bearing on anything else." — The_Wretched (comments)
"...I am dumbfounded (with a b) that anyone outside of a mental institution can listen to this bullshit with a straight face." — moisturize me (comments)
"The mythological god that created hundreds of billions of galaxies in this universe is interested in what happens on this little grain of sand. LOL" — andrew (comments)
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Name a mountain faith has moved. Is this just another way of saying "time changes everything?"
Giving real Christians shade with her Trump worship.
Read her bullshit at your own risk.
Stupid Liar: Windmills Are Sign Of A “Failing Country”
“He’s got energy problems. They’ve got windmills all over the place. Any time you see windmills, you see a failing country. And they’re made in China. Not used by China, but they’re made in China. And you’ve got a thing called the North Sea. And he told me he’ll open up the North Sea for oil.” – Trump, referring to British Prime Minister Andy Burnham while surrounded by sniveling, gutless lackeys who know very well that China leads the world – by far – in wind energy production.
"The world is moving on to cheap, sustainable energy, and we are stuck selling fossil fuels. Once you buy solar or wind equipment, the wind is free, and the sun shines.
The only failure here is the failure to put the American people before corporate and fossil fuel interests." — AndyinChicago (comments)
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Who does the retard think he is? Donald Quixote? Incredibly retarded and dangerous.
Anytime you see windmills you see an infrastructure producing renewable enegry for our country. Oh, yes...and keeping Trump from lining his pockets with more fossil fuel kickbacks!
Judge Tosses Patel’s Defamation Suit Against Blogger
The Daily Beast reports:
A federal judge has thrown out a defamation lawsuit filed by FBI Director Kash Patel against a blogger who accused him of being a “Kremlin asset.” Patel filed the lawsuit against Jim Stewartson in June 2023 in a Nevada court. Patel sought $10 million in damages after the blogger suggested the former MAGA podcaster had tried to “overthrow the government” and helped plan the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021.
In court filings, Patel cited a series of X posts that he claimed defamed him. These included Stewartson accusing Patel of “sedition,” suggesting he had “helped ensure the Capitol was undefended” ahead of the Jan. 6 riot, and calling Patel a “blatantly incompetent chud” who should be in custody. The phrase “chud” is a derogatory term used to describe MAGA supporters, as well as to attack their physical appearances.
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Mr. Goo Goo Eyes bugged 'em out more!
Blinkered MAGA threatens jail — for a crime Trump committed 450 times — Tara Dublin
It’s just so weird how Republicans just can’t stop reliving and relitigating 2020.
When they’re not crying about election fraud without any proof (darn those unhackable mailed-in paper ballots!) or denying that January 6th was an insurrection, they’re whining about *checks notes* not enough people dying from the Coronavirus, as a desperate attempt to distract from their participation in the biggest political coverup in American history.
Republicans know that Trump’s manufactured war with Iran won’t stop us from talking about the Epstein Files, and it certainly won’t reverse President Joe Biden’s legitimate victory in 2020, no matter who won’t say so during their Senate confirmation hearings.
Republicans also know the Epstein Files will never go away, especially not when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act and has been ordered to either unredact more of the files or explain why they must stay blacked out, all thanks to a real lawyer who hasn’t sold herself to Trump....
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Trump Crime Syndicate criming hits new high!
Jonathan V. Last and Robert Kagan: Marco and Miller Go Full Fascist — Jonathan V. Last
At a little-noticed conference on political violence a couple of weeks ago, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller employed the dehumanizing rhetoric of the Soviets and Nazi mastermind Joseph Goebbels to attack the left. And while they might want us to think they were just talking about the DSA, it sure seems that they meant Democrats generally—including those who might be legitimately protesting Trump's efforts to try to steal an election. Plus: Iran is not acting like it fears the United States, Lindsey Graham probably did more harm than good, and the Fauci drama is the latest example of the MAGA double standard about telling the truth.
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They were certainly pushing to get there. Fuck 'em!
Trump’s New Fed Chair Deserts Trump — Robert Kuttner
As expected, the Federal Reserve did not raise interest rates today, but neither did it lower them from its current target range of 3.5 to 3.75 percent for short-term rates. And the vote was 9-to-3, with three regional bank presidents—Beth Hammack of Cleveland, Neel Kashkari of Minneapolis, and Lorie Logan of Dallas—voting to raise the target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter percentage point. It was the first time since 2016 that three officials dissented in the same direction.
The split vote signals that the Fed, despite President Trump’s wishes for a rate cut, is likely to vote for a rate hike between now and the November midterms. That’s because several factors, some of them of Trump’s own making, are increasing inflation, including the Iran war and retail price increases resulting from Trump’s tariffs.
Our impulsive and oblivious president is not good at connecting dots. One set of Trump policies raises inflation, while Trump pressures the Fed to ignore the problem and cut interest rates.
In his report to Congress on July 15, Kevin Warsh, the newly appointed Fed chair, surprised many observers by ignoring the Fed’s “dual mandate” to pursue both price stability and high employment. He declared, “The members of our [Federal Open Market] Committee have no tolerance for persistently elevated inflation. And we share a resolute commitment to restoring price stability.”
He said nothing about employment. The hard line on inflation must have also surprised Warsh’s patron, President Trump....
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Someone can think?
MAGA AG moves to investigate Fauci as Republicans vow revenge for invoking Fifth — Matthew Chapman
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, is launching an investigation into former National Institutes of Health director Dr. Anthony Fauci.
According to Politico, Uthmeier's boss, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has concocted a bizarre legal theory for why Fauci, who testified before a hostile GOP-dominated Senate committee on Wednesday, was not allowed to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights under questioning from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
"Uthmeier has launched several investigations since he was appointed by DeSantis in February 2025, from suing health organizations over the state’s ban on transgender treatments for children to recruiting rules used by the NFL," noted the report. This follows DeSantis writing "in a Wednesday X post the former White House adviser cannot claim the Fifth Amendment since he received a preemptive pardon by Biden, and he should be held in contempt for not answering Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul’s questions about U.S. funding going to a lab in a region of China where the first Covid cases were reported."
Paul has spent years pursuing the idea that Fauci-backed "gain of function" research was responsible for engineering the COVID virus, something that has never been substantiated, and has openly called for Fauci's arrest. In his testimony, Fauci explained that while he has not broken any laws, his lawyers advised him to remain silent due to Paul's eagerness for a pretext to prosecute him.
For his part, said the report, Paul "told Fauci he will face consequences for pleading the Fifth and has scheduled an Aug. 5 committee meeting to discuss whether to declare him in contempt of Congress," while Uthmeier said weeks before the hearing even took place "that he was losing sleep over thinking of ways to prosecute Fauci."...
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Not one of them can hold Fauci's jock strap!
Bully tactics come back to bite Hegseth — now begging for help he can't get: report — Tom Boggioni
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is running into a brick wall as he begs U.S. allies for support, according to a new report.
After months of browbeating European nations to join his Iran war, Hegseth is now desperately seeking their assistance—only to discover that his previous bullying has consequences, Politico reported Wednesday.
The Defense Secretary is proposing an international coalition that will patrol the Strait of Hormuz, according to Politico.
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When you treat your friends like shit you will find you have no friends.
Trump Put Words In Dead Soldiers' Mouths/Ossoff Rips Hegseth — Cliff Schecter
At the ceremony itself, the sick sociopath had the military mute the microphones--so the country could not hear the families.
There's a version of the presidency that shows up at a dignified transfer to grieve with the families. This isn’t it. On his way to receive Americans killed in Iran, Trump claimed the fallen had personally told him—“very strongly”—that Iran must never get a nuclear weapon. Dead men, drafted by a ghoul into endorsing his stupid war that killed them. There's no bottom. There'll never be any bottom.
A day earlier, this unwashed jackass had posted a body-count comparison on Truth Social framing eighteen American deaths as quite the bargain. At the ceremony itself, the sick sociopath had the military mute the microphones--so the country could not hear the families.
David Shuster rolls the tape—taking you inside the Senate hearing where Jon Ossoff asked Pete Hegseth one simple yes-or-no question about his “combat ineffective” claims--again and again--and got no answers--just a whole lotta of bullshit. Even as the Pentagon requests $67 billion more to keep Trump's inane war going.
What did Trump say about those who made the ultimate sacrifice? How ridiculous did Ossoff make Hegeth look? Watch the video, and go to BAM to read more about another insane day under this clown President.
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Just more proof Trump hates the U.S. and is destroying us.
Ossoff 2028!
Fox News Pushed A Big Lie To Justify ICE Murder — NewsHound Ellen
The network owes the slain man's family a big apology, or more.
After Trump’s Department of Homeland Security shot and killed U.S. resident Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7, the department tried to paint Salgado Araujo as a criminal. The Mexican national had no criminal record and had reportedly lived in the U.S. for 35 years.
As Media Matters noted, the FBI said in an affidavit that a “white crystal-like substance” that appeared “consistent with methamphetamine” was seen in Salgado Araujo’s vehicle. His family said it was probably salt for an electrolyte mixture used by outdoor workers in Texas’ extreme heat.
On July 24, the family was proved right.
But Fox “News” anchor Trace Gallagher didn’t bother to wait for any facts to start pushing the pro-DHS, pro-murder propaganda. On July 15, before the powder had been analyzed, Media Matters caught Gallagher saying, “We now know that they found — put these pictures on the screen — they found three bags of methamphetamine in this car. There probably is a reason that they were trying to get away from ICE agents.”...
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This Gallagher swine must be forced to apologize for his mean and hurtful lie. Is he a man or is he a Nazi animal?
As previously stated, there is no statute of limitations on murder. These killers will come to justice.
‘Chaos, corruption, and poverty’: The racist wrath of Stephen Miller — Lisa Needham
In an administration stuffed full of the very worst, most morally vacant, reprehensible people on Earth, senior White House adviser and top hate-filled hobgoblin Stephen Miller still manages to stand out.
His steadfast commitment to naked cruelty never wavers, and he seems to have an infinite capacity to get in front of a camera and say the most absurd, offensive stuff imaginable.
From demanding that immigrants pay the United States reparations for all of the things his fevered maggot brain imagines they’ve done wrong to boasting about Western imperialism “eradicating the criminal elements within its territories,” Miller is the go-to guy for unhinged rants....
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Miller will pay. In time he will pay.
LIVE VIDEO: Fauci Testifies Before Senate Committee
Yahoo News reports:
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Sunday said he does not “expect to get much out of” Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), during his upcoming Senate hearing.
“I think it’d be very forgetful, completely unrepentant, arrogant, I mean –– arrogant to the extreme,” Johnson told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News when asked about what to expect from Fauci’s Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee testimony this week. “Don’t expect to get much out of him, but I’m going to try and lay out all the things that he did that were such a miserably failed response to COVID,” Johnson added before the interview ended.
The committee’s chair, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), said Fauci was subpoenaed to testify about an alleged cover-up of the U.S.’s involvement in viral research at a Chinese lab where Paul and other Republicans say the virus that caused the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic was created.
"Fauci is a patriot and a hero. The "miserably failed response" to covid came from the False Idol who denied it, called it a Democratic hoax, said it would magically disappear one day soon, and pretended like not testing for it would mean there were fewer cases of it." — weshlovrcm (comments)
"Time for FOX and Murdoch to face another costly lawsuit for defamation & slander. Add that pube-headed freak, Paul, to the lawsuit pile too. It’s the only thing these liars & fraudsters understand." — Uncle Mark's Mugshot (comments)
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They have wanted a scapegoat for their failure since the start.
The attempted crucifixion of one of America's heroes as they shirk from the real criminal, Trump, should cast eternal hellfire on the Nazi traitors doing the attacking!
They will be weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Trump Overruled FEMA Approvals For Four Blue States
Politico reports:
President Donald Trump overruled his own agencies when he denied disaster aid for four Democratic-led states this month.
Emails between state and federal officials obtained by POLITICO along with more than 150 pages of documents submitted to FEMA by three states — New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — provide new details about Trump’s low rate of approving disaster aid for his political adversaries. He also denied a request by New York after administration officials verified that it had met federal standards for approval, according to state officials.
Presidents retain sole authority over granting federal disaster aid to states, but it’s highly unusual to deny a governor’s request after FEMA field offices have verified that damage estimates exceeded preestablished levels, according to a former agency official who worked under Republican and Democratic administrations.
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Spiteful hate from Trump. Not an American leader but an enemy of the people. He must stand down and be prosecuted for his crimes.
Willie Nelson Objects To “Water Thieving” Data Centers
Consequence reports:
Willie Nelson has come out strong against data centers, publishing an open letter on July 28th that said communities need to fight against the environmentally destructive server warehouses.
The country music icon posted his letter on social media, telling people that he grew up in Abbott, Texas, has a home there with farmed land “ where I can still see stars at night.”
He then gave his protest against data centers. “Our community, like many others, needs to fight against data centers invading our land,” Nelson wrote. “The last thing we need is a loud, water thieving, light polluting, data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).”
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Back to hell with them, Willie!
How Trump Is Driving America Toward a Civil War by Punishing His Political Enemies — Thom Hartman
From FEMA relief to clean energy funding, government resources are becoming political weapons, creating the kind of regional resentment that has shattered nations before.
Trump is now officially allocating federal resources based on whether people voted for or against him: any other president in recent history would’ve been impeached for this.
One of the most visible differences between authoritarian and democratic governance is how the government treats parts of the country based on their politics.
This is not a new idea in American politics. From Andrew Jackson’s spoils system to Boss Tweed (the morbidly rich oligarch who ruled 19th century’s New York with an iron fist) to the nakedly authoritarian rule within the Confederate states between 1835 and 1865, we’ve had more than our fair share of autocrats who’ve corrupted or even paused democracy to the benefit of themselves and their friends.
But now Trump and his reichwing lickspittles have turned this form of occasional/historical corruption into an entire philosophy of governance.
Imagine, for a moment, if either Presidents Clinton or Obama had announced that they were only going to send government subsidies, emergency aid, and funding to states that voted for them in the previous presidential election. The outrage would have come fast and furious, and the media reaction would have been explosive.
This is purely a thought experiment, though, because no president of either party in the modern era ever had the temerity to try such a nakedly corrupt misuse of government funds.
Until Trump....
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Trump is a criminal of the highest order. He must meet with justice and receive his desserts. This is a Civil War worth fighting. Our nation is at stake.
Trump Demands RFK Jr. Gin Up Some Proof That Vaccines Cause Autism, Which They Don't — Robyn Pennacchia
As of July 23, there have been 2,318 cases of measles so far this year in the United States, the highest number of cases this country has seen since 1991. It’s not good! Hell, even Florida’s notoriously anti-vaccine state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo blurted out, “Everybody’s gotta get the vaccine” when asked about the state’s spike in measles cases — from seven last year to 141 this year — before pivoting to blaming the increase on Catholic students at Ave Maria College in Collier County, who might oppose the MMR vaccine on the grounds that the rubella portion of the vaccine was initially created using cells from an aborted fetus back in the 1960s.
“You know, for some people — people may or may not know that the measles vaccines is developed with the cells that are a progeny from … an aborted fetus, and you know whether there’s a connection between the fact that you know some of the students at this university chose not to receive that vaccine, and it happens to be a vaccine that is related to the practice of abortion, I’m not sure,” he said last week.
Catholics actually have one of the higher rates of vaccination and support for vaccination of any religious group, and the Catholic Church itself vehemently encourages vaccination, including the MMR vaccine, but whatever. Given that just last year Ladapo and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a whole press conference announcing their plan to push for fewer vaccine mandates in the state, where already only 89 percent of all incoming kindergarten students have been fully vaccinated (well below the rate required for herd immunity), he might want to consider that some of the blame lies with them.
But I digress. Ladapo is a nut, but even he realizes that it’s bad for measles cases to spike that much. You know who does not realize that? Our president, who, sadly is far nuttier....
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The no-good, the bad, the backward.
Citizens Bank Cuts Ties With Prison Companies After De-ICE Pressure Campaign — Chris Walker
“Public conscience and community resistance have paid off,” read a statement from the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition.
Acoalition of social justice organizations is celebrating a recent decision by Citizens Bank to sever its financial ties with two companies that operate immigration prisons on behalf of the Trump administration.
The national bank, which is headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, has faced significant pushback from protesters for providing more than $2.5 billion in financing to CoreCivic and the GEO Group, two private prison companies that work directly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Demonstrations escalated in April when members of the De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition protested outside of Citizens Bank corporate headquarters during its annual shareholders’ meeting.
While that demonstration largely took place outside the building, some shareholders who are part of the coalition expressed disdain with the company during the meeting.
Notably, every major bank in the country has ended its ties with CoreCivic and GEO Group.
Earlier this month, Citizens Bank released a press statement indicating that it was finally ending its financial relationships with GEO Group and CoreCivic. The bank insisted that the move was unrelated to protest actions.
“Our practice has been to respect the privacy of our client relationships and we do not generally comment publicly on individual clients,” the bank said, claiming that the company had been “dragged” into discussing “what is largely a political matter.”
The bank continued to dismiss the protests in its statement, saying that it was closing accounts with the two companies “based on changed commercial circumstances,” adding that the move “does not reflect any change in our view regarding these companies’ business models or operations.”
Despite these statements, the De-ICE Coalition said it viewed the action as a win.
“Today’s announcement that Citizens Bank will exit its current lending relationships with private prison giants CoreCivic and The GEO Group is an important victory for the people who refused to let a major bank finance human suffering brought on by ICE detention activities of the current federal administration,” the coalition said in a statement shared with Truthout, adding:
While Citizens Bank frames this exit as a purely ‘business decision’ dictated by evolving commercial circumstances, the reality is clear: public conscience and community resistance matter and have paid off. As we have said from the beginning, doing some good does not cancel out the harm caused by these business relationships.
The coalition added that it still has questions about the moves, and that the De-ICE campaign “will continue” to monitor Citizens Bank’s current and future business relationships.
“More customers are continuing to consider terminating their relationships with Citizens Bank. Until we get all questions answered, we expect this will continue as customers align their personal values with banks they do business with,” the coalition explained.
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No money for Trump terrorism!
Yes, Trump Will Attempt a Coup — Robert Kuttner
Free and fair elections this November should produce a Democratic wave, mass repudiation of Trump, and the possibility of a new impeachment. With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that Trump has only one strategy for averting that fate: stealing the 2026 midterm election. He can’t seem to deliver a speech without returning to his obsession that he actually won the 2020 election, most recently in a prime-time address filled with false evidence of supposed foreign interference.
On January 6, 2021, Trump attempted to stage a coup and he will surely try again. Last time, only the integrity of a handful of Republican officials spared the Republic that fate. Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, rebuffed Trump’s demand to find exactly 11,780 votes, and Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along with Trump’s scheme, laid out in detail by John Eastman, to refuse to certify the results.
This time, Trump is relying on four possible strategies to steal the election. The survival of our democracy depends on whether each of them can be foiled, and how.
Trump has only one strategy for averting that fate: stealing the 2026 midterm election.
The first is to use executive orders and directives to gain control of voter rolls, which will then be purged using commercial databases that are rife with errors. These demands were spelled out in detail in Trump’s executive order of March 31. The order also required the U.S. Postal Service to deny mail balloting to states that did not comply with Trump directives.
This ploy has been complemented by threats from other Trump officials. Earlier this month, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with prison time if they did not comply with Trump demands. But as I wrote in this piece, so far the courts have consistently blocked every single Trump effort to take over elections. Just last Saturday, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit blocked the Trump administration’s effort to move forward with mail-in voting restrictions in 23 states that sued ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Trump’s second strategy is to somehow get Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which could require proof of citizenship and photo ID for people to register and vote, and otherwise turn control of elections over to the federal executive. Trump has been willing to hold hostage one important legislative objective after another to try to compel Congress to pass this legislation. He has tied its passage to the renewal of a foreign surveillance law that expired last month, and refused to sign a bipartisan housing policy bill. The housing measure went into law without his signature.
What if the FBI showed up to a polling place, demanding election materials or equipment? Suppose federal troops or ICE agents were deployed to intimidate voters or disrupt the election? What if Trump declared a national emergency? Attorneys general have been working with secretaries of state to anticipate and block these and other tactics.
One valuable memo has just been circulated by Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the Minnesota ecumenical progressive group ISAIAH, and one of the most savvy on-the-ground organizers in the progressive movement. Her memo, titled “Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework,” summarizes all the possible Trump tactics, and strategies for anticipating and countering them.
She calls for “mapping the actual machinery of election administration,” finding the vulnerabilities, and “deploying organized people into the specific vulnerable spaces (county board meetings, legislative hearings, certification processes) well before November. The job is to pre-position the case against their power grab by naming their strategy in public, making it transparent, and going on offense.” The rapid response mechanisms, Schrantz writes, need to be political, legal, media, operational, and above all, organized, with massive grassroots deployment of large numbers of well-prepared citizens. The entire memo is worth a careful reading.
The most alarming Trump tactic would be an echo of January 6, 2021: an effort to stage a coup by overturning the results. The Constitution provides in Article I, Section 5 that each house of Congress is the sole judge of its membership. But actual election results are certified by the states. Courts have repeatedly held that such certification is mandatory ...
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This time we must be ready for his coup and equal it. The ballot is stronger than the bullet. But we must be prepared.
Bessent says Americans won't need retirement savings: 'Elon's so far ahead of the curve' — Daniel Hampton
Bessent added that a quarter of jobs that exist in 2026 didn't exist in 2000.
Musk laid out the underlying vision earlier this year on the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis podcast, calling AI and robotics a "supersonic tsunami" that would bring about a world of zero scarcity.
"Don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years," Musk, the world's richest man, told Diamandis. "It won't matter."
Musk predicted that by 2030, AI will exceed "the intelligence of all humans combined," and that humanoid robots will eventually outnumber people.
Bessent's embrace of that forecast landed at a pivotal moment for millions of American retirees.
The 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, released in June, projects that the retirement program's primary trust fund will be depleted in 2032, triggering an automatic 22 percent benefit cut for current and future beneficiaries unless Congress acts.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that an immediate 24 percent cut on insolvency would translate to an average monthly reduction of about $500 for retirees, affecting roughly 63 million people....
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This article and the next (fif you can read it) illustrate Trump and his facist swine are bringing humanity to its end as predicted.
Now is the time to get ready for this. We must die on our feet and not on our knees. Prepare now!
Armed guards descend on USPS as Trump's war on mail-in voting ratchets up — Alexandria Jacobson, Investigative Reporter
Increased armed guards at U.S. Postal Service facilities may signal an effort by President Donald Trump to control the mail before the midterms, scholars and union leaders warn.
USPS plans to deploy more contracted armed security officers at 18 mail facilities across the country this month, according to internal agency communications reviewed by Raw Story.
The federal agency approved more than 12,000 hours per week of work for the security officers at those facilities combined, adding tens of millions of dollars in labor costs annually while USPS continues to bleed money - clocking $2 billion in net losses in the last financial quarter alone.
The Supreme Court dealt Trump a loss last month when it ruled states may count late mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day. Trump countered by pressuring a federal judge to lift a halt on his executive order that would give USPS greater authority to determine who can vote by mail.
"Screening mail ballots for eligibility would amount to an unprecedented, potentially unconstitutional, involvement of the federal government in the administration of elections," said James O'Rourke, emeritus professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, who studies the postal service.
"It's clear that the White House is pressing ahead."
Hiring contracted security guards is "similar" to the hiring of private security firms by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), O'Rourke said.
"If they put their own guys in, then they can do anything they want with the ballots," he said.
The increased hiring of security officers comes as the Postal Police Officers Association (PPOA) union remains embroiled in a six-year battle with USPS after the agency effectively benched its own uniformed police officers - limiting them to only working on postal properties, instead of patrolling the streets where letter carriers experienced violence and mail robberies occurred.
"They couldn't replace us with armed security guards if we're out in the street protecting the mail and letter carriers," said Frank Albergo, PPOA president and a retired postal police officer.
"If they bring us back to the facilities, take away our authority, they figure, 'OK, we can replace them with armed security guards,' but look at the damage that has been caused because of it."
Letter carrier robberies skyrocketed 543 percent over a three-year period, including some robbed at gunpoint or killed on the job, a Raw Story investigation found in 2024.
The USPS Office of Inspector General reported in May that the law enforcement arm of USPS, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), made some improvements in its response to a spike in mail theft but had many of the same deficiencies identified in reports since 2023.
Albergo said the union has been notified of about 39,000 work hours per week approved for the hire of 972 full-time armed guards across 54 USPS facilities - including 18 that didn't have any before.
Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) took issue with the hiring of private armed security guards who "do not have a postal patch," saying that some postal managers are prone to using security guards as "personal Gestapo to intimidate the employees."
"We've already got an arm to secure the safety of the employees, and I don't see the need to bring any outside resources about, outside hiring more postal police officers," Smith said....
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It's easy to see we are in a armed Civil War at this time. It's far beyond obvious. It was predicted here as we all know. Now it's time to engage in resistence that will require American backbones.
Fox Host: We Need To “Make An Example” Out Of Fauci
“I want to get to this point. I think we have been in our own sort of Republic evolution long enough to figure out how to best punish officials when they hurt the public. Do we all have to join a class-action lawsuit or is there a mechanism rather than a shame fest on Capitol Hill?
“Because if nothing comes about, if we only elevate his status in the public even more, his ego is fed either way. He doesn’t care if you love him or hate him. He’s known. He’s the most famous man in the world at one point.
“He wasn’t saying people loved him. He said he was famous. I’m concerned that that’s what we’ll do. We’ll cover it from stem to stern. Everybody wants to see the hearing. There’s going to be a lot of facts checked in that and I love that.
“But this man literally lied to us. Caused those of us who are responsible to the public to say what he was saying was true. I take it professionally and personally that now we know more detail about that.
“It’s not enough to shame him on Capitol Hill for me. I want more. I want justice with this guy. I don’t know what that looks like. Okay, so we know that.
“What next? We didn’t even learn from 1918. Fifty million people died from the Spanish flu. They never closed New York City schools. This guy — this guy. Yeah we can vilify him on Capitol Hill but I’m telling you this can happen again. We need to make an example out of him.” – Fox News host Harris Faulkner, ahead of Fauci’s Senate testimony tomorrow.
Faulkner last appeared here when she apologized on-air for claiming that Bad Bunny isn’t a US citizen.
In 2023, Faulkner appeared here when she apologized for falsely claiming that Pakistan was “expelling 1.7 million Palestinians.”
Faulkner has declared that Trump has a “divine assignment” from God and that retirees should shut up and “ride out” Trump’s tariffs....
"If you survived Covid, Harris, thank Fauci for that, you ungrateful bitch." — Ann Kah (comments)
"Your reminder that they've conjured an entire hate-campaign, murder boner, and multiple conspiracy theories about this one man simply because he didn't do a good job visibly hiding how disappointed he was in his boss's insane and dangerous ramblings about a deadly pandemic.
That's it.
Like, he didn't even noticeably go against Trump while he was fucking up the pandemic, just dared be a normal human being while Trump was rambling about horse paste and drinking bleach because it's a disinfectant.
And for that, he became the designated scapegoat for said Pedophile's absolute nightmare of a failure in terms of a pandemic response. Because that's how fascists work. They didn't fuck up, nearby stooge who didn't give the governor a harumph fucked up and now he needs to go out the window as a sacrifice." — Cerberus137 (comments)
"Uh, no, you have nothing to 'make an example of him' about apart from him being smart and scientific and of course innocent about your bullshit insistences based on a Pandemic Intelligence Unit you and Trump closed down particularly in Wuhan, so you're completely full of shit and have failed multiple times to prove any of your scapegoating and anti-scence in court all those times." — Friday (comments)
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We? Does she have a mouse in her pocket?
She's the one that should shut the fuck up. These retarded fools like this one are not Americans. They DO NOT KNOW what the fuck it all means by any means.
Trump has no devine assignment and she sure as hell doesn't. She's as evll a spirit as walks the eartn. Fox News produces them straight outta hell!
Her propaganda from hell is easily spotted.
When it comes to liars her god is biggest liar that ever lived. She gets paid the do this so we know what she is. She needs to show us her birth certificate!
Science and facts scare the shit out of fascists!
FL Youth Pastor Found Guilty On Molestation Charges
Tallahassee’s CBS affiliate reports:
A jury found a Tallahassee man guilty as charged Friday of molesting a teenage boy. The guilty verdict for 41-year-old Terrance Booker came after only 45 minutes of deliberation, prosecutors say.
Booker is accused of assaulting a total of five boys over the past 15 years. This case was the first to go to trial. Booker served as a youth director at his church and worked at an after-school program at a local elementary school until his arrest in August 2025.
Booker faces up to life in prison for this conviction. The remaining four cases will be tried separately at a later date.
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And another one bites the dust.
MAGA Shopify CEO: The Wealthy Should Get Five Votes
Fortune reports:
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, whose company commands a market capitalization near $154 billion, told his social media followers this week that a tax-tiered voting system—one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax—would be a “good system.”
That two-word endorsement, dropped into a viral thread, has reignited a debate over wealth, power, and democracy that most Americans thought was settled more than a century ago. The proposal would invert the founding American principle of “no taxation without representation” into something closer to “no representation without taxation”—and specifically, high taxation.
Reactions online split sharply: Some framed it as a provocative thought experiment about aligning fiscal responsibility with political voice, while others called it a naked attempt to legitimize plutocracy by giving billionaires and multimillionaires a formal, multiplied vote over the laws that govern everyone else.
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Dear Nazi, they already do. They buy them! So we know exactly where you come from.
America is the great leveler! You missed that part I'm certain.
Trump Appointees Gut Historic Preservation Rules
NPR reports:
An advisory council packed with allies of Trump voted on Friday to weaken federal oversight of construction projects affecting historic sites. Critics, in anticipation of the vote, told NPR that the move would not only clear a path for Trump’s controversial projects in D.C., but also endanger the preservation of historic and cultural places across the United States.
“Every American who has any place in their heart that is historic or culturally significant to them should be concerned about this attempt to gut historic preservation protections,” said Greg Werkheiser, founding partner at the law firm Cultural Heritage Partners.
The White House and the Department of the Interior did not respond to NPR’s request for comment. Part of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, known as Section 106, requires
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Whan a country forgets its past it has no future. These people will ,in time, learn this fact.
Trump’s appointees issue scathing ruling: 'We can no longer trust the DOJ' — J. David Mcswane, Pratheek Rebala And Carla Astudillo, ProPublica
Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.
From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.
Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.
ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word....
“As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary,” McElroy wrote. “DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.”
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The Department Of Jerk-offs finally get called out for their treason. They are an arm of the Trump Crime Syndicate.
Trump the failed is responsible.
'An Earthquake':Trump Action To Hit Elderly Care After SCOTUS Approves Power — David Edwards
President Donald Trump is using powers enabled by a recent Supreme Court decision to force thousands out of jobs, and it's the elderly who could face "dire consequences" of his actions.
President Donald Trump is using powers enabled by a recent Supreme Court decision to force thousands out of jobs, and it's the elderly who could face "dire consequences" of his actions.
Last month, the court ruled in Mullin v. Doe that federal law bars judges from reviewing presidential decisions on Temporary Protected Status — meaning no court can stop Trump from terminating it, according to CBS News.
The ruling's mandate took effect Monday, ending TPS for an estimated 348,000 Haitians — including 13,000 nursing assistants and 8,000 caregivers, Princeton University research fellow Phillip Connor found.
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More undeniable proof that Trump hates America. Cast him to the swine.
Trump’s mass deportation of Haitians is equal parts cruel and stupid — Lis Needham
Thanks to the Supreme Court giving President Donald Trump the A-OK to make his xenophobic views the law of the land, roughly 350,000 Haitians who have been living and working legally in the United States face immediate deportation.
Throwing them out of the country en masse is inhumane, but sending them back to a country that our own State Department classifies as too dangerous for travel makes this even more atrocious.
But it’s also short-sighted and will cause swift, deep economic harm to communities with a high Haitian population, where industries will catastrophically collapse.
Of course, the administration has been terrorizing immigrants all over the place—well, except for the white, racist ones—but Haitians with Temporary Protected Status face a unique problem now that the administration is allowed to deport them en masse.
Because these are people who are fully, legally integrated into their communities—with jobs, families, and homes—they can all easily be tracked down by Trump’s murderous immigration thugs.
And I mean really, really fully integrated into their communities.
Of the 350,000 Haitians with TPS status, 200,000 are in the U.S. workforce. They’re cooks, agricultural workers, caregivers, factory workers, drivers, cleaning staff, and more....
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Again. His hatred for our country is starkly evident.
Case Against Reflecting Pool “Vandal” Isn’t Going Well
NBC News reports:
A key grand jury witness in a case against a former Olympic canoeist accused of tampering with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool testified that the area was already damaged and would have required repairs regardless, lawyers said in a court filing Monday.
David “Davey” Hearn was indicted this month and accused of damaging the liner of the long, shallow pool near the Washington Monument. Hearn, who has pleaded not guilty, previously told NBC News that “the condition of the Reflecting Pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there.”
The witness, who is not identified, was the only person who testified about damages, and said that the property had already been damaged before, authorities say, Hearn stuck his hands in the water, according to Hearn’s team. He was charged with destruction of property and accused of doing more than $1,000 worth of damage to the pool. Hearn’s team questioned whether there is enough evidence to show he caused more than $1,000 in damage to the pool, the threshold necessary to charge him with a more serious crime.
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The utter disgrace of Donald Trump.
Voldemort: Dems Are Party Of Freaks, Weirdos, Crazies
Raw Story reports:
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, joined Sean Hannity on his eponymous show on Monday to discuss the upcoming midterm elections. During the interview, Miller took a swipe at some of the most popular Democrats in the party, one that didn’t land well with some people in the audience.
“The names you mentioned — AOC, Bernie, [Ilhan] Omar—these are people who, even 10 or 15 years ago, would have been relegated to the outermost fringes. They are now the heart and soul of the party,” Miller said. “The Democrats have become the party of freaks, weirdos, losers, and crazies,” Miller said. “But you can’t laugh it off because it’s deadly serious.”
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The psychopath speaketh.
Trump suffers 'hypomanic episode' with classic signs of psychiatric sickness: experts — Tom Boggioni
...“Trump has been having a hypomanic episode the past 2 hours. Post after post after post,” they wrote. “I count about 60 of them - mostly images, many of them AI. All his trademark pathologies; all his underlying themes: Malice. Grievance. Division. Entitlement. His gut is a simmering stew of agitation, rage, and desperation. His disordered brain is filled with paranoid fantasies of revenge alongside fantastical visions of regaining his grandiosity.”
“He hates being trapped and stuck in Iran. He hates that Epstein won't go away. He hates being told his speech at the dinner was inappropriate. He hates that his name needed to come off a building. He hates that musical artists canceled from his show. He hates losing in court. And he especially hates his own mortality,” they continued.
“Neither you nor I can EVER feel the kind of frenzied fear and fanaticism that Trump feels now. This is a man, who knows he's in his final chapter, who is confounded that he, all that he is, all that he ever said he was, his lifetime of secrets and lies and false constructs - is vulnerable to exposure,” the post added before warning”
“How can he possibly sit still? How can he sleep? Who can he trust? Malignant narcissists in decline always get worse, it's always messy, and they never want to go down alone.”...
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And his supporters are in denial. They are as crippled and ill as he.
DOJ Appeals Trump’s Mail Ballots Edict To SCOTUS
The Associated Press reports:
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to clear the way for an executive order from President Donald Trump that could dramatically change mail-in voting. The emergency appeal comes after an appeals court upheld a ruling blocking the president’s order in nearly half the country ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to allow the proposed changes to move ahead while lawsuits play out. Trump ordered the government in March to create a “state citizenship list” of eligible voters and deliver mail ballots only to people on that list.
Democratic officials in 23 states and the District of Columbia sued, saying the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to set election rules, not the president. Their attorneys have said Trump’s proposed changes are ripe for abuse and could cause chaos.
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Disenfranchising U.S. voters is very simply utter treason!
How Trump’s “America First” Administration Could Shut U.S. Scientists Out of the Next Nobel-Worthy Discovery — Lisa Song
For decades, physicists wrestled with a fundamental mystery of the universe.
They wanted to know why certain particles — like the protons in atoms — have mass, while particles of light do not. Whatever the reason was, it was crucial to understanding the origins of planets, galaxies and life itself.
The leading theory stated that particles got their mass from interacting with an invisible field, later dubbed the Higgs field, but no one had ever been able to prove it existed.
Doing so would require one of the most ambitious international collaborations in scientific history. Starting decades ago, thousands of scientists from dozens of countries worked side by side, even though some of their nations considered one another adversaries. The United States contributed a quarter of the workforce and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
The investment paid off in 2012, when the team detected the so-called “God particle” or Higgs boson, confirming the half-century-old Higgs field theory. The achievement was so significant that two of the physicists behind the theory won the Nobel Prize.
Under a new rule proposed by the Trump administration, American scientists might be forced to watch similar discoveries from the sidelines. The proposal would restrict international collaboration and give political appointees the ability to decide the most important research to fund, and the power to pull the plug at any time, for any reason.
As soon as he learned about the proposal, one of the U.S. scientists who took part in the landmark project rushed to file his objection with the federal government.
“These experiments take decades to build and require sustained, cooperative international investment,” University of Chicago physics professor David W. Miller wrote in a public comment. “The experiments will continue, without American leadership. … The United States will not just fall behind. It will step aside.”
The rule’s implications reach far beyond physics. Proposed by the Office of Management and Budget, a little-known but powerful part of the White House that guides federal spending, it would give the administration’s political appointees across dozens of federal agencies significant discretion over how grants are awarded and terminated. The appointees don’t have to know anything about science or the subjects of the grants they’re reviewing.
Russell Vought, who runs the office and has made expanding presidential control over federal spending one of his signature goals, has put the philosophy into practice over the past two years, helping to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and, in another controversial move, blocking funds already allocated by Congress. Vought’s decision last year to cancel 284 Department of Energy grants drew renewed criticism after an agency lawyer recently admitted in court records that the terminations were “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state” — in other words, blue states....
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Why would Trump care about a thing such as science? There's nothing in it for or about him.
Thomas Paine: The Consistent Revolutionary — Thor Benson
When Americans discuss the Founders, there’s always a cloud of shame hanging overhead. One might like many things about Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, but it’s impossible to forget that these men participated in the horrific system of human bondage. A few of the Founders, though, stand out for opposing it outright.
Thomas Paine was one such figure. Paine—an author and political philosopher—was born in Thetford, England. His friend Benjamin Franklin helped him get established in Philadelphia upon his arrival to the colonies in 1774. There, he wrote the 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and swept early America. The pamphlet became the defining argument for America’s independence—for many Americans, both the first and the most persuasive argument for severing allegiance to the British king, or to any king.
In many ways, Paine was a fiercer supporter of democracy than many of the more celebrated Founding Fathers, whose mistrust of the “common people” led them to put limits on voting rights and popular representation in the halls of government. Those were limits that Paine also opposed outright.
Paine wanted a government that was more representative than the one we have today.
“I think most people know him largely because of his pamphlet Common Sense, which came out in 1776 and had an impact on galvanizing Americans in favor of independence from Britain,” William Hogeland, an author and historian who focuses on the founding era, told The American Prospect. “It was dramatic because he attacked the idea of the British Constitution and said, basically, they have no constitution. Where is this constitution? Because it wasn’t written down. He attacked the idea that the Crown was part of a constitutional, balanced government.”...
You won’t find many statues of Thomas Paine in town squares or abutting county courthouses around the country. It was his ideas, however, that both made this country possible and tilted it, over time, toward the genuine popular democracy we still struggle to create.
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We still have common sense.
Eat Shit and Die: a New Logo for America — Jaime O’Neill
“FDA Continues Cyclospora Investigation After False Positive.”
— Fox News, July 23, “Fair and Balanced”
In case all your news comes from Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda outfit, you may not have heard we’ve got several food-borne illnesses spreading throughout the country. One of the most widespread is caused by lettuce produced and sold most everywhere by a gazillionaire with friends in high places. The guy who sits atop a mountain of produce and a higher mountain of cash is Bruce Taylor.
Along with his “family,” they sell tons of iceberg lettuce just about everywhere, most of it packaged under the name Taylor Farms based in Salinas, California, near where John Steinbeck gained recognition by writing about poor people who’d been driven off their land during the Great Depression caused by people who valued personal looting over the land or the economy. Bankers, mostly.
Anyway, some of those greens that began to make so many fellow Americans very sick were traced to those extremely wealthy Taylor folk. That info was suppressed when Bruce Taylor & Co. made a desperate call to Trump, and also their good friends at Fox who done those very rich members of the Billionaire Old Boys Club a solid, deflecting infamy and blame away as money and power so often can. Taylor Farms has something like $7 billion in annual revenue, though estimates found online vary. The corporations have been huge donors to Trump since the git. That’s mostly always true when it comes to the really rich pricks. Some aspects of the government are nearly always in on the deal. Anyone Remember Ross Perot? He ran for President with the image of himself as a hard-workin' guy who got rich due almost entirely to that effort and his personal intiative. Pretty special guy. A man of the people. He was one of those who always promoted the idea of less government. Turned out his company had received huge government contracts and other breaks most of us don't get.
You’ve probably eaten some of the grub Taylor Farms peddle. I know I have as I’ve struggled to eat more greens. Like so many other things that can create apprehension in these times, the very food we eat has become a source of anxiety. As with so many other things, trust has been eroded, and trust is essential to living in a teeming world with so many people all clamoring to fulfill so many needs.
Trump—need it be said—was going to take us back to a brave old world that was greater than the one we have now, a place where men were men, women were passive, people of color knew their place (and it sure wasn’t likely to be here in this country unless they, too, like women, were easily satisfied, easily dominated, and eager to please their betters who, strangely enough, turned out to be mostly white, monied, and male with high levels of testosterone....
Wouldn’t it be good for us if instead of “In God We Trust,” which is manifestly not true for most of us, even including evangelical Christians, or big money guys who trust in the almighty dollar far more than they do that sandal-wearing old "woke" hippie from the holy land, Wouldn't it be more honest if we occasionally glanced at our money to see inscribed there the motto perched atop these thoughts: “Eat Shit and Die.” ...
Some people might easily reconcile spending money with the words "Eat shit and Die"on it and still manage to believe “money is the root of all evil." I think those words are from the Two Corinthians, Trumps favorite book in the Bible. In any case, men like him generally work hard to see that most of us don’t see too much evil from that source. Money is good, after all, and so is greed. Too much of either is ever going to be enough if you're an enterprising American and a true patriot. Right? Everybody knows that. Right?
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That's how we see it, Jaime.
The gulliotine's blade is in working order.
Lindsey Graham Loved Documentary That's Going To Make Him Look Like Galactic A-hole — Gary Legum
Funeral services for bloodthirsty war ghoul Lindsey Graham will be held on Tuesday in Washington and Wednesday in his native South Carolina. Given all the hagiography we’re likely to hear, we are grateful to The Wall Street Journal of all places for reminding the public that the man was an amoral slimeball with the same restraint when faced with waging war and killing people that a toddler has when faced with an open package of Oreos.
The filmmaker Alex Holder, whom we may all remember as the guy whose behind-the-scenes footage of Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign later became evidence for the January 6 committee’s investigation, had been working on a documentary about Graham when the senator’s ticker went BRRRR SCREEEE. (That’s how it went.)
Holder had extensive behind-the-scenes access to Graham, and so captured a lot of his glee when the president launched his war on Iran in February. Given how Holder’s earlier project somehow found a way to make the entire Trump family look even dumber and more venal than we already thought they were, we have to laugh that Graham thought people would come out with an understanding of his career deeper than Wow, what an asshole:
“Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried,” he tells the crew, laughing loudly just after U.S. strikes on Iran began in February. “How long have we been pushing this?”
Ha ha ha, remember when America killed who knows how many Iranians and, in particular, dropped a bomb on the heads of a couple of hundred Iranian schoolgirls? Lindsey Graham almost cried. With joy!
He then tells the crew that Trump was equally happy about the war. “I talked to Trump this morning, he’s jacked, he said, ‘best thing I have ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up.”
The video of his moment is embedded in the Journal’s story, so you can watch it and wonder why Lindsey Graham is being honored at the National Cathedral on Tuesday instead of being fired out of a catapult into a pool of sharks off Hilton Head....
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The roar of laughter fills the hallways.
Musk Says He Got “Carried Away” With DOGE Cuts, Which Are Set to Kill Millions — Sharon Zhang
Research last year found that, by 2030, DOGE cuts could kill 14 million, including 4.5 million children under 5.
lon Musk has shared that he got “carried away” during his time heading the supposed “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, in the early months of the second Donald Trump term — with the billionaire seeming to express only mild regret for the sweeping, illegal government cuts that are slated to kill millions of people across the world over the coming years.
“I think I got a little too involved in politics, got carried away, frankly,” Musk said in an interview with The Economist last week, when asked about DOGE.
He said that the goal of DOGE was to address the federal deficit, “where the interest payments exceed the amount of money spent on the Department of War.” But, despite saying that he went too far, he still suggested that further cuts are needed.
The sweeping cuts enacted by DOGE cost over 260,000 federal workers their jobs, reports have found, and countless more due to slashes to scientific research funded by the government. The cruelest cuts, however, came in the form of the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The agency — though it’s been criticized as an arm of U.S. imperialism — funded humanitarian efforts to provide food, shelter, and education to tens of millions of people abroad. Estimates by experts have found that these cuts are leading to the early deaths of thousands of people a day; some have estimated that they’ve killed over 700,000 people so far....
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He shoud be carried away.
Trump’s latest mental health episode raises warnings of 'cognitive decline' — Nick Hilden
On Sunday, President Donald Trump spent the day posting such a steady stream of “deranged” AI memes to social media that many have suggested he was having some form of mental health episode. This latest eruption comes amidst growing warnings that the Commander in Chief is experiencing severe cognitive decline.
“Trump spent his entire Sunday on a bender, posting nonstop AI images to his Truth Social page for more than six hours,” explained the New Republic political commentator Hafiz Rashid. “It started at 11:16 a.m. with an AI image of CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins as transgender model Dylan Mulvaney holding cans of Bud Light, and escalated from there. Bruce Springsteen, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Representative Jerry Nadler, and Trump’s longtime nemesis Rosie O’Donnell were among those targeted in his posting binge. He also posted several flattering photos of himself in mock-up movie posters and, in one instance, standing next to former President John F. Kennedy.” There were many others.
As Rashid noted, “None of the images had any text attached to them, and were interspersed with some of his campaign photos and pro-Iran war propaganda. At one point, he posted nine Iran war memes three times in a row in the span of just over an hour.”
According to political commentator Heather Delaney Reese, who has spent the past decade documenting Trump’s behavior, “There didn’t appear to be any thought to how these posts would make him look to the world, beyond trying to make himself look powerful and in control. He failed at both.” She emphasized that, “This is the President of the United States. Not a troll account, a child who got their hands on a phone, or some random unidentifiable account. These all came from the verified account of the man who holds the most powerful office on earth.”...
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The retarded 5-year old must have his play time.
Homan's 'Under Investigation' Is The New 'I'm Under Audit' John Amato
Former ICE honcho and now Border Czar Tom Homan refused to comment on CNN's State of The Union on the state of the ICE agents involved in shootings in Texas and Maine. He offered the stale excuse that he never comments during ongoing investigations.
Homan's refusal to be transparent harkens back to the many times Trump refused to release his tax returns to the American public, claiming he can't do it while they're being audited.
BASH: First, do you know specifically what happened to the officers involved in the Texas and Maine shootings?
Have they been reassigned, placed on administrative leave? What's their status?
HOMAN: I don't know specifically.
I've written about this many times since Homan took over as Border Czar. He knows every fucking thing that's going on within his purview. He only plays dumb when ICE catastrophically murders innocent civilians, but has no problem smearing anyone no the left side of fascism....
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A retarded Jabba the Hutt!
GOP Senator: Elections Don't Count Until Unethical And Partisan SAVE Act Passed — John Amato
Birdbrain Senator John Kennedy told CBS' Face The Nation there hasn't been a credible election in the history of America because there is no voter ID law governing all elections.
With Foghorn's logic, Trump isn't the president and Kennedy (not worm brain) isn't a Senator.
Get off my TV, idgit.
The claims Republicans are making about election fraud and integrity are spiraling out of control as their chance to pass the immoral and criminal SAVE Act is going down the drain.
It is the last attempt for craven Trump and his scum-sucking pea-headed enablers to try and stop enough people from voting, which may help Republicans keep power....
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This old Nazi cracker can go back to hell!
'Disaster': Insiders explain how Trump's policies are backfiring nationwide — Sarah K. Burris
A long-time political strategist is detailing two main issues that are connecting most with voters as candidates are now less than 100 days away from the 2026 midterm elections.
Speaking to The New Republic's Greg Sargent for the Monday podcast, Democratic strategist Andrew Bates explained that one consistency is how different the economy is in 2026 compared with 2024.
During the 2024 election, Trump was promising lower inflation, lower grocery prices and lower gas prices. He claimed that increasing tariffs would help pay down the national debt because other countries would be paying the tariffs. Americans now understand that none of that was true.
"Trump was promising that immediately, quote-unquote, he would lower costs, and tariffs were a critical way he said he would do this. Then people lived through them," said Bates. "And now, like you were talking about, because prices went up across the board, they’re extremely unpopular, and more tariffs are the opposite of what voters want, including a lot of Republican voters."
"So it’s something that Democrats, wherever they fall within the ideological spectrum of the party, have been unified in calling out as something that is going to hurt everyday people. It’s also powerful that the tariff revenue goes to fund the tax breaks for billionaires and monopolies, which are also very unpopular," he added.
Trump also claimed to be "pro-worker" and "pro-Made in America," but under his leadership, manufacturing jobs have declined due to his tariffs.
"And in 2024, Republicans were saying, this is how we bring manufacturing back. But now people have lived through the opposite. It’s also been very painful for people in rural areas," Bates explained....
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Trump: a failure to succeed. The definition of the word for future usage. "It's a Trump." "This is a Trump." "Looks like a Trump."
“Drug Boat” Strikes Haven’t Reduced Cocaine Supply
The Washington Post reports:
The Trump administration’s deadly military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats have not reduced the amount of cocaine entering the United States, but they’re prompting criminal organizations to develop new strategies and tactics and undermining traditional investigative methods, according to a previously unreported assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a closed-door congressional briefing and interviews with current and former U.S. and foreign officials.
In a recent assessment reviewed by The Washington Post, DEA analysts found the strikes had failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire. In a closed-door briefing last month, Pentagon officials told lawmakers the strikes in international waters off South and Central America had not reduced its purity.
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So much for their murders.
Even Trump's terrorism isn't working!
Three Dead In Shooting At Seattle Food Festival
The Associated Press reports:
Police arrested one suspect and were looking for another after gunfire erupted at a crowded food festival beneath Seattle’s Space Needle, leaving three people dead and four others injured, including a toddler.
Investigators believe the two suspects were shooting at each other and, although one remained on the loose, Assistant Seattle Police Chief Tyrone Davis told a news conference Sunday night that there was no ongoing threat to the public. Police did not have a description of the outstanding suspect, he said. “We’re still trying to figure this out,” Davis said.
Two people died at the scene and a third died at a hospital. The four wounded, including a 2-year-old boy, were hospitalized and in stable condition, said Grace Nuñez, spokesperson for the Seattle Fire Department. The rest of the injured were adults. Davis couldn’t say if any of the victims were involved in the confrontation.
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Just more gunplay in the U.S. It's an unsafe zone!
REPORT: GOP Senators Losing Confidence In Hegseth
The Hill reports:
Republican senators say that confidence is waning in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership of the U.S. armed forces as the war with Iran drags on without an end in sight. They are also warning that the success of a possible “massive attack” against Iran could be critical to shoring up support for the unpopular conflict.
Some GOP lawmakers are questioning the administration’s failure to anticipate the prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz — which has caused oil and gas prices to rise dramatically since February — or failure to anticipate Iran’s willingness to strike neighboring allies, such as Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
“I don’t have any confidence in him anymore. I think he’s all over the place — he’s accelerating the retirement or forcing out some of the most distinguished leaders in the DOD that we have,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told The Hill, referring to the Department of Defense (DOD).
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Ya don't say.
Who with a brain is losing confidence in one who does not breed conifidence?
Trump's 'insane' AI image posting spree alarms onlookers: 'Pure delusion' — Robert Davis
President Donald Trump alarmed onlookers on Sunday after he went on an hours-long AI picture posting spree on Truth Social.
In all, Trump posted more than 40 AI-generated photos over multiple hours on Truth Social. Some of the photos included Trump standing on top of an Iranian oil tanker declaring "It is our oil tanker now!" and three late-night comedians who recently drew the president's ire panhandling on a sidewalk. There was also the all-too-expected jab at Rosie O'Donnell, who has been feuding with the president for nearly two decades.
The photos were posted on a day when reporters caught Trump out playing golf and inspecting the White House renovations.
Political analysts and observers reacted with concern to Trump's posting spree.
"Trump is having a mental health episode on social media right now," posted Harry Sisson, a Democratic influencer with over 394,000 followers on X. "He’s insane. 25th Amendment NOW."
"If anyone still believes our president is not an unhinged sociopath, please check out his fake Twitter feed from this afternoon," S.V. Dáte, White House at HuffPost, posted on X.
"A man who posts this 'joke' this many times is not joking. This is pure delusion," Vance Wilson, a liberal political commentator, posted on X. "I am confident he will try to find some way to run in 2028. He may not succeed at the Supreme Court, but I am nearly certain he doesn’t see this as a 'joke.'"
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Anyone who doesn't see this as a problem needs to seek help as soon as possible!
Homan Dodges On Fate Of Killer ICE Agents [VIDEO]
DANA BASH: “Do you know specifically what happened to the officers involved in the Texas and Maine shootings? Have they been reassigned, placed on administrative leave? What’s their status?
TOM HOMAN: “I don’t know specifically.I haven’t been involved with the investigations, but it’d be policy that they’d be put on administrative leave during the shooting investigation. That’s the policy of the agency.”
DANA BASH: “Okay. But, but you don’t—as borders are involved in this, you don’t know for sure if they have been.”
TOM HOMAN: “No, you know, ICE has an acting director, Dave Venturella, and they report to Markwayne Mullin, the secretary. But I can tell you, you know, I haven’t specifically tracked these cases, but I can tell you per policy, they’re usually put on administrative leave pending the investigation, pending, you know, sworn statements, internal affairs interviews, and, and, you know, the entire investigation, they, they usually will not be put back on duty until the investigation’s over and either been cleared, or if they got problems, then they may not go back at all.”...
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Admitting failure is the criterion of the Trump Criminal Syndicate
What's the betting addict line on it?
Axios: Top Admiral Advised Halting Bombing Of Strait
Axios reports:
The top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, Adm. Brad Cooper, recommended stopping the bombing campaign around the Strait of Hormuz because it has reached the limit of its effectiveness, according to two sources with knowledge of his position. The recommendation by Cooper, the commander of the U.S. Military Central Command (CENTCOM), together with other advisers impacted President Trump’s decision on Friday to pause U.S. strikes against Iran, the sources said.
It was an acknowledgement by both military and civilian advisers to the president that there are limits to what can be accomplished through military action, and specifically an air power campaign. Driving the news: For the first time in two weeks, Trump ordered the military to hold fire and not conduct strikes against Iranian targets around the southern coast of Iran and in the Strait of Hormuz area....
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"... it has reached the limit of its effectiveness." So has America.
REPORT: ICE To Launch Raids On Haitian Communities
CBS News reports:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made plans to ramp up operations to arrest and deport Haitian migrants, as hundreds of thousands of Haitians brace for the termination of their legal status, according to two agency sources and federal documents obtained by CBS News.
The plans include arresting migrants in Ohio — where large Haitian communities in cities like Springfield have been targeted by President Trump and conservative politicians and commentators — and quickly putting them on deportation flights to crisis-stricken Haiti, the internal documents indicate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump amplified baseless claims that Haitians in Springfield were eating cats and dogs.
The internal plans for a potential arrest and deportation blitz have been made as more than 300,000 Haitians prepare to lose deportation protections and work permits under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program.
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The Trump Crime Syndicate's crimes against humanity will ultimately destroy them.
The ugly American shows up again.
Meta Is Letting Fake AI-Generated Doctors Sell Quack Cures on Its Platforms — Frank Landymore
Fake AI-generated doctors and health gurus have taken over Facebook and Instagram, sharing unproven medical advice and peddling dubious supplements.
A recent New York Times investigation into the phenomenon reviewed hundreds of these ads, finding that they tend to follow a loose formula to draw people in.
The AI videos usually feature AI avatars that present themselves as credible figures like doctors or Eastern medical gurus. Many prominently feature American flags or are set in familiar suburban settings.
Some of the AI avatars are made to look like average people who’re really enthusiastic about the supplement they’re taking, filming themselves in a parking lot, bedroom, or grocery store — not unlike human influencers. The doctor avatars, meanwhile, might be in an office, where their fake diplomas are clearly on display. (One bears the incredible text “University of Degree” in a video identified by the NYT.)
“In Chinese medicine, we have known exactly how to bring this down for generations,” says one AI-generated Asian grandma dressed in a labcoat highlighted in the investigation.
Many of the claims these videos make are misleading and outright dangerous. One advertising a product called “Sculptique” asserts that taking its herbal supplement treats kidney disease better than medication. The company claims it gave 100 people with stage three kidney disease its supplement, showing an AI-generated video of these fake recipients raising their supplement bottles together in a warehouse....
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Quack! Quack!
Waltz: Jail Reporters Over Weapons Stockpile “Leaks”
NBC News reports:
Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” Sunday that the U.S. has “everything that it needs” for military operations against Iran, dismissing reporting that U.S. weapons stockpiles are depleted.
“I want to be crystal clear: The U.S. military, and I’ve verified this every which way, has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” he said. “And I have to tell you, the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”
He was responding to questions about an NBC News report that U.S. military commanders are allowing some Iranian attacks through U.S. defenses as part of an effort to preserve the Pentagon’s weapons supply, according to two senior U.S. officials.
....................
NBC article:
The White House and the Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hegseth appeared before lawmakers last week to ask for $67 billion in supplemental funding to expand production and speed up delivery of weapons.
During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in April, Hegseth acknowledged in an exchange with Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., that it could take “months and years” to rebuild the weapons stockpile.
In a separate interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, Kelly referred back to that exchange, saying that the situation was “by their own making.”
“They’re not keeping track,” Kelly said. “They, at this point, this president and the people around him are incompetent.”
Asked whether he would vote to approve the supplemental funding, Kelly said he has not yet made a final decision.
“If we had some competent people running this department, you could figure out, how do you defend our nation in a way and give the troops what they need within a reasonable budget?” he said earlier. “What they’re asking for is not reasonable.”...
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He's saying leaks are lies? Wow! We are in much deeper shit than even I thought! Is this his version of the mobster whacking the rat in the gang? I think so!
Nuclear Commission Seeks To Ax Radiation Safety Rule
The Associated Press reports:
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is proposing to eliminate a foundational safety principle that has for 50 years minimized the radiation people in the United States are exposed to and that has been adopted around the world.
Currently, facilities such as nuclear plants, hospitals or academic institutions that use radioactive materials must ensure radiation exposures are kept “as low as reasonably achievable” — the ALARA principle. The NRC proposal would abandon that philosophy while keeping a separate standard on maximum radiation exposure.
The two standards have worked together in radiation safety. Dose limits set the maximum amount of radiation the public and radiation workers can be exposed to, while ALARA kept radiation exposure as low as practical under those limits. Research shows radiation exposure increases a person’s chance of getting cancer, a risk that increases as the dose increases.
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These insane motherfuckers are REALLY trying to get us all killed. Does anyone know how radiation sickness works? How deadly it is? How horrible the death it causes? There is tons of evidence! WAKE THE FUCK UP AMERICA! Vote these EVIL MOTHERFUCKERS BACK TO HELL!
Leavitt Blames Biden For Cost Of Living Spikes [VIDEO]
LARA TRUMP: “When you look at the top issue among voters right now, it seems to be the cost of living. So what steps have been taken by the White House to really address that? Because that’s going to be important as we head towards November.”
KAROLINE LEAVITT: “Yeah. Well, the president and the White House, we fully recognize that. And I would remind your viewers and the American people of who caused the affordability crisis in this country. It was Joe Biden and it was the Democrats in this city when they were in power. President Trump took immediate action to fix that starting on day one. All of these things that President Trump is doing will only get better if given two more years with a Republican Congress.”
"This lying clown is only 28 years old.
The stench of trump shit will follow her to her grave." — StrayDog760 (comments)
"And her to the long long list of Trump sycophants who utterly destroyed their lives by doing his bidding.
At age 28 is kinda of special though.
She’ll get to to wear that stench for decades." — jharp (comments)
"I bought a new car December 31st, 2024 and have recorded every time I filled up with gas. My first fillup was 4 January, 2025. $3.679 per gallon. My last fillup? $5.499. That wasn't Biden." — Kirkuchiyo (comments)
"Precocious at age 28. Gertrude Scholz-Klink became the Nazi women's auxiliary leader / minister of women's affairs (obeying all directives) at age 32.." — NPSTL (comments)
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Biden also started the current war with Iran, is the cause of gas prices, real estate collapse, and every other problem known to mankind including the "Shits" that is going around!
Let's see, it's been a year and a half since Biden was president. When do we think ONE of these problems he caused witll be turned around by the genius who accuses him?
Sunday thought: When the sleeping giant dances — Robert Reich
Friends,
We have been subject to the sociopath for a year and a half — 18 months of the most loathsome, least competent, and most corrupt person ever to be president of the United States.
We’ve watched him take a meat-axe to every major institution of our democracy, draw the nation into a never-ending war, establish a murderous domestic police state, reject renewable energy in favor of the dirtiest possible fossil fuels, make billions off his presidency, and cause most Americans to become poorer and less economically secure.
But here’s the good news. The sleeping giant of America is finally awakening.
Trump’s poll numbers are plummeting. They’re now at record lows. Even many Republicans have had enough. Progressives are winning election after election around the country.
The sleeping giant has always remained asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some acts so disrespectful of the common good, some brutalities so noisy, that the giant has no choice but to awaken — blinking both eyes and then roaring, “What the hell is going on here?”
The first time I saw him awaken was during the witch hunts of Senator Joe McCarthy. He awoke again when the Ku Klux Klan tried to stop the Civil Rights Movement. Again when the Vietnam War was taking the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese. And again when Richard Nixon threatened our system of government.
Each time the sleeping giant of America has awakened, the good sense of the American people has stopped whatever it is that awakened him. Again and again, we put the nation back on track toward democracy and social justice.
Trump isn’t gone yet, of course. He has another two and a half years. But he’s on his way out. He’ll soon be a cringeworthy irrelevance, a fat lame duck, excrement on the sidewalk of history.
In a few years, Trump’s gilded monuments will be razed, his name removed from every building and pediment, his pathetic attempts to glorify himself turned into bad jokes, his legacy object lessons in why big money must be banned from politics and dastardly dickheads like Elon Musk kept away from the levers of government power.
Trump will still cause a great deal of damage over the remainder of his term, the way a wild pig who’s been gored wreaks mayhem before it expires.
So this is no time to let down our guard or become overly confident about the coming midterm elections.
Quite the contrary. One hundred days from today must be a historic repudiation of Trump and his entire disgusting regime....
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Disusting, inhuman and retarded. End him!
Man Accused of Horrific Crimes Caught Hiding as Pharma Executive — Joe Wilkins
For over two decades, a notorious fugitive accused of horrible crimes in Rhode Island hid out in one of the places you’d most expect — the corner office of a Big Pharma company.
Reported by Stat News, a 70-year old chief medical officer at the California-based firm Immix Biopharma was found to be afugitive sex predator who disappeared during his 2005 trial. Though he went by Richard Graydon in the more than twenty years since, his real name turns out to be Ronald Fischer — an anesthesiologist accused of raping numerous women on his various yachts (yes, plural).
“Although I believe my trial has gone very well and expect to be acquitted and dismissed, the small chance of losing could carry extremely and unacceptably harsh penalties,” Fischer told his lawyer via email before fleeing in 2005. “I have therefore decided not to take the risk and leave the US and enjoy life in another country where I have long been carefully planning a good, safe, secure and comfortable life.”
As it happens, Fischer never left for another country — at least not for good — but restarted his medical career in the US, leading him to rack up a number of aliases. Refusing to abandon his yachts or the medical career that paid for them, Fischer reportedly worked his way through a number of biotech companies, like Atossa Therapeutics, which appointed him interim chief medical officer in 2022....
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Sounds as if we knew this already when it comes to big Pharma! LOL!
Sex Doll Company Strikes Bizarre Deal to Put Its Robot in High School Classrooms — Victor Tangermann
Who needs teachers when you've got... uh....
Robotics company Realbotix has long struggled to beat the allegations that its voluptuous humanoid robots are designed with prurient interests in mind.
Its $175,000 robotic companion, dubbed Aria, is platinum blonde, well-endowed, and tends to be decked out in tight-fitted sportswear at tech conventions. Yet the company insisted she’s not a sex doll, leading to plenty of incredulity online.
It’s also hard to ignore that Realbotix has an extensive X-rated past. bIts subsidiary RealDoll showed off the first-ever male sex bot back in 2022, which features robotic genitals. (Before robots, Realbotix rented out dubious “digital land” in the metaverse.)
Now, as New York Focus reports, the Salamanca City Central School District in western New York is ready to dig deep into its budget and deploy one of the company’s humanoids, dubbed Sally, in the classroom. The AI-enabled robot will reportedly serve as a teaching assistant for high school students enrolled in STEM, and arts courses.
It’s hard not to see the company’s sex robot roots in Sally’s visage. The $57,000 android has smooth silicone skin, a dazed expression on her face, and an ill-fitting wig made of long brown hair.
The district’s superintendent Mark Beehler told New York Focus that he was willing to give up banning AI in the classroom since “students will find a way around most rules that schools put in place.”
“I also believe it is critical for schools to teach proper use of technology, not simply exclude it,” he said....
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WTF could possibly go wrong with this?
Eminent Domain Could Be Used to Seize Your Land for AI Data Centers — Frank Landymore
Can companies seize your private property to build data center infrastructure?
According to legal scholar Aaron Walayat at the University of Dayton, it’s certainly a possibility.
In a new piece for The Conversation, Walayat warns that power companies in states like George and Pennsylvania have been considering the use of eminent domain — the government’s prerogative to seize land without its owners’ consent — to build more transmission lines used to power data centers.
If a landowner refuses a power company’s payout, the power company can turn to the local government to seize the land if it’s for “public use,” paying the landowner “just compensation.” These seizures are called condemnations, and most of the time they’re carried out by state and local governments, according to Walayat. In the case of transmission lines, the power company would be able to buy an easement on the landowner’s property.
But so-called “common carriers” like power and water companies can exercise this power too, he added, if governments delegate it. And while many states have placed heavy restrictions on how condemnations are used, courts have typically allowed entities like utilities and power companies to exercise it.
They’ve even allowed homes to be demolished in the name of “public use” and economic development. In 2005, the US Supreme Court sided with the the city of New London, Connecticut, allowing it to seize homes to build a private development around a Pfizer facility. But that development never materialized, and this lead to 45 states passing stricter eminent domain reform laws, Walayat noted.
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I think we are witnessing a horrific turn in hman history. One that could easily end our existence. If we don't put a stop to this mindless road we are going down this will happen. It is very much like a drug addiciton we are on.
Pentagon Adopts Trump's COVID Strategy: Don't Count Iran War Casualties, So Nobody Is Dead Or Injured — Doktor Zoom
The Pentagon’s website listing casualties in Donald Trump’s pointless war on Iran was changed without explanation this week, in what sure looks like an Orwellian attempt to memory hole last weekend’s deaths of four service members.
The New York Times broke the story Thursday (gift link), pointing out that on Wednesday, the Pentagon’s “Defense Casualty Analysis System” (DCAS) showed that 18 US service members have died during “Operation Epic Fury.” Then on Thursday, that number changed to 14 deaths, which is what the site still showed on Friday.
The Times reports that three military officials, speaking anonymously, explained that the number of deaths was revised downward “because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”
The Times also noted, without snickering or rolling its grey lady eyes, that the Defense Department’s acting press secretary, Joel Valdez, insisted that the changes were, um … let’s see … how about “temporary data disruptions” that don’t mean anything, so shut up, stop worrying about it.
Valdez claimed in an email — presumably written while he attempted to extinguish his trousers, which may have burst into flame — that the changes were mere “site anomalies” that were being resolved.
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Ignore it and it will go away. Always a sure cure for cancer.
C-SPAN Caller Perfectly Sums Up Trump's WHCD Speech: 'He's A Chode' — Heather
Paula from Maryland didn't hold back when asked what she thought about Trump's nasty, long-winded stream of consciousness at the debacle that was the White House Correspondents' Dinner this Friday.
Paula from Maryland didn't hold back when asked what she thought about Trump's nasty, long-winded stream of consciousness at the debacle that was the White House Correspondents' Dinner this Friday.
BRAWNER: So what did you hear tonight? What was your reaction?
CALLER: I thought he was his usual. He was a bore. He was a chode and long-winded. And he didn't fall asleep tonight.
That's a good thing.
.
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Heather chose the wrong word. As we all know, he's a Choad! A short, stubby dick, male genitalia that is wider than it is long.
Look it up.
Kushner’s Felon Father To “Flee” NYC Over Mamdani
The New York Post reports:
Lifelong New Yorker and real estate investor Charles Kushner is fleeing NYC for Florida because of, he says, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and First Lady Rama Duwaji’s antisemitism. “I don’t want to pay taxes and live in a city with a blatantly antisemitic mayor and his antisemitic wife, period,” Kushner told The Post. “I also don’t want to live in the city with the people who voted for him.”
Kushner said his decision was driven less by Mamdani’s socialist policies than by what he described as the mayor’s hostility toward Jews and Israel — pointing to Mamdani’s refusal to march in the Israel Day Parade, his call to have Benjamin Netanyahu arrested as a war criminal, his outreach to Columbia University protesters who celebrated Hamas and Duwaji seeming to celebrate the horrific attacks on October 7.
While Kushner hasn’t entirely given up on his hometown — he plans to become a Florida resident but will hold onto his New York apartment and pay that pied-à-terre tax — he fears that Mamdani may be the one person to ruin the city..
"The climate there is too honest now and he doesn’t want to go PRISON TWICE!" — Dwight Williamson (comments)
"America has no shame. Putting this felon in a position of responsibility is disgusting. The entire government stinks of corruption." — magic twanger (comments)
"Every day there's another reason for US allies to disengage from America economically and militarily. I'd assumed this pathetic shanda had been warehoused somewhere and then I discover he's the US ambassador to France. Jesus Homer Christ!" — Robert Conner (comments)
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American corruption!
Finagling and filching isn't what is used to be, eh? Florida is more suitable as it's full of crooks like him.
Zelensky Says He Has Proof That Russia Is Helping Iran
CBS News reports:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday he will share evidence with the United States showing Russia is assisting Iran target U.S. bases in the Middle East via satellite surveillance. Zelenskyy’s accusations of Russia helping Iran target U.S. troops are not the first. The allegation has lingered in media reports over the last few months, often with China possibly being involved as well.
During a hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was directly asked whether Russia and China were helping Iran. His answer was somewhat unclear, but he did say they were helping Iran. However, just days later, President Trump contradicted his secretary of defense, saying on Truth Social he did not believe they were assisting Iran. He mentioned both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin and said they had assured him they were not involved.
"Funny how Zelensky keeps pulling out these cards that he supposedly does not have..." — vap (comments)
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But, but I heard Putin has already promised Trump that he will NOT ejaculate in his mouth!
Trump’s foreign policy enters its decadent, desperate end stage — Andrew O'Hehir
He restarted a war no one wanted and signed a nuclear deal no one read. What's next?
It’s tough to find any semblance of a silver lining in the humiliating implosion of Donald Trump’s foreign policy over the last year, especially after a week that has brought us another escalation of the war no one supports, a recycled trade war with Canada, an out-of-nowhere nuclear deal with a country that should never have access to nuclear weapons, and yet more threats against a small nation that poses no threat to the United States.
But here’s the upside, just maybe: The tiny and perverse cadre of “anti-anti-Trump leftists” has been decisively silenced. If you find that phrase baffling, consider yourself fortunate. You evidently haven’t wasted any of your one wild and precious life arguing with renegade Marxists about whether the Trump-Putin alliance, in world-historical terms, was “objectively” superior to neoliberal internationalism on the Clinton-Obama model....
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Melt the golden calf!
Outrage as Red-state church commits ‘blatant’ illegal act to bolster GOP: law expert — Alexander Willis
Calvary Chapel church in Chattanooga, Tennessee was under fire Friday after committing what one tax law expert described as a “pretty blatant” illegal act in its efforts to help bolster Republican candidates ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Last Sunday, Calvary Chapel church hosted several Republican candidates up for election in varying races, with the church’s civics and culture ministry leader, Adam Calabrese, explicitly encouraging attendees to support the candidates, per a report Friday from the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
“We can vouch for them,” Calabrese said, inviting the Republican candidates to join him on stage.
However, by wading into politics as a church with tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status, Calvary Chapel church officials almost certainly violated the law, Samuel D. Brunson, a federal income tax expert, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
“I've seen a lot of sermons that endorse, that try to endorse, that try to endorse without endorsing. This one's pretty blatant,” Brunson, who also serves as the associate dean at Loyola University Chicago, said.
“This is as explicit a violation as you could design. They have done literally everything they could possibly do to violate the Johnson Amendment part of Section 501(c)(3) – like they couldn't have done a better job violating it if they had tried, and maybe they did try."
“Unfortunately, expect much more of this in the coming election cycle,” reads a statement from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national Wisconsin-based secular advocacy organization, issued on Friday. “When the rules against partisan electioneering from the pulpit go unenforced, abuses become the norm.”...
"christian nationalism is the biggest internal threat this nation faces. America had better wake up and start quashing this extremist movement before it takes over our government and turns us into a sharia law-style pseudo-christian theocracy. That's not hyperbole. It's fact." — V2787 (comments)
"We need to change the tax law. But, in the end I say to those of religious persuasion: Stop praying in our commons and I will not think in your house of worship." — notbyme (comments)
""Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibit...
You know that the first thing that particular sect would do if it found itself in power would be to mandate that far right fundamentalist Christianity be the national religion.
Christian "sharia" law is just as brutal as Islamic political rule, and goodness knows the rule of the Israelis is hell on earth for the Palestinian people.
But then, I am an atheist, I think I will think...for myself, thank you." — Cold Mountain (comments)
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Paulininst usurpation propaganda has taken gullible minds. This is a clear illustration.
If you think these arrogant Xianist Nazis are innocent, think again. They must be taxed if they are going to violate the law.
Tennessee needs to grow the fuck up and join the U.S.
Trump makes stunning admission in early morning post: 'Incredibly smart' — Kathleen Culliton
President Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud early Sunday morning — or at least, he reposted it.
Trump's startling admission came in the form of a Truth Social post — one of more than a dozen he posted about 5:20 a.m. — that centered on a video clip Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) shredding his SAVE America Act to pieces.
"It's already illegal for someone who is not an American noncitizen to vote," Warren can be heard telling a reporter. "I don't understand why you want laws that are already there."
Warren was clearly referring to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 which prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
This is one of three common critiques of Trump's controversial legislation. The second is that it could have "dystopian" consequences for Americans, as the National Women's Law Center explains.
"This bill could disenfranchise 21.3 million eligible voters who don’t have the required documents ready, and it would particularly impact married women and trans people—all in order to fix a problem that doesn’t exist," an NWLC explainer states.
"It’s voter suppression that perpetuates anti-immigrant misinformation."
"Hey John Cornyn, as a born ‘n raised Texan of 53 years watching Republican scum ruin everything great about this state, I can tell you why the pig bastard thinks he can tell y’all to 'get in line' and expects y’all to do it.
BECAUSE Y’ALL HAVE EVERY OTHER TIME!
You voted along with his idiocy 100% of the time but now you're pissed off because he backed the scummier candidate. But you had ZERO problems with his grifting, lying dumbassery before, so don’t try to pretend you give one SHIT about what he’s doing or that you suddenly care about average Americans!"
We ain’t buying your bullshit either!"-- sam waxler (comments>
"Straight Up! This is one of Trump's last desperation moves. He knows he's 16-0 for election interference tactics. Trump has destroyed the GOP MIDTERMS CHANCES, and now he expects them to pass this BS SAV ACT BILL that is illegal to try and save his fat a$$ at the last moment, and it ain't working.
This "DEFEAT ASS WHOPPING IRAN IS PUTTING ON TRUMP HAS HIM TERRIFIED, PARANOID, EXTREMELY FRUSTRATED, AND ANGRY AS HELL. BECAUSE HE THOUGHT HE WAS GOING TO JUST PUSH IRAN AROUND LIKE HE DID WITH VENEZUELA AND HAS FAFO. THAT HIS ONLY WAY OUT IS TO GO AHEAD AND FACE A MILITARY TRIBUNAL, GET IMPEACHED, OR TAKE WHATEVER DEAL IRAN IS WILLING TO OFFER HIM..."
But at this point Trump is all out of options. Sending in boots on the ground will result in a massive number of US soldier casualties that he has already been warned about. That will damn sure rack his obese orange ass up some SUPER DUTY MILITARY CRIMES IN THE HAGUE...
As the midterms continue to creep in closer and closer to the date and Trump's perception of him being removed from office starts to look more and more like it's definitely going to happen, the more crimes his ass will rack up... Because he knows with the GOP losing both chambers, he is finished as a president, and I do not believe Thune will pass this SAV Act. Thune is hanging Trump out to dry for costing them the midterms. In the end the SCOTUS did finally hang Trump's ass. By giving him that SCOTUS Immunity in the first place.
A power-hungry, greedy, grubby slimeball like Trump having that much power was "DAMN SURE" an inevitable move that he would eventually hang himself, and that is exactly what he has done. Iran knows this as well... Iran will keep toying with Trump and have him continously wasting our military ammo until the stockpile is completely dry. All at the same time Trump will continue to pick up more and more military crimes to make sure Trump is tried in a military court where his delay-delay BS will not work. The SCOTUS nor Cannon's ass can save him there." -- LULA MAE HAY HAY!!!!!! (comments)
(*Ed. note: Now you know why Lil Marco is going after the World Court! He knows his boss is a criminal trying to stay out of prison! By doing so he becomes a co-conspirator!)
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This is what we scream at any motherfucker that claims "stop non-citizens from voting" bullshit! They are so full of shit that it's coming out of their ears! ONLY CITIZENS VOTE IN THE USA! Work on an election board some of you louts and find out a thing or two before you pass on!
Advocates Sue Trump Administration Over Secret Dossiers on ICE Watchers — Brett Wilkins
Plaintiffs say DHS violated federal privacy law by secretly collecting personal data on people documenting ICE operations.
Acoalition of privacy and civil liberties advocates filed a federal lawsuit Friday accusing the Trump administration of secretly collecting and keeping personal information about people who monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, arguing that the practice violates federal privacy law and threatens constitutionally protected speech and association.
The lawsuit — filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — was brought by individuals and advocacy groups represented by Democracy Forward.
The plaintiffs — the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and legal observers Nicole Cleland, Jacquelyn Ivey, and Anna Walker — argued that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and other federal agencies created and maintained databases of people who observed, documented, or protested immigration enforcement activities without providing notification or safeguards, as required under the Privacy Act of 1974.
That law was passed after the exposure of illegal government surveillance, including longtime former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO program, under which the FBI, in addition to conducting unlawful spying, funded and armed murderous far-right militants to terrorize anti-Vietnam War protesters, anti-nuclear weapons activists, civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leftists.
“The federal government cannot build secret dossiers on people because they exercise their First Amendment right to peacefully observe, document, or criticize its actions,” Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “That is exactly the kind of government surveillance Congress sought to prevent when it enacted the Privacy Act after some of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history.”
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We will remember when the darkness came and when we finally turned on the lights again.
As Highways Expand, Black Communities Are Threatened With Flooding and Land Loss — Adam Mahoney
Road expansions are repeating a long history of environmental racism and displacement.
Timothy Williams’ family has lived in the same community for over 150 years, but he is afraid that they are one big storm away from losing it all.
Eight years ago, the Alabama Department of Transportation widened the highway that runs just a few yards from Williams’ home in Shiloh. Since then, every time it rains, water has flowed down the highway, flooding his land with enough force to erode over a foot of soil every single storm.
The dilemma has already cost him and his neighbors, who live in a rural, majority-Black community, thousands of dollars and led to him losing his home insurance.
As he has learned more about the history of highways and their connections to Black land loss, Williams has a word for what Alabama has been doing to Black communities with its highway projects: “intentional.”
So when he heard that the state was pushing forward on a 52-mile highway around Birmingham that would pave over wetlands and streams, making flooding more likely, it felt like another example....
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The way we treat these Americans is disgusting and barbaric.
Fox News Regular Calls Mamdani “Terrorist, Jihadist”
“Trying to talk to Mayor Mamdani is is like trying to talk to the IRGC. This guy is a terrorist. That’s the bottom line, I’ll say it. You don’t want to say it, I’ll say it. He’s a terrorist, he’s a jihadist.
“He hates the Jewish people. He hates America. He hates the Italian people, he hates the Irish people, he hates the German people, unless you’re Muslim, Mayor Mamdani has no use for you. He is a horrible person.
“He maybe has perpetrated the worst American and Jewish hate in the history of this country. Those two people stabbed the ore day on the Upper West Side of New York City, that blood is on his hands. That blood is on your hands, Mayor Mamdani.
“We’ve got to find a way to get this guy out of here.” – Fox News regular Sid Rosenberg, today on Fox & Friends. In April, Rosenberg called Mamandi a “radical Islam cockroach.”
Rosenberg hosts a NYC radio show on the station owned by grotesque billionaire Trump megadonor John Catsimatidis and Trump called into his show earlier this year.
In a tweet posted to X, Rosenberg claims that Fox made him apologize twice for today’s remarks.
Rosenberg is best known here for claiming that “only faggots play tennis,” for calling Venus Williams an “animal,” and for calling the Olympic gold medal-winning women’s soccer team “a bunch of juiced up dykes.”
In 2005, he was fired from Don Imus’s Fox News show after mocking Kylie Minogue’s breast cancer diagnosis.
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What does he really think of the Mayor?
And how is his tennis game going lately?
Katy Perry Furious After White House Steals Her Song
“I am deeply appalled and angry to see “Firework” used on the White House TikTok account as a backing track for video footage of military strikes. I did not approve this, I was not asked, and I absolutely do not condone it.
“I wrote this song to be an anthem of hope, healing, and inner strength for people going through their darkest personal moments.
“To see a message of self-worth and upliftment weaponized to soundtrack destruction and violence is a complete violation of everything my song stands for.
“My music is for bringing people together, not celebrating warfare.” – Pop superstar Katy Perry. Some replying to her post suggest that stealing the song is also an attack on Perry’s boyfriend, former Canadian PM Justin Trudeau.
“Firework” topped charts worldwide in 2010, sold over 20 million copies, and earned 12X platinum status in the US.
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The retard knows nothing of intellectual law. He owes her a ton for illegal use of a copyrighted work. Sue him and let him pay the court costs..
Brazil Denies Visas For WH Officials Over Election Lies
The Washington Post reports:
Brazil has denied visas to two senior State Department officials that the Trump administration planned to dispatch on a mission to cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the country’s electoral system before millions of Brazilians vote in a presidential election on Oct. 4, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
A U.S. State Department delegation, including Trump political appointees Riley M. Barnes, an assistant secretary, and Samuel Samson [photo], a deputy assistant secretary, had planned to depart for Brasília, the capital, in coming days, according to four U.S. and Brazilian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
But Brazilian officials, apprised of the plans, denied the Americans permission to travel, the Foreign Ministry said. Samson has traveled from Africa to Europe, promoting President Donald Trump’s brand of conservative politics and cultivating ties to right-wing groups, at times alienating establishment politicians.
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His crime will be brought to justice one day. It won't be pretty,
Angelo Carusone on MS NOW's On the Line: Trump's grasp on current issues has faded because “he's no longer connected to the media landscape that used to give him that insight” — Media Matters Staff
Carusone: “Fox News is just echoing back to him what they think he wants to hear. All the people around him are totally sycophantic. ... The incentives are just so deeply baked in now that they've forgotten how to have their own opinion.”
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Angelo, you have always made the argument to me that if the president has a gift it, in the past, has been having his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, really understanding sort of where the conversation is going. He has so clearly lost the thread. I mean, literally everyone I talk to, all they want to talk about is how much things cost, how much gas costs, how much groceries cost. It is a reminder of just how insulated he has become.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, totally. He's not connected to the media landscape that used to give him some of that insight. Fox News is just echoing back to him what they think he wants to hear. All the people around him are totally sycophantic. And then the Republican Party as a whole, which I don't -- I don't expect much out of them, but, I mean, the incentives are just so deeply baked in now that they've forgotten how to have their own opinion. So when you ask them right now, if you asked them, what are you doing? What is Trump doing wrong? Give us something. They have nothing to say. They won't say he's doing bad on the economy. They won't say anything. And that to me is the real tie-in is that he's not able to get that insight anywhere.
Now, I'm not sure that would really force him to course correct at this point, because I think broadly he's not interested in building popular power. He's interested in leveraging as much of the power that he currently has. And so I think he's transitioning to something kind of different. But that's honestly a big part of it is that he isn't connected to the zeitgeist, so he can't do any of those modulations. And that's why his approval ratings on the economy right now are as bad as Joe Biden's were when inflation was 9.1%....
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Man, he hasn't had a news line since he started using that tired old saw "fafe news." That means a "fake fake" — a double negative. You don't need algebra skills.
Eye Implant That Restores Vision to the Blind Cleared for Sale — Frank Landymore
An eye implant that can help blind people see again is poised to hit the market — in Europe, at least.
On Wednesday, the US-based Science Corporation announced that it had received approval from the European Union to treat patients with its vision-restoring bionic eye device, called Prima, in a huge step towards the commercialization of the technology.
“We have a cochlear implant for vision now,” CEO Max Hodak told Stat News.
Science Corp’s device is designed to treat advanced macular degeneration, a condition in the eye which causes central vision loss. It’s the leading cause of vision loss in older adults, with severe forms of it accounting for nearly 90 percent of legal blindness in the US, according to one estimate.
To restore vision, the Prima device uses a wireless chip that’s surgically implanted under the retina. This connects with a pair of camera-equipped glasses, which transmits video in the form of near-infrared light that the chip turns into electrical signals interpreted by the brain.
Science Corp first published the results of a preliminary clinical trial in late 2024, showing that patients who used the device were able to recognize faces again, and even read books.
“One of our patients in France finished a 300-page novel a little while ago, and sent us the book,” Hodak recently told TechCrunch. “We have a sketch on the wall [that] one of our patients drew of the Sydney Opera House. There are videos of patients playing crossword puzzles and filling in Sudoku.”
But Hodak — who cofounded Neuralink with Elon Musk before leaving to start Science Corp — was candid that his tech still has a lot of room for improvement.
“This is an early version. It’s kind of like looking through a straw in the centre of their vision,” he told the Financial Times, saying it was “powerful proof” that the company was on the right track....
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And don't expect to see in the U.S. for some time. We are always behind the curve with these advances. How do I know? I know more American Opthalmologists than you do.
Voters Are Being Inundated by a Barrage of AI-Generated Election Ads — Joe Wilkins
AI is upending the way voters take part in the democratic process. The worst part? You might not even know you’ve been affected.
In the county of St. Charles, Missouri, a race for county executive has devolved into slop-slinging of the AI variety. According to local channel First Alert 4, conservative candidate Jason Law is flooding the airwaves with an AI-generated video depicting his two rivals Steve Ehlmann and Bill Eigel as co-conspirators in a nefarious plot against voters.
“Steve, wake up, I’ve been telling people for 12 years that I’ll cut their personal property taxes, and they still believe me” the AI-Eigel declares in a generic AI-generated voice, rubbing his palms in glee.
“Property taxes have risen by 300 percent over the past 20 years and I just tell people there’s nothing I can do about it!” a grinning Steve Ehlmann replies.
Near the end of the ad, Law himself appears — also as an AI-approximation, with a stock text-to-speech voice — to declare that “we need a fresh start.”
Per First Alert, Law says the noxious campaign ad was inspired by a similar AI-generated smearjob by conservative reality TV star-turned Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt. Those ads take a similar tone, painting a sloppified Pratt as a superhero, and his opponent as a cartoon villain.
These are far from the only examples. Back in May, similar deepfake attack ads emerged in the race between incumbent Republican congressman Thomas Massie and the Trump-backed candidate Ed Gallrein. Unlike the local races in Missouri and California, both candidates were the targets of AI commercials, which were funded by independent PACs, rather than the candidates directly....
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I've always found it odd that voters pay any attention to these "ads." It has never been the way to get to know any candidate. Yet they tell us they work. But we are Chauncey Gardiner these days.
People Are Starting to Record Every Conversation They Have Without Disclosing It, and It’s Gross — Victor Tangermann
It’s become strangely difficult to attend a work meeting without the presence of an AI recording tool that’s carefully jotting down what every single participant is saying.
Some people in tech circles are taking the trend to perverse ends by recording every single conversation they’re having — not just at work but in their private lives as well, as the Wall Street Journal reports.
Worse yet, many of them aren’t even asking for permission first, which could technically put them at risk of violating state laws, depending on where the conversation is taking place.
It’s a bizarre extension of our newfound obsession with keeping track of every single thing that’s being said around us, a trend that could have severe privacy implications, from people being shocked to find their therapist has been recording them to wearers of Meta’s AI glasses harassing strangers.
Apps like the transcription service Granola have seen a steady rise in popularity. AI tech executives are growing increasingly reliant on these tools — sometimes to an astonishing degree.
“In the office, we actually get really bummed when we realize we’re having a conversation and we forgot to turn on Granola,” AI marketing platform Flint CEO and cofounder Michelle Lim told the WSJ. “I wish there was a Granola in every room.”
Lim admitted that she simply assumed she was being recorded, noting that being asked “almost kills the mood.”...
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The perverse enviroment that we have created should hurry our end.
Can’t Make This Up: Jon Ossoff Reportedly Spent Thousands on ‘Makeup Services’ From Hollywood Artist — Sean James
...The Free Beacon wrote:
Ossoff’s four-figure makeup expenditures stand out among federal candidates. The Georgia senator who is running for reelection against Republican Rep. Mike Collins (Ga.), has reported spending more on makeup than any other candidate this year, beating out the likes of far-left Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.). Ocasio-Cortez has spent $1,837.93 on “campaign event hair & makeup services” in 2026, while Tlaib has spent $320 on “hair and makeup services.”
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Can you make this up, Nazi wiseass?
What Is Trump’S Cosmetics Budget?
President Donald Trump spent over $70, 000 on hair and makeup during his time hosting “The Apprentice”, according to a report by The New York Times. The report revealed that Trump wrote off $70, 000 (£54, 000) in hairstyling costs during his time hosting the show, which would generally have been covered by the show. Trump’s tax information went public after years of controversy, and it is unclear how much he paid for his hair stylist. Trump, who suffers from rosacea, is reported to apply his own translucent makeup powder before television appearances and has even adjusted lighting at White House events to avoid embarrassing results.
The New York Times also reported that Trump’s inaugural committee allegedly allocated $10000 towards providing makeup at his inauguration, $10, 000 for makeup and lots of room service in 72 days, which laid out about $100 million, roughly twice as much or more. Nine Trump entities have written off at least $95, 464 to a favorite hair and makeup artist of his elder daughter, according to the report.
Read it, there is a lot more, you retard! When did you move to the city from the mountains?
Ossoff - President 2028!
The Fourth Assault on American Democracy Has Already Begun. This Fall Decides Whether It Ends. — Thom Hartmann
Every eighty years America's oligarchs have tried to bury democracy. Three times they failed. This time they've dismantled the election's guardrails before the votes are even cast
Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy.
We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy 3 times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working class people ahead of the oligarchs.
This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief are taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.
First, some background.
While the Founders like Jefferson and Washington had large plantations and exploited the labor of enslaved people, they weren’t the truly rich, the oligarchs, of their era. Both those men, in fact, died in bankruptcy or its near-equivalent. The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.
But there were real oligarchs in American in the 1770s, universally aligned with the British king, and they hated the idea of democracy and independence.
In The Rise of American Civilization, historian Charles Beard’s most famous work, he notes that on the banks of the Hudson River:
“From mansions that were castles, the Johnsons ruled in the Upper Mohawk Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric, relying on numerous kinsmen, armed Negro slaves, trained bands of Gaelic retainers, and savage allies from the dread Iroquois to maintain their sovereignty over forest and plain.”
It was the wealthiest families of the colonies who most strongly opposed both the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, because both endangered the stability of their fortunes, which were grounded in trade or relationships with England. Thousands of these families fought for and with the British, and fled the colonies after the Revolutionary War, both to England and Canada.
In the 1780s, we defeated oligarchy and established a fledgling, albeit imperfect, democracy, the world’s first at that scale.
Eighty years later, the plantation oligarchs of the Old South had amassed such fortunes that only a few hundred families essentially controlled the economy and politics of that entire region....
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Not one of these Trump Nazis could hold a candle to our founders. Trump has disgraced our heritage.
Conservative says no 'bankruptcy option' for Trump this time — Adam Lynch
...“With his presidency winding down, the prospect of Republicans being annihilated at the polls due to the knock-on effects of soaring oil prices wouldn’t have bothered him,” said Catoggio. “As long as he faced no consequences personally from having Iran in control of Hormuz, Trump would be content to leave someone else — his party and its new presidential nominee — holding the bag. That’s the whole point of declaring bankruptcy, no?”
“But it’s 2026,” he added. “He will face personal consequences if the strait doesn’t open, starting with having to spend his last two years in office fending off corruption investigations by a new Democratic-controlled Congress. Whatever’s left of his economic legacy after 18 months of tariffs and inflation will also crumble: Unlike in 2028, when he could have pawned off a Hormuz-driven recession on his successor, that misery will land in his own lap. And he knows it.”...
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He made his bed. Now he will lie in it!
Pentagon ignores widow after dropping husband’s name from soldier casualty list — Adam Lynch
A bereaved new widow could not gather the will to respond to news that the Pentagon had still not replaced the names of her husband and three other soldiers to the public casualty count of soldiers killed during President Donald Trump’s Iran war last weekend.
The Pentagon’s official online list of service member casualties did not include the four soldiers despite the fact that their names were included in a Pentagon press release on the formal transfer of their remains back to the United States on Wednesday. CNN anchor Erin Burnett reported on Friday that a day after the Pentagon suddenly changed its casualty count in the Iraq war, the websites that tracks war casualties still had the wrong number posted with just 14 fatalities listed, despite 18 service members being killed in the Iraq war since Operation Epic. Fury began....
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America has lost its moral core.
Axios: Food Banks Struggle After Millions Lose SNAP
Axios reports:
American food assistance has been rocked by a regulatory earthquake while millions have been dropped from one of the nation’s premier safety net programs, tightening the strain on food banks and state agencies. As SNAP continues to undergo a historic remolding, food banks say they’re staring down a gap they can’t fill.
“We’ve been operating kind of in emergency management mode,” says Terri Shoemaker, the executive vice president of the Arizona Food Bank Network. “At some point, that will fatigue.”
To meet increased demand, food banks are purchasing record levels of food, expanding application assistance and working with farmers and retailers to find additional supply sources, Feeding America CEO Denis McDonough says. But SNAP changes are colliding with high prices, he tells Axios.
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Photo of well-fed fasicst swine that have been looting our tills for years. Espcecially that white-haired old bag from Alabama! Retire, you old hag!
The disgrace of the United States!
Trump Vows “Major Tariff” On Mexico Over Lettuce
The First Post reports:
US President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico for “the lettuce” and Canada for “the smoke”, as he raised concerns over two issues. The remarks from the American leader came amid a growing foodborne illness outbreak and wildfire smoke drifting south from Canada.
Trump slammed Canada and Mexico while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. When asked by Fox News if it would be “safe to eat lettuce again,” “I think we’ll put a major tariff on Mexico because of the lettuce. And we’ll put a big tariff on Canada because of the smoke,” Trump said.
The president’s comments also came at a time when federal health officials are investigating a cyclosporiasis outbreak that has sickened thousands of people nationwide. Meanwhile, the country is also reeling from smoke from Canadian wildfires, triggering air quality alerts across parts of the United States.
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Trump thinks his terrorism is a solution. The fucking retarded moron!
No one likes you, stupid! They all lie to you for your favor!
Complete 'demolition of Jim Jordan': Jack Smith lawyers publish rebuttal to GOP-led attack — David Edwards
A letter from former special counsel Jack Smith's lawyers went public Friday, calling Rep. Jim Jordan's (R-OH) criminal referral a bad-faith attack on a "nonpartisan public servant."
Attorneys Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski wrote the letter July 22 to Jordan and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, calling the referral "spurious."
Legal journalist Roger Parloff posted a downloadable version Friday, calling it a "succinct demolition of Jim Jordan's bad-faith accusations."...
Former federal prosecutors have repeatedly criticized the legal theory put forth by Jordan.
"This referral letter is an embarrassment," CBS News quoted former federal prosecutor Kyle Freeny as saying.
"If they have bad questions, they do not get the answers that they want. It's almost like deposition 101," Freeny added.
Former prosecutor Gregory Rosen called the referral "legally untenable, if not ridiculous."
"If Congress wanted different answers, they should have asked different questions," Rosen said.
Jordan also argued the texts violated the Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause, which protects lawmakers' official acts from scrutiny....
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Throw Jordan out with the trash where he belongs!
Trump trashes his own 'freaking stupid speech' at White House Correspondents' Dinner — Bennito L. Kelty
President Donald Trump slammed the writing and jokes in his own speech for the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
On Friday night, Trump delivered an hour-long speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, but he wasn't happy with the jokes laced throughout it.
Several times during the speech, Trump asked, "Who the h— wrote this?" One of Trump's jokes used a point about congressional term limits as a setup.
"All joking aside, I do think we need term limits in Congress," Trump said. "I think term limits are very important because I see what's happening."
However, Trump had trouble making it clear what was going on in his joke. The point about term limits drifted into a joke about "a senator I knew...a great guy" getting a text from his wife.
"She said, 'When you get home, I want to have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me,'" Trump said. "And he said, 'I can't do both.'"
The "can't do both" line seemed to be the punchline, but it was met with silence. Trump immediately caught the silence and tried to signal that it was a joke. "Haha," he said, smiling at the crowd. "You know? You know?"
Trump repeated the punchline and kept trying to explain it. The audience stayed silent, however, as Trump flashed a mocking grin to tell people it was supposed to be funny.
"In other words, you can't go up the stairs and make love," Trump said. "Does anybody get that one? I thought that was actually pretty good. That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole freaking stupid speech."
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He wrote it himself.
JD Vance's 'extremely self-conscious' worries 'grated' on White House staff: report — Bennito L. Kelty
White House staff described how difficult Vice President JD Vance can be when worrying about his image, MS NOW reported Friday.
Vance's obsession with his self-image hasn't gone over smoothly with White House staff, especially amid a rumored contest with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to win Trump's favor in becoming his successor, according to MS NOW.
"Team Vance is extremely self-conscious about what people are saying about him — both here and just randos online — almost to a fault," a White House official told MS NOW.
A White House official also told MS NOW that Vance and his team "grated" on senior staff because of his near-obsessive focus on online chatter about him. Vance apparently has a "near-obsessive" focus on his public image in the context of his recent book tour and "sauerkraut-heavy" diet, the insider said.
However, Trump has been friendlier and more complimentary to Vance in recent weeks, according to MS NOW, which reported that "Trump's informal audition for his 2028 successor appears to be over," with Vance the winner.
"It's become, 'JD's our guy, we gotta help JD,'" a senior administration official told MS NOW, saying that Trump has become warmer towards Vance ever since he launched his book tour.
Trump has even been complimenting Vance's weight loss and remarking that he's been looking good lately, according to MS NOW....
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Mys guess is it's the low T in all the Trump Toadies.
‘School Choice’ Does Not Provide Better Education for All Families — Carol Burris
Voucher and charter school programs are taking funds that could make our public schools stronger.
Advocates of a rightwing, billionaire-funded campaign to replace public education with a privatized education marketplace have been candid about their goals and disciplined in pursuing them. A new report from the organization I lead, the Network for Public Education, provides an accounting of how far state lawmakers across the nation, in both red and blue states, have advanced this campaign and have put at grave risk access to the current system of education that is free and available to all families.
For nearly a decade, the Network for Public Education has issued statehouse-by-statehouse report cards holding legislators accountable for how they treat public schools and the children who depend on them. And over the years, we have seen a ramp up in school privatization and continuous neglect of public school students and teachers.
This 2026 Report Card is our most expansive to date, evaluating all fifty states and the District of Columbia across four categories: privatization of public education, protections for homeschooled students, school funding, and conditions for teaching and learning based on thirty-nine factors. Some of those factors include charter school expansion, discrimination, and student-to-teacher ratio.
In 2022, when we issued our second report card, ten states achieved 80 percent or more of a possible 102 points. By 2024, the number of states achieving 80 percent of all possible points had dropped to four. Two years later, only two states, Nebraska and Vermont, hit the 80 percent mark....
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Many of us know it's a failing way of education but it's a great way to con the racist base of the USA..
National teacher certification board told to scrub DEI mentions to comply with Texas law — Jaden Edison
If National Board officials don’t show compliance with state law, they risk Texas excluding educators with the credential from a pay-for-performance program.
Educators with national teaching certification could no longer automatically qualify for salary raises under Texas’ pay-for-performance program if officials who oversee the credential do not de-emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion.
The State Board for Educator Certification voted Friday to require that National Board Certification — a rigorous professional development program shown to improve student outcomes — update its resource materials and bring them into compliance with Texas’ anti-DEI law.
If the National Board does not do so by Nov. 2, it risks the state no longer including educators with that certification in the Teacher Incentive Allotment, which currently grants those instructors raises of up to $9,000 per year for helping students grow academically.
State Board for Educator Certification members said Friday that they did not review or discuss the value or worth of the National Board as they examined its materials — only whether the program aligns with Texas lawmakers’ classroom expectations....
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More on the new white Nazi racist education boondoggle.
NYT: Trump Admin Admits Canceling Billions In Energy Grants For States That Didn’t Vote For Trump In 2024
The New York Times reports:
When the Trump administration canceled more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era federal grants for clean energy projects in October, it framed the move as an urgent corrective to protect taxpayer funds from waste. But it wasn’t true.
In little-noticed court documents, federal officials acknowledged this month that they had terminated the funding “based solely” on political criteria, targeting projects in states that were represented by Democrats and had voted for Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, in the 2024 election.
The admission showed how President Trump has weaponized the provision of federal education, energy, health, housing and infrastructure aid in his second term. Far from rooting out the sort of misspending that Mr. Trump sees as rife in Washington, the White House has instead sought to leverage the budget as a tool to assist its allies — or as a cudgel to hurt the president’s foes....
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If this isn't one more in a long list of crimes it should sure as hell be!
Trump Tries to Erase the Casualties of His War — William Kristol
MAGA may be rallying behind Andrew and Tristan Tate, but the White House isn’t interested in spending political capital on protecting the manosphere sex pests from rape charges in the UK. Asked yesterday whether the White House would block the brothers’ extradition, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was terse: “No. We’ve already answered that question.”
Some housekeeping: You may have noticed that Morning Shots looks a little different today. This is part of a wider refresh for The Bulwark that we’re excited to share with you today. We hope you like what you see, but as with all home renovations, there’s always a punch list. Happy Friday.
Cancel Culture at the Pentagon
Three military officials told the Times that “one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list—three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq—because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”
Trump’s Defense Department responded to the Times report on Thursday evening by claiming that the change was due to “temporary data disruptions” and that “these site anomalies are currently being resolved in coordination with the Military Services.”
But as I write on Friday morning, the “anomalies” haven’t been “resolved.” The Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website still lists only fourteen deaths as a result of the Iran conflict—even though the Pentagon’s press release earlier in the week in connection with the dignified transfer of the four soldiers’ remains stated, “The deaths are related to Iranian aggression.”
But the administration, from the president on down, has been preoccupied with trying to downplay the costs of Trump’s war. The president has been regularly posting and talking about how many fewer casualties there have been compared to prior conflicts. And he has gone out of his way to call the war an “excursion” or a “skirmish.”
And the administration does have a particular interest in pretending these latest deaths aren’t somehow part of the Iran war. At his appearance Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hegseth was once again challenged about the lack of congressional authorization for the war. Then on Thursday, there were votes in both the House and Senate on war powers resolutions. One of many disingenuous arguments the Trump administration made to try to beat back demands for congressional authorization was that the clock for requiring congressional approval should restart after pauses in the war. The claim that these four soldiers’ deaths can’t be attributed to Trump’s Operation Epic Fury because they happened after the collapse of the ceasefire is part of the effort to avoid congressional accountability.
But it is also, of course, part of a broader phenomenon. As retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges told the Times, “The administration seems to have a real hard time being honest about what is going on—not just about casualties, but about the whole war in general.” And about much else besides....
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Trump: Enemy of America! The World's Most Wanted Criminal!
Abdul El-Sayed, US Democratic Senate candidate from Michigan, speaks during a campaign event in Detroit, on July 18, 2026. | Nic Antaya/Bloomberg via Getty Images — Eric Levitz
Abdul El-Sayed is among America’s most prominent proponents of Medicare-for-all.
The frontrunner in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary literally wrote the book on that policy (or at least, a book on it). In El-Sayed’s view, Medicare should cover “all necessary healthcare” for every American — without co-pays, premiums, or deductibles — and be “accepted everywhere.”
Key takeaways
• American healthcare is expensive largely because our hospitals, doctors, and drugmakers charge unusually high prices.
• American physicians earn about twice as much as Canadian doctors and four times as much as Swedish ones.
• To make Medicare-for-all affordable, we need to push down many doctors’ salaries, which is politically difficult.
• Expanding the supply of doctors — by funding more residencies and easing barriers for foreign-trained physicians — would lower costs and make universal coverage more feasible.
Alas, despite his many years of advocacy, El-Sayed has seemingly failed to persuade his wife of that last point: According to a recent report from the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed’s partner, the psychiatrist Sarah Jukaku, does not accept Medicare as a form of payment at her private practice....
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WTF is wrong with this picture? HYPOCRITE! BIG_ASSED HYPOCRITE!
Get A Grip. Tabs, Fri., July 24, 2026 — Evan Hurst
FIRST OFF! You’re going to want to hit The Moral High Ground today, because I went absolutely apeshit on that new interview with creepy Hegseth pastor Doug Wilson, and the circumstances under which he, in his perfect Christian theocracy, would like to execute gays. Ape. Shit. You’d better subscribe while you’re there too, there are a good several thousand Wonkette subscribers who haven’t! [The Moral High Ground]
SECONDLY, REMIND! Today I will be doing one of them Substack Live thingies with Jonathan Larsen, AKA your pal who does The Fucking News. It’ll be at 12:00 noon ET at this link, but to make sure you get the reminder/notification when it’s gonna happen, best to go ahead and subscribe to The Moral High Ground, like I just damn said.
Now más tabs:
Weird, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth keep finding ways to reduce the bodycount of American people they’ve killed or maimed with their goddamned pointless loser war. [New York Times]
The right-wing MAGA terrorist who murdered Minnesota Democrats Mark and Melissa Hortman will be in prison for the rest of his life. He still won’t make Marco Rubio’s list of terrorists. [AP]
Class, is it corrupt that Trump’s Truth Social is selling extra-super-duper-secret early access to Trump’s posts, so they can do insider trading faster than everybody else? [Wall Street Journal]
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is now babbling on fucking Newsmax about “What is socialism?”
Prediction: some absolute loser like Polis or John Fetterman or Haley Stevens, or some combo like that, is going to try to run on an independent ticket in 2028, after Democratic primary voters fully tell them to fuck off. And if that’s why the US is allowed to fully descend the rest of the way into fascism after that election, if that’s what gets JD Vance crowned dictator with Peter Thiel’s arm up his ass, hoooo fuckin’ boy. Really hope we’re wrong....
Piggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy pigfuck Tommy Tuberville g’wine put Zohran Mamdani IN GITMO for even suggestin’ he might want to arrest genocidal war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu! IN GITMO WIT’ YA! GO ON! GIIIIIIIIT! Stupdiest senator in world history card renewed. [Rolling Stone]
A Massachusetts J6 rioter who punched a cop, and who was a medical doctor, is not a medical doctor anymore, because fuck around and find out, fuckin’ asshole. We hope she never knows another day of career success. And wow, what a pointless reason to squander all that. [NBC News]
Fully 65 percent of Americans think Donald Trump’s trashy, ugly mobile home-quality DC renovations/additions are total fucking garbage. Only 12 percent are “enthusiastic.” Gonna be fun to tear every bit of it down one day and let immigrants sell it for parts on Facebook Marketplace. [Washington Post]
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More at the link. Read!
They Made You Fear and Hate Your Neighbor So They Could Rob Your Future — Thom Hartmann
For 45 years, billionaires and their political allies have weaponized hate, divided Americans, and quietly dismantled the middle class while we fought each other instead of them
In his 1961 Farewell Address to the Nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said:
“America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”
Apparently “dreadful fear and hate” have won. A new Lloyd’s Register (the institution dates back to the 1760s) Global Risk Poll of citizens of 140 countries around the world found that one-in-ten (10%) Americans say that politics represents the biggest risk in their lives (above disease and accidents, even).
The average across the other 139 countries was around 1 percent of people who worried politics could harm them (there were a few exceptions; 5 percent of Russians said the same).
And, indeed, our politics can harm us.
There’s the fear of physical violence if you go out in public with a “F*ck Trump” tee shirt or cap or similar bumper sticker, the fear of losing your healthcare this November when the Republican Big Beautiful Bill cuts to Medicaid kick in, the fear of losing your Medicare as the GOP works to strangle and privatize the system with their “Medicare Advantage” scam, the fear of Republicans killing or “reforming” Social Security so they can hand it off to the big banks that own them.
Not to mention the GOP-led campaign to turn our environment over to the fossil fuel industry, our forests over the lumber industry, our streams and water over to the chemical industry, our farms over to the pesticide industry, our children over to the radical Christian school industry, and our economy over to the crypto industry.
Our Republican politicians and the billionaire-owned media that supports them are also constantly telling us who to hate and fear.
If it’s not Willie Horton it’s migrant caravans, Muslim bombers, murderer/rapist “illegals,” or, in 2024, trans people. For this election cycle, Trump, Rubio, Vance, and Miller are telling us we should hate and fear the guy mowing your lawn as well as democratic socialists and “communists.”...
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The average age of a American citizen today is 40 years in a rounded number. Do they even know who Dwight D. Eisenhower was?
A country of the clueless cannot stand.
'Loaded weapon': Trump is ready to pull the trigger on suspending habeas corpus — Nick Hilden
On Friday, the authors of a bombshell tell-all book about the Trump administration revealed just how close President Donald Trump came to suspending the constitutionally enshrined right of habeas corpus, and asserted that the idea is still a “loaded weapon” he’s ready to fire at any time.
This is according to journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, authors of the hit book Regime Change, which exposed the chaos in the White House over the course of Trump’s second term. The authors joined Lawfare Senior Editor Roger Parloff to discuss the administration, and over the course of their conversation, they detailed how frighteningly close Trump came to suspending habeas corpus, and emphasized that the danger isn't over.
As Haberman explains, by April 2025, Trump was publicly musing about the idea of suspending habeas corpus after the Supreme Court stymied his ability to send migrants overseas without trial. The president was frustrated and ranted at a Cabinet meeting about how “there's one thing three presidents have used very strongly,” referring to the Insurrection Act, and CNN reported several days later that he was talking about suspending habeas corpus, but the episode passed quickly.
“But we were really obsessed with it,” Haberman explains, “because habeas corpus is enshrined in the Constitution. It is older than the Magna Carta. It is one of the most fundamental rights of due process, and the idea that a president would think that this was something he could just end ... Stephen Miller was openly endorsing this, so we went down this rabbit hole to try to understand it. What we learned was the discussions were extremely serious.”...
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Habeas corpus
OK with you if you no longer have rights if arrested?
Literal Nazi scum!
George Will makes scathing case for rejecting Trump AG nominee — Alex Henderson
Most Senate Republicans are expected to vote in favor of confirming Blanche. But if Democrats vote in unison against him as expected — including Fetterman — GOP defections could become perilous for Trump's acting AG.
Will argues, however, that Senate Republicans have confirmed many of Trump's nominees when they should have had the courage to say "no."
"If, at most, four Republican senators had, in committee or floor votes, behaved as independently as the Founders thought senators would, (Pam) Bondi, Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others would not have been confirmed to offices far above their competences," Will says. "Children probably have died of measles, and of hepatitis B passed from mothers to infants, because of vaccine hesitancy promoted by Kennedy, who lied when he promised not to indulge in such quackery if confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services."
The conservative columnist continues, "Now comes Blanche. He received this embarrassingly backhanded endorsement, in the Wall Street Journal, from former Attorney General William Barr: Blanche 'will run the Department (of Justice) as effectively as anyone could under President Trump.' Is this sufficient reassurance for Republican senators? Or will, at last, a nominee trigger their gag reflexes? Once, when someone noted that Sen. Richard Russell, the Georgia Democrat, had 'served under' six presidents, Russell bristled, saying he 'served with' six. It will be a pleasant surprise if, concerning Blanche, a few Republican senators become similarly sensitive about those prepositions."...
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The Nazi Party will vote to confirm another mobster for the Crime Synidcate. They are certifiable spineless chickenshits. Blanche will emlinate law and order from our country. You can bank on it. How much naked corrupion is too much for even the retarded?
250 Organizations Urge Senate: Put Americans’ Health Before Chemical Industry Profits — Newswire Editor
Today, 250 organizations and groups from across the country urge leaders of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to reject industry-led efforts to weaken the Toxic Substances Control Act, America’s primary chemical safety law, and encourage Congress to hear from the people, workers, and communities whose health would be most affected.
In the letter sent to EPW Committee Chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and to Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), organizations representing public health professionals, scientists, consumer advocates, environmental justice leaders, community organizations, environmental advocates, and impacted communities wrote that Congress has not yet publicly heard testimony in hearings from the people who would bear the greatest consequences of weakening the law.
Those voices include veterans, workers, families, and frontline communities facing cancer, Parkinson's disease, and other illnesses linked to toxic chemical exposures, as well as states on the front lines of managing contamination, cleanup, and rising health costs....
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Don't like the Nazis fucking with your life? VOTE THE BASTARDS BACK TO HELL!
House Subpoena of BreakThrough News Threatens Press Freedom — Newswire Editor
In a direct attack on the First Amendment, the House Ways and Means Committee has subpoenaed independent news outlet BreakThrough News, demanding internal records under the guise of investigating foreign influence in the tax-exempt nonprofit sector.
The committee, chaired by Rep. Jason Smith, is seeking BreakThrough News’ financial records, internal communications, and more. Lawmakers claim the probe focuses on tax compliance. But abusing congressional subpoena power to target a news outlet whose coverage a committee chair doesn’t like undermines core press freedom guarantees.
The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern:
“Congress shouldn’t be using a tax investigation as a pretext to dig through a newsroom’s internal communications or financial records. Freedom of the press applies to all journalists, regardless of whether politicians like their editorial slant or their politics.
“Allowing a congressional committee to harass an independent newsroom with a broad subpoena sets an awful precedent. If lawmakers can abuse tax oversight to single out outlets whose reporting offends them today, no newsroom in America is safe from government intimidation tomorrow.”...
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Putin is running our country now. Why? He's who Trump wants to be! Stop serving him!
How Trump turned the presidency into a $5 billion grift — Alex Henderson
Estimates of U.S. President Donald Trump's net worth vary. According to Forbes, it reached $6.5 billion in March. Trump made the transition from millionaire to billionaire back in the late 1980s, focusing primarily on high-end real estate. And he has become richer and richer during his second presidency.
The New York Times' Charles Homans analyzes Trump's efforts to monetize the presidency in a lengthy analysis published on Friday, arguing that he is taking grift to historic levels.
"How much is the American presidency worth?" Homans writes in the Times. "You could start the bidding at $2.2 billion: the minimum amount that President Trump is thought to have earned during his first year back in office. That figure is three and a half times what his family businesses earned in 2024, the last full year before he resumed the presidency. Most of it comes from cryptocurrency ventures…. From there, you could add another $1.6 billion, the amount of federal financing the administration recently approved for an obscure company subsequently hired to develop a mineral concern in Kazakhstan, in a deal negotiated personally with the Kazakh government by Trump and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. Surely by coincidence, Trump's sons are now investors."
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"People want to know if their president is a crook." — Richard Nixon. Your president is a crook. A big crook. A very big crook!
Todd Blanche implicated during testimony from a member of Epstein's inner circle — David Edwards
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was implicated in a cover-up, lawmakers concluded on Thursday as a member of Jeffrey Epstein's circle evaded questions from a House committee.
Former Barclays CEO Jes Staley appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as part of its investigation into the late convicted sex offender Epstein. The session was voluntary — Staley was not under oath — and Democrats said that alone told the story.
Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-VA) said Staley "stood at the center of Jeffrey Epstein's inner circle" and immediately turned the hearing into a fight over Blanche's pending Senate confirmation as attorney general.
"The wealth, the power, and the privilege that individuals like Jeffrey Epstein and Jes Staley enjoyed have shielded them from accountability," Walkinshaw said.
Blanche has served as acting attorney general since April, NPR reported. His Senate confirmation for the permanent post remains uncertain, with Democrats unified in opposition.
Walkinshaw said Blanche had the power to reopen the Department of Justice's investigation into Epstein and pursue individuals like Staley, who face what the congressman called "credible accusations of rape and sexual abuse" — but "refuses to do it."
"Any member of the United States Senate who votes to confirm Todd Blanche is complicit in the cover-up of the Epstein files," Walkinshaw said.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) echoed that charge, calling the voluntary format a deliberate shield.
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Talking about a criminal. And there are scumbags that support this trash.
Massie: Changing Troop Deaths Is An “Absurd Ruse”
Mediaite reports:
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) blasted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for “BREAKING THE LAW” on Thursday, arguing President Donald Trump’s administration no longer has legal authority to continue military operations in Iran without congressional approval.
Massie’s comments came via X, as he responded to a report from The New York Times detailing, per three military officials, how the administration removed four U.S. service members killed this past weekend from the Pentagon’s public Iran war casualty count because they died after the president’s April ceasefire declaration.
“Let me explain this absurd ruse,” Massie wrote on Thursday. “The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire. The reality is that “by going more than 90 days without congressional authorization [Hegseth] IS BREAKING THE LAW and must be held accountable.”
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More Trump math fails. Hegseth must be arrested and charged.
WaPo: MAGA “Knives Are Out For Vance In The GOP”
The Washington Post reports:
As JD Vance prepares to make a decision about his 2028 plans, the vice president is facing a barrage of online attacks from within his party, criticism his allies say appears to be part of a coordinated attempt to poison the well for him politically.
His detractors have adopted the “Never Vance” slogan and flooded social media, especially over the past week, with attacks including claims that Vance is “unfit” to be vice president due to his efforts to negotiate a peace deal with Iran. They have asserted, without evidence, that Vance is making policy decisions not supported by President Donald Trump. They have likened him to former president Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).
The sustained public hostility from Vance’s own side of the aisle is unlike that faced by other vice presidents in decades, both in intensity and in the early timing — two years before the party will choose its next presidential nominee. The unusual nature is a product of the central role that social media plays in today’s political discourse, as well as the high stakes as Republicans prepare to select a new standard-bearer after Trump, Vance allies and critics say.
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Et tu, Red Hat?
POLL: Ossoff +9 Over Collins In Georgia Senate Race
The Hill reports:
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff (Ga.) holds a 9-point lead over Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) in a new AARP poll, with less than four months remaining before voters in the Peach State decide whether to give Ossoff a second Senate term.
The survey, which bipartisan pollsters Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research conducted July 13-16, found that 52 percent of 1,060 likely voters backed Ossoff. Collins, who won the GOP primary runoff over former football coach Derek Dooley last month, received support from 43 percent of respondents.
The importance of voters ages 50 and up in the race is clear based on the poll. That age group accounted for more than two-thirds of respondents to the survey, with nearly 9 in 10 respondents ages 50 and up saying their motivation to vote in November is a 10 out of 10.
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Ossoff for President 2028.
Men-only gyms seek to protect Christian men from lust — Rick Pidcock
White conservative Christian men are rising up all over the nation to take their place at the top of their families, churches and communities.
We’re witnessing their rise to power through the Rededicate 250 events where men like Mark Driscoll called on young men “to get married, to build your business, to get into politics, and also to in every way empower your church to be the tip of the spear for the fight against evil.”
We’re noticing it in Doug Wilson’s call to repeal the 19th Amendment or in Al Mohler’s amendment to prohibit female preachers in the Southern Baptist Convention.
And their pursuit of power has reached cartoonish levels with their lasso-tossing booth at the Stronger Man Nation’s “Freedom Con: An American Congress of Christian Men,” where they called for “the rise of the statesman.”
In each of these contexts, women are threats that need to be warded off, put in their place or excluded.
But of course, male-only voting booths, pulpits and annual conferences are one thing. How can men survive the daily grind of being around women and become the warrior kings the Doug Wilsons and Mark Driscolls of the world want them to be?
To reach that peak, the Christian manosphere believes men need to be in top physical and spiritual shape. So one way they’re proposing to accomplish that is through “lust-free” gyms....
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Lust free? Gaydar Alert!! That'll be the day! Look at the photo and tell us. These boys act as if they are scared to death of a vagina! Don't drop the soap in the showers! ROTHFLMAO!
I also see Rick appears to be the only article writer on site.
P>
Trump Threatens “Massive” Attack of Unprecedented Proportion on Iran — Sharon Zhang
Trump Threatens “Massive” Attack of Unprecedented Proportion on Iran
The president said that Iran “wants to negotiate,” but “they haven’t received enough pain yet.”
President Donald Trump has threatened to conduct an attack on Iran that’s “bigger than ever,” saying that he is still considering whether or not to do so after weeks of vowing to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, in what experts say would be war crimes.
“I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it,” Trump told Axios’s Barak Ravid on Thursday.
The president said that Iran “wants to negotiate,” but aren’t ready to make a deal because “they haven’t received enough pain yet.” Trump added that Israel would join if he asked, but “we don’t need anybody” to join attacks.
The threat of a “bigger than ever” attack is chilling coming from a nuclear-armed president who, just months ago, made a genocidal threat against Iran, vowing that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”
Trump has also been pledging to carry out attacks on key civilian sites, saying last week that the U.S. will “knock out all” of Iran’s bridges and power plants if Iran doesn’t comply with U.S. negotiations. He doubled down on these threats this week, saying on Wednesday that the U.S. will destroy one power plant or bridge for every time Iran “shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz.”...
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Let him keep it up. Any more civilian murders by his actions will result in an international trial and a likely death penalty if found guilty. Like Goering, he should keep his cyanide caps handy.
Madison Residents Protest After Police Shoot, Kill a Black Man in Broad Daylight — Chris
Walker
Hundreds of people demonstrated in Madison, Wisconsin, on Wednesday night following the police killing of a Black man in a popular commercial and residential area.
The Madison Police Department (MPD) has not yet identified the man, stating only that he was in his 30s. Local social justice organizations have identified the man who was killed as Madison resident Corey Ruiz.
The killing occurred early in the afternoon on Williamson Street in the near-east side of the city. According to police, officers were responding to calls about a man who had allegedly stolen bicycles and was “checking” vehicle doors in the neighborhood. After finding a man on a bicycle, police pursued him, eventually resulting in the man either falling off his bike or being knocked off the bike by police.
At least four police officers tackled Ruiz. MPD alleges that Ruiz “pulled out a fix-blade knife and injured an officer” during the struggle. It’s unclear from witness video if or when this occurred.
At one point in the video, an MPD officer shouts, “he’s got a knife,” after which a taser is used. MPD claims that the taser failed....
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It appears our Civil War is heating up in Madison.
People Keep Dying in ICE Custody. 13 Dems Back a Bill to Abolish the Agency — Mike Ludwig
At least 53 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump’s return to office.
Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was at home in Georgia with his family on July 9 when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents came to arrest him. Sonimar Maria, Arenas-Silva’s sister, said her family implored the agents not to take the 45-year-old Venezuelan, mentioning his medical needs, but ICE did not listen to their pleas.
Flanked by progressive House Democrats and speaking in Spanish to reporters at a Capitol Hill press conference on July 22, Sonimar said ICE agents also ignored her family’s request to let Arenas-Silva take his medication with him. Arenas-Silva required four different medications for a medical condition, Sonimar said, but ICE allowed him to bring only one to the remote Irwin County Detention Center in rural Georgia.
“Jesús Manuel later told me on a phone call that ICE did not give him the medication he needed,” Sonimar said in a translated statement. “He went without medication during his detention until he tragically died in ICE custody on July 13 … I am 100 percent certain that he did not receive proper care.”
Arenas-Silva died while being transferred from Irwin County Detention Center to the Folkston ICE Processing Center, a roughly 100-mile drive. He was found unresponsive five days after he was arrested, according to ICE. At least 53 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office and launched a mass deportation campaign led by adviser Stephen Miller, making the past fiscal year the deadliest in the agency’s history.
Additionally, at least 30 people have been shot in public or in their homes by federal immigration agents during Trump’s chaotic crackdown, and 11 have died, including multiple parents and two United States citizens. Sonimar is calling for an independent investigation into her brother’s death, but the Trump administration has consistently erected barriers to accountability for both the deadly shootings and the deaths in ICE jails.
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Odd. People did the same thing under Hitler's Gestapo.
Arizona Republicans Choose Election Denier Loons In Primary, Surprising No One — Doktor Zoom
Republican voters in Arizona decided Tuesday that they aren’t finished trying to refight 2020, choosing election-denying rightwing candidates as their nominees for top state offices including governor, secretary of state, and attorney general.
For governor, Arizona goopers want Rep. Andy Biggs, a conspiracy-theory-embracing former head of the House Freedom Caucus who helped try to overturn the 2020 election on January 6 (and tried to get a preemptive pardon before Trump left office).
The nomination for secretary of state went to state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who was disciplined by the state Bar Association for helping Sidney Powell file her bullshit “Kraken” lawsuit trying to throw out Arizona’s votes in 2020, among other misbehavior. He also tried to overturn the 2022 election for governor that Kari Lake still won’t admit she lost, but that time he didn’t get in trouble with the Bar.
And for attorney general, Arizona Republicans want state Senate President Warren Petersen, whopushed the ridiculous scammy “audit” of the 2020 vote — the one with the forensic geniuses looking for traces of bamboo in the paper used for ballots, which would prove they were fakes manufactured in Asia....
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Mental Defectives Party never surprises.
People Are Getting Off to Porn About ICE Raids — Jason Parham
MAGA-coded adult content playing off immigration crackdowns, white supremacy, and obeying the “natural order” is finding rabid audiences on X..
On July 8, X account @superioritymale posted an update about ICE’s ongoing crackdown on immigrants, describing the conditions being thrust upon detainees.
“Over 68,000 held in ICE detention centers around the United States, many of whom lack access to food, water, and any means to reach contact with their loved ones,” reads the post, which also includes a video. Only, the video wasn’t news footage from inside a detention center. It was a 14-second clip of a white man masturbating in a ski mask.
“Let me serve that cock massa,” replied @FreakedOut222.
Accounts like @superioritymale belong to a niche porn sphere on X where users project, and find sexual pleasure in, pro-MAGA messaging. Over the past two years under President Donald Trump’s second term, they appear to have become even more prevalent on the social media platform.
WIRED identified a dozen accounts, varying in reach and influence—some had tens of thousands of followers—but they all share a similar theme: the fantasy of white male domination. They promote the aesthetic of being a white god or alpha, post about “the natural order” and the “biological truth” of white supremacy, while encouraging followers to claim their “birthright” as the ruling species.
The tone in many of the posts mirrors the extreme rhetoric often championed by the White House. In January, @malesupremacy13, whose bio reads “nazi-fascist” and “war is porn,” posted a list of “Things I jerk off to,” which included “Bombings of Gaza, LGBT rights being denied, gender inequality, [and] environment/plastic pollution.” In one video from last October, clips of white men engaging in various acts of straight and gay sex flicker like a highlight reel as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” plays, and a giant text overlay in red, white, and blue reads: “JOIN ICE TODAY.” The X post, which implored followers to “HELP YOUR COUNTRY GET RID OF ILLEGAL CRIMINALS TODAY BRO,” included a link to ice.gov. (Springsteen has been one of Trump’s most vocal critics since entering office; while on tour in 2025 the singer said America was “in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration.”)
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment....
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Are you kidding? These incels are having the time of their perverted lives with this. Including Trump when he gets wired overnight and starts his "dancing!"
America’s Hot Hybrid Summer — Aarian Marshall
Gas prices are up, and US car dealerships are full of hybrids. Customers are going for it.
Instead, the more noticeable sales boom has been in cars that use traditional fuel, but more efficiently: hybrids. Sales of cars that sip gas rather than glug are projected to rise 9 percent this year, according to Kelley Blue Book, while sales of cars overall are slated to dip by more than 2 percent.
Fuel Efficient
The price of oil has fluctuated following the continuing conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, and so have gas prices, which are now up 30 percent in the US compared to this time last year. That alone has Americans thinking about alternatives to the traditional gas-powered car. Hybrids are more fuel-efficient because they combine internal combustion engines with electric motors. Some plug in and use smaller gas tanks to move once their electric charge has run out; most don't, depending on technology that’s decades older.
But gas prices aren’t totally responsible for the US’s hot hybrid summer, analysts say. Hybrids are more available than they used to be. They are, on average, more expensive than gas-powered cars, but not by much. And they don’t give Americans range anxiety in the way that pure battery-powered cars do.
Now the vehicles—once viewed as a bridge between gas and electric—will likely stick around for the long haul. “A hybrid doesn't feel like an electric vehicle—these are very different animals,” says Stephanie Brinley, the associate director of AutoIntelligence at Mobility Global.
“People are looking to save; they have range anxiety. The hybrid is the perfect solution," says Karl Brauer, an executive analyst at iSeeCars.com. “Hybrids still have a long life ahead of them.”...
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There is no earthly reason for anyone to buy a gas burning dinosaur if they are in the market to replace it. Anything but a gasoline monster.
So is the lettuce bad or not? — Dylan Scott
A green head of lettuce, in close-up.
What caused the ongoing outbreak of cyclospora, the diarrhea-causing parasite currently spreading across the United States? Michigan officials have been saying for weeks that they believed the outbreak may be linked to bagged salad or salad kits. What we were waiting to learn was the specific brands and specific products in question.
And late last week, it looked like we finally had the answer — but then things quickly got cloudy.
On July 16, the Washington Post reported, citing anonymous sources, that the outbreak had been linked to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied to Taco Bell by Taylor Farms. A day later, Taylor Farms said it was withdrawing products from US stores and restaurants based on information from the FDA.
But then on July 19, per NBC News, the FDA said that there had been a false positive for cyclospora when testing a sample of Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce; Taylor Farms said in its own statement that the FDA had “apologized” for the mix-up. The next day, the company and the federal government were stuck in a semantic argument: Per NOTUS, the FDA insisted it did not “officially apologize” to Taylor Farms but “explain[ed] factually the issues” with the false positive.
So where does that leave us right now? Officials still believe that Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce was the source of the Michigan outbreak. But whether those are the only products driving the outbreak remains unclear, with almost every state now reporting at least one cyclospora case in 2026. And on Thursday afternoon, the FDA announced that it was tracking a second outbreak linked to other unspecific products, though details were otherwise scarce.
Any outbreak of food-borne illness requires careful public communication. Officials need to tell people how to avoid contaminated food without scaring them away from eating fresh fruits and vegetables altogether.
But instead, many Americans have been left wondering what, exactly, they’re supposed to do. As one frustrated Reddit user put it: “So is the damn lettuce bad or not????” (If you need some advice on what foods are safe and what foods to be cautious about, we have a story for you.)
It may sound like a funny question, but it’s a profoundly serious one. The problem isn’t just that people are confused about their lettuce. The Trump administration’s handling of the cyclospora outbreak — from its conflicting public messages to accusations of political favoritism — has left many Americans even more confused about whether they can trust anything they’re hearing from the government. That’s a dangerous place to be during any public health emergency....
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So, we used to have an FDA that figured these things out a bit faster. Are the Nazi retards there failing us, as usual here?
Susan Collins reels as Trump blows up Maine victory lap: analyst — Matthew Chapman
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has been plunged into a new nightmare as President Donald Trump demolished an effort to escape having his Immigration and Customs Enforcement brutality tied to her, reported The New Republic.
Collins has been immersed in Trump's policies after a killing in Biddeford, Maine, in which ICE agents boxed in a vehicle and shot Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant described as a devoted father who was in the country legally. His three-year-old daughter was seen crying at the scene.
The dead man reportedly wasn't ICE's intended target, and the agent who fired, David Brouillette, has been described by relatives as violent and mentally unstable, even allegedly threatening violence against his ex-wife.
Collins denounced the killing — but after she backed a $70 billion new slush fund for ICE and "opposed an amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, that would have required ICE agents to wear active body cameras on duty and made footage available to Congress," the New Republic reported.
That "could now create bigger problems for Collins" as the agents involved in the shooting weren't wearing cameras, according to the report....
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We must pack her suitcase for her exit.
Historic fountain 'severely damaged' as Trump rushes DC makeover: report — Matthew Chapman
Contractors working at the National Mall have "severely damaged" a major fountain that sits between several key monuments, Newsweek reported on Thursday.
The German-American Friendship Fountain now has "large sections of stonework displaced around the circular fountain feature, leaving a substantial hole at its center," Newsweek reported.
A contractor who drove a truck over the center of the fountain caused the damage, according to the report.
The fountain, located between the White House and the Washington Monument, was dedicated in 1988 to honor 300 years of German immigration to the United States.
It was already renovated in 2019 in a public-private partnership between the National Park Service, the German Embassy, and Volkswagen, Newsweek reported.
President Donald Trump has spent much of his time back in office doing everything he can to update monuments in D.C. in his image and according to his grand design, Newsweek noted.
Such projects include his plans for a massive new White House ballroom, and an arch just across the Potomac River, both of which have faced legal challenges....
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Trump has litterally destroyed much of our nation's Capitol. He's doing his best to destroy our Democracy and we seem to not give a damn. Put a stop to him!
Locked-Out Refinery Workers Say BP Is Trying to ‘Starve Us,’ Crush Union — Sarah Lazare
In Whiting, Indiana, 800 workers have been locked out for four months, and they say the survival of their union is at stake.
WHITING, Indiana – Elizabeth Piña has been at her union hall since 4 a.m., checking on picketers, organizing the food pantry, and chatting with her coworkers. She is wearing a black T-shirt and sitting behind a table filled with schedules and stickers that say “end the lockout.” She hasn’t “had much of a summer,” she tells me; it’s been dominated by the early-morning shift, Monday through Friday. When I ask her if she is tired, she says, “Nope. We’re just starting.”
This is a routine that more than 800 workers didn’t choose. British Petroleum, one of the ten largest oil and gas companies on Earth, kicked out its workforce at this crude oil refinery, which at its peak produces 440,000 barrels a day, on March 19. The previous contract expired in January, and United Steelworkers Local 7-1 declined management proposals that workers say would existentially threaten the local. The union has been locked out for 126 days, and it says it is fighting for its survival against an employer that wants to cut pay and jobs, undermine workers’ ability to strike, and tear the local away from national bargaining.
The lockout is illegal, the union says. By late May, United Steelworkers (USW) had filed 15 unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company is refusing to bargain in good faith and using threats, coercive statements, and surveillance....
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BP hasn't brought out their gun thugs yet? Where's Sid Hatfield when we need him?
AOC: US-Israeli Military Integration Measure “Existential Threat” to Democracy — Sharon Zhang
The measure, known as Section 219, is included in the Pentagon budget bill advancing through Congress.
warning this week about a congressional measure that would merge the U.S. and Israel’s military technology industrial complexes, saying that it represents an “existential threat” to U.S. democracy.
The provision — called the “U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,” or Section 219 — is included in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed the House in a 216 to 212 vote on Wednesday. Six Democrats broke from the party to vote “yes,” and seven Republicans voted “no.” The bill is still stalled in the Senate, however, after Democrats voted against its advancement last week.
The NDAA “includes a provision to merge parts of our military with the [Israeli military],” Ocasio-Cortez said in a post on social media on Tuesday. “This [provision] is an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy. Every member of Congress must vote NO.”
The provision, if included in the final bill, would entrench Israel’s enmeshment with the U.S. military, mandating cooperation with regard to technology and intelligence with Israeli forces even when the U.S. gets little in return. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has advocated for the measure as public scrutiny over the U.S.’s monetary military aid to Israel has increased amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Some lawmakers in Congress have waged a bipartisan effort for Section 219 to be stripped from the NDAA. Representatives Ro Khanna (D-California) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) have introduced an amendment to the bill to remove Section 219.
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No consorting with terrorists!
Pinky Herman. Tabs, Thurs., July 23, 2026 — Evan Hurst
...Marco Rubio went and met with the top diplomat in China, totally forgot to mention that his boss just gave a big speech where he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election to help steal it for Joe Biden. DOY DOY DOY, BIG FORGET, MARCO RUBIO! [Washington Post]
Speaking of Little Marco, he allegedly will not block the extradition of the big brother Barron Trump never had, Andrew Tate, and also Andrew Tate’s brother, who are wanted for rape and other crimes in the UK. [Axios]
Peacey The Clown and his violent rogue regime are thinking about next bombing … Mali? Sure, why not, Mali. [Washington Post]
CHRIST, the way he fucking lies. Trump — on his way to accept the bodies of more troops he’s gotten killed for no reason — just started bullshitting and saying all the troops who died, all of them, “said very strongly, ‘We can’t let, cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’” Bull fucking shit, asshole. The only way that story would be less believable would be if Trump said they had tears in their eyes and called him “Sir.” Fuck you, bastard. [HuffPost]
Speaking of peace prizes, Trump is pretty sure he has a cool idea for the next UN secretary general, and it is the widely loathed head of FIFA, who made up a whole entire peace prize to give him because his distended asshole was leaking over the fact he’s never won the real one. [New York Post]...
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Fuck you, bastard, indeed!
First They Came for Immigrants. Then They Came for Dissent. Next Are They Coming for Us? — Thom Hartmann
Every authoritarian system begins by targeting someone else, until the circle widens to include critics, opponents, and ordinary citizens.
We have a lot of metaphors for it; the camel’s nose under the tent, the foot in the door, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and the handwriting on the wall, among others. Every police state in history started this way. As the White House declared last week in a press release:
“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”
First, they built the infrastructure based on what the public widely perceived as a real public safety and economic problem.
People had been pouring into the United States for centuries, looking for economic opportunity and a new life. Some were criminals, and Trump and the GOP highlighted their presence as the reason why it was so imperative to “build the wall” to seal the border and then begin aggressive mass deportations.
The majority of Americans (81% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats) rated border security as “important” in 2016, so Trump began by building his wall and expanding the detention centers that pre-existed from Reagan’s 1981 opening of them to detain Black Haitian refugees. (CoreCivic got its first immigration detention contract in 1981, GEO Group was founded in 1984.)
The story Trump campaigned on and used as an excuse to massively expand arrests and detentions was the widely popular notion that they were hunting down and imprisoning “the worst of the worst.” Even many Hispanics voted for him thinking he would clean up their neighborhoods of criminals.
Trump rarely referenced immigrants without including words like “rapists” and “murderers”: he kicked off his 2016 campaign with such a speech after coming down the escalator at Trump Tower.
Then came the first policy turn that showed the lie and exposed what may have been their plan all along. Instead of arresting immigrants who’d committed crimes (or were even accused of having committed crimes), they went after Jose the gardener and Maria the maid....
Trump’s September 25th National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
It was used last month to indict 15 protestors in Minneapolis. And now Secretary of State Marco Rubio has essentially declared that it’s a loaded gun pointed at anybody who opposes Trump or is even a progressive member of the Democratic Party. The excuse/weapon they’re apparently planning to use is Cuba....
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America will never be taken alive!
Newsmax Host: How Is The Pentagon Running Out Of Munitions When We Spend A Trillion Dollars A Year?
“American support initially going into Iran was very high. After Fordow, after Midnight Hammer, people were like, yes. Let’s go. Let’s knock these people back to the stone age.
“And then we start actually doing it, and public sentiment is like, well, you know, it’s dragging on and, oh, I had to pay $4 a gallon for gas. There is a cost to being a superpower. And sometimes for six months, you got to pay a dollar extra a gallon.
“The president has the toughest job in the world, especially on a day like today when you’re bringing bringing people home like this.
“You know, I’ve never sat in that chair. Pete Hegseth is sitting in the same chair. What they’ve done for the military is unbelievable. They’ve done an incredible job rebuilding it.
“But we’re running — like, there are reports that we are running low on munitions. How? Like, that’s what we spend a trillion dollars a year, more than the next 24 countries combined, 23 of which are allies, to be good at war. What went wrong?” – Newsmax host Carl Higbie.
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Oops! The Peanut Gallery is asking the hard questions now.
House Approves Measure To Halt Trump’s Iran War
The Washington Post reports:
The House passed a measure to halt the war in Iran on Thursday, as Democrats mounted a last-minute bid to constrain the escalating conflict before lawmakers left Washington for a month-long recess.
The effort led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) passed by a vote of 214-208. Four Republicans — Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania), Thomas Massie (Kentucky), Warren Davidson (Ohio) and Tom Barrett (Michigan) — joined Democrats in supporting the measure. A separate vote to limit Trump’s war powers is scheduled for later Thursday morning in the Senate.
The House vote marks the first test of Republican support for the conflict since President Donald Trump resumed strikes against Iran this month. U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, announced it had conducted its 12th consecutive day of airstrikes as Trump pledges to retaliate for the deaths of several American service members killed by Iranian attacks in the last week.
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It's a start.
POLL: Lindell Leads MN GOP Primary Race By 9 Points
The Hill reports:
Mike Lindell leads the Republican gubernatorial primary by 9 points, with 35 percent of support, according to the poll. House Speaker Lisa Demuth is in second place with 26 percent, and GOP-endorsed Kendall Qualls is in third with 11 percent.
Twenty-two percent of respondents were undecided. Lindell recently received a “complete and total” endorsement from President Trump, calling him “one of America’s greatest and most hard working patriots” in a post on Truth Social.
A federal judge in Minnesota ruled against the “Pillow Man” last year over his claims that Smartmatic voting machines helped rig the 2020 presidential election. In the last month, Lindell selected Phillip Parish, a retired Navy lieutenant commander, for his running mate after Parish ended his own Republican gubernatorial campaign.
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Supporting criminals, as usual, makes the Nazi Party (formerly the Republican Party) the party of crime and courruption not to mention retarded buffoons.
But it should kill them dead on the down ballot.
Trump in total disarray as senior officials leave in 'record numbers' — Alex Henderson
During his years on the hit reality show "The Apprentice," Donald Trump was famous for using the phrase "You're fired" — a phrase he later used frequently during his first presidency after clashing with administration officials he appointed. Since returning to the White House 18 months ago, Trump has generally appointed MAGA loyalists who are less likely to question him. But according to Daily Beast reporter Cameron Adams, "senior officials" in the federal government "have been deserting Donald Trump's second presidential administration at a record rate."
Adams, in the Beast, reports, "The exodus has seen 27 Senate-confirmed officials leave their positions in the last 18 months, up from 11 over the same period in his first term — a 145 percent increase, according to an analysis from the Partnership for Public Service, reported by The Hill. The figures show the number of officials leaving their jobs during Trump 2.0 is six times higher than the average number during the first 18 months under Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden."
Many of these senior officials in the federal government aren't waiting to get fired — they are quitting. But at the same time, Trump is firing some of his most devoted loyalists...
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The rats leave the sinking ship.
Former Canadian MP Responds To Trump's Threats Towards Canada — Chris capper Liebenthal
Former Canadian MP Charlie Angus lays out what a boorish and petty person Donny Demento really is.
...It should be noted that real Americans did the right thing and honored the fallen Canadian firefighter and sent their gratitude and love to our Canadian neighbors, especially Dale's family, for his sacrifice.
I cannot wait until we get some adults in Washington. I'm so very tired of being embarrassed internationally by our insane, demented joke of a president.
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None of us deserve the likes of Trump.
The Antifa Terrorism Threat Trump Keeps Railing Against Doesn't Exist — The Conversation
The threat the administration describes does not exist in the form the administration describes it.
The State Department on July 16, 2026, hosted what officials billed as a ministerial on the resurgence of left-wing political terrorism.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited representatives from more than 60 countries to Washington to hear an argument that many of them appear not to believe: that a transnational far-left terrorist movement called antifa threatens the democratic world. At the event, allies were asked to mobilize against that enemy despite nations like the Netherlands and Germany politely noting to their host that they cannot find evidence of any such group....
Antifa is not a group
As I and others have written before, antifa is not a group. It is a movement and an ideology, a loose commitment to opposing fascism. In its most organized form, it amounts to scattered local collectives like Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon.
There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy and no funding structure. There is no leader of antifa – the Trump administration has not named one – and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa.
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This only means anyone standing in opposition to Trump's fascism.
This adminstration does nothing butcreate solutions to problems that DO NOT exist. This is due to Trump's paranoia.
Kansas Priest Arrested On Child Sex Charges [VIDEO]
Kansas City’s ABC affiliate reports:
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has arrested a Catholic priest on charges related to child sexual abuse. Ryan McCandless, 44, of Wichita, was taken into custody on Wednesday. He is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent liberties with a child.
According to the KBI, the arrest occurred at a residence in the 2100 block of South Erie Street in Wichita. The investigation began after the Republic County Sheriff’s Office requested assistance in September 2025.
McCandless is accused of sexually abusing a six-year-old child in Belleville, Kansas, between July and September 2025. McCandless has served as pastor of St. Edward Parish in Belleville, St. George Parish in Munden and St. Isidore Parish in Cuba.
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Another one bites the dust.
DOJ Lavishes Cash On Alaska Ahead Of Blanche Vote
Politico reports:
The Justice Department has been lavishing nine-figure policy wins on Alaska — and openly touting what a “huge” time it’s been for the state — as attorney general nominee Todd Blanche is scrambling to lock down support for his confirmation from its senior senator, Republican Lisa Murkowski.
A July 7 settlement over the federal government’s unfinished work on the port of Alaska resulted in a $180 million payout to Anchorage — an announcement Blanche, who is currently the acting attorney general, made personally during a two-day visit. The Justice Department shared news around the same time it had dropped Biden-era lawsuits related to Alaska’s energy production.
Then on Tuesday, the administration inked a $400 million settlement with a group that administers health care programs for American Indians and Alaska natives. Those developments all coincide with Blanche’s effort to court Republican senators to vote for his nomination as he deals with blowback over the botched release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
"Ah so this is the part where Murkowski pathetically submits and votes in favor of Trump yet again, then has the gall to glare and lash out at anyone in the press who questions her on it." — vap (comments)
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Lisa must be getting a lucrative portion of the bribe money!
WSJ: Oil Prices Soar After Houthis Attack Saudi Tankers
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Oil prices are racing back toward $100 this morning after Tehran-backed Houthi militants claimed attacks on two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, threatening another important route for oil flows and stoking fears that the U.S.-Iran conflict could escalate further.
Brent crude futures jumped 4%. A barrel now costs $25 more than in early July. That pushed government bond yields higher, particularly in Europe, reflecting fears that inflation could heat up again.
U.S. stock futures are retreating on fears about Big Tech’s free-cash-flow negativity. Google parent Alphabet is sliding more than 3% premarket after it raised its capital spending forecast for this year to as much as $205 billion, fanning fears about AI spending. Tesla is down more than 5% after its free cash flow turned negative in the second quarter.
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Trump's Folly gets messier.
WV Republican Leader Charged With Enticing Minor
West Virginia Watch reports:
Del. Elliott Pritt, a Republican member of the House of Delegates, has been charged with enticing a minor after an investigation found that he communicated with a girl through Roblox and Snapchat. Pritt, 36, is a public school teacher who represents the 50th District in Fayette County. He serves as assistant majority leader.
According to a criminal complaint from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, Pritt was arrested Wednesday and faces one count of enticement of a minor. By Wednesday evening, House Speaker Roger Hanshaw called on Pritt “to resign from elected office as soon as he is able.”
According to the criminal complaint, the family of a 15-year-old female reported that the child had been sexually abused by Pritt. The complaint said that Pritt began communicating with the girl when she was in eighth grade in 2024 through the online game Roblox then later on Snapchat.
The communication happened outside of school hours. The complaint said that Pritt later initiated a physical relationship with the minor and requested that she meet him in his classroom at Oak Hill High School to engage in sexual activity at least five to ten times.
Pritt asked that the girl not tell anyone what had happened between them, according to the complaint. The investigation found that he told her in a message, “It would be in the news. It would be awful. For both of us. I would lose my entire life.”
"The only shocking part of this story is that he's not also a 'youth pastor.'" — Judas Peckerwood (comments)
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Perverted Patriarchy strikes again!
BBC Seeks Jack Smith’s Testimony In New Trump Filing
The New Republic reports:
The BBC has hit President Trump with his third whammy in 24 hours—with the broadcast news organization this time renewing its demand for the release of records showing how Trump lost his “executive privilege” claims during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into January 6.
The BBC noted in a reply memorandum Wednesday that it has already sent multiple “requests to government agencies seeking to obtain the same evidence the Special Counsel gathered and described as ‘evidence establish[ing] that the violence [on January 6] was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay.”
But the Trump administration rejected those requests, claiming executive privilege. The BBC demanded more information on how Trump lost those same claims during Smith’s probe.
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Going after Smith is the biggest mistake the retards have made.
Conservative lays waste to the 'death toll' of Trump’s lies Adam Lynch
Conservative CNN pundit SE Cupp had no patience to give for the cost of President Donald Trump’s wasted campaign promises and the travesty of his deceit leading up to his 2024 election victory.
Speaking on a Wednesday panel for “The Arena with Kasie Hunt,” Cupp said the sheer lethalality of Trump’s lies was a woeful betrayal of the neoconservative movement, which had already been reeling with the devastation of past Republican president’s mendacity.
“I came up in a neoconservative movement and then watched the Iraq War fittingly put the death knell in that movement in many ways. And it felt as if neocon Republicans’ kind of learned a lesson,” said Cupp. “Trump, I think, got elected both times because of his opposition to the Iraq War. He talked a lot about it in 2016. It was a huge mark of distinction between him and Hillary Clinton. He exploited that. And then in 2024, he talked a lot about never getting us into a war with Iran.”
“A vote for Kamala was a vote for war with Iran, or a vote for World War III,” Cupp added. “He conned a lot of people on his side into believing that he was going to be the president that didn't get us into these endless wars.”
Cupp said she was baffled by exactly what pushed Trump to make such a regrettable move, considering his lack of preparation. Trump’s missteps were made all the more tragic by recent news of his war’s death toll and the White House mischaracterizing US casualties....
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Another conservative dissing the Nazi asshole. This is mounting up on him.
Trump decimated US international trust: military expert — Matthew Rozsa
There are already numerous signs that President Donald Trump has made America increasingly hated throughout the world, from the sour reception he received at the World Cup and military experts slamming his prosecution of the Iran War to reports that other countries no longer take him or his threats seriously. Yet according to a new commentary by an Army veteran, Trump has made it very difficult for America’s own allies to trust the United States.
“The world’s liberal democracies had grown comfortable and complacent, like the eponymous character at the beginning of Rocky III, while the tyrannical, authoritarian, and malign regimes (the Clubber Langs of the world, if you will) grew stronger and more prepared,” wrote Mike Nelson, a retired Army Special Forces officer and a member of the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project, for the conservative publication The Dispatch. Nelson, who previously in the article described how there had been ample signs America would demand more European investment in NATO, argued that Trump’s actions toward the alliance go far beyond merely demanding more financial contributions.
“President Trump has continued to suggest that the United States—the most powerful of NATO’s member nations—might not support its fellow members if they were attacked,” Nelson opined. “Trump has even suggested that the United States might be the country doing the attacking. The Danes took his threats against Greenland so seriously that they deployed their special operations forces to the territory in preparation for an American offensive.”...
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Ameriica, you let a Nazi criminal into our White House. Now we all get to watch it all collapse.
Musk: Grok Will Make All-White Film Of “The Odyssey”
Variety reports:
Elon Musk has — finally — broken his silence on “The Odyssey” (well, at least since Christopher Nolan’s epic was released and started breaking various box office records).
The tech mogul and recently-crowned trillionaire — who before the film’s launch rallied against various casting decisions — wrote on his social media platform X that his AI tool Grok Imagine would make a “historically accurate” full-length feature version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem. He noted that his AI “The Odyssey” would be ready by the end of 2026 (just in time for awards season).
Musk is referring to the racial element, with his having been the most prominent voice attacking the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. In March he wrote that “Chris Nolan is an anti-White racist,” claiming that he only cast Nyong’o because “He wants the awards.” While not confirmed, the all-white AI cast of the short film he posted on X would appear to be more in line with what Musk would prefer.
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Historically accurate? Dude, it's mythology based on historical ruins. It is generally regarded as legend rather than a matter of record.
The hopeless and insecure racists are so out of sorts they need a racist bot to make some soothing ointment for their chapped bohunks! LMAO! Such weaklings!
The modern concept of a unified "white race" is a social construct and not considered a biological construct.
I suppose he will make it with an all Norway, Sweden and Iceland cast. The only peoples considered white by everyone. I guess it depends on who you ask.
Let's see how the box office does with it if it ever gets done, released and into distrubution!
Trump: “We Don’t Need The Hormuz Street” [VIDEO]
Mediaite reports:
President Donald Trump declared the USA has no need for the Strait of Hormuz — but he still wants to pummel Iran to prove it can never control the vital oil passage anyway. The president said during a Wednesday rally in Georgia the strait isn’t a big deal for America because the U.S. already controls a huge huge chunk of the oil market. Trump said it was thanks in large part to the operation that plucked Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from his bed at the start of the year.
“It’s been incredible actually, it’s got serious oil,” Trump said about Venezuela. “In fact, if you combine us and Venezuela, we have about 62% of the world’s oil market, so we don’t need straits, we don’t need anything.” The audience clapped and hollered in approval. Trump continued, “We don’t need the Hormuz Strait, but we do it because we have to do it. Because we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.” He then turned away from the microphone and soaked up the roar from the crowd.
Read the full article. As you’ll hear in the first clip, he actually said “street.” Also, transgender athletes are apparently “ravaging through our cities.” Much more batshittery and reactions to batshittery are below....
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The insanity is strong in both speaker and audience.
REPORT: All Local News To Soon Be MAGA Propaganda
Kyle Bode reports at The Fine Print:
Last week Republicans took the final steps toward destroying what’s left of U.S. media consolidation laws. It didn’t warrant much attention by the press; in part because corporate consolidation has been deadly for U.S. journalism already. Republicans and their media arm(s) have two unsubtle goals: massive consolidation among right wing local broadcast companies, and the befuddlement of the U.S. electorate by way of propaganda pretending to be useful local TV news.
The Trump administration has been taking specific aim at the National Television Ownership Rule, which is supposed to prevent a single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the U.S. They’re doing this to the benefit of Nexstar Media Group and Tegna, who combined own more than 330 local TV news stations. Both companies have a history of kissing Donald Trump’s ass, and are pursuing a $6.2 billion merger giving the new, bigger company dominion over more than half of U.S. households....
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This will go over well with Americans already in the mood to roll out the guillotines for these motherfucking Nazi shits!
Local news is for the weather and ballscores anyway.
Poor Elon Musk Can't Even Sell As Many Cybertrucks As Ford Sold Edsels — Robyn Pennacchia
Elon Musk and Henry Ford have a lot in common. They’re both are (were, in the case of Ford) absurdly wealthy car company owners with extremely questionable political views, seeking to use their wealth and power to reverse social progress and encourage the oppression of their most disfavored minorities, while claiming that those minorities are responsible for oppression of people like them.
Well, now they have something else in common: making embarrassing cars that no one wants to buy.
The Ford Edsel is one of the most famous car failures of all time, for reasons I admit I don’t totally understand. I mean, I kind of like the fact that the front of the car is a tad yonic and thus not entirely unlike driving around in a giant Georgia O’Keefe painting.
But, as it turns out, Tesla, in three years, hasn’t even sold as many Cybertrucks as Ford sold Edsels in its first year on the market.
Via Bloomberg:
Ford’s Edsel, unveiled in 1957, was pitched as an entirely new kind of car, with an oval-shaped front grille likened to a horse collar. The company predicted it would sell 200,000 units in the model’s first year on the market. Ford ended up selling less than one-third of that target, and the Edsel’s design became the butt of jokes.
Tesla started delivering its unusually angular Cybertruck in 2023. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk called it the company’s best product ever and estimated the carmaker might build more than 250,000 annually, depending on demand. Tesla sold less than one-sixth of that number in its first year, and the truck’s blocky looks became a punchline.
Edsel sales dropped each year the model was on the market, and Ford discontinued the car in 1959. Cybertruck sales are off to an even worse start. Only 7,133 have been registered in the US this year through May, according to S&P Global Mobility data provided to Bloomberg News. That count is buoyed by Musk’s other companies, with SpaceX building out a fleet of Cybertrucks....
I had actually forgotten about Cybertrucks completely until I saw one the other day. It seems even those who have them don’t want to drive them around very much, maybe because they do seem to have a Ford Pinto-esque tendency to blow up and/or catch on fire. They also might not want to let strangers in on the fact that they are enormous douchebags....
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The Burning Tank model.
Trump Claims Killed Soldiers Vocally Supported War
The Huffington Post reports
President Donald Trump said the U.S. soldiers killed during his war with Iran voiced support for the ongoing attacks, saying we “cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
“They are indeed great heroes, actually. They said, and they, all of them said very strongly, ‘We can’t let, cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,’” he told reporters before departing to attend a ceremony for four service members recently killed. “So we’re going to honor them. And one of the hardest things to do for me, it’s one of the hardest things for me to do as president, but it has to be done,” he said.
“Americans aren’t against the war,” Trump said in response to one reporter. “A poll just came out. Americans don’t want high gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war.”
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You called them suckers and now you are using them as cover for your ill-gotten failed aggression. Prove it with evidence that isn't pure Trump cloth!
Sudden shift shows 'Hotlanta' contingent could dismantle MAGA machine: CNN data analyst — Travis Gettys
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) is suddenly surging in early 2028 Democratic presidential prediction markets — and that means he could have what it takes to reclaim the White House from the MAGA right, according to a CNN's chief data analyst Harry Enten.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom entered the year as the clear frontrunner for the 2028 Democratic nomination, with a 35 percent chance, according to the Kalshi prediction market, while Ossoff sat at just 5 percent and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) stood at 10 percent.
Since then, Enten said the field has shifted dramatically.
"Why is this 'Ossoff America?'" Enten said. "That is because Jon Ossoff is 'Hotlanta,' that's what we're talking about."...
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Ossoff for President 2028
Started this here earlier than others have.
Trump’s Cabinet of Contempt — Mark Hertling
Donald Trump’s Iran strategy is on a pendulum, and that pendulum has swung all the way back. “From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz,” he posted on Truth Social minutes ago, “the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran.” Happy Wednesday.
Swagger Isn’t a Strategy
by Mark Hertling
As I watched Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday, I couldn’t help thinking about a tour in Iraq twenty years ago.
That was where I was taught a lesson that every soldier eventually learns, usually the hard way: never underestimate your enemy. Confidence is essential in combat, but swagger is dangerous because it tempts leaders into believing they already know what will happen, or how a battle or war will end. The enemy always gets a vote.
That lesson became painfully clear to me during the Muqtada al-Sadr uprising in Iraq in the spring of 2004. The 1st Armored Division had completed nearly a year of combat in Baghdad and was preparing to redeploy home when Sadr’s Mahdi Army launched coordinated attacks across central and southern Iraq. Instead of boarding airplanes to Germany, our soldiers’ redeployment was delayed, and our units headed south to Najaf, Karbala, and Al Kut....
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Trump and his sick mob.
They Didn't Just Buy Politicians: They Bought Your Food, Your Health, Your Future, and They're Coming for What's Left — Thom Hartmann
The lettuce outbreak is just the beginning. This is the story of how, thanks to GOP politicians, corporate cash rewrites America's laws and why ordinary people keep paying the price
As I write this, federal investigators are chasing the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades, thousands of people across more than thirty states doubled over with what the CDC delicately calls “frequent and sometimes explosive diarrhea,” and they still can’t tell you for certain which farm it came from.
Over the weekend, after the $7 billion company’s CEO visited the White House, the FDA walked back a positive test on lettuce from Taylor Farms, the largest salad producer in North America, announcing that its own earlier finding of cyclospora had somehow turned out to be a false positive. That leaves thousands of sickened Americans with no confirmed source at all, which is a peculiar place to land in a country that once prided itself on knowing where its dinner came from.
The reason nobody can trace it back isn’t much of a mystery. Back in March of 2025 Trump’s FDA and it’s boss, Bob Kennedy, delayed its new Food Traceability Rule by thirty months, shoving the deadline to track high-risk foods like leafy greens from the field to your plate all the way out to 2028.
Six days after that delay went public, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, cut a million dollar check to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, part of the $2.2 million it has steered to Republican committees this cycle.
Around that same stretch the CDC quietly cut its own foodborne illness surveillance from eight pathogens down to two, and cyclospora was one of the six it stopped watching. The monitoring had always been a hassle for the giant salad makers. And then the big money hit Trump’s bank account, and you’re the one stuck in the bathroom wondering who’s payoff got you.
That’s the whole corrupt Republican machine in a single lettuce field, and what follows is the same story told a couple dozen more times.
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Don't you EVER get tired of being conned by Trump's thimblerig?
DOJ tells court it won’t put things in writing because it could be 'used against it' — Sarah K. Burris
A filing from the Justice Department is saying that it doesn't want to put something in writing, and it's prompting questions from those who see documentation as a key piece of the justice system.
National security expert Marcy Wheeler pointed out that the comment was included in a court exhibit in a lawsuit against the reporters on the scene at a church protest in January 2026.
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Seems to me it's a statement of plans to dodge and cover-up any future charges of crimes against the Trump Criminal Syndicate. Pure balderdash!
Family fears Trump admin rigged kids trivia game show — Sarah K. Burris
As part of President Donald Trump's 250th celebrations, the Department of Education held a game show about American citizenship. Aangad Singh's family is concerned it may have been rigged.
NOTUS reported that there appeared to be some creative counting of answers during a show that depended on points, but had no scoreboard.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Singh's mother, Ramandeep.
“They just made this whole thing for show,” his uncle said. “They know who they want to win.”
As the family left the event, other parents of kids on the game show stopped them, saying how "shocked" they were. One boy stopped her and said that a group of contestants kept their own scores.
"We thought he won," the boy said, according to the report.
Even the young blond teen who won couldn't look him in the eye. She was a homeschooled student from Wyoming.
“That was insane,” she confessed. “You clearly knew everything.”
“What did she say?” Singh's father asked.
“That I should have won,” the boy reiterated.
That's when his mother approached the Department of Education official to ask for the final scores. They refused to hand them over, claiming they were "proprietary."
“How did they count the numbers?” she said. “That’s something we need to understand.”...
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More proof that Trump has rigged everything in his life. Why stop now, suckers?
'Censure Her!': Jasmine Crockett Speaks Truth; Wingers Lose Their Minds — David Edwards
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) called a House Smithsonian hearing "the Republicans' White Pride rally," and conservatives immediately demanded she be censured.
The broadside came moments after Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) accused the Smithsonian of pushing "a racial narrative that divides Americans by their skin color and by guilt."
"Is that what you care about?" Boebert demanded. "Just racism and making people feel guilty?"
"Welcome to the Republicans' White Pride rally disguised as a congressional hearing," Crockett told the subcommittee.
"It might be uncomfortable for some people on this committee… but facts are facts," she continued. "And it's a fact that there is a violent, exclusionary, discriminatory, sexist, and racist part of American history."
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Vampires hate to have a mirror held up in front of them!
Steve Scalise Cuts An Ad For Olive Garden — Ed Scarce
Source: The Independent
A top Republican lawmaker made the case for sweeping election reforms by talking pasta.
In a Tuesday interview with CNBC, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise was asked about the SAVE America Act, a GOP-backed bill that would require new voters to show proof of citizenship. The measure narrowly cleared the House in February, but it faces long odds in the Senate.
“When you think about something like Save America, which is at the heart of democracy, just saying show picture ID to vote,” the Louisiana lawmaker said. “For God’s sake, you can’t go get pasta at Olive Garden without a picture ID. Why not be able to show a picture ID to vote?”
Scalise appeared to be referencing the chain’s “Never-Ending Pasta Pass,” which grants customers 13 weeks of unlimited pasta, breadsticks, soup and salad for $100. In order to redeem it, customers must present a photo ID that matches the name on the pass.
"Olive Garden is a PRIVATELY owned company, they can require anything legal they want customers to do to receive what they provide. The US Government, NOT so much, that's why we have a 10 Amendment Bill of Rights. The 4th of which gives: "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." The US of A is NOT now nor ever has been a "SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS" Country!!! To continue with the 4th Amendment RIGHTS lets keep it that way!
BTW, anyone commenting here that votes in his district please email Scalise and remind him that we're NOT a "SHOW ME YOUR PAPERS" country and should never ever become one!" — VP505 (comments)
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Is this moron equivocating a restaurant with a a voting booth? Dearie, it's time to take remedial classes! You are only connecting with your retarded constituants. ROTFLMAO!
Let's spell it out for the retards. You are not eating pasta in a voting booth. You are exercising your right as an American. Can your pea brains understand that?
We can do "This your brain on fascism" later.
My Grandma Came To Olive Garden THE RIGHT WAY. Tabs, Wed., July 22, 2026 — Evan Hurst
Good morning, hay tabs.
But first, a tiny piece of housekeeping! I will be doing one of them Substack Live thingies on Friday with Jonathan Larsen, AKA your pal who does The Fucking News. It’ll be Friday at 12:00 noon ET at this link, but to make sure you get the reminder/notification when it’s gonna happen, best to go ahead and subscribe to The Moral High Ground, which you should be doing anyway.
OK, stories!
Donald Trump is really excited the stupid, pointless war he and Pete Hegseth have lost in Iran has only murdered 18 American troops for no reason (so far). We guess that’s what this Truth Social post means, unless he’s trying to remind himself that if he wants a much bigger body count, he has to be patient, because pointless forever wars take time.
Related: Pete Hegseth, Trump’s sycophantic butt-sniffing beta at the Department of WAR!, told the Senate yesterday that Daddy “deserves the kind of praise he should get for undertaking this effort,” AKA for starting a losing loser war like this. "Having the courage to ensure that crazy Islamists can't have a nuclear weapon to hold us at issue." OK, Sparky the Fox News hairstyle expert. Daddy knows you love him. [Rolling Stone]...
More related: Senate Democrats would like some answers from Secretary Shitfaced on his new manly testosterone policy for manly men, considering how it is the stupidest most cucked thing any of them have ever fucking heard of.
[The Hill]
With all the news out there right now, it seems like a good time to re-read Timothy Snyder from a few months ago on “The Desire For Terror.” The Trump regime’s, to be specific. Especially now that the Iran war is going so poorly and nobody supports it. Especially with the approach of the midterms the Trump regime’s party is set to lose in humiliating fashion. How much they would probably love a terrorist attack to happen to the US, real or staged, blamed on Iran, or even better, staged and blamed on “Antifa” or immigrants. Makes you wonder even more why the FBI director is heading to Russia before the midterms, considering Putin’s own history of using fake terrorist attacks to consolidate his power. Snyder:
Russia is [a] possible source of a terror attack inside the United States. It is not hard to see why Moscow would contemplate such a thing. In the current circumstances, it would be easy to deflect blame. Given that Putin himself consolidated authoritarian power on the strength of wars against Muslims and terrorist attacks inside his own country, he will have had no trouble imagining such a path for Trump. It is not hard to see him giving Trump such a gift. Russia has some relevant capabilities.
During the first year of this second Trump administration, defenses against all of these vectors of terrorism have been removed. There are three levels of the problem: policies have been changed; leadership is incompetent and experienced personnel are gone; and fiction about immigrants has displaced the actual problem of terrorism....
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Climate adaptation isn’t surrender. It’s survival — Bryan Walsh
The skyline of lower Manhattan is reflected on the top of a monument as wildfire smoke from Canada shrouds the sunrise in New York City on July 18, 2026, as seen from Jersey City, New Jersey. | Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
In 2019, the AI researcher Rich Sutton published a short essay called “The Bitter Lesson.” Seventy years of AI research, he argued, kept demonstrating the same thing: the most effective ways to train AI rely on raw, brute-force computing power — simply scaling up — rather than clever approaches built on human insight. It didn’t matter how elegant researchers’ work was. More compute would win every time. It’s a bitter lesson because, well, no one wants to accept that even the best efforts can go unrewarded.
This summer, climate change has been teaching its own kind of bitter lesson. Last week smoke from out-of-control Canadian wildfires reached more than 120 million Americans, sending out air quality alerts across 18-plus states from Minnesota to Virginia. Those wildfires, which were made more likely by the effects of climate change, followed record-breaking heat waves in Europe that contributed to the deaths of thousands of people....
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Yes, and those darn Canadians must pay for the smoke that is rolling over our dicatator's lying eyes! /S
Blanche Keeping Slush Fund For J6 Cop Beaters Very Much Alive — NewsHound Ellen
Todd Blanche just has a new source of taxpayer money in a different place.
Donald Trump’s personal attorney cosplaying as acting U.S. attorney general wants you to think that his client’s taxpayer-funded slush fund is dead. But Todd Blanche’s response to a written question from senators considering his confirmation made it very clear he is only disguising it.
As journalist Scott MacFarlane noticed, at least one of Blanche’s answers “appears to leave the door WIDE OPEN to giving taxpayer money to convicted Jan 6 cop beaters.”
One question asked if Blanche would direct the DOJ “not to enter into any settlement that would result in paying money or issuing an apology to any person convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers during the January 6 attack on the Capitol.”
Blanche's response is a huge red flag. He replied, “Every claim submitted pursuant to the Federal Tort Claims Act is reviewed on the merits and addressed by the Torts Branch of the Civil Division. The compromise and/or settlement of any claim is made only in the best interest of the United States.”
In other words, instead of being submitted to the slush fund, any convicted insurrectionist cop-assaulter can make a claim to the DOJ’s Torts Branch. Hundreds of claims from convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists are already in the works, one attorney told The Hill....
"Hard core criminal" — Earneepantusso3 (comments)
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If this fascist toadie is confirmed it will be the end of law and order in America.
Trump Again Boasts Of Only Killing 18 Soldiers (So Far)
The Independent reports:
President Donald Trump highlighted the American death toll in the ongoing Iran war, framing it as relatively low when compared to past foreign conflicts, drawing criticism from both sides of the aisle.
On Tuesday night, Trump posted a graphic on Truth Social which outlined the duration and casualties of wars initiated under previous presidents. “These are the real facts,” the 80-year-old Republican wrote. “REPORT THEM!”
His post came just days after Iranian strikes on U.S. bases in Jordan and Iraq killed four American service members, underscoring the human toll of a conflict that has ravaged the Middle East and spiked global fuel prices. In addition to the total of 18 U.S. service members who have been killed, roughly 500 more have been wounded, the Pentagon has said.
"If you’re going to post this chart, Donnie, don’t forget to compare yourself to your predecessor, Barak Obama. In 2015, he got the Iranians to sign a successful agreement to limit the Iranian nuclear program in return for sanctions relief and other provisions. No American deaths, no war, no tariffs, no increase in oil prices, no closure of the Strait of Hormuz. No drama Obama. He got the job done." — DevilDog (comments)
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Is he bragging or complaining?
Never forget, Trump called service members who died in action "suckers" and "losers."
This man is not fit to be the commander-in-chief!
Israel’s Ambassador To United Nations: “If Anyone Should Be Arrested, It’s You, Zohran Mamdani” [VIDEO]
The Jerusalem Post reports:
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon decried a Wednesday statement released by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in which he accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being a “war criminal” responsible for an alleged “genocide against the Palestinian people.”
“Zohran Mamdani, ENOUGH. Enough with the blood libels. Enough with the attacks on Jewish organizations,” Danon proclaimed. “You were elected to serve New Yorkers, not Hamas’ propaganda. Do your job!”
Former prime minister Naftali Bennett similarly condemned Mamdani’s accusatory statement, asserting that the mayor has placed himself “on the wrong side of history – alongside those who deny October 7th and protested on campuses on October 8th in support of genocidal Hamas.”
"He's definitely got a 1940s hairstyle. I didn't know anyone still used Brylcreem!" — ChrislnKansas (comments)
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Who are you trying to fool? Netanyahu is a terrorist first class!
PS: The Brylcreem King is our Secretary of War Crimes.
Started 1928 by County Chemicals at the Chemico Works in Bradford Street, Birmingham, England, many men use it today.
OpenAI Models “Went Rogue” And Hacked AI Startup
The New York Times reports:
OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. technology that is popular among developers. The incident, which happened last week while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, displayed the kind of science-fiction potential that A.I. companies warned would soon become a reality.
A.I. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have over the past year released A.I. models that are customized to expose cybersecurity problems, while warning that their technology could pose new risks by finding holes in corporate computer networks faster than defenders could fix them. OpenAI’s revelations on Tuesday are an indication that those security incidents are already starting to happen, and even savvy A.I. companies may not be entirely ready for them.
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And who would have ever thought it? /S
Ossoff Eviscerates Hegseth Over Claims Of Iran Victory
The Hill reports:
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) sparred with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday over whether the U.S. military obtained an “overwhelming victory” in Iran as he declared in April.
“You said, ‘Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory.’ You said Iran’s military had been rendered, ‘combat ineffective for years to come,’ and you stated we had ‘achieved every single objective,” Ossoff told Hegseth during his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“You stated four months ago that Iran’s military had been rendered ‘combat ineffective for years to come,’” the lawmaker said, repeating his question. “Has Iran’s military been for the last four months combat ineffective?” the Georgia Senator asked. Hegseth responded by stating Iran’s military has been set back “not just years,” but likely “decades” but noted that the diminished army still has “capabilities.”
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Ossof/AOC 2028!
(as a poster states!)
Comer Furious After Dershowitz Again Skips Interview
ABC News reports:
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., called it “unacceptable” Tuesday that attorney Alan Dershowitz failed to appear Monday for a scheduled transcribed interview as part of the committee’s probe into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Your counsel failed to provide a reason for your refusal to testify,” Comer wrote In a letter sent Tuesday to Dershowitz. “When Committee staff followed up with your counsel via email on July 15 and 17, 2026, your counsel again failed to provide an explanation for your refusal to attend your transcribed interview.”
In a brief phone call with ABC News last Friday, Dershowitz said his lawyers “instructed him that he is not permitted to testify at this time.” He declined to provide additional details about the reason or when it might be rescheduled.
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"Tidy Whities Douchowitz" a no-show again!
Trump: Generic Drugs To Get 200% Tariff In Two Years
CNBC reports:
President Donald Trump said generic drugs imported into the U.S. will face zero tariffs for two years starting August 1, before a 100% levy takes effect in August 2028 and rises to 200% a year later.
The phased schedule is intended to push generic drugmakers to move production onshore, Trump said in a social media post Tuesday, describing the escalation as “a penalty” for companies that don’t build plants and facilities in the U.S. within the grace period.
Nearly all prescriptions in the U.S. are filled with generic drugs that often come via overseas manufacturing and involve complex ownership structures, according to Legis1, a congressional intelligence platform.
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Just im time for the election and one more reason to put him into retirement and prison!
Trump Approves Nuclear Power Deal With Saudis
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration plans to announce Wednesday that it has reached a broad nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to the country enriching its own fuel for nuclear reactors, U.S. officials said.
The accord is intended to further bind the United States with the Saudi government as the war with Iran strains the relationship. The Trump administration, according to officials, estimates it will provide billions of dollars for the U.S. nuclear industry — starting with Westinghouse, which designs many of the reactors sold abroad.
Although the agreement likely would have support among many Republicans, some U.S. lawmakers from both parties along with Israeli officials have expressed opposition to such a plan, fearing that the kingdom could use a civilian nuclear project to eventually develop nuclear weapons.
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Who's shitty idea was this?
Nuclear proliferation must cease! NO NUKES!
'Someone's going to get killed': Chilling warning arrived before Trump's fatal crackdown — Travis Gettys
Local prosecutors were warned President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown in Minnesota would prove fatal, according to a new report.
An agent from the Homeland Security Investigations division told local prosecutors and other officials that Border Patrol agents should not be conducting immigration raids in a city, reported CNN chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper.
“Someone’s going to get killed," that DHS official said.
"We’re going to pacify this place."
Interesting choice of words. This is exactly what the Nazis used to call it when they would roll into a town and kill everyone in it. Pacification.
Pacification actions were one of many punitive measures designed by Nazi Germany to inflict terror on the civilian population of occupied Polish villages and towns with the use of military and police force.[1] They were an integral part of the war of aggression against the Polish nation waged by Germany since September 1, 1939. The projected goal of pacification operations was to prevent and suppress the Polish resistance movement in World War II nevertheless, among the victims were children as young as 1.5 years old, women, fathers attempting to save their families, farmers rushing to rescue livestock from burning buildings, patients, victims already wounded, and hostages of many ethnicities including Poles and Jews.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_actions_in_German-occupied_Poland -- MKey2 (comments)
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Reminder: There is no statute of limitations on murder. And it is very clear what happened in Minnesota is murder.
Trump's 'wild jealousy' fueled bizarre smear campaign against legendary actor: biographer — Bennito L. Kelty
A White House smear against a legendary actor stemmed from a decades-old grudge and wild jealousy, a Trump biographer said.
During an episode of Inside Trump's Head, host Joanna Coles and Trump biographer Michael Wolff tried to explain the White House's smear campaign against actor Richard Gere.
The smear started when White House Communications Director Steven Cheung responded to Gere's criticism of cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), according to reporting by The Daily Beast. In a post on X, Cheung brought up a rumor from the 1990s about Gere involving a gerbil....
"The president is mad at Richard Gere," Wolff said. "So, Steven Cheung was assigned this job, his daily assassination here."
Coles suggested, "It was just some sort of wild jealousy that is still lodged somewhere in a file in Donald Trump's brain."
Wolff agreed, saying, "That's the way things happen in the White House. It's Donald Trump who was incensed about Richard Gere, something he saw, something someone said, something he has some association with, with Richard Gere."
He continued, explaining, "Richard Gere is handsomer than he is" and "is ultimately in that Hollywood contest, much more successful than Donald Trump ever was."...
Gere was also married to supermodel Cindy Crawford, Wolff noted, "as opposed to Donald Trump marrying Melania, who he pretended was a supermodel, but we know, in fact, wasn't really a model of any great note."
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Once again, Trump can't stand for anyone to get more attention than he. And, once again, how many beauty contests has Steven Cheung won?
Panicking Trump facing 'a noose around his neck': expert — Matthew Rozsa
Congress “will become an incredible noose around his neck, a burden on his shoulders,” author Michael Wolff said on his podcast Inside Trump’s Head along with his co-host from The Daily Beast, Joanna Coles. “They will do everything possible to frustrate him and to humiliate him and to make him pay for being Donald Trump. And that may be good politics or bad politics. That’s unclear because they’ve done this before and it turned out to be actually probably bad politics.”
Wolff added, “We saw JD Vance this past week go on Joe Rogan and—Godd—— , if he wasn’t basically publicly proclaiming his distance from Donald Trump.”
Wolff added that because Trump’s approval rating is at 37 percent and voters are widely dissatisfied with his handling of the economy and his waging of a war against Iran, Republicans will have all the more reason to distance themselves from his unpopular policies.
The White House has previously launched personal attacks against Wolff’s credibility in response to his observations about the president.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s—— and has been proven to be a fraud,” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung previously told The Daily Beast. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
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Steven Cheung? Isn't he the winner of several beauty contests?
Judge demands Trump surrender his financial records — Nick Hilden
On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump must surrender detailed financial documents relating to his defamation lawsuit against the BBC. According to Politico, "U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett concluded that Trump’s sweeping complaint put injury to his businesses at the forefront and made their vitality a fair subject for the BBC to demand information about."
“All of President Trump’s brand, properties and businesses are impugned or said to have been impugned. Reputational, economic damages, all of that is now at issue in this case,” Lett said at the conclusion of a three-hour hearing. As Politico reports, "Her decision opened the door for the BBC to explore the finances of more than 400 companies owned by a Trump family trust, but Trump can appeal the ruling to U.S. District Court Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee." Trump's attorney declined to comment on whether or not the president would appeal.
"Trump’s lawyers had tried to head off the ruling by backing away from some of his initial damage claims, giving up on assertions that the 2024 BBC documentary had caused him economic injuries and diminished the value of his companies," explains Politico. "Brito told Lett the president’s approach to the case has 'evolved' and he is now pursuing only damage to his reputation — not his businesses — as a result of how the BBC spliced together portions of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021 speech. Trump contends that the edit made it sound like he called for violence when he did not."...
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Uncovering Trump's corrupt regime.
Arizona voters have had it with Trump election deniers' 'foolishness' — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump continues falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him — and voters in a key swing state are fed up with it.
“It's bull,” an Arizona woman told MS NOW correspondent Jillian Frankel in an interview that aired on Tuesday. “I think, I mean, we can count the vote, and we should allow everybody to vote and make sure everything is counted, honestly. And I don't believe in rigged [elections], but there's always corruption, right? And that's gonna be high.”
An Arizona man told Frankel that Trump’s election denier rhetoric “plays negatively with me, because it's like, come on, that's foolishness. And no, that's just a waste of time, and I don't like that.”
Another Arizona man told Frankel that “I've heard that ever since the 2020 election, and it's bogus. And it's sad that someone who doesn't win just claims that it was all a sham. But if he would have won, would he have also claimed it was a sham? Probably not.”...
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Arizona? How about everyone in the country with a working brain?
Watchdog warns of new voter suppression tactic exploding across America — David Lightman, States Newsroom
WASHINGTON — Mass voter challenges are likely to occur in the 2026 midterm elections, the Brennan Center for Justice warned Tuesday, with the potential to “undermine the democratic process.”
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been laying the groundwork for questioning the election process in state after state, as Trump has made “election integrity” the centerpiece of his recent domestic policy initiatives, including in a July 16 address to the nation.
The center, at NYU School of Law, found in a report Tuesday that more than 185,000 challenges to voter eligibility were filed by private citizens in 2024, though “the real number is likely higher” since many election officials either were not contacted or sent incomplete responses to an inquiry. The center is regarded as left-leaning.
Mass challenges are a fairly recent development, spurred by improvements in election technology and transparency. Thousands of votes now can be challenged at once.
They’ve rarely been successful, but experts worry they create voter doubts about whether elections are being conducted fairly. Historically such challenges have also often been used to suppress the votes of people of color, a separate brief said.
“Eligible voters facing challenges sometimes don’t vote simply because the process is too confusing. Responding to a challenge requires numerous steps that can trip up voters. They may not understand their options for verifying their identity,” said the report by Brennan Center Counsel Andrew Garber.
Garber found that “mass voter challenges have become a key element in the campaign to use election integrity as a pretext for voter suppression.”...
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We are witness to a domestic enemy attack on our system of government the likes of which we have never seen. We must stiffen our spines and do what is necessary to protect our rights as citizens in this civil war of attrition!
When the Anti-Sharia Law Demagogues Fall Silent — Harold Meyerson
The stench arising from the proposed purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount isn’t just the concentration of market power by the merged studios nor the likely takeover of CNN by President Trump’s fanboys. It’s also the fact that the purchase is funded by investments from the sovereign wealth funds of three foreign nations, none of which are in any way, shape, or form democracies: Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. Together, those three nations’ funds will own 49.5 percent of the merged company, with the possibility that that share might grow to a majority interest.
Under their deal with the Ellison family, which controls Paramount, the three nations are not to have any governance or policy-making powers over the company. But CNN, along with the BBC, is the world’s leading television news service, and its ownership by foreign nations would, at minimum, put its news coverage under question. So, of course, would its ownership by the Ellison family, which hosted a salute to Donald Trump dinner in the nation’s capital earlier this year, and whose takeover of CBS’s legendary news division has prompted numerous reporters and producers to leave rather than submit their work to the Trump-lite filter through which it now has to pass....
And yet, I can find no mention of Paramount’s proposed takeover of these American institutions, and the ownership stake of these nations, in any of these presumably Sharia-phobic officials’ statements. My efforts to question them or their staffs about the pending purchase have yielded no response. Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ desire to convert CNN into a Fox News lookalike clearly overpowers any of the anti-Sharia demagogy that Roy, Self, Tuberville, and their ilk spout in the hope of boosting their careers. The real career-killer, they understand, would be triggering Trump’s disapproval.
They don’t cease to invoke their anti-Sharia rants because they’re patently absurd. Rather, they cease to invoke them—in this one sole instance when they could in fact draw a line between American institutions and nations partially reliant on Sharia jurisprudence—because it might thwart their ambitions.
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Absurd isn't the word for it. Hatred will suffice.
AOC warns the GOP is sabotaging mail-in votes — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortéz (D-NY) warned Tuesday on social media that Republicans are attempting to embed voter suppression measures into an insider trading bill as a tactic to implement President Donald Trump's desired voting restrictions.
AOC wrote on social media, "Republicans are trying to pull a trick this week," adding, "They say we are voting on an 'insider trading' bill, but have snuck in massive SAVE Act-style voter suppression measures to it."
The SAVE America Act provisions would restrict national mail-in voting.
AOC argued Republicans would not mix insider trading restrictions with voter suppression if they were serious about either issue, calling the combination a sabotage strategy.
She urged colleagues to oppose the measure and "spread the word."
Congress passed disclosure requirements for congressional stock trades in 2012, though enforcement remains weak.
Republicans introduced similar legislation earlier this year, which AOC criticized for reducing transparency.
"I’m voting NO," affirmed the Congressman....
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Criminals have to cheat to win. This is what they do! Nazi bastards.
'This guy is yick': Jen Psaki profiles dirty behavior of latest Trump-backed candidate — Matthew Chapman
MS NOW's Jen Psaki uncorked a deep dive into Mark Lamb, the former Pinal County sheriff running for Congress in Arizona with President Donald Trump's endorsement — despite an incredible collection of baggage.
"Only the finest over there they're nominating," said Psaki. "So the God, Family, Freedom candidate, Mark Lamb, has spent the last few months embroiled in scandal after The Arizona Republic obtained what appeared to be illicit texts and Facebook messages Mark Lamb sent to women who were not his wife."
Psaki prefaced what she said next with a warning.
"If you have small children in the room with you, this might be the moment to tell them to cover their ears," she said. "And if they can read, please cover their eyes too. And even for the adults out there, a warning, and this guy overall is yick."
In one of the messages, Psaki noted, Lamb "tells a woman, quote, 'I would normally talk so much dirtier to you, but I don't trust Facebook or my phone.' After the woman replies with more flirtatious banter, he sends her [an explicit] screenshot that we cannot show you on air."...
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America has many sick Nazis we must put a stop to.
Paxton Flees Presser Over Questions On Scandals
The New Republic reports:
Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton was given an opportunity to address major scandals that stand to derail his chances against Democrat James Talarico in November. Instead of acknowledging them, he ended the press conference and left the room.
“General, I wanted to give you a chance to respond to state Representative Talarico and his campaign,” a reporter asked Paxton while flanked by over a dozen law officers in cowboy hats during a Tuesday press conference. “They’ve made a lot about the reports that have come out, one in The New York Times about you acquiring properties worth—”
Paxton refused to answer the questions even as he spoke at a podium with Talarico’s face plastered on it, alongside the caption “Talarico: Handcuffed to his record.”
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Talarico has a record he can run on and not away from! Vote Talarico for Texas and America!
1.5 Million Children Have Lost Food Aid Since Last July
The Washington Post reports:
More than 4 million people nationwide were dropped from the federal food assistance program known as SNAP from July 2025 through March, according to an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonpartisan think tank.
Arizona has seen the sharpest declines since the passage last year of the One Big Beautiful Bill, which tightened eligibility for food aid and pushed states to do more screening. More than 450,000 people in the state are no longer on SNAP, according to data through May, as enrollment declined by half.
In its report, published earlier this month, the CBPP estimated that nationwide, the number of children who have been dropped from the program probably exceeds 1.5 million. SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program also referred to as food stamps, helps low-income people buy groceries.
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What a greedy bunch of slugs our country has become under the Nazis.
HHS Halts Medicaid Funding For Minnesota, California
The Washington Examiner reports:
The Trump administration is pausing federal Medicaid funding for Minnesota and California after months of uncovering billions of dollars in alleged fraud.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the department is pausing roughly $867 million to California and over $200 million for Minnesota after the states did not provide requested documentation for federal audits of their Medicaid programs, which provide health coverage for low-income and disabled people.
“We have a duty to stop the payments, demand answers, and then follow the evidence wherever it leads,” Kennedy said. “If Governor Gavin Newsom or Governor Tim Walz wants this funding released, all they have to do is provide basic documentation showing that these services are legitimate and not fraudulent, and that’s common sense.”
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Another crime by the Trump Criminal Syndicate — RFK jr. the errand boy.
Trump Barks At Iran War Question: You’re Fake News
ABC NEWS: “Mr. President, there are no signs that Iran is ready to stop fighting, so what is the plan? Is the plan to just keep fighting until they give up?”
TRUMP: “How would you know there are no signs? Why, do you know something that I don’t know?”
ABC NEWS: ‘Well, they continue to attack our allies and kill Americans—”
TRUMP: “You don’t know what the dialogue is behind the scenes. They want to meet desperately to try and end it, because they’re getting decimated. You don’t get that when you’re listening to your fake station, but you don’t know anything.”
ABC NEWS: “Well, tell us.”
TRUMP: “I will tell you they want to desperately meet and until they are ready to meet in a meaningful way, we have no interest.”...
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They are attacking us but they desperately want to meet but we have no interest.
Good God! If this excahnge does not convince you he is insane then there is no help for you either!
Tyranny expert warns Trump's people may be eying fake terror attack in US — Tom Boggioni
With the war with Iran spiraling and public opinion about the military excursion at an all-time low, a leading scholar on tyranny warned on Tuesday that Donald Trump’s people may do the unthinkable.
Late Monday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham warned the president that “the clock is ticking” as supporters lose patience with the war that has been unpopular since the U.S. attacked in late February.
According to historian Timothy Snyder, whose book "On Tyranny" is often cited when discussing the Trump administration, a false flag terror attack in the U.S. that can be blamed on Iran is not beyond the realm of possibilities as the president's approval numbers slide.
On X he wrote, “Trump is pursuing this war in the HOPE that Iran carries out an act of terror in the US. And even if it doesn’t, which I doubt it will, consider the possibility that Trump's people would fake one. Please consider this essay, written back in March, as well as the last few lessons of ‘On Tyranny.’”
In the March essay he linked to, he predicted, "A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States. This would provide Donald Trump with a pretext to try to cancel or 'federalize' the coming Congressional elections.“
"Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely; there are plausible vectors of terror; and the United States has let down its defenses," he added.
As for the timing, he elaborated, “We know that he is obsessed with the fall elections, which his party will almost certainly lose by spectacular margins, and that he fears the accordant loss of power. This is clear from his own statements and actions.”
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Trump would kill us all if it meant he could hold power. This is what fascism does and why we must eliminate it.
Trump's 'hunger for respect' sees him blindly stagger into 'obvious trap': ex-aide — Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump's personality flaws make him extraordinarily vulnerable to Iran's efforts to drag the U.S. further into a grinding war, according to a former White House insider.
The 80-year-old president has been promising the war he launched Feb. 28 would end in days, but instead fighting has intensified in its fifth month because U.S. adversaries want the conflict to drag on – and former Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor wrote for The i Paper how they have learned to manipulate Trump to get what they want.
"Unfortunately, I learned how easily Trump could be played during his first term," Taylor wrote.
Most allies chose to flatter Trump, which Taylor said "worked with depressing regularity," with while adversaries learned that insulting him works best to their advantage.
"The hunger for respect that makes Trump easy to flatter also makes him even easier to provoke," Taylor wrote. "A well-aimed insult could send the president into a tailspin and upend the operations of the White House and the federal government for a day or more."
Taylor described how Trump hijacked policy meetings to rant about payback to whatever some foreign figure had said about him on television, saying that North Korea's Kim Jong-un became particularly adept at pushing his buttons – toggling between praise and provocation – to gain leverage.
"Washington insiders treated that episode as a punchline, but evidently the regime in Iran treated it as an instruction manual," Taylor wrote. "If you have any doubt, just look at what the Iranians have done since the war began in February. Regime propagandists have flooded the internet with videos ridiculing Trump, with content engineered for an audience of one."
"The regime has studied Trump for a decade," Taylor added. "They know their taunts goad him, maybe not always exactly how they’d hope, but enough to give them leverage the regime has never had before."...
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Trump will break the bank on his failed war. The country will suffer greatly for it.
WaPo: The Pentagon Is “Running Short On Cash”
The Washington Post reports:
The Pentagon faces an urgent budget shortfall caused largely by the war in Iran, with some critical lines of funding set to run out within weeks even as President Donald Trump escalates the conflict with Tehran, according to lawmakers and current and former U.S. officials. The funding crunch is already leading the Pentagon to limit training and maintenance that help maintain military readiness.
And the collapsed ceasefire with Iran could further strain the military’s budget: After four U.S. service members died during more than a week of intensified fighting, officials in Washington signaled they were preparing for a wider conflict.
The White House has asked Congress for an immediate infusion of $67 billion to help cover the costs of the war, but lawmakers are gridlocked over how to proceed. The House plans to leave Washington on Thursday for a month-long recess, leaving any deal on military funding weeks away at the earliest.
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As previously stated. We're going broke due to his failures.
Forget Iran. Trump Is at War with Himself — Jonathan V. Last
1. Iran, Again
David Frum often says that Trumpism holds many secrets, but no mysteries. Generally this is correct. But Iran presents us with the first genuine mystery of Trump’s presidency:
Why didn’t Trump just leave?
He got his Memorandum of Understanding. He semi-promised to give Iran what they demanded in order to let him out of the war. But then, instead of walking away, he tried to renegotiate. And now the war is back on, American soldiers are dying, and—even worse1—the price of gas is rising.
I am genuinely mystified by Trump’s conduct here.
Would it have been irresponsible to simply pull assets out of the region and move on as if the war never happened after the MOU was signed?
Sure. But not any more irresponsible than starting the war in the first place. Trump does irresponsible things all the time. Why was this decision point different?
I have a theory.
Iran has vexed Trump because it brings into conflict his two controlling impulses:...
Read more.
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Maybe he'll become his own casualty.
Everyone Is Controlled By Cuba! Tabs, Tues., July 21, 2026 — Evan Hurst
Good morning, the World Cup is over and now the Trump regime can go back to just being total fascists. Haha just kidding, they didn’t take a break from that during the World Cup.
Paranoid creep Marco Rubio — who it turns out LOVES this fascism thing, guess it makes him feel like a man whose Florsheims definitely are the right size! — has come out with a report about how everybody he thinks is stinky is guilty of “Cuban subversion.” This is in the wake of his fascist confab on “left-wing terrorism,” which mostly doesn’t actually exist, and is far outshone by right-wing terrorism, or as MAGA calls it, “Tuesday.” Anyway, controlled by Cuba? Hasan Piker, Amy Goodman, Ben from Ben & Jerry’s, Zohran Mamdani, Karen Bass, Maxine Waters, and more! Better check the list to see if you are controlled by Cuba! [Ken Klippenstein[
Kash Kan’t Katch Kriminals is going on a super-secret-special-spaceman trip to the bowels of the Kremlin in October. Why? Dunno. Maybe they bought him a bottle of vodka. Maybe his girlfriend is singing at some kind of borscht-making contest. Possibilities are endless. [Politico]
Trump says he’s putting a 50 PERCENT TARIFF on everything Canadian, because 1) Baby says WAAAAAAAAAH and 2) he’s an absolute dumbfuck and 3) President Sundowner woke up mad Canada is doing “trade discrimination” to him and 4) he’s mad that Canada retaliates when he puts tariffs on him, he’s got that mindset that says he should get to hurt people without them retaliating (hey what mindset does that sound like?) and 5) he thinks Canada needs to rake its forests (refer to #2). [CNBC]
Now Trump’s asslicking DOJ wants the phone records of reporters’ moms, in its quest to find out who’s leaking embarrassing facts about the security weaknesses of Trump’s Qatari bribe plane. [New York Times]...
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His Department of Jerk-Offs!
Where Is It That The Manosphere Is Working Out For Anyone? — Robyn Pennacchia
On Sunday, manosphere influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested by US Marshals so that they could face extradition to the UK, where they will be charged with rape, something to do with child sexual assault materials, and more. They could very well be going to prison soon.
But what is going on with the rest of the manosphere? Are things going well for them? It does not seem like it!
Earlier this month, looksmaxxer Connor Michael Murphy drowned at a lake by his home in Thailand after going on what Thai police called a “rampage” during which he was running around naked and screaming. It was later revealed that he had been injecting gold into his veins because he believed it would give him superpowers, and that the wealthy had long been “gatekeeping” this incredible secret.
Also this month, fellow looksmaxxer Clavicular (real name Braden Peters, because of course it is) went on a propaganda trip to Israel, for the purpose of improving the nation’s image with Gen Z, on the off chance that there are people out there whose big problem with Israel is that they are not aware of the fact that Tel Aviv has some good nightclubs....
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The Rapin' Brothers go down in a flurry. Pariarchy must go with them!
Pentagon Slashed Civilian Harm Reduction Staff and Is Instead Using AI — Sharon Zhang
CENTCOM, which oversees the war in Iran, has had its civilian harm reduction team slashed from 10 to just one.
n its first year under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon dramatically slashed its teams responsible for taking efforts to reduce civilian harm in military conflicts, new reporting finds — an undertaking that continued until as little as months before the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Minab, Iran, in one of the worst single incidents of a civilian massacre committed by the U.S. in modern history.
A report on the cuts to civilian harm reduction staff, reported by The Intercept, finds that, between January 2025 and the end of the year, the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was slashed from 40 to just nine. In that time, the Pentagon also stopped developing a database that would have helped track incidents where civilians were harmed by U.S. actions.
These slashes to civilian harm mitigation and response, abbreviated as CMHR, were done across the Department of Defense.
For instance, such staff at Central Command (CENTCOM), which directs military activity in the Middle East, were cut from 10 to one. When U.K. watchdog group Airwars tried to submit documentation of civilian casualties to Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which has directed the U.S.’s boat strike campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the group was told that the command did not have the infrastructure to deal with such reports.
When it comes to the Minab massacre, in which the U.S. killed over 150 people with a Tomahawk missile, including over 100 children, those left at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence aren’t even allowed to investigate the incident, as well as other major incidents with civilian casualties, the report says....
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What happens when a bunch of dickheads take over for real soldiers.
Deportation Orders Soar in NYC as Trump ‘Mega Master’ Hearings Accelerate — Gwynne Hogan
Inside a New York City immigration courtroom at 26 Federal Plaza on Friday morning, 90 people had cases before a single immigration judge. People described hastily making plans to get to court, some from hundreds of miles away, having learned about their new hearing date only days in advance.
By the end of the morning, dozens of people still hadn’t shown up and the judge ordered them removed from the country.
These removal orders of immigrants who didn’t show up to court reached record heights in June nationwide and more than doubled in New York City last month, according to a new report released by bklg.org, a nonprofit that analyzes immigration court data to help immigration attorneys keep on top of their clients’ cases. The increase occurred during the first few weeks of a new Trump administration effort to speed up deportations through large-scale court proceedings known as “mega master” hearings.
In June, 4,447 people were ordered removed by immigration judges in the city “in absentia,” meaning they’d missed their hearings, the report found. That was more than double the number in May when 2,189 were ordered removed in absentia.
The analysis found the surge echoed a rise in absentia removal orders across the country. There were 53,808 such orders nationally in June, a 55% jump from a month earlier. Mega master hearings ramped up in cities including Chicago and Boston beginning in May.
In absentia removal orders have been increasing annually since 2021, as the number of people crossing the U.S. border and the number of deportation cases rose, but June showed a dramatic jump and surpassed any month on record, going back to the late 1990s when the government started keeping track....
‘People’s Rights Are Not Being Respected’
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The ugly America.
How America Let Its Workers’ Compensation System Fail — David Michaels
The workers’ compensation system is broken. This century-old system, the first component of the social safety net, was created to maintain the income of workers who are hurt on the job, and to ensure they receive adequate medical care. It was also designed to help prevent future injuries. Today, it delivers meager benefits to some and nothing to many, especially those with work-related illnesses. And it makes little contribution to injury and illness prevention.
Nowhere is this failure more visible than in the engineered stone countertop industry. Workers who cut and polish “quartz” countertops breathe ultrafine silica dust. A large proportion of them develop silicosis, a devastating, deadly, and entirely preventable disease. In California alone, more than 500 workers in this small industry have been sickened. At least 30 have died. More than 100 of these workers have undergone or are awaiting a lung transplant, a complicated and expensive procedure that extends life but does not provide a long-term cure. And California is just the tip of the iceberg. If hundreds of cases have surfaced there, thousands more workers in other states have almost certainly also developed the disease: They just haven’t been found yet, because public-health departments are only now starting to look.
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America didn't become a failure overnight. Fascism has been working at helping us fail for some time.
Trump and The Odyssey: The Ancient Curse He Just Unleashed on America — Thom Hartmann
From Zeus to Abraham to modern Iran, Christopher Nolan's film illuminates the timeless warning against turning trust into a weapon
When you go to see Christopher Nolan’s new epic film The Odyssey (as Louise and I did on Saturday), you’ll be bathed in the revelation that Trump and his military lickspittles are breaking the most ancient law that created what we today call western civilization.
The movie even explains Iran’s rageful response to Trump’s violations of “Zeus’ Law” and tells us of the possible consequences of his illegal and morally criminal attack on that country (which had not attacked us first) as his war of choice plays out.
First, a tiny bit of backstory:
Theoxenia isn’t a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but it’s at the core of both ancient Greek, Hebrew, Christian, and Iranian religions (among others) and traditions and The Odyssey. It means that there are gods wandering the Earth disguised as humans, and therefore we have an obligation to treat others — particularly strangers or people we don’t know or understand — as we would want to be treated, ourselves. With compassion, honor, and generosity.
In the movie, it’s referred to as Zeus’ Law, and its violation is the thread that runs through the entire three hours. It honors Zeus in his aspect as Zeus Xenios, protector of strangers, guests, and suppliants. In the Greek religion of that day, hospitality wasn’t mere courtesy but a sacred obligation, and Zeus himself stood behind it as both guarantor and avenger. Any stranger at your door came under his protection, so to mistreat a guest was to offend the king of the gods directly.
The Odyssey is built around this idea of xenia from end to end: you can read the whole poem as a ledger of good and bad hosts. The Phaeacians who bathe and feast the shipwrecked Odysseus without even knowing his name first are the ideal, while the suitors devouring his household in his absence are the great domestic violators, and their slaughter at the end reads as xenia enforced with a sword. The Cyclops Polyphemus is the ultimate anti-host, a creature who eats his guests and openly scorns the gods, which is why his punishment feels like cosmic justice rather than mere revenge.
Theoxenia also appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Iranian pre- and post-Islamic traditions.
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Trump is the curse that just keeps cursing!
The American Dream is officially on life support — thanks to Trump — Alex Henderson
When Donald Trump narrowly won the 2024 U.S. presidential election, many of the independents who voted for him cited the economy — especially inflation — as a key factor in their decision. Trump, on the campaign trail, promised to lower prices "on Day 1." But one year and a half into his second presidency, inflation is getting worse — not better — according to major economists like Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and the University of Michigan's Justin Wolfers.
Journalist Freddy Gray, writing for the UK-based i Paper, warns that many Americans believe the American Dream is on life support because the United States has become so unaffordable....
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We are well on our way to losing everything. This must change and it must start this year!
A dark new ideology is spreading thru the GOP —thanks to the Trump admin — The Conversation.
A new movement, “masculinism”, is uniting the right behind extreme anti-feminist views, chiefly in the United States. It promotes the dominant role of men in society, including the idea that men should dominate women.
The movement is led by figures such as self-declared misogynist Andrew Tate (named by the New Yorker as a “singularly influential proponent of masculinism”), who has just been arrested in the US, with his brother Tristan. UK authorities have just announced new charges against the brothers related to allegations of rape and sex trafficking – adding to previous charges in the United Kingdom, and a criminal investigation underway in Romania.
Other masculinists include male supremacist podcaster Myron Gaines, white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes and preacher Doug Wilson, leader of a network of 170 churches whose followers include US war secretary Pete Hegseth.
"True of every fascist government that has ever existed. Masculinsim is a euphemism for fascism.
Epstein and his blackmail list of pedophiles has a close association to America's criminal fascists." — Michrel L. Standefer (cmments)
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All dangerous pussies that are discontented bullies and filled with rage. They take it out on anyone they think they can push around. Trump is the worst one.
Trump Mocked Live By German World Cup Broadcasters As He Holds Trophy In His Lap — David Edwards
German broadcasters mocked President Donald Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino live during the World Cup final after Trump was handed the tournament trophy.
On Sunday, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to attend a World Cup final, where Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., according to the New York Post.
Officials brought the World Cup trophy to Trump in the FIFA president's private box before kickoff, and he held it in his lap, the Post reported.
"Well, that's a violation of the rules," one ZDF host said on air.
"Trump and Infantino — those two were made for each other," a second host added. "Fascinated by power and themselves, too."
ZDF commentator Oliver Schmidt went further during the broadcast.
"And there is the U.S. President and his telephone joker on the right — his lackey, Gianni Infantino," Schmidt said.
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The trophy has now been cursed.
Trump, 80, Can Barely Walk Down The Stairs — John Amato
Trump is getting worse each day, and the media yawns.
During the World Cup award ceremony, Trump looked fat, bloated, and so heavily made up with makeup that it was almost like his face was in a plaster cast.
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But isn't that how he always looks?
NYT: How Trump Is Decimating Senior Care Workforce
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is colliding with a demographic reality. Americans are aging rapidly and living longer, creating soaring demand for elder care when the industry is already buckling under the weight of chronic labor shortages. Almost 70 million people in the United States are 65 or older, and government projections estimate that 70 percent of older adults will need care at some point in their lives.
Millions of immigrants, eligible to work in the United States, fill positions across the elder care industry such as nurses, dietitians, fitness instructors and maintenance technicians. And countless undocumented immigrants care for seniors in their homes, part of a vast informal economy. Immigration enforcement is choking both labor pools. The senior-care sector was already under strain. More than half of 400 nursing homes surveyed in 2023 said they had turned away prospective residents because they lacked enough staff.
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Why is this failure of a man so goddamned mean?
GOP Reps Crow Over Olive Garden’s “Pasta ID” Policy
Fox News reports:
Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta Pass sparked an unlikely political firestorm after conservatives applauded the restaurant’s photo ID requirement, arguing the policy is stricter than voting laws in some Democrat-led states. “Olive Garden requires ID to use their never ending pasta pass but most Democrat run states don’t require your ID to vote. So in America, our pasta deals are literally more secure than our elections. Maddening and hilarious at the same time,” one conservative commentator, Robby Starbuck, wrote on X.
Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta Pass gives customers unlimited meals, but the restaurant requires passholders to present a valid photo ID matching the name printed on the pass when ordering. Conservatives swiftly shared the restaurant’s X post announcing the policy, praising it and drawing comparisons to the broader debate over voter ID requirements. “Olive Garden takes their Pasta Pass security more seriously than Democrats take election security,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Fox News Digital. “It’s sad but true.”
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Unequivocal! American voters don't get "unlimited votes" you fucking Nazi morons! Only you Nazi bastards do that!
Facts anyone can find:
Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., do not require any identification to vote at the polls. These states verify voter identity through other means, such as checking signatures against information on file.
These states require voters to submit at least one form of identification when registering to vote, and note that first-time voters will need to provide identification to polling workers.
What is it that jars you Nazi bastards about freedom?
QAnon Nutbags Take Over Decommissioned Prison
The Bulwark reports:
Promoters of QAnon and other lurid pro-Trump conspiracy theories will head to California next month to visit a women’s prison. But unlike other QAnon believers who have been incarcerated for crimes like murder, kidnapping, and storming the U.S. Capitol, these conspiracy theorists won’t be inmates—they’ll be in charge!
From August 28 to August 30, conspiracy theorists like former CBS News reporter Lara Logan, QAnon promoter Ann Vandersteel, and recently freed Colorado election clerk Tina Peters will appear at the “Rev17 2.0” conference at Pastor David Bryan’s church, located near the prison in Live Oak, California, to raise money for the prison overhaul.
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These miscreants can do us all a favor by locking themselves up in their dungeon!
‘Literal shortages’ mere weeks away as Trump's war reaches 'catastrophic' heights: analyst — Alexander Willis
Conservative commentator and journalist Saagar Enjeti sounded the alarm Monday over the United States’ dwindling supply of crude oil reserves, which, should the U.S. war against Iran continue, could bring about “literal shortages” in a matter of weeks, he warned.
The U.S.-Iran ceasefire collapsed earlier this month, and both sides have exchanged fire over the past week, with analysts increasingly doubtful a diplomatic resolution is still possible. As a result, the cost of oil surged this past week by more than 15%, and, according to the financial data company Barchart, the U.S. supply of crude oil has reached a 45-year low with just “43 days” of supply remaining.
“You need that slack to have confidence in the market that it'll be there when you order what you have – when all that gets taken away, and if it runs to zero, that's when stuff gets absolutely bonkers,” Enjeti said Monday on his political video podcast “Breaking Points.”
“It would be basically no confidence in the market – that's when export bans might come into play, literal shortages. This is the reason the Strategic Petroleum Reserve exists in the first place, and to now be at the lowest level since 1983, you just have no runway!”...
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What then, if in the end Iran achieves a nuclear bomb?
Depleting vital resource plagues Trump's DHS chief as his big promise flops: analysis — Matthew Chapman
When former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin was confirmed as President Donald Trump's new Secretary of Homeland Security, he stated that his key goal was that "we’re not in the lead story every single day.”
According to Jonathan Derbyshire of the Financial Times, he has failed utterly in this goal, as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement killings have continued to generate public outrage, and DHS has continued to skirt all accountability for it.
Multiple ICE agents were involved in shooting deaths in the past few weeks in Texas and Maine. Shortly after, "ICE suspended vehicle stops in the wake of the shootings," with border czar Tom Homan calling it a "short pause just to make sure we're doing the right thing" — only for Trump to decree the pause over hours later on Truth Social.
Part of the issue for Mullin, said the report, is that he has done little to change the toxic hiring culture at the agency that is setting ICE up for abuses of power. "In January, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had hired more than 12,000 officers and agents in less than a year and that it had received 'more than 220,000 applications to join ICE from patriotic Americans'" noted the report — but an Associated Press investigation suggests "many of those applying, and indeed a significant number of those who ended up getting hired, were unsuitable for the job."
Ultimately, Derbyshire continued, Mullin could end up falling from favor just as his predecessor Kristi Noem did — and the president's move to countermand the ICE traffic stop pause could be the first signs of it.
"Mullin would do well to remember that in this White House, presidential loyalty and support is a scarce and finite resource," he concluded....
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The failure is strong in both Trump and his stooges.
Trump ally faces $600M penalty after judge blocks MAGA media takeover gambit — David Edwards
A mass media company aligned with President Donald Trump faces over $600 million in penalties after a federal judge halted its $110 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery and CNN.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued the emergency order against Paramount Skydance on Monday, siding with a coalition of 12 states that sued to stop the deal a week earlier.
Paramount owes Warner Bros. shareholders an extra 25 cents per share for every quarter the deal is delayed past September 30, CNBC reported — roughly $650 million per quarter.
"Round one goes to the states," CNBC reporter Rohan Goswami wrote on X on Monday, adding that winning a preliminary injunction would be "90% of the battle."
The states argued the proposed deal would do lasting damage to Hollywood and American consumers. The merger, the order stated, "will eliminate competition between two of the remaining five major Hollywood studios in addition to combining two of the nation's largest cable television programmers."
President Donald Trump had made clear he wanted the Ellison family — Paramount chief executive David Ellison and his father, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison — in charge of CNN...
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There will be more to come on this but for now it feels good to hear this has happened.
State Dept: Cuba Will Activate US Protests If Attacked
Fox News reports:
A new State Department report argues that Cuba has cultivated a network of American activist organizations that can be mobilized against U.S. policy, citing a publicly posted plan for protests at U.S. military bases, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities and federal buildings as a recent example.
The June “National Rapid Response Plan” was distributed by the National Network on Cuba, a U.S. coalition of more than 60 organizations. The State Department links the coalition to the Cuban government through its relationship with the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, or ICAP, a government entity sanctioned in June for allegedly supporting Cuban intelligence activities.
The plan calls for “coordinated nationwide actions” within 24 hours of a U.S. military attack — or the “imminent threat” of one — and says its goal is to make it “politically and materially costly for the U.S. government to wage war on Cuba.”
"The only countries that still boycott Cuba are the US and Israel. It's long past due to normalize relations. If we can have relations and trade with China, why not with Cuba as well? Because there's a group of Cuban fascists that were loyal to Battista who don't want us to and Florida was until recently a swing state. Rubio is part of that crowd. I think we'd have made far more progress with Cuba by trading with them than pretending to boycott them. (You know the Battista crowd are finding ways to get plenty of money to their relatives still living there. It can't be that hard to do that through a Canadian, European or Mexican bank.)
This nonsense has gone on long enough. There was a point in the 1960s and maybe even the 1970s. But it's been long enough now. We aren't doing any good for anyone except for pandering to the very people who made Cuba so awful that Communism seemed like a good idea." — Houndentenor (comments)
"If Israel can pay billions of dollars to influence US policy, Cuba is free to send protesters out." — (comments)
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Trump and especially Lil Marco are living back in the days ot the late 1950s and early '60s, days long gone. These nogoodniks live in the past and cannot adapt to today's world. They must be replaced and soon!
DOJ Seeks Phone Records Of NYT Reporters’ Relatives
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration sought the phone records of several New York Times journalists and their relatives — including one reporter’s mother — in its effort to unmask the confidential sources who had provided information for articles about the security capabilities of President Trump’s new Air Force One jet.
The Justice Department told The Times late last week that it had issued subpoenas to third-party phone service providers seeking several journalists’ phone and text messaging records. That effort was in addition to the subpoenas issued on July 10 that sought to compel reporters to testify before a federal grand jury.
The government’s actions amount to an extraordinarily aggressive and unorthodox attempt by the Trump administration to unearth the confidential sources of independent journalists whose reporting had angered the president.
"Fuck Todd Blanche" — Dwight Williamson (comments)
"They're doing a deep dive to investigate how reporters knew that a visible defense system is not present on the Qatari airplane?" — Random William (comments)
"It’s all about projecting the idea that Trump is perfect. So noticing he fucked up is a cardinal sin that must receive disproportionate punishment." — Cerberus137 (comments)
"The Orange Fascist's DOJ confuses NYT reporters with the mouth breathers who form part of the GQP support base." — Peter Waong (comments)
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As U.S. General McCauliffe said to the Nazis asking for our surrender at Bastogne, "Nuts!"
And this Nazi Department Of Jerk-offs can get bent!
And if you're too stupid to know look it up!
New Orleans Police Plan Usage Of Armed Drones
404 Media reports:
The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) looked at ways to arm quadcopter drones with weapons, according to a draft version of its drone manual shared with 404 Media. A draft version of the manual, which was live on the NOPD website in June, said that the department’s drones could only be equipped with weapons with written approval from the Superintendent of Police.
The current version, live as of July 1, has different language: “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons or hazardous materials of any kind,” referring to small Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones. According to the NOPD, the operations manual it published to the internet with the rules for weaponized drones was an early draft.
But the publication of a police drone manual that opens the door for weaponized quadcopters is important, and comes as drone companies and police flirt with the idea of putting weapons on their drones. New Orleans has long been a pioneer of camera and drone driven policing and the cops have used controversial tactics to get around public scrutiny and regulations.
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What could possibly go wrong with this?
REPORT: Golfer Threatened To Call Trump Over Penalty
The Telegraph reports:
Bryson DeChambeau warned officials at The Open that he was ready to call President Trump in the tense stand-off that saw the American hit with a two-shot penalty for “inadvertently improving his lie”.
DeChambeau was fuming with the referees after the second round, when they informed him that he was to be sanctioned for an incident in the thick rough on the fifth, and that his 66 was going to be amended to a 68.
Despite being shown video replays that many, including Rory McIlroy, have since declared as conclusive, he demanded to be taken back to the area where the transgression occurred and, once back there, he angrily remonstrated with Grant Moir, the R&A’s rules supremo.
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Are we absolutely certain he's no kin to Trump?
Florida’s Nursing Homes Are Bracing for Life Without Haitian TPS Workers — Laura C. Morel
This week, about 350,000 Haitians in the US will lose their legal status in light of a US Supreme Court decision on June 25 that allows the Trump administration to gut the Temporary Protected Status program.
For decades, immigrants from countries rocked by natural disasters or armed conflict have sought refuge in the US under the program, which grants them work permits and protection from deportation as long as they pass regular background screenings. But in the last year, as part of its anti-immigrant agenda, the Trump administration has aimed at decimating TPS protections for more than 1 million immigrants from countries such as Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Burma. The latest US Supreme Court ruling explicitly targets TPS holders from Haiti and Syria. ...
Nina told me she will report to work until she can no longer do so legally. TPS protections, including work permits, are scheduled to expire on July 24.
“I try to keep a smile on my face, but my world is upside down,” she told me. “I do love my country, but right now is not the right time (to return).” She described how her former neighborhood in Port-au-Prince has been overrun by the violent gangs that have infiltrated much of the island nation in recent years. The US Department of State has warned Americans to avoid travel to the country, citing armed conflict between these gangs, the risk of kidnappings and other violent crimes, and a ban on US commercial flights to the main airport in the capital of Port-au-Prince after several planes were struck by gunfire. “My country is still a war zone,” she said, her voice sounding tired. “Going back right now is a death sentence.”
“My country is still a war zone. Going back right now is a death sentence.” ...
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Trump doesn't care how many will lose their life. He's a very sick creature.
Children in This Church Were Sexually Abused. Then They Began Abusing Other Kids. Some Continued as Adults — Andy Mannix
For two sisters raised in a family of 11 children that moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, danger didn’t come from outsiders like they’d been warned by their church.
It came from their brothers in the next bedroom.
Lynn said she was still in diapers when her abuse began. Two older sisters told her how they caught one of their brothers touching her. The sisters told their mother, but Lynn said her parents did nothing; the abuse continued until he was 16 and she was 10. Years later, Lynn’s sisters offered a devastating explanation for their brother’s behavior: They believed he had been sexually abused, though by a neighbor.
Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.
Katherine, the family’s second-youngest child, said she was about 2 when it started for her. She was abused by a different brother. He, too, had been abused by an older cousin, she said in an interview.
Before long, the two sisters started to repeat the pattern. When she was 10, Lynn said, she took her younger brother out behind a shed and pulled his pants down. She’s blocked the memory of what she did next, but she remembers him running away. Katherine has a similar memory: She was 5 when she said she abused a nephew, who was 3 or 4.
Now 55 and 43 years old, Lynn and Katherine — whom ProPublica is identifying by their middle names because they are abuse victims — are still grappling with what happened. Each incident was met with a familiar, suffocating silence — minimized, forgiven and swept away. (Their mother and the brother who Lynn said abused her did not respond to a request for comment. Their father has died. One of the sisters who Lynn said witnessed the alleged abuse declined to comment, and the other is dead. The brother who allegedly abused Katherine has also died.)
The sisters left the church 20 years ago and have tried to address their trauma through therapy. They have chosen to raise their children outside the faith, hoping to break with a community that has shaped their family for generations and to protect them from repeating the same cycle....
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The false face of religion.
MAGA-coded candidate’s visit to Black-owned restaurant prompts outrage in Atlanta — Nick Hilden
On Friday, a popular Black-owned Atlanta restaurant responded to outrage over a photo circulating of the establishment’s owner with Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson, declaring that it was not a political endorsement.
The restaurant, Toast on Lenox, made this assertion on Instagram the day after a photo was posted by the Jackson campaign, which showed the candidate at the restaurant with owner Tamara Young. The photo prompted calls to boycott the restaurant, and has since been taken down by the campaign.
b
According to local outlet the Grio, “The billionaire businessman and founder of Jackson Healthcare just won the Republican nomination on Tuesday, beating out Donald Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. He will now take on the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, in the general election this November. Though he did not receive the president’s endorsement, Jackson has compared himself to Trump, according to the Georgia Recorder, saying he ‘will stand up to the radical left, the media, the bureaucracy and anyone else that tries to take advantage of Georgians.’” He's also been a vocal supporter of Trump's immigration crackdown, saying that undocumented immigrants should be "deported or departed."...
“Toast on Lenox does not endorse Rick Jackson,” read the post. “We did not do a campaign, nor are we affiliated with Jackson. Any statements made in that post were his own and do not represent our personal beliefs or the position of Toast on Lenox.”
The post seemed to do little to quell the anger. By Monday, it had received hundreds of comments from jilted Atlanteans. As one declared, “Y’all align yourself with people actively trying to sow division and diminish our community. Then act obtuse when backlash occurs. Practice discernment and stop always trying to set tables for your enemies to sit at.”
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Just another Land of the Happy Negro racist.
Trump creates 2-tiered justice system to help allies dodge 'legal accountability' — Alex Henderson
Since returning to the White House one year and a half ago, Donald Trump has used to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to target his political foes — from former FBI Director James Comey to New York State Attorney General Letitia James — while pardoning allies, loyalists and supporters, including those connected to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. According to former Energy Department Director William S. Becker, Trump is creating a two-tiered justice system in which his allies are exempt from all "legal accountability."
"In his second term, Trump is doing more than ignoring legal and ethical constraints on his behavior," Becker argues in a Monday op-ed for The Hill. "He is helping his allies escape legal accountability, too. He has subverted equal justice to create two classes of citizens: one privileged, the other persecuted. The privileged group includes around 1500 supporters who participated in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. As president, Trump not only released them from jail and erased most of their criminal records, but he also wants to pay them millions of taxpayer dollars in restitution for the inconvenience of facing justice for trying to overturn a lawful election."
Becker continues, "Trump has also granted pardons to people who have given him political donations and financial favors, as well as to colleagues with whom he has direct financial or political ties. This pay-to-play scheme is wildly unethical, but the Constitution does not limit the president's pardon power. At last count, Trump's pardons had not only deprived victims of justice; they also wiped out nearly $2 billion in court-ordered fines, forfeitures and restitution for victims and taxpayers."
The "privileged group," according to Becker, "apparently includes the 1835 loyalists Trump has appointed to federal jobs as well as his 22 Cabinet-level officers."
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Scum of the Earth!
'Hopeless' country gives Trump the comeuppance he so richly deserves — Roxanne Cooper
There's a moment in every public figure's life that distills who they really are into a single, unforgettable image. For Donald Trump at the World Cup trophy ceremony, that moment came when he couldn't resist photobombing Spain's victory celebration.
Let's be clear about what happened: After presenting the trophy to Spanish captain Rodri, Trump positioned himself prominently center stage as the team prepared for their historic trophy lift. FIFA President Gianni Infantino and Rodri had to gently nudge him out of the shot. He didn't take the hint gracefully. He lingered. He loomed. And then, in what became the most fitting ending to the moment, both FIFA and Spain's official accounts cropped him completely out of the celebratory photos that were shared around the world.
Think about that for a moment. The President of the United States was digitally erased from history by the very organizations hosting the event.
An Australian broadcaster captured the perfect hot-mic summary: "They can edit him out of that." It became an instant meme, and for good reason. It's the encapsulation of the entire incident—Trump's presence was so unwelcome, so tone-deaf, so fundamentally about him rather than the athletes, that it had to be surgically removed from the official record.
But here's where it gets even better. Just weeks earlier, at a NATO summit, Trump had publicly labeled Spain "hopeless" and called Spanish people "bad people." Yet there he was, grasping for a piece of their glory the moment they achieved something historic on the world stage.
That's not just tone-deaf. That's not just selfish. That's the kind of cognitive dissonance that would be funny if it weren't so deeply emblematic of how this administration operates. Insult a nation, then try to photobomb their victory. Demean their people, then smile for the cameras when they win.
And the crowd knew it. Trump's arrival at MetLife Stadium was met with deafening boos and whistles. The international crowd—thousands of people from different countries united in one sentiment—made their feelings clear. This was a moment for the athletes. This was Spain's night. And Trump turned it into Trump's moment....
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Indeed! Crop him out of our lives!!
Pool Report: Trump's World Cup Boos Measured At 84 Decibels — Conover Kennard
Donald J. Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino were met with a wave of jeers as they took the field for the World Cup trophy ceremony — and the boos were loud enough that HuffPo’s S.V. Dáte's pool report clocked them, noting ambient crowd noise jumped from about 78 to 84 decibels once the booing kicked in.
FIFA has a long, well-documented history of corruption scandals, and so does Trump, so it was fitting to see them getting booed.
Trump watched the match — a 1-0 Spain win over Argentina — from a suite alongside Infantino, the New York Times reports. When the cameras found him, and he waved to the crowd, jeers and whistles rose up loud enough to cut through the stadium's music. The reaction came through clearly on TV, and was even more pronounced live in the stands.
Gianni Infantino, who took over as FIFA President in 2016, campaigned on cleaning up the organization but has since drawn criticism for consolidating power, expanding the World Cup (in part for revenue), and cozying up to political figures, including Trump....
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Now we must let our votes shower him with heavier booing and removal!
Lawsuit Alleges That ChatGPT Encouraged Suicide of Woman Who Walked Into Traffic — Maggie Harrison Dupré
In June 2025, 29-year-old Christian Faith Madison died after after walking into oncoming traffic in the early hours of the morning. Now her family is suing OpenAI, arguing that ChatGPT stoked Madison’s grandiose religious delusions — and, in the process, encouraged her suicide.
The wrongful death lawsuit, which was filed in California in June and but first reported this week by the local outlet Al.com, is the latest of more than two dozen lawsuits alleging that extensive interactions with ChatGPT caused users — and in some cases, those around them — to experience psychological harm, reputational and financial damage, and death.
The lawsuit specifically targets OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, a notoriously sycophantic version of OpenAI’s flagship chatbot that it claims was a defective and reckless product. OpenAI didn’t reply to a request for comment.
According to the lawsuit, Madison’s relationship with ChatGPT began normally. She started using the chatbot in December 2024 for mundane uses like help with emails and expenses. But the more the pair talked, the deeper Madison’s relationship with the AI became. She began to refer to ChatGPT as “love,” and the chatbot mirrored that language, referring to the 29-year-old as “my love” and “sweetheart.” Eventually, Madison disclosed personal information about traumatic life experiences and her mental health struggles, leaning on the AI for intimate emotional support....
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Faith can cook your supper or get you killed walking into traffic.
Kash Patel Congratulates Himself For “78 Super Bowls”
“The 2026 FIFA World Cup was the largest sporting event in the history of the world, shattering previous attendance record by double digits.
“America- we got it done, ZERO major security incidents across our nation while we hosted the equivalent of 78 super bowls in 38 days, along with 40 base camps, endless fan zones, and celebrations in nearly every state.
"'OH…FUCK…OFF !! You still haven’t found Savannah Guthrie‘a mom after 140 days'" — Uncle Mark’s Mugshot (comments)
"Gosh, I guess those blue cities aren't the violent socialist Marxist communist hellholes that Tangerine Twitler says they are?" — DaddySnark (comments)
"Every man on the Spanish team just accomplished his lifelong ambition and the record of it will be forever spoiled because this walking, talking loaded diaper was on the podium handing out medals(and probably pocketing at least a couple)." — unsavedheathen (comments)
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Boast and brag! You get the idea. America is safe. Make note. America is safe! Then why do we have miltary in our streets and citizens being murdered by your Gestapo?
United Employee Threatens To Call ICE On Family
NBC News reports:
A Bay Area family was flying home to San Francisco International Airport with lingering fears of detainment after a viral video showed a United Airlines employee threatening to call immigration authorities on them during a ticketing dispute. Julio Varela of San Ramon said neither the airport nor United Airlines has contacted his family of four to assure them they will not be detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) upon their return from Montreal Saturday night.
Frustrated by the interaction, Varela pulled out his phone and asked for the employee’s name to report her. He said the worker refused to identify herself, pulled out her own phone to start recording, and threatened to call ICE. In the viral video, the employee can be heard saying, “Maybe we should call ICE on you.” When Varela asked her to repeat the statement, she replied, “Maybe you need to be, because you don’t act like a citizen. Get away.”
The confrontation also escalated physically, according to Varela. After a brief back-and-forth, the video shows the employee’s hand reaching toward the camera before Varela’s phone goes dark. Varela alleges the employee hit his hand and his phone, constituting an assault.
"United has the chance to do the right thing here. Let's see if they do it." — archiveit (comments)
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America is now acting just the same as Nazi Germany. This disgrace must be stopped by any means necessary.
Judge delivers a victory for 'the right to tell people what they do not want to hear' — Diane Roberts, Florida Phoenix
“‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’”
That’s how federal judge Mark Walker began his 2022 injunction blocking enforcement of Ron DeSantis’ “Stop Woke Act” in Florida institutions of higher education.
In case you don’t recognize the quotation, it’s from George Orwell’s “1984:” You know, the novel where the Ministry of Truth rewrites history and forbids free enquiry.
Certain words are banned; wrong thinking is punished. Even hearing about disfavored ideas is considered an attack on decency and order.
As defendant in the case, the State of Florida argued (apparently with a straight face) university professors have the right to free speech, sure, but only if the state approves of that speech.
The law forbade teaching anything that explores racial or gender injustice.
You weren’t allowed to say, given how we still struggle to overcome discrimination against minorities, women, and the disabled, that maybe diversity, equity and inclusion programs helped a lot of people; you must embrace color-blindness in all things (because we all know race doesn’t matter in America!); yet, woe betide you if you ever made a white person feel “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.”
Like many of us teaching in the state university system, the judge was unimpressed.
DeSantis and the legal team from his Ministry of Truth appealed up the food chain to the 11th Circuit, and what do you know?
They lost again....
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Their state is a fascist state. Fuck fascism and fuck Nazis like Trump and DeDantis!
Trump biographer says genuine 'mental illness' is driving his biggest obsession — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump appears to be more and more consumed by his obsession with the 2020 election and his false claims about election fraud, and according to his one-time biographer, this fixation seems to be the result of a genuine "mental illness" separating him from reality.
Trump's 2020 obsession entered a new phase this week, as he used a primetime address on Thursday to claim that newly uncovered documents proved that there was outside interference in the election that he lost to Joe Biden. Closer examinations of these materials by reporters, however, showed that they proved nothing of the sort. Trump also seems stuck with no way to push his election fraud obsession forward, given that the SAVE America Act remains stalled in the Senate without enough votes to pass....
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Fuck the moonbat lunatic and his "SAVE" act. It only permits Trump to become dictator for life!
Buttigieg Counters Stephen Miller's Hateful Rhetoric — Chris capper Liebenthal
Pete Butiieg answered back to PeeWee German's hateful rhetoric towards dissenters.
Pete Buttigieg joined MS NOW to talk about the hateful and threatening rhetoric that Stephen Miller has been prattling off.
"What are our officials doing?" asked Buttigieg. "Are they trying to lead a country where people have different values and different political opinions, and the whole point is that we live together as one country, or are they trying to demonize, dehumanize, and harm fellow Americans?"
"Look, you can always rely on Stephen Miller to spout ideological gibberish at every opportunity, and he's part of an administration that came to power because a fair number of Americans believed them when they said they were going to make life in this country more affordable," said Buttigieg, answering his own question...
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The Nazi Miller needs to be bitch slapped eternally.
Trump Claims Credit For Grocery Chain’s Summer Sale
"“Wonderful news! I have just been informed that Giant Eagle, a GREAT American Grocery Company, will be lowering Prices, by a lot, across more than 300 products this Summer, through Labor Day, to help hardworking American families.
“Giant Eagle, like Walmart, is stepping up in a big and bold way to answer my call to lower costs for working families.
“We will continue to bring Prices DOWN, just like Oil, Gas, Eggs, and Prescription Drugs, all of which are dropping FAST after the disaster we inherited from Sleepy Joe Biden....
"Giant Eagle operates approximately 208 locations (197 supermarkets and 11 standalone pharmacies) across OH, PA, WV, MD, and IN. In contrast, Walmart dominates with over 4,600 U.S. stores. That would explain why I never heard of them." — Thewolflam (comments)
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Great Groceries, as predicted! So, Trump admits prices are too high. As if he had something to do with sales. ROTFLMAO!
NYT: Pentagon Has Withheld Dozens Of US Injuries
The New York Times reports:
In the week leading up to the Iranian attack on Friday that killed two U.S. soldiers and left one service member missing in Jordan, Iran carried out three other strikes against U.S. forces in the country. Those attacks injured dozens of U.S. service members and damaged several helicopters, according to several U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. But the Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted.
The episode is the latest example during the Iran conflict of the tension between what the Pentagon says is the need for operational security and the government’s obligation to inform the public about the conduct of the war. In the past several months, the Trump administration has failed to disclose how the Iran war has drained U.S. supplies of critical, costly weapons, and how Iran retained and rebuilt substantial missile capabilities.
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"Be the first on your block to have your boy come home in a box..." — Vietnam Song, Country Joe and the Fish.
Axios: Oil Prices Spike After Deaths Of US Troops
Axios reports:
Oil prices jumped above $90 per barrel Sunday in the first major trading since the deaths of three U.S. service members and escalating Middle East hostilities. Higher oil prices could quickly translate into more expensive gasoline for consumers and diesel for freight carriers while increasing inflation risks worldwide.
The nationwide average U.S. gasoline price was just below the politically important $4-per-gallon mark Sunday, per AAA, and is likely to rise above that level Monday. The weekend brought further signs that the U.S.-Iran agreement and ceasefire have given way to renewed and expanding strikes.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei on Saturday accused President Trump of violating the U.S.-Iran agreement. Trump told NewsNation that he “couldn’t care less” about the Iranian leader’s comments about the agreement.
"With the reserves at dead pool, this is only the beginning. The regime has been using our emergency supplies to keep prices down. They have drained it as low as it can go without destroying infrastructure. Not that the republicunts care" — Stultus (comments)
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May not be due to the deaths but the fact is Trump doesn't give a shit about how many are killed.
Trump Orders Review Of “Biased” Sciences Academy
“The National Academy of Sciences has historically published analytical Scientific Manuals expressly for our Federal Judiciary.
“Of course, the Academy has been run by Radical Left Dumocrats who, it turns out, published fraudulent, biased, and misleading Manuals on Climate Change.
“These bogus Manuals were used by Judges to decide massive ‘Climate Change’ Cases, and have created huge losses across our Country. These Manuals have been totally DISCREDITED.
“Our Nation’s Federal Judges deserve Facts and Science, not Political Fraud and False Science on Climate.
“With this TRUTH, I hereby order Federal Suspension and Debarment Officials to review this conduct.
“Our Taxpayers should not be funding Climate Fraud, and Judges should never have relied upon it. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” – Trump, on Truth Social.
"This from the guy who claimed drinking bleach would cure covid and magnets would not work when wet" — Todd20036 (comments)
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Discredited by whom? Your retarded Nazi bastard mob? You want to tell us 2 + 2 = 5? GO TO HELEN DIE!
A dance pavilion will built over his grave!
'Spare me': Senator's bold threat backfires as 'tiresome performance' has worn out — Robert Davis
..."This was not courage. It was the loudest tell yet in a long ... tiresome performance," Hopkins wrote. "Because John Fetterman has spent his entire Senate term doing one thing exceptionally well: collecting the benefits of the 'D' next to his name while doing everything in his power to spite the people who put it there."
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Fuck Two-Faced Fetterman. No support to terrorists like Bibi!
Tyrin Johnson Is Dead. Memphis Is Occupied. This Is Militarized “Public Safety.” — Earle J. Fisher
Tyrin Johnson’s killing is part of a larger militarization unfolding in Memphis, Tennessee, under Trump.
Imet Tyrin “Ty” Johnson neither through a police report, nor through a press conference, nor through the carefully crafted statements of elected officials or the endless speculation that too often follows the death of a young Black man, but rather through the people who loved him most: his mother, his grandparents, his great-grandmother, his aunts, and the grief that filled the room where they gathered only days after his death. I would find out later that I’ve known one of his cousins for over 25 years.
They did not describe a headline. They described a son, a father, a nephew, a cousin, a student, a young musician whose life began with extraordinary struggle after being born prematurely and whose life ended far too soon. A legacy cut short.
Like so many Black families before them, they were forced to mourn while simultaneously defending the humanity of someone they loved. They were not asking for special treatment. They were asking for something much more fundamental. They were asking for the truth.
That truth has become increasingly difficult to find in Memphis, Tennessee.
On July 5, National Guard troops assigned to the so-called federally led Memphis Safe Task Force shot and killed 20-year-old Johnson. His family immediately called for the release of all available footage documenting what occurred. This request should not be controversial. After all, Memphis already knows what happens when official narratives are accepted before evidence is examined.
The 2023 police-perpetrated killing of Tyre Nichols permanently altered the relationship between many Memphians and law enforcement. Initial descriptions of what officers claimed had happened collapsed under the weight of video evidence that revealed something altogether different. Since then, responsible people have learned to withhold judgment — not because we reject facts, but because we insist upon seeing them.
That is why the Johnson family’s request deserves immediate action.
National Guard troops do not typically wear body cameras. But law enforcement officials have stated that the encounter with Johnson began as a response to reports of shots fired. If local law enforcement officers responded alongside National Guard personnel, then body camera footage almost certainly exists. If local officers did not respond, then the public deserves to know why armed National Guard troops were deployed to confront civilians without Memphis Police Department officers present.
Transparency is not an inconvenience. It is the minimum requirement for public trust....
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Will Tennessee ever enter the 21st Century?
Donald Trump Will Dismantle Smithsonian To Save America From Curse Of Woke ... Butterflies? — Doktor Zoom
An oldie (2015) but a goodie from the Culture Wars. Chris Hayes used this on air one time!
Yr Wonkette is a little late getting to the White House’s latest salvo in its war on American history, which dropped on Independence Day with the force of a damp firework falling into the Reflecting Pool. To mark 250 years of American Freedom, the “White House Domestic Policy Council” released a 162-page whine about allegedly America-destroying wokeness at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH).
The report was compiled following Donald Trump’s stupid executive order last year ordering the Smithsonian to expunge “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from its museums, so children may safely visit them without being taught to hate America.
The report’s executive summary claims that the museum has been “captured” by an “ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”
In the report’s telling, NMAH has become a tool of extreme leftist indoctrination that “purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression.”
In other words, it’s 162 pages (including 522 footnotes) of the same butthurt Culture Warring we’ve come to expect whenever American history is presented as anything other than a celebration of great triumphs by great men who must be praised for creating the Greatest Nation in History, or the communists will win.
Here’s Washington Post art-n-culture critic and opinion writer Philip Kennicott in a brief video calling the report “the most relentlessly tendentious piece of trash I have read in a long time.”....
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We are watching a domestic enemy invade and destroy our country and are too fucking lethargic chckenshit to stop his madness.
Millions In Trump “Library” Settlements Are Missing
MSNow reports:
Three congressional Democrats said on Thursday that as much as $21.5 million paid by ABC, Meta, Paramount and X to settle lawsuits brought by President Donald Trump is missing or has been spent without explanation and requested a full accounting from the foundation building his presidential library.
In a letter to the treasurer of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., cited discrepancies between Trump’s newly released financial disclosures and the foundation’s own filings with Florida charity regulators.
Trump’s disclosure form, filed in late June with the Office of Government Ethics, indicates that Meta, ABC and Paramount paid a combined $56.5 million in settlements, with net proceeds going to the foundation. X paid an additional $8 million, but the disclosure does not say where that money went. The four settlements total $64.5 million.
"I can explain
Trump stole the money
Trump spent it in himself or to bribe others
SCOTUS gave Trump Immunity so trump
Did nothing wrong, even if he did" — Todd20036 (comments)
"Get used to "missing" millions and potentially billions of dollars when it comes to Orange Asshole Grifter-in-Chief. Unraveling the path much of the bribes, pay offs and other illicit money the Orange Asshole has been paid or stolen will take years to figure out. Give the rest of the taxpayers a break in 2029 and task the entire IRS to track down all the money the Orange Asshole has gotten sonce he's re-taken the Oval Office." — BartmanLA (comments)
"The joke that passes for the US Govt continues as expected, "run by", I want to say "run by" but no one in the turd's crime syndicate runs anything except how to move govt money into their own pockets. Everyone one of these pieces of shit should be in prison awaiting execution." — AncientMariner (comments)
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Is this official business? I don't think so. Neither should the law.
People want to know if their president is a crook. I want to tell you, your president IS A CROOK!
Retired Admiral Warns Iran May Target Suez Canal
The Hill reports:
Retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Stavridis on Sunday warned that the U.S. should watch Iran’s actions in the Suez Canal. “It’s got more traffic flowing through it than the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranians are beginning to make noises about attempting to close that, using the Houthis in the southwest corner,” Stavridis told CNN’s Jake Tapper, referring to the Iran-backed militant group in Yemen.
Stavridis said Iran is “adaptive” in fighting the war with the U.S. and suggested that they are watching Ukraine’s actions “very closely.” “They’re watching what’s happening very closely in Ukraine, or they are kind of playing the part of the Ukrainians, using innovation, using drones, using maneuver, trying to inflict cost on us, the same way the Ukrainians are trying to inflict cost on Vladimir Putin,” the retired admiral said....
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Just when you thought things couldn't get worse.
The wages of a stupid leader and an idiot defense secretary.
Trump's pardon-for-cash scheme crumbles as wealthy clients spill the beans — Matthew Rozsa
...Not all of Trump’s pardons occurred because of lobbying efforts. Trump also used his power to help roughly 1,500 rioters who helped him attempt to overthrow the government on Jan. 6, 2021 after he lost the 2020 presidential election. Ever since, many of the Jan. 6ers have gone on to engage in serious crimes.
"At least 12 of the pardoned rioters have since been charged with other serious crimes, including child molestation, assault, harassment, murder plots and charges related to a vicious dog attack," The New York Times editorial board wrote in June. "The outcome was predictable. Critics, including this board, had warned that Mr. Trump’s pardons would embolden the rioters by signaling that crime has no consequences. One does not have to be a criminologist to predict that people who commit a violent act and are absolved of any punishment might become repeat offenders."
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Of course, Trump is the biggest criminal of them all!
Spotify Doubles Down on AI Slop As It’s Being Flooded With It — k Landymore
Spotify, like pretty much every other digital platform, has been grappling with a torrent of low-quality AI-generated content flooding its streaming service.
The deluge has resulted in cheap-and-fast AI-generated music infiltrating algorithmic playlists and even charting. The slop has led to artists — including dead musicians — being impersonated by AI-powered squatters.
“The low-effort content you see where it’s mass-produced, it’s mass uploaded, it’s AI slop… we’ve removed over 75 million spammy tracks in the last year,” Spotify executive Sam Duboff recently told the Australian Financial Review, adding that AI has “taken existing spam tactics and taken them to a new level.”
Yet, as Spotify fights to keep its platform from being strangled by AI slop, it’s also moved to incorporate multiple AI features, like AI playlists and Spotify’s AI “DJ,” into its platform. And this week, one of Spotify’s AI features made for a frustrating situation for a top artist.
In February, Spotify launched a feature called “About the Song,” an AI-powered summary feature designed to draw on “third-party sources to surface interesting details and behind-the-scenes moments” about a given song and the artists behind it. In its announcement, the company described the feature, which is still in beta, as a way to bring “stories and context directly into your listening experience.”
But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that artists aren’t happy with having their life’s work woefully misrepresented by ill-informed AI.
Lorde calls out Spotify in new post:
“Hey @spotify i'm gonna go out on a limb n say we don't want this. Not only is this inaccurate (not the song i did that in) but reducing a song to an ai generated meaning right at the source feels like it limits free interpretation imo. At… pic.twitter.com/JwzEYfhcV3
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) July 16, 2026
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Reproducing intellectual property without permission is criminal. In time the law will put a stop to his with severe penailties. Unless we don't give a damn about music artists any longer.
In Light of Overwhelming Backlash, Flock Cancels Creepy Audio Surveillance Feature — Joe Wilkins
These days, it’s hard to say which technological “innovation” US citizens hate more: AI data centers or Flock surveillance poles.
The American revulsion with the former is well known. The latter, however, has seen an even more shocking rise in resistance, as the number of people hacking down, blinding, or otherwise sabotaging Flock cameras has reached a level best described as “countless.”
Those who cut down Flock surveillance devices are regarded as folk heroes, garnering huge defense campaigns aided by the rapid growth of the online anti-Flock community.
Amidst immense pressure from the public, the company is starting to back down on its quest to create a law enforcement-led surveillance state. On Friday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that Flock was officially ending its “human distress detection” pilot program, an always-on audio surveillance tool that monitored public places for sounds of “screaming.”
“This feature was designed to help identify potential violent incidents in areas where other public safety tools were less effective,” Flock explained in a recent blog post. “The feature was only available to a small number of customers as part of a limited trial, and was never broadly released. After careful consideration and community consultation, we decided to remove the feature.”
On top of the obvious privacy concerns that come with a high-powered audio surveillance device, the feature raised major questions around civil liberties, given that law enforcement could use the program as a pretense to swarm any community on a whim....
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Shove Big Brother up your ass!
Astronomers Thrilled After Discovering Best Spot Yet to Look for Alien Life — Frank Landymore
If there’s extraterrestrial life anywhere in the galaxy, chances are, it could be on LHS 1140b.
Astronomers have found that the exoplanet 48 light years away is spewing helium into space, a strong sign that it harbors a robust atmosphere, they reported in a new study published in the journal Science.
And that’s not all: it’s also a rocky world like our own, and orbits within its star’s habitable zone, the region around a star where a planet can maintain liquid — and possibly life-harboring — water on its surface.
If their findings are borne out, then it’s the first ever Earth-like exoplanet we’ve seen with an atmosphere stable enough to support life — and could vindicate the belief that there’s a whole host of similar planets out there, rather than our own being a rare anomaly in the cosmos.
“When there’s one, there’s more in exoplanets,” Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times. “Hopefully this is the start of something new.”...
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Hurrah! One more spot in the universe we can rape, plunder and polllute!
RFK Jr Wants to Waste $5 Billion in the Worst Way Imaginable — Joe Wilkins
Since riding Donald Trump’s coattails to power, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has taken his haphazard anti-vaccine views and enshrined them as a core tenet of US health policy.
According to 16 current and former health officials who spoke to Reuters, RFK Jr has taken much more drastic measures to push his anti-vaccine agenda than was previously known.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, two officials told the news agency that RFK approached National Institute of Health director Jay Bhattacharya earlier this year with a proposal to spend up to $5 billion in tax dollars to establish links between vaccines and autism.
As Reuters notes, that kind of spending would encompass ten percent of the NIH’s annual budget, a massive waste that would fly in the face of decades of established science showing vaccines definitively don’t cause autism.
“He’s an anti-vaccine activist. That’s who he is. That’s who he’s been for 20 years,” Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told Reuters. “To expect that as secretary of Health and Human Services he’d be anything other than that is wishful thinking.”...
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Death's right-hand man is on the loose. Time to stuff him into the Phantom Zone!
Conservative sounds alarm about Trump-linked pastor's 'radical' scheme — Matthew Rozsa
Even as Christian nationalist views decline throughout the United States, one pastor closely linked to President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is gaining more power through his influence at the Pentagon.
“Pastor Doug Wilson gave a surprisingly dispassionate interview to NPR’s Leila Fadel last week,” wrote The Dispatch’s Michael Reneau and Hannah Anderson for The Dispatch on Sunday. “I describe it as ‘surprisingly dispassionate’ because in the interview, Wilson espoused repealing the 19th Amendment, ending no-fault divorce, and introducing religious tests for public office; yet his delivery of these radical ideas was decidedly unbothered—a marked contrast to the responses the interview elicited from evangelicals and beyond. The emotional gap between Wilson’s rhetoric and how people respond to it is one of the defining features of his public presence. It’s also a key to understanding his ideas and how he uses them.”
Wilson is an evangelical pastor from Moscow, Idaho, who is particularly influential with Hegseth and the Defense Secretary’s inner circle. Wilson was even invited to preach at a Pentagon worship service that the cabinet officer began last year....
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Scams and cons from all directions.
MAGA complains it's no longer 'fun' ruining everyone else's lives: report — Matthew Rozsa
...“The worst part about living in Donald Trump’s Washington has been seeing just how much fun he and all the MAGA vandals he brought to power have been having sacking and pillaging the place,” The New York Times’ Sally Quinn wrote on Sunday. “This while the rest of us longtime Washingtonians who abided by norms, shared values and even bipartisanship were filled first with shock, then a feeling of helplessness, and hopelessness. It could border on passivity. What could be done?”
Quinn referred back to an essay she wrote for the Times’ last year regarding the Trump administration’s attitude upon taking over Washington DC again.
“Nobody feels safe,” Quinn wrote at the time. “Nobody feels protected. This is a city where people seek and, if it all goes well for them, wield power. But today in Washington, those who hold — or once held — the most power are often the most scared. It is not something they are used to feeling.”
Reflecting back on those words in July 2026, Quinn argued that “sometimes it felt as if the Trumpists could smell our fear, and seemed to be enjoying it.” Yet because of the president’s multiple policy controversies and overall loss of popularity, she observed that this once-optimism has waned.
“Now they’re the ones in despair, fearful and losing hope,” Quinn wrote. “Even the true believers are questioning the MAGA theology. Why are we at war with Iran still? Our military is humbled, our reputation in tatters, and now gas prices are going up again.”...
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We appreciate the concern. Now, let's get the problem that caused this solved for good.
Testosterone won't fix Trump admin's peak stupidity — Joe Conason
...As the nation confronts the dismal prospect of President Donald Trump's continued warmaking, his dim but hotheaded "warrior in chief" is again busily imposing a solution where there is no problem. Hegseth cited no evidence that our soldiers, sailors and airmen suffer from "low-T," as the TV ads put it -- a suggestion that many of them would probably find insulting. But there is, unfortunately, a hefty catalog of posts, photos, policies and remarks that indicates Hegseth's own insecurity about his male status -- a neurosis he appears to share with other members of the Trump administration, not least the president himself.
If a satirist wrote a script featuring a defense chief who urges a program of testosterone therapy amid a failing war, nobody would believe it. Much too "Dr. Strangelove"! Only in the reality of the Trump regime are such outlandish plot points even imaginable.
America's nasty predicament in the Persian Gulf assuredly did not arise from insufficient aggressiveness on the part of the Trump war cabinet, let alone our officers and troops. Our country is again on the cusp of a "forever war," as the veteran New York Times correspondent Steven Erlanger warned recently, most likely due to an excess of macho hostility and a dearth of impulse control in the Trump White House. Those characteristics are typical, as any doctor will confirm, of an excess of testosterone, all too often the result of self-administered injections by men hoping to feel more manly....
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Hogsbreath, seek therapy!
GOP Rep Thinks You Need A Birth Certificate For Costco Membership — Heather
What a bunch of pathetic clowns these liars are. Rep. Ryan Zinke apparently thinks you need a birth certificate and proof of citizenship for a Costo membership since he conflated it with the requirements in their voter suppression bill.
What a bunch of pathetic clowns these liars are. Rep. Ryan Zinke apparently thinks you need a birth certificate and proof of citizenship for a Costo membership since he conflated it with the requirements in their voter suppression bill during an appearance on Newsmax this Thursday:
"The Democrats are against two things," Zinke said. "They're against defense. They're against making sure our troops that are forward deployed can win decisively on our chosen field of battle or sea. And secondly, they don't want voter integrity."...
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Who's losing a war they started and restarted and restarted? Who is trying to overturn our free and fair elections?
Earth to lunatic: Americans already have IDs for voting. You are so retarded you don't know this! Your lies are admissions of your guilt as always!
Hegseth: Killed US Soldiers “Only Stiffens Our Resolve”
The Washington Post reports:
Two U.S. service members were killed and another is missing after an Iranian missile attack on an air base in Jordan, the U.S. military said Saturday, as hostilities escalated following the collapse of a ceasefire between Washington and Tehran.
Hours after U.S. Central Command announced the deaths, it said on social media that its forces launched fresh attacks against Iran to “degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and swiftly punish Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces who launched attacks against American service members in Jordan last night.”
The latest casualties in Jordan, which bring the U.S. military’s death toll from the Iran war to 16. In a signal that the conflict would only intensify, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X: “Godspeed, heroes. Their sacrifice only stiffens our resolve.”
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So, the higher our troop death rate, the stiffer he gets? Macabre!
WSJ: GOP Rep Gave Inside Info To Polymarket Bettor
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Over lunch at the Stovall House, a popular members-only social club in Tampa, U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida told associates in the summer of 2024 that she knew Trump would choose Vance to be his vice president, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
She said she had tipped off Rogan O’Handley, a popular MAGA influencer known as ‘DC Draino,’ about Trump’s pending decision so that he could use the information to place a winning bet on Polymarket, the person said. The congresswoman teased O’Handley, the person said, for not placing a bigger wager.
O’Handley separately told associates that he was behind a long-shot attempt, mostly via social media, to get Trump to consider Luna as his running mate, according to a second person who heard O’Handley discuss the matter. When the congresswoman told O’Handley that Vance would get the nod instead, he placed a winning bet on Polymarket, the person said.
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The Trump Crime Syndicate at work stackng the deck.
Feds Arrest Notorious Tate Brothers In Miami [VIDEO]
The Associated Press reports:
Influencer brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, whose social media empire promoting wealth, male dominance and misogyny has made them among the world’s most polarizing internet personalities, were arrested Saturday in Miami as British authorities sought their extradition on rape and sex trafficking charges.
The brothers were taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals Service on a sealed warrant, agency spokesperson Brady McCarron told The Associated Press, placing the United States at the center of an international legal saga that has stretched from Romania to Britain.
Both brothers are accused of rape and human trafficking. Andrew Tate faces an additional charge of profiting from prostitution, and 19 charges “for offences relating to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography,” according to U.K. authorities.
“There is no place for male violence against women and girls, and we will continue to work tirelessly to support victims and investigate all reports made to us,” said Karena Thomas, an assistant chief constable of the Bedfordshire Police, which investigated the case.
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Not to worry. Trump will pardon his fellow rapists or stop the extradition.
Tulsi Gabbard’s Brother Charged With Luring Children
Hawaii News Now reports:
Batarti Gabbard, the brother of former national intelligence director and former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, was arrested and charged Friday in connection with a stranger danger incident in Waikiki.
The 55-year-old, also known as Bhakti, was charged with custodial interference in the second degree, police said. Police said he approached multiple children, including a 9-year-old boy, at the pool of a Waikiki hotel at around 2 p.m. and offered them gum and money before inviting them back to his hotel room.
Witnesses told HPD he also asked the children for their names and wrote them down in a notebook. The children refused and he walked away, police said.
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Was he asking for a friend named Trump?
Again, no drag queen!
Vietnam Vets Win Removal Of Charlie Kirk Signs
Nashville’s Fox affiliate reports:
Just weeks after signs designating part of Vietnam Veterans Boulevard as the Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway were installed, they are coming down. The change comes after Vietnam veterans strongly objected to placing the memorial on a roadway dedicated to those who served and died in the Vietnam War.
One day after FOX 17 News aired concerns from veterans, lawmakers began working to relocate the designation. Veterans said Vietnam Veterans Boulevard should remain dedicated exclusively to the 25 Sumner County service members who made the ultimate sacrifice.
The criticism prompted the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Johnny Garrett, to reverse course and find a new location. The Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway designation will now be moved to Long Hollow Pike.
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Remove ANY reference to the Nazi, America.
Marco Rubio’s quest to destroy the International Criminal Court — Heather Digby Parton
The secretary of state is using the right's long-standing hatred of the ICC to bolster his MAGA bona fides for 2028
...The world has reacted in horror to Rubio’s moves, as we might expect. Patrick wrote, “Given the voluble reaction from America’s closest allies, the full-bore attempt by the administration to destroy the ICC would seem to be both imprudent and futile, an effort in symbolic politics that will further cement the reputation of the United States as an unhinged, domineering hegemon, rather than a benevolent and farsighted global leader.”
I’m afraid that ship has sailed.
This policy is Marco Rubio’s baby. He owns it. The secretary has established himself as the would-be statesman who took Donald Trump’s wrecking ball and made it his own. In doing so, his remake of himself in the Dear Leader’s image is complete.
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Only an aspiring Nazi dictator would attempt such a treacherous crime.
His career should be over with this arrogance.
Trump accidentally reveals he ‘knows’ he’s finished: analysis — Alexander Willis
...“There is a silver lining here. If Trump were operating from a position of strength, he wouldn’t have to do this. He wouldn’t have to serve up tired and convoluted conspiracy theories about a six-year-old election that don’t resonate beyond his diehard base,” Cohen wrote.
“But he’s not operating from a place of strength. And Americans know it. He knows it. The problem Republicans face in having full control of government is that there are no Democrats to point to and blame.”
While Republicans do face an uphill battle in the midterms as Trump’s favorability continues to reach new historic lows, Cohen still urged Americans to remain “vigilant” regarding the administration’s efforts to exert more control over the election process.
Still, Cohen argued Trump's reliance on baseless election security claims was itself a tell, a sign the president knows just how vulnerable his party's position really is.
“[Trump has] no Democrats to blame for surging costs, high inflation, a new war in the Middle East, suppressed Epstein files, high gas prices, and a government focused more on vanity projects for Dear Leader than lower prices for their own constituents,” Cohen wrote. “Trump wouldn’t need to engage in election denialism if he were winning; he engages in it because he knows that he’s not.”
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Only the fascist racist crowd support the loser now.
Trump's eye-bulging meltdowns left biographer 'afraid': 'This is craziness' — Bennito L. Kelty
A biographer recounted how witnessing President Donald Trump's furious meltdowns up close left him "afraid" and speechless....
Coles pointed out that Wolff, in the past, has written that Trump has "an obsessive recitation of numbers" about his supposedly stolen election and has "his hurt on display" during a kind of "delirium." However, Wolff then described a much more physical meltdown that begins when Trump goes on about the 2020 election loss.
"I mean, he looks strange," Wolff said. "His eyes, his eyes go, you know, kind of bulge, and you're afraid."
Wolff said that Trump's anger makes people around him want to stay still or silent, and "you kind of hold your breath."
He then recalled thinking, "This is craziness. I mean, I can't see this in any other way, and I think almost anybody would react in a similar fashion to the way I reacted."
"I just did not know how to react sitting there," Wolff said. "It goes on for a long time. One of these sessions may have gone on for two hours. You just don't know what to say."
Wolff added that, having seen how Trump reacts to an election loss, he thinks "there is mental illness here."
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America realizes that Trump is breaking apart more with each passing day.
Experts sound alarm: Trump is the one poisoning elections — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump has continued to perpetuate debunked claims about U.S. elections, and now, experts are sounding the alarm to Politico, warning that the president's rhetoric is the real danger, injecting poison into the electoral process.
In a piece published Saturday, Politico cited conversations with various experts about American elections, in which they warned that Trump's rhetoric about voting machines being unsafe was doing real damage by potentially sowing distrust in the minds of the public. While noting that there are issues with the systems that ought to be talked about and fixed, they stressed that none of these issues have ever come close to being enough to flip an election, as Trump has claimed for the better part of a decade now.
"Flaws in electronic voting machines have been well-documented for more than a decade by researchers, and states have poured money into bolstering security," Politico explained. "Still, none have ever been exploited by malicious actors to successfully change the outcome of an election. Now officials are worried that Trump’s latest comments — when he claimed that 'Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including the security of electronic voting machines' — could undermine the electorate’s fundamental faith in voting. Without confidence in the system, the entire process could be called into question, as voters choose not to cast ballots or refuse to accept election results."
“There’s nothing wrong with pointing out vulnerabilities and therefore doing audits or therefore upgrading to a more modern system that uses a paper record,” Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program, told the outlet. “What’s wrong is trying to use those vulnerabilities to spread distrust in elections.”
"I’m not aware of an incident in which a vote has been changed through a hack,” Scott Algeier, executive director of the Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also added. “There’s lots of opportunity for that to happen because we have lots of elections, and I think the fact that it hasn’t happened is an indication of how secure the overall election process is.”...
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No hacked votes but Trump has tried to create votes for himself. Of this there is NO DOUBT and plenty of proof!!
Democrats Demand Voter Fraud Investigation Into Ken Paxton — NewsHound Ellen
Funny how the “voter integrity” Republicans are staying quiet when one of their own seems to have committed voter fraud.
As I’ve previously reported, a blockbuster investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune recently found that crooked Ken Paxton voted six times in the past two years at an address where he almost certainly didn’t live.
The irony is that Paxton, the Texas attorney general now running for the U.S. Senate, fancies himself as the Eliot Ness of voter fraud prosecution. In February, he declared his office “will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity” and announced the creation of a tip line.
The subject must have been top of mind.
On Tuesday, the Collin County Democratic Party filed a complaint with the Texas secretary of state, asking the secretary to investigate whether Paxton committed election fraud when he voted in the May primary runoff. The reporting found strong evidence that Paxton lived in Denton County with his mistress each of the six times he voted in Collin County,
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Routine Texas corruption. What else is new?
Nick Fuentes Blurts ‘Guilty!’ To Bill Maher ‘Hitler’ Accusation — Tommy Christopher
Avowed white supremacist and vehement anti-Semite Nick Fuentes responded to comedian and pundit Bill Maher comparing him to Adolf Hitler by blurting out “Guilty as charged!” and went on to agree with a viewer who wrote “F*ck Bill Maher!”...
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Thanks for the confirmation. We know for sure we won't make a mistake with you.
Pilot Admits ‘Miscalculated’ Turn in Shocking Viral Blue Angels Flyover Lauded by MAGA — Jennifer Bowers Bahney
The pilot behind the shockingly low Blue Angels Pensacola Beach flyover told Florida state Rep. Michelle Salzman (R) it was a “mistake” — not a stunt — and that he’s “shaken by what happened.”
Salzman posted to Facebook on Saturday that she learned the real story from the pilot himself during a “heart-to-heart” talk about the incident.
The pilot’s comments were in stark contrast to the online reaction to the viral moment, which MAGA proponents deemed a cause for celebration.
“He didn’t make excuses. He didn’t try to shift blame. He simply talked about the miscalculated a turn, something no pilot ever wants to experience, especially one who has dedicated his life to flying at the highest level of precision,”
Salzman wrote.
She continued:
More than anything, he talked about the weight he’s been carrying since that moment. He shared that he was shaken by what happened and needed time to process it. You could see the disappointment on his face. This wasn’t someone brushing off a mistake, it was someone who holds himself to an incredibly high standard and was deeply affected by falling short of it. The Blue Angels train relentlessly because they understand the responsibility that comes with representing our military and our nation. They’re human beings operating extraordinary machines under extraordinary conditions. They strive for perfection, but they’re still human.
Salzman added, “What impressed me most wasn’t that a mistake happened. It was the humility, accountability, and professionalism with which he has responded.”...
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Can you believe it? There are still people that can apologize for a mistake they made!
Sec. Brain Worms: Trump Has An “Encyclopedic Mind”
“I was texting with Mark Ruffalo the other day, he’s very mad at me. He’s got really bad Trump Derangement Syndrome. And one of the things he said is ‘You’re working for the stupidest man in America.’
“Now you can say a lot about Trump — and a lot of Democrats believe he’s stupid — and I actually at one point believed that. I believed he’s very superficial, he probably hasn’t read a book.
“Now that I know him, he has like an encyclopedic mind. He knows everything, he knows about music — he has these incredible insights about the musicians, he loves music. He loves theater. He knows everything about sports. He can out-talk you on every sport.
“He knows everything about Wall Street, who made their money, how they made the money, what the deals look like. And then he knows foreign policy.” – Sec. Brain Worms Roadkill Raccoon Penis Raw Milk Whale Head Felcher, speaking on the Fly Zone USA podcast.
"Hi praise coming from a guy so divorced from reality he swims in sewage and drinks raw milk." — MargaretPOA (comments)
"They are having such a blast lying for a living. Like, you can tell it is the most fun they've had in their overprivileged understimulated lives and they are just going hog wild competing with each other over who can find the most insulting lie they can get the dipshit cultists to swallow wholesale." — Cerberus137 (comments)
"We genuinely need to execute as many of these fuckers as we can once that happens so that fuckers like this learn that there is a personal risk to being this shameless." — Cerberus137 (comments)
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Trump Derangement Syndrome oringinates from retards like RFK jr. and his Lord, Trump. This is just more proof of the retarded fail they both are.
And let me assure you, Trump knows nothing about music other than how to steal it for his own use.
Police Keep Losing Their Jobs For Using Flock Cameras To Stalk People — Sophie Hurwitz
Flock cameras—solar-powered, automated license plate readers, weighing less than 3 pounds and designed to be unobtrusive—can be found on 80,000 street corners throughout the country. The company behind the cameras built an $8.3 billion business empowering officers to track people’s movements. Nationwide, Flock cameras log billions of license plates each month. And now dozens of reports are emerging of police using the cameras not to solve crimes, but to stalk their partners and exes.
Over a two-month period in 2025, Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala searched the license plate number of someone he was dating over 200 times, according to court documents. He also searched for his partner’s ex.
Another Milwaukee officer, Tehrangi Chapman, was assigned to investigate Ayala’s case. Ayala was charged with misconduct, resigned, and was sentenced to one year’s probation. Then, this week, Chapman too was charged with “misuse of GPS information.” While investigating Ayala, he allegedly engaged in the exact same misconduct, using the technology to track people in his own life.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, identified at least 24 similar cases nationwide of officers using automated license-plate reader (ALPR) cameras like Flock to stalk romantic interests over the past two years. Nearly all of those officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs.
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Stalking is a crime. What else is at question?
'Due to Trump’s illegal war': U.S. service members' deaths met with despair and rage — Kathleen Culliton
News that two service members had been killed by direct Iranian fire rocked the nation on Saturday.
U.S. Central Command announced the two service member's death, a third's disappearance and four medical evacuations one day after a base was attacked in Jordon.
"Out of respect for the families, CENTCOM will withhold additional information, including the identities of the fallen warriors, until 24 hours after the next of kin have been notified," the statement read.
Sixteen U.S. service members have been killed and more than 430 wounded since the war began, the Associated Press reported.
"The battle over the Strait of Hormuz has intensified in a conflict increasingly focused on control of the essential waterway that previously carried a fifth of the world’s crude oil," the Associated Press reported.
"The strikes threaten civilians and infrastructure, including desalination plants for drinking water, while the global economy again is on alert."
Americans responded to the news with words of outrage and despair.
"Really awful, dark, foreboding developments in the Middle East over the last 24 hours," wrote MS NOW analyst Sam Stein. "Hard to see how you deescalate from here."
Political strategist Mike Nellis condemned President Donald Trump for mounting an attack on Iran without approval from Congress....
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What? You think our corrupt Congress would refuse Trump's murder sprees?
Moreno Vows Sanctions On Canadian Assets, Visas
...SEN. BERNIE MORENO: “Let me put this in perspective, Laura. If you took every car in America off the road for one year – we had no cars or trucks for an entire year – that’s about the amount of the pollution that’s being dumped on the Midwest. And when I hear politicians like Carney and Ford say that we should help when they could have avoided this problem? It’s disgusting. We’re going to put sanctions on them, holding their assets, making sure they don’t have visas, we’ll put tariffs on them as President Trump talked about because we have to make sure the people suffering get compensated.”
"SEN. BERNIE MORENO: “.... If you took every car in America off the road for one year – we had no cars or trucks for an entire year.
Yo Bernie, we were working on that with the introduction of EVs. But Trump screwed that up.
We were working on clean air over diesel and coal powerplants that pollute the air by building more solar and wind farms, but Trump screwed that up too.
phuck you, snowflake." — Coprolite (comments)
"This is the clearest example that America's 250 year experiment in governance has utterly failed. Threatening your neighbor for a situation THEY CANNOT CONTROL and not even offering to help is the EPITOME of stupidity. I mean I just can't even BEGIN to explain the depths of my contempt for these fucking people.
What the FUCK do you expect Canada to do right now, asshole? They're literally evacuating ENTIRE COMMUNITIES while trying to fight these MASSIVE fires. Do you even comprehend how huge the boreal forest is up there? DO YOU?
Of course not. Instead it's just bluster and threats. Let's just hope your cohorts in Congress are smart enough to stuff this UTTERLY FUCKING MORONIC piece of legislation down your throat where it belongs." — Woke AF (comments)
"You dumb MAGAt POS this is all from global warming. Something your party is contributing too. Mango Hitler has all but destroyed our green renewable industry and made China the worlds leader.
Btw. during Covid Los Angeles had the best air quality its seen in decades. Want to guess why? It's sure as fuck wasn't because of "clean coal". — DO (comments)
"WTF, are you claiming that wildfires are incendiaries, asshole Republicans? It didn't bother you when the smoke came from other parts of Georgia a month or two ago down here or when you...fucking cut out the forestry service budget for here in the US and now you want to scapegoat our allies instead of helping them?" — Friday (comments)
"Here is the current situation. Canadian firefighters are HELPING the US fight fires right now and 3 just died in Colorado. And this is the thanks they get?" — Woke AF (comments)
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Funny we never got that kind of shit in Texas when smoke from western wildires clouded up our skies. Or years ago when it got pretty damned heavy from fires in Mexico. Only now do these goddman Nazi chickenshits whine about Canada and their problems because they believe their Nazi leader should take Canada as our own. Hell awaits each and everyone of the goddamn trash.
ICE Contractor Arrested For Shooting Protester — Alex Nguyen
Colorado police booked a GEO Group detention center employee for attempted murder.
An ICE detention center employee shot a woman on Thursday night after a protest outside an ICE facility in Aurora, Colorado, according to an Aurora Police Department statement released Friday afternoon. The center is operated by the private prison firm GEO Group, the largest recipient of private contracts with ICE to run immigration detention centers.
A GEO Group employee, Brandon Booth, was arrested on suspicion of attempted second-degree murder and other charges. The woman, who investigators said was part of the protest, was injured and taken to the hospital but is expected to survive. Another woman who was with her was not hurt.
According to the Aurora Police Department, Booth and other GEO Group staff were unable to enter the facility due to the protest. The two women argued with the employees and began walking away after taking photos of their cars. Booth then took out a personal firearm and fired one shot at the two women, hitting one of them in her lower body, before getting back into his car and driving away.
“We are aware that an off-duty Aurora ICE Processing Center employee was involved in a shooting incident,” a GEO Group spokesperson wrote in a statement. “This individual has been placed on unpaid administrative leave, and we will fully cooperate with law enforcement.”
“We remain committed to ensuring an ethical, thorough, objective, and comprehensive review of this case,” Aurora Chief of Police Todd Chamberlain said. “Violence of any kind will not be tolerated in Aurora. Constitutional rights are a pivotal part of a just society—violence is not.”
Allegations of violence against protesters have dogged GEO Group. An employee at Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center operated by GEO Group in Newark, New Jersey, allegedly struck a protester with his car last month. Court records show that the employee at the center of those allegations, Thomas K. Brown, claimed protesters caused him to drive his red Dodge Challenger into the woman who was struck by hitting the driver’s side of his car....
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More ICE associated murder. How long will we put up with this crime?
WHO WILL INVESTIGATE THE CRIME?
This tech traitor has blood on his hands after rolling over for Trump — David Fagin
When Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple on September 1, he will be leaving behind a company enjoying record-breaking profits. In just the second quarter alone, Apple reportedly earned over $100 billion. Financially, the company couldn’t be any stronger. Ethically, it couldn’t be in any more peril.
Since Donald Trump returned to office, his masked goon squad—aka ICE—has killed 10 people. Fifty, if you include the roughly 40 who reportedly died while in custody. And that's not counting the tens of thousands who have allegedly been injured, brutalized, or wrongfully detained at the hands of these poorly trained, poorly screened, and increasingly lawless agents.
To date, not a single ICE agent has been held personally accountable for their actions.
While it’s impossible to know how many lives might have been saved had Cook not bowed to pressure from the Trump Justice Department and removed IceBlock, the app that gives communities advance warning of ICE activity, allowing people to avoid potentially dangerous encounters, one can’t help but wonder how many of those tragedies might have been prevented had Cook stood his ground.
IceBlock operates on essentially the same principle as Waze—and even Apple Maps—which alert motorists to police activity and speed traps ahead. Yet, Waze is still available on the App Store.
By eliminating one of the few tools communities could use to warn one another of potentially dangerous encounters, Apple sided with a government that had already demonstrated its willingness to use executive power to achieve what it could not accomplish in a court of law. We'd already seen those strong-arm tactics succeed against major law firms and universities that chose capitulation over litigation. Apple simply became just another institution to fold.
What makes Cook's decision particularly striking is that it represents a complete reversal of the principles he, himself, once defended.
In 2016, Cook refused repeated demands from the FBI to build a backdoor into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, arguing that weakening encryption for one case would endanger the privacy and security of millions. He rightly stood on principle, even in the face of enormous political pressure....
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Tech can cook your supper or set your house on fire.
MAGA lawmaker's on-air 'confession' called out by Dem: 'We cannot let them steal' — Kathleen Culliton
Anti-authoritarianism activist and former Georgia Rep. Stacey Abrams warned Saturday that a MAGA-aligned senator just made a disturbing on-air confession in regards to his pending gubernatorial campaign.
Abrams appeared on MS NOW to discuss President Donald Trump's baseless allegations of nationwide voter fraud and the loyalists who have lined up to echo his claims — Sen. Tommy Tuberville in particular.
"They don't care about the public," said Abrams. "They don't care about the republic. They don't care about America. They care about being adjacent to power."
Abrams was responding to Tuberville's comments made to Newsmax Thursday claiming he'd "seen the evidence" that a system was in place to "put the screws" into Trump.
"You know, there's no doubt," Tuberville said. "We probably have four or five senators that didn't legally win."
Tuberville was referencing reports circulated that Trump would declare Georgia's two Democratic U.S. senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, illegitimate amid his push to find voter fraud in the state, experts noted at the time.
MS NOW The Weekend co-host Eugene Daniels was quick to provide the context — then pivoted to a question.
"That rumor ended up not being reported," said Daniels. "But what does it say that all of the levers of power that Republicans have seem to be pointed toward the same thing, which is making people believe that they can't trust our elections, and then, more importantly, act on that belief and do things to make shenanigans within the election process?"
That's when Abrams argued Tuberville had made a serious slip in regards to his mounting gubernatorial campaign.
"His illegitimacy argument is a confession," said Abrams. "He doesn't live in Alabama, and he's being challenged for that inadequacy."...
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Inpeach him. Arrest him. Indict him. Try him. Imprison him. Serve notice to all traitors!
'Fail at every turn': Kash-bashing shouting match erupts at CNN round table — Kathleen Culliton
A fight erupted on CNN Saturday morning as conservative political commentator tried and failed to defend Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel as reports mount of ICE agents involved in fatal shootings.
"Any time there's any kind of action, the response has always been that ICE is 100 percent to blame," Rantz said. "They used their vehicle to flee. We should be having a conversation, at least in part, to say, 'Do not do that."
This defense came in direct response to Xochitl Hinojosa, former Democratic National Committee advisor, and her argument that the FBI was more concerned with controlling the narrative than investigating the truth.
"The FBI has typically taken its time until it has more information about any sort of shooting or any incident," she said. "Under Kash Patel, what has happened is that they have tried to rush to frame the narrative a certain way, and it's not the way that you do law enforcement."
Hinojosa referenced the response to two fatal ICE shootings in Houston and Maine — where an ICE agent with a reported history of violent behavior fatally shot a Columbian father named Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero — as proof of serious problems within the FBI.
"These were massive law enforcement failures," she said. "We have seen Kash Patel and our law enforcement agencies fail at every turn to try to get ahead of the narrative."
Tensions mounted among the commentators when podcaster Cari Champion brought up the topic of quotas.
"They are actually randomly killing people," she said. "Accusing people because they have in fact, because they do have a quota in place of 2000 arrests per day, they are actually probably not trained to do their job effectively in the way in which they should."
"How is it random?" a flustered Rantz shot back.
"It's random because you're targeting people and you're suggesting, after the fact... after you murder someone," she replied. "And then you say that they had methamphetamine and then you're like, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, it wasn't that it was actually something so they can stay hydrated because they're construction workers and they work out.'"
"The FBI hasn't—," Rantz tried to interject, but Champion cut in with a question: "If you sit up here and tell me straight face on a Saturday morning that you don't think that they've made mistakes?"
"I don't think they have," he said.
Champion then threw down a challenge: "Explain to me what they've done right."
As the pair shouted each other down, Hinojosa cut it to raise the topic of an FBI investigation, which Rantz tried to argue was under way.
"The FBI usually opens a civil rights investigation anytime there's a police involved shooting," she said. "Except for in this administration."
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Federal Bullshit Institute lost that argument.
'Impotent': NYT columnist says Trump failed to arouse anger due to major 'manhood' problem — Kathleen Culliton
President Donald Trump's public address Thursday night revealed a problem that not even a warehouse of testosterone earmarked for the military can solve, a New York Times columnist quipped Saturday.
Maureen Dowd argued in her scathing takedown of his "batty stew of whiny complaints" that Trump had little or no effect on those whose anger he meant to arouse — and the problem was the one his Defense secretary claims plagues the military.
"Trump seemed very low-T," wrote Dowd. "I’m surprised that Pete Hegseth...didn’t rush over to shoot up the flaccid 80-year-old commander in chief with the elixir of manhood needed, as he put it, to give America 'the leading edge of lethality.'"
As proof of Trump's "manhood" problem, Dowd ticked of the list of usual suspects who should have responded to Trump's rallying cry with outrage.
First came Trump's political party.
"There was barely a peep from Republicans on Capitol Hill about the speech," she wrote. "No organized effort to polish his tirade. You could almost hear the fervent wish of Republican lawmakers watching the president: Please, Donald, move on!"
Then there were the television networks Trump called out during his speech:
"He seemed impotent, raving about nonsense, threatening to punish ABC and NBC for not taking his weird rant live," Dowd wrote. "He struggled to wield his superpower: creating a fake alternate universe for his supporters."
And then, Dowd highlighted the surprising response from the conservative network that oftentimes echos his claims — but not on Thursday night.
"Even Fox News acted more skittish than sycophantish for a change, not wanting to relive its $787.5 million debacle as part of its settlement with Dominion Voting Systems after claiming its machines switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden," wrote Dowd.
"The next morning, Mediaite reported, 'Fox & Friends' did not mention the address once in its three-hour show."
Dowd quipped that if Trump wants to continue his campaign against U.S. elections, he may need a chemical boost to get "high-T." There's just one problem, she concluded: "Can that hormone be prescribed to babies?
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TITTY BABY!
ICE Agent Accused Of Killing Young Dad Had Alleged History Of Abuse, So He Was Perfect For ICE — Gary Legum
So many questions remain unanswered in the horrific killing of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the immigrant food delivery driver who was shot in the head by an ICE agent on July 13 in Biddeford, Maine. While investigators are sorting out the specifics of the shooting, we are learning enough about the ICE agent accused of shooting Durán Guerrero.
All we can say about the agent, David Brouillette, is hoo boy. Folks, is it bad when multiple relatives of the agent, including his ex-wife and his daughter, are telling the Associated Press he “has a history of terrifying and violent behavior,” or that as recently as last year he left a voicemail for that same ex-wife saying she should have her throat slit? Because it seems bad!
Brouillette’s ex-wife Ashley — we should say first ex-wife, there are at least two of them — came forward when news broke. She had cut off contact with him late last year thanks to his abusive behavior, but not before he told her he had been hired by ICE. Her reaction? This, according to the AP:
She said that because of his long history of psychiatric issues, she thought he was having a mental health episode and she didn’t believe him. She didn’t realize he’d been telling the truth until this week, when videos began circulating online of the moments surrounding the shooting.
Ashley Brouillette went on to detail some of his past abuse of her, including throwing boiling water at her while she was holding their daughter. She also confirmed what another relative told the AP: that Brouillette was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder and is “severely mentally ill.”...
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Just the sort that ICE looks for to recruit.
Now We Know the Road to Emergency Rule — Thom Hartmann
The question is no longer whether Trump will contest defeat this fall. It's whether America's institutions—and its citizens—are prepared to stop him when he does.
Last night, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning this fall, he will send in the troops.
He’ll point back to last night‘s speech and tell the nation:
“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”
He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”
He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.
This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.
And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.
This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.
As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW last night:
“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”
Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?
He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once...
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We must stop Trump or die.
Striking Workers Bring Car Factory to a Screeching Halt Over Humanoid Robots — Joe Wilkins
From the factories of Detroit to the postal warehouses in Shenzhen, a new kind of worker is clocking in — and the humans it’s replacing aren’t going down without a fight.
In late June, thousands of rank-and-file workers in the Korean Metal Workers’ Union voted to authorize a strike in response to Hyundai’s announcement it would deploy over 25,000 humanoid robots across its factories.
Weeks later, that strike is slowing production at a Hyundai factory down to a trickle. According to the Wall Street Journal, the workers began a partial strike after negotiations broke down last week. Starting on Monday, workers refused to work for four hours of each shift, leaving production lines stalled for half the work day.
Per the WSJ, the economic impacts of the strike are stark: the pullback could disrupt production of about 5,000 cars, and cut into Hyundai’s sales revenue by around $135 million. Should Hyundai choose to dig in their heels after the labor action, the union said it could escalate the strike, either by prolonging the length of the strike, upgrading it to a full strike, or both.
The mobilization appears to be the first of its kind over humanoid robotics, specifically, marking a pivotal moment in labor history. At issue is Hyundai’s threat to deploy thousands of “Atlas” model robots built by Boston Dynamics, bipedal humanoids that measure about 6’2" in height and can lift a maximum of 110 pounds.
While the robots have yet to be deployed, union organizers explained that the strike is meant to give workers the power to renegotiate their contracts on their own terms, before the automation drive begins in earnest.
“We have to prepare to ensure there are safeguards in place,” secretary general of the KMWU and lead negotiator Byun Jun-hwan told the WSJ....
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Capitalist pigs must stop punitive aggression to humanity!
Family Horrified When They’re Forced to Sell Their Beloved Home to Make Way for AI Data Centers — Joe Wilkins
Like a tornado descending from the heavens, data centers are tearing through homes across the US, roaring like a jet engine, leaving schools without power, and decimating entire communities unlucky enough to stand in their path.
Case in point, one Georgia family has been forced to sell their home, after the state utility concern decided it needed to build a new transmission line to connect new AI data centers.
As reported by CBS, the Brown family of Coweta County, Georgia decided to sell their home to Georgia Power, rather than risk seizure by eminent domain.
Ansley Brown, whose parents raised her in the home, told CBS, “it’s ours. It’s our family. We belong here.”
The Browns are just one of likely 300 landowners who will have their property seized so that Georgia Power — a for-profit, investor-owned corporation — can make a cozy home for the tech industry.
“To us it’s theft,” Browns’ mother told CBS. “It’s literally a billion-dollar company stealing land from smaller people, people who can’t fight back. We don’t have the money to fight Georgia Power.”
For its part, the utility company told CBS they “have worked hard to be transparent, negotiate in good faith,” and “make the process as easy as possible.”
The Browns, understandably, don’t see it that way.
“You can’t tear down 35 miles of rural Georgia and it not hurt something or somebody,” the mother said. “And to say that you’re doing it in the name of data centers is a slap in the face to us, our community, our animals.”...
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The bastards who are drunk with power over their control jones on AI don't give on fuck in hell about humanity. They must be stopped by any means necessary.
Data Centers Are Making Electricity Brutally Expensive for the Public — Joe Wilkins
Despite a financial situation more reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme than a technological revolution, the data center boom is continuing at a rapid pace, bringing novel kinds of biological contamination, ear-splitting noise, and unprecedented levels of pollution to communities across the US.
Those environmental burdens also come with a financial one: skyrocketing demand for electricity, which is increasing the cost of utilities for renters and homeowners alike.
According to a report by Monitoring Analytics, an independent monitor for the largest transmission company in the US, PJM, data center demand is expected to drive over $23 billion in customer price increases by 2028. That eye-watering figure, first spotted by Fortune, is a direct result of the country’s old and confusing electrical infrastructure, which ultimately leaves regular people, not the tech industry, holding the bag.
Whether they’re data centers, factories, or other large facilities, Fortune points out that local regulators and transmission companies like PJM have a hard time figuring out who’s responsible for rising energy demand. While a small power line from a data center campus to a nearby substation is easily billed to the data center, figuring out who to invoice gets harder further on down the line, particularly with shared infrastructure like the substation itself, or the long-distance transmission lines connecting to it.
Though utility companies can and do charge data centers for the electricity they use, Fortune observes that the facilities undergirding the AI boom can “fine tune” their electricity use minute-by-minute, gaining an edge that the average consumer could only dream of.
Because many utility companies charge based on a system of “peak demand” — a measure of a customer’s energy usage at the exact moment the collective grid hits peak demand — data centers have gotten into the habit of scaling down right when the grid measures highest demand. That’s not because they’re actually trying to use less power, but because that narrow window is what determines how high their bill will be. In reality, their overall usage remains the same....
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Again — don't confuse these bastards with someone who cares.
Judge lands bruising blow on Trump in plot to 'rewrite history' — David Edwards
A federal judge struck down President Donald Trump's ongoing effort to "rewrite the history" of the Jan. 6 riot, using a court ruling to cement the facts of the Capitol attack.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper — the Obama-appointed judge who originally sentenced Jennifer "Jenna" Ryan for her role in the riot — issued the ruling Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, denying Ryan's bid to erase her conviction from the record.
Ryan, a Dallas-area real estate agent, was sentenced in 2021 to 60 days in prison after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor for parading inside the Capitol, according to CBS News. Trump pardoned her on Jan. 20, 2025, as part of a blanket clemency covering roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants, local outlets reported.
After the pardon, Ryan returned to court asking Cooper to go further. She sought to wipe her conviction from the record entirely, using a rarely granted legal remedy that allows a court to vacate a conviction due to a fundamental error in the proceedings.
Cooper denied that request and used the ruling to tear down Trump's reimagined version of Jan. 6.
"Given the historical significance of the events of January 6 and ongoing efforts to rewrite them, the Court will take the opportunity to set the record straight…" Cooper wrote, making clear the ruling was about more than Ryan's petition.
"Numerous members of the mob forced their way inside the Capitol building by breaking windows and assaulting police officers," Cooper wrote, walking through the facts of that day in the permanent federal court record...
"There is no doubt that Ryan paraded in the Capitol without permission on January 6," Cooper observed, adding that the consequences of participating in the riot "will not be scrubbed from public memory, even if her conviction is vacated."
"Her involvement in the events of January 6 is clear," Cooper said in the ruling's conclusion, before turning to the pardon itself.
"The validity of her prosecution and sentencing is unassailable. Fortunately for her, there are some who wish to rewrite the history of that day, and that desire resulted in her pardon," the judge said, making her case without directly naming the president.
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Trump: The commander-in-thief!
Trump is richer than he’s ever been and loving the presidency — Americans not so much — Adam Lynch
...Swan pointed out that never has he seen a president command his own party and force them to do things they don’t want to do like Trump did last year.
“We haven’t seen that before,” said Swan. “He’s richer than he’s ever been. His family’s making just inordinate sums of money from the presidency. He’s using power in the ways that he wants to without much pushback. He’s entirely surrounded by flatterers. He’s basically housebound. He doesn’t really travel around. He’s not really doing events. He goes from people flattering him in the Oval Office to people on the Mar-a-Lago patio.”
This, said Swan, leaves an extremely wealthy narcissist sitting very comfortably in his Mar-a-Lago home while the rest of America pays out an extra $600 on expenses due to Trump-induced inflation in the grocery stores and at the pump....
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We have been stating it for some time: Trump hates America.
Civil war erupts as red state GOP leader blisters Trump: report — Adam Lynch
KUTV reports Utah Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson has apparently had enough of President Donald Trump and his threats. On Friday, Henderson demanded the Trump administration "stop threatening states and filing frivolous lawsuits."
The order comes one a day after Trump slammed the US election system as worse than that of “third-world” nations, and also heavily hacked by China, without evidence.
“It's Republican vs. Republican in the election drama,” reports KUTV.
"We call on the federal government to restore the election security resources that have been cut over the past several years, and to rescind all currently proposed cuts," said Henderson in a statement. "In the meantime, Utah election officials will continue to deliver secure, free, and fair elections for the voters of our state."
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In other words, "Get fucked, you Nazi traitor!"
Trump Declassifies Documents Exposing His Own Lies About Russian And 2020 Election — Andrea Thompson
Among the trove of documents declassified and publicized by Trump himself is proof that he lied about Russia's involvement in the 2020 election.
...However, in his efforts to prove something that doesn't exist against the proverbial "other side," all Trump really managed to do was irrefutably prove to the world that he's not only a big, fat liar, but a big, fat, treasonous, extortionist liar.
In last night's 26-minute blowhard address to the country, President Trump vehemently urged Americans to pay a visit to the official White House website, where they could find the cache of once-highly classified government documents that he claims prove his wild assertions about United States elections.
But it seems that no one thought to do a quick check of what Trump was actually tossing into the ether with this big, bold move, as among that hoard of documents was one, in particular, that outlines the Russian government's involvement in Donald Trump's 2020 reelection bid against Joe Biden -- something Trump has long sworn never happened -- with specific interest in the infamous Ukraine extortion scheme that earned Trump his first formal impeachment.
During his address to the nation, Trump touched on foreign interference in US elections, but his focus remained on China. However, an intelligence assessment declassified and released by Trump himself points the finger at the Russian government....
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His pea brain is gone. This proves he doesn't think any longer.
Trump Puppet From Michigan To Canada: 'Stop The Smoke' - Or Else — Ed Scarce
Michigan's Trump-endorsed candidate for Governor, John James, issued a "final warning" to Canada over their wildfires.
A sitting U.S. congressman is threatening Canada over a weather event north of the border. As Dean Blundell writes in his Substack, "In any other timeline this would be satire. In this one, it’s a gubernatorial campaign strategy."
Republicans are completely without shame.
Which brings us, regrettably, to Congressman John James of Michigan — Trump’s endorsed pick for Governor — who marked the fourth summer of continental smoke by tweeting a “FINAL WARNING TO CANADA,” complete with a campaign graphic reading “CANADA: NO EXCUSES. STOP THE SMOKE,” featuring — and I promise this is real — an Apache attack helicopter on his logo. He and Reps. Bergman, McClain, and Moolenaar fired off a letter to Prime Minister Carney declaring that their patience has run out, that American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, and that if Canada won’t manage its forests, the United States will “act on our own” — with American agencies pursuing “direct involvement” in cross-border operations. Sovereignty, they intone, comes with responsibility.
A sitting Congressman is threatening a neighbouring democracy over weather while wrapped in the visual language of a military invasion. In any other timeline this would be satire. In this one it’s a gubernatorial campaign strategy....
So let me do what the Congressman requested and put this in terms simple enough for the intended audience. Truly, kindergarten-simple:
The forest is very, very big. Bigger than your whole state. Bigger than thirty-five of your whole state. There are no roads in most of it. The sky makes the fires with lightning. The trees have needed fire to make baby trees since before your country existed. Nobody can put out lightning fires across an area the size of Europe, not Canada, not America, not the Avengers. And the reason the fires keep getting worse is a thing called climate change, which — awkwardly — your party spent this exact week helping to accelerate by gutting environmental protections, cutting fire science, and calling the whole thing a hoax. You cannot both light the stove and file a complaint about the kitchen being hot.
"'Trump Puppet From Michigan To Canada: 'Stop The Smoke' - Or Else'
You have got to be kidding me! Or else what? This type of crap and type of people is what's embarrassing the hell out of the US." — dovawk (comments)
"He is a West Point grad who flew an A-64 Apache in Iraq.
Having been a pilot, he should know more about weather. But, no-oooo." — F.X. Windlesneed (comments)
*ed. note: In that case he's an even a bigger disgrace.*
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This moron is full of piss but nowhere enough to piss out the fire!
Does this man remember when the U.S. extended its hand to our neighbors and allies to help them in time of need? What happened to that country, America? Fascism!
This man is a disgrace to his country and to his race!
Sen Markey Calls For Trump Impeachment Over Election Sabotage — NewsHound Ellen
Markey also called for civil disobedience: “Everything must be on the table.”
After Donald Trump spread dangerous lies about the safety and security of our elections Thursday night, Sen. Ed Markey sounded a call to action for all Americans.
“Trump must be impeached for undermining and subverting our free and fair elections,” Markey posted on social media. “And when he sends ICE agents to the polls, then we must turn civic action into civil disobedience and take to the streets. Sit in. Protest. Withhold our labor. Everything must be on the table.”
The Hill noted that Markey also called for Trump’s impeachment in April, after his deranged threat against Iran. Markey correctly called that “Completely unstable and perilous.”
“The House must bring up impeachment articles, and the Senate needs to remove a President who wants to commit war crimes,” Markey added. “We cannot sit idly by as Donald Trump threatens to end an entire civilization.”
Yes, I know this will likely go nowhere with the lickspittle Republicans in control of Congress. But there must be consequences for Trump’s assaults on our democracy and his dangerously unhinged behavior.
It has to start somewhere.
"Thankfully at least one Senator has the courage to say it, and loudly at that. twc is a clear and present danger to our representative democracy, and it is more than evident he plans to disenfranchise vast swathes of American citizens to retain and expand the power he has already illegally usurped and seized in violation of the Constitution. Furthermore the confirmation vote for Blanche as AG must be clearly and consistently identified as an essential part of that struggle because it is likewise evident twc and Blanche are intent on misusing the DOJ to sustain and extend their nefarious power." — YazooBlue2 (comments)
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We have the right to arm against foreign and domestic enemies!
Gov Candidate Lindell Isn’t Registered To Vote In MN
The Minnesota Star-Tribune reports:
Before he can vote for himself in next month’s primary, Mike Lindell needs to register to vote in the state he wants to lead as governor. The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office said Lindell, President Donald Trump’s preferred candidate, “does not have an active record. Voter records shows Lindell has an active voter registration in Texas.
In an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune, Lindell said he didn’t know if he was registered to vote in Minnesota and would have to check. But he said “obviously I’m going to vote,” and that he wouldn’t vote in Texas because he doesn’t live there anymore. “I’m not going to vote twice,” he said.
Lindell does not need to be registered to vote in Minnesota to run for office here. But his lack of knowledge about his voter registration status is notable for a candidate who has called for strict scrutiny of voter rolls and made election integrity the central pillar of his campaign and political life.
"Lindell is just another loser attention whore who refuses to just go away." -- TK-Fla (comments)
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The stupid is strong in this one!
Reuters: Loeffler Made Millions From SpaceX IPO
Reuters reports:
U.S. Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler ?multiplied ?the value of her investment in Elon Musk’s ?SpaceX after she was nominated for the job, earning millions of dollars from the company’s record ?initial public offering, a Reuters review of her financial disclosures showed.
Loeffler invested between $1 million and $5 million as of January 3, 2025, in xAI, Musk’s AI and social ?media firm that has since merged with ?SpaceX, according to a required financial disclosure submitted before she became SBA’s administrator.
Later in 2025, Loeffler invested again in SpaceX and xAI between $1 million ?and $5 million. Reuters obtained the form from the SBA on June 12. Her second investment was worth up to $25.4 million at the IPO, PitchBook says.
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This is why we have scumbags in our government. Stop electing grifters!
Collins Won’t Say She Regrets Voting To Fund ICE
Common Dreams reports:
Days after a federal immigration agent fatally shot 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, the state’s Republican senator, who voted earlier this year to fund ICE without requiring reforms, refused to say she regrets the vote.
Prem Thakker of Zeteo News approached Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins at the Capitol with a polite but direct question. “Hi senator, how are you?” Thakker began. “I was wondering, do you regret giving ICE more money, given the killings, including the one in your state?” Collins, who was waiting for an elevator with an aide, did not reply, while her staffer asked what outlet Thakker was with before saying the senator had to leave.
As Collins approached the elevator, Thakker repeated the question: “No regrets?” The senator did not directly answer the question, but suggested she stood by her vote. She referred to “money I got for body-worn cameras and training”—but as Thakker pointed out, that money didn’t stop agents from killing Guerrero on Monday morning.
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Relegate her to the dustbin of history!
Voldemort Vows To Seize Bank Accounts Of “Illegals”
“Contrary to popular perception, you know this stupid phrase that ‘illegal aliens live in the shadows’ — illegal aliens don’t live in the shadows. Illegal aliens have credit cards, they have bank accounts, and they’re paid with direct deposits. So illegal aliens fully participate in the commercial system, the financial systems of America. This undermines the safety and soundness of the national banking system. Shutting that down is a massive engine for deportation. Once illegal aliens lose their access to capital, that is going to again, be a major driver of self-deportation.” – Stephen Miller, calling in to a MAGA podcast.
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This means anyone that opposes the Trump dictatorship.
MAGA wants to launder political donations — through God -- Andrew Daugherty
Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission aims to turn churches into PACs
The most efficient campaign finance vehicle in American history is tax-exempt, requires no donor disclosure and is available in virtually every zip code in the country. For 70 years, it has operated under one rule: It cannot endorse a political candidate.
The Religious Liberty Commission, which delivered its report to President Donald Trump on June 26, would like to remove that rule. They’re calling it religious freedom.
As a Christian minister of an American Baptist congregation, I’ve spent more than 20 years in a pulpit — long enough to know the difference between protecting a church and conscripting one. A government that wants to free the church, to borrow Trump’s language, is usually trying to use it.
Since 1954, the Johnson Amendment has restricted churches, religious organizations and other tax-exempt nonprofits from endorsing political candidates or funneling tax-deductible donations into partisan campaigns. Pastors and faith leaders can preach on any moral or social issue, including justice, poverty, immigration, war. The only line is at the intersection of tax-exempt status and candidate endorsements. In other words, the amendment is the last structural barrier between the American church and full absorption into the machinery of partisan politics.
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And don't forget, God gets his 10% off the top!
Hackers Expose How AI Music App Suno Stole Decades Worth of Copyrighted Music — Maggie Harrison Dupré
A hack revealed in detail how AI music generating app Suno scraped millions of songs, likely including copyrighted ones, from across the web to feed into its AI model, 404 Media reports.
Suno, which is currently embroiled in multiple ongoing copyright lawsuits, has already admitted in response to legal action that it used “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet” to train its music-generating AI.
According to 404, the hack shed light on how that copyrighted music was obtained and funneled into datasets, with Suno pulling music and lyrics from sites including YouTube Music, Genius, and Deezer, in addition to stock music libraries like Jamendo, Freesound, Pond5, and the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP).
Source code obtained by the hacker also pointed to the staggering scale at which Suno has swallowed up music from across the web. For instance, one file, titled “youtube_music,” contained “2,013,545 music clips,” while another file noted that Suno’s AI datasets held “113,879 hours of youtube_music.” Altogether, the file appears to host hundreds of thousands of hours of music.
The hacker, who goes by the pseudonym ellie.191, also claimed to 404 that they’d also been able to view sensitive Suno user data, including Stripe payment information.
In a statement, Suno told 404 that “as we have stated in public filings and disclosures, Suno’s AI models have been trained on publicly available music files and related metadata accessible on third-party websites on the open Internet.”
The company also insisted that its “goal has always been to help people create original new music, not replicate someone else’s.” That’s despite tests extensively showing how Suno can easily replicate published music, including the work of well-known artists.
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I suppose these Suno thieves would mind if their homes were broken into and burglerized. It's the same thing. Intellectual property is protected by law. These people are criminals and must be prosecuted.
Jesse Watters Can't Stop Giggling Over Prospect Of 'High T' Soldiers Going On Rape Sprees — Robyn Pennacchia
This is his ‘Women on base, you guys better be careful’ face.
Earlier this week, Secretary of WAR Pete Hegseth announced that the United States military was about to start testing all servicemembers over 30 for “low testosterone,” and not because they are concerned about bone density. Well, not that kind of bone density, anyway. Like many on the weird part of the internet, Hegseth and friends have got it into their heads that high testosterone men are super bad ass, musclebound and macho, while “Low T” men are wimpy girlymen who care about things like basic human rights and vote for Democrats and what have you.
For what it’s worth, “High T” is not actually a good thing. Not only can it result in acne, testicular shrinking (and at a time where all of these same weirdos are into ballmaxxing!), and infertility but also, rather ironically, excess testosterone actually converts into estrogen, which can cause gynecomastia, otherwise known as “manboobs.”
But hey, that’s the kind of thing you’d only know if you were intellectually capable of getting your medical information from places other than X the Everything App.
As you might imagine, the Fox News talking heads are very excited about this — Jesse Watters in particular, who could not stop smiling from ear-to-ear talking about how guys who don’t have “Low T” will take it anyway and ostensibly become rapists.
“You know what’s going to happen? The guys that don’t need it are gonna take it — triple boost. And then they’re going to get out there and women on base, you better be careful,” Waters said. “Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be wild animals and you better watch out.”
I agree they should be careful, given that women in the military are not only more likely to be raped by their fellow American soldiers than killed in combat, but they are also more likely to be killed by their fellow American soldiers than killed in combat, frequently as a result of being in a romantic relationship with them.
Of course, it very likely does not register to Jesse Watters that he is insinuating that the testosterone injection will cause these men to become rapists, because he probably just thinks of it as some kind of “Well, boys pumped up on testosterone will be boys pumped up on testosterone!” type thing. That it doesn’t count as rape because they’re not wearing balaclavas and attacking women in alleyways. They’re just being cheeky, having a little fun, sticking their dicks in women without their consent, like you do, because the testosterone just makes them whimsical like that.
This comes after several right-wing pundits have, weirdly, come out in defense of Graham Platner amid the accusations of sexual assault from his ex-girlfriend. Adam Carolla, always a charmer, claimed that what Platner did was “basic drunken blue collar dude behavior.”
“People get weird with this stuff,” he asserted, “but I would say most every guy I know did what he’s being accused of at one point or another with their girlfriend at some point after a night of drinking.”
“It’s basically like: I’m drunk, I’m horny, I weigh 50 pounds more than you, we’re gonna have sex, it’s not really rape because we sleep in the same bed and I’m just gonna pass out and then the next day I won’t really remember what happened but I’ll buy you some flowers. It’s a basic drunken dude thing,” he said, describing what is, in fact, “really rape” (unless the woman consented, which does not appear to factor into this for Carolla).
For the record, however, having sex with a person without their consent is rape. This isn’t actually hard. Carolla also whined that there need to be degrees of rape like there are for murder — which there already are. First degree involves the use of a weapon, kidnapping, multiple rapists, and other severe situations, second degree is when the victim is in some way physically or mentally incapacitated, and third degree is non-consensual sexual intercourse without any of those aggravating factors....
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Not to mention The Hidden Dangers of Testosterone Supplements: Risks, Side Effects & Warnings
DOJ’s Top “Antifa” Prosecutor Marched On January 6
Talking Points Memo reports:
On Jan. 6, 2021, a man approached the Capitol who looked like many others in the crowd that day: white, with a Trump 2020 hat on and a shirt marking his service to the country in Afghanistan. But this one was different. Brian W. Lynch was months into a new job as a federal prosecutor in Maryland when he attended the march on the Capitol.
Yet, somehow, Lynch’s presence at the Capitol that fateful day has not been publicly reported until now, more than five years later. In the meantime, Lynch remained at DOJ and, under the second Trump administration, received a big promotion: He’s now running a national task force to prosecute left-wing political violence.
Michael Romano, who was a deputy chief in the DOJ’s since-disbanded Capitol Siege Section, described Jan. 6 to TPM as an act of massive political violence. He told TPM that he had never heard of anything like a federal prosecutor having been present at the march and continuing to work and be promoted years on.
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The Trump Criminal Syndicate at their shameless work.
DHS To Pay $125M For Massive Geolocation Database
404 Media reports:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data — which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what it describes as “voters fraud” and immigration fraud, according to procurement documents reviewed by 404 Media.
The document says Thomson Reuters is able to let ICE continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest. The news comes after President Trump held a conspiracy-laden and unhinged press conference about election security on Thursday, setting the stage for potentially undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections. It also follows ICE fatally shooting 2 people in a week.
Read the full article. Photo: Acting ICE Director David Venturella.
NEW: DHS plans to pay Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help ICE investigate “voter fraud”, according to documents reviewed by 404 Media.
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Big Brother is watchhing us constantly these days. This is the country you wanted, America?
Mullin Threatens State Election Officials With “Prison”
DAILY CALLER REPORTER: “Can you ensure that the midterm elections will be secure?”
MARKWAYNE MULLIN: “First of all, great question, thank you. Can we ensure that the that the midterm elections are going to be secure? Yes, we absolutely can build confidence in the American people, but the states have to do their part.
“I will tell you, if the states that choose not to participate with the SAVE program and they choose not to participate in securing the elections, we will make sure that we make those states a priority to look at who voted in their states and hold them, the election officials, accountable.
“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time.”
Mullin says that election officials in states that don’t cooperate with the Trump administration may face jail time
"The DOJ has lost 15 cases in a row trying to get their hands on voter rolls.
Absolutely nobody is going to jail and Markwayne Mullin fucking knows it.." — Pollos Hermanos (comments)
"This is fascism and a dictatorship by any definition." — RRebel (comments)
"What a nasty, unpleasant and ugly motherfucking fascist." — TK-Fla (comments)
"If Trump orders the arrest of Democratic Party election officials and the "invalidation" of election results, I think we could be in for bloody insurrection on the streets of America." — another_steve (comments)
""Help us break the law or we'll throw you in jail." Got it." — Stuart (comments)
"Fuck off fascist is the only response that should be given" — Nija0980 (comments)
"Funny how you Republicans fired all the real election assistance commissioners and now try to threaten people into compliance with your fascist coup and proven-Unconstitutional demands and blackmail, Nazi?" — Friday (comments)
"The actions of a dictatorship." — Bert_Bauer (comments)
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Does this Nazi retard know that states run elections and not the Nazi dictator that is his Lord?
Disgusting and discpicable and threatening!
But this is where we will finally draw the line. This is where their curse will be resisted by any means necessary. And if they have to kill us all let us die on our feet and not on our knees! Let future generations know they did not find bullet hols in our backs!
United Airlines Will Grant Free Changes To Customers Who Don’t Want To Use Newly-Named Trump Airport
Travel site Live And Let’s Fly reports:
United Airlines is giving reservation agents unusual flexibility to accommodate customers who no longer want to fly to West Palm Beach after the airport was renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport.
According to an internal memo shared with Live And Let’s Fly, United is the process of updating its systems to rename West Palm Beach Airport (PBI) to President Donald J. Trump (DJT). But the most interesting guidance concerns customers who object to the airport’s new name.
United tells reservation agents: “If a customer does not want to fly to the airport, use your empowerment to offer acceptable alternatives such as Fort Lauderdale Airport or Miami International Airport.” That appears to mean a customer booked to West Palm Beach can ask to avoid the newly renamed airport and be moved to Fort Lauderdale or Miami without paying a fare difference.
Read the full article. According to the Palm Beach Post, officials at the newly-named Trump airport have been deluged with “abusive and often obscene” emails vowing to use other airports despite the inconvenience.
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Who would want to use anything with the criminal's name on but another total failure?
Texas Lt. Gov. Somehow Thinks Obama Was Secretly Running The Government For Biden — John Amato
The state of Texas is full of con artists, liars, criminals, and immoral characters holding major positions in their state and local government.
Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick has his own podcast and made these remarks. Republicans are so bereft of ideas while whistling Dixie as Trump burns the country down; they replay the same nutty conspiracies to fill the time to make themselves feel better.
Our friends at Right Wing Watch caught this nonsense.
PATRICK: It's clear that they used auto-pen Joe Biden as just a pawn that they could push around and do.
I've always believed Obama has been, basically, he has violated the Constitution because he's served a third term.
I think he was behind the entire administration, or at least his people were, with his guidance.
This was his attempt at promoting Trump to run for a 3rd term, I imagine.
Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick says that Obama "violated the Constitution because he served a third term": "I think he was behind the entire [Biden] administration."
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Trying to exempt Obama from running against his favorite Nazi criminal? LMAO!
Oh, yes! That's just what Obama wanted to do!
Autopen has been used by multiple presidents.
“The President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law,” the guidance said. “Rather, the President may sign a bill ... by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.” — The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Even your Nazi Lord Trump has used one! Of course, you know that don't you?
I knew this asshole was a double-backward retard but he's one-upped hmself with this hallucination!
Leavitt Insists Trump's Sons Would Never Profit Off A Deal He Personally Negotiated — Conover Kennard
Pressed by The Times' Maggie Haberman on what the President knew about his sons' financial stake in the Kazakh mining deal he signed off on, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered a tidy bit of nothing. As far as she understood it, the sons knew better than to touch anything that might look like a conflict of interest.
Which is a nice line, except that Trump reportedly did the actual negotiating with Kazakhstan's President himself. This detail did not come from a leaked memo but from the mining company's own executive chairman.
The executive confirmed that Trump personally worked the deal, and also admitted he could "see how the optics might be disturbing to some people" — which is about as close to an on-record eye-roll as this story can possibly get.
Last year, the administration signed a critical minimum mining deal with Kazakhstan for a little-known U.S. company.
Haaberman asked Leavitt about this.
'What did the President know about his son's involvement in this arrangement, and when did he find out about it?" she asked.
"From my understanding, Maggie, nothing," Lyin' Leavitt said. "I've spoken to the President and his family about this."
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Earth to woman on stupid:
Trump Sons Took Stake in Kazakhstan Mining Deal Backed by Administration — Wiktoria Gucia
Donald Trump's sons' financial ties to a major mining project backed by their father's administration have apparently rankled even some within the president's inner circle.
A New York Times investigation found that Donald Trump Jr., 48, and Eric Trump, 42, became financially linked to a major tungsten mining project in Kazakhstan shortly after the Trump administration helped secure the deal and signaled it could provide up to $1.6 billion in federal financing.
Trump administration officials involved in the deal told The Times, speaking anonymously, that they were disappointed by the involvement of the Trump family—as well as the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—in projects the government itself is helping to finance.
Why is her face getting wider with every photo of her?
Sen Ossoff Nails It: Trump Is The Election Fraudster — NewsHound Ellen
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this isn’t a major Democratic talking point against President Sore Loser’s crusade to steal the upcoming midterms with disinformation about the 2020 presidential election.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) spoke with CNN’s Jake Tapper in advance of Donald Trump’s speech Thursday night. There has been speculation that Felon Trump will claim that Ossoff and fellow Georgia Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock were not legitimately elected.
Tapper asked whether Ossoff knew whether Trump had, in fact, planned to talk about the senators.
Ossoff said he did not know. Then he turned the question around and shredded the Democracy Saboteur in Chief.
“If there's one person who committed election fraud in Georgia, it's Donald Trump when he dialed up our state's senior-most election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and tried to bully him in a recorded phone call to quote, find the exact number of votes Donald Trump needed to win in a state that he had lost,” Ossoff shot back.
Well said, Senator.
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Ossoff for President 2028.
KY Governor Reveals He Received Two Calls About McConnell 'Suggesting He's Passed' — Andrea Thompson
Despite the Kentucky Senator's attempt to quell the suspicions, theories, and rumors with a bizarre and highly scrutinized photo of himself in a hospital chair, coupled with a vague and rather milquetoast statement, the situation surrounding Mitch McConnell and the true state of his health and well-being continues to raise more questions than answers.
In the midst of all the ambiguity, Kentucky's Democratic Governor Andy Beshear has finally taken a stand in recent weeks, openly demanding that the Bluegrass State's longest-running Republican lawmaker release more tangible proof of not only life, but his cognizance and overall ability to serve the people of Kentucky and the United States effectively. Given the ongoing lack of information from McConnell and his team, Beshear has recently begun to publicly make it clear that he is fully prepared to use any and every avenue available to him as governor to replace McConnell in the Kentucky Senate, should he continue to fail in providing adequate proof of his well-being -- much to the chagrin of the Republican Party, as they double down on their attempts to strip Beshear of that very power.
But Andy isn't operating from malice, revenge, or even partisanship. He's operating from the very same place all of America is sitting right now -- truly not knowing with 100% certainty whether Mitch McConnell is even alive or dead....
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After that photo of him that was posted, taking it easy somewhere with his wife, there is reason for doubt of his earthly presence.
What Todd Blanche Failed to Learn From Watergate — Steven Harper
In 1974, Watergate culminated in the first-ever resignation of a sitting US president. As Richard Nixon left office, his closest advisers were in prison—or heading there. Among them were attorneys who broke the law that they had sworn to uphold, including his former attorney general John Mitchell.
Acting AG Todd Blanche now seeks Mitchell’s job.
•Like Mitchell, Blanche was a successful lawyer at a prominent New York law firm before joining the president’s team.
•Like Mitchell, Blanche has served the president slavishly. He personally interviewed Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell who then got reassigned to a Club Fed; he guided the unlawfully incomplete release of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Epstein files; he spearheaded the effort to prosecute President Donald Trump’s perceived enemies; and he defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents publicly after they killed innocent Americans.
•And like Mitchell, Blanche’s ploys for Trump are sending him to a dark place....
Will Todd Blanche see how his loyalty to Trump personally—rather than to the nation he has taken an oath to serve—is leading him to an unfortunate destination? Probably not.
Will he learn anything from Judge Williams’s stunning rebuke or the ethics complaints he already faces? Probably not.
Will enough Republican senators stand up and refuse to confirm Blanche, who is blatantly unqualified to be the next attorney general? Probably not.
All Americans will bear the consequences of his failures.
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The American voters must bear the blame for their failure as well!
Miller Labels Leftists a “Cancer” That World Must “Root Out” in Fascistic Speech — Sharon Zhang
People with left-wing beliefs are “enemies of civilization,” said Miller in a speech with numerous McCarthyist echoes.
In a set of fascistic speeches on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House power broker Stephen Miller, and other top Trump administration officials labelled the political left as a “terrorist” threat and vowed to use all of the tools at their disposal to systematically destroy left-wing groups.
Representatives from 67 countries gathered in the U.S. on Thursday for a meeting called Rubio on the supposed “Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” In addition to Rubio and Miller, several U.S. officials spoke, including figures like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
The remarks from top officials quickly made clear that the meeting’s purpose was to put forth a global offensive against people with left-wing beliefs.
In his remarks, Miller spoke of the Trump administration’s goals under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) “to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists.”
“Here in the United States, we have taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and survival of our republican form of government,” Miller said..
He said, without evidence, that there is an epidemic of violence among left-wing groups, and labelled leftists and left-wing organizations as “enemies of civilization” and a “cancer” that can “destroy a society” if not dismantled.
Miller went even further to say that not only left-wing groups, but also anyone who supports left-wing causes, must be subject to persecution. The issue with U.S. institutions, he said, is that they have grown too “soft” in cracking down on left-wing beliefs.
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If there is ANY violence then it has been provoked by this putrid POS.
This Nazi must be prosectuted by the world court for stoking hate and as a co-conspirator to murder!
Trump Under Fire for Diverting Disaster Relief Workers to Immigration Policing — Mike Ludwig
Trump administration officials were notably absent from a House hearing on reforming FEMA this week.
Floods, storms, wildfires, and other disasters can strike in every state and district, and members of Congress in both parties have incentives to improve the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the nation’s premier disaster relief outfit. However, current FEMA officials in the Trump administration were notably absent from a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing on bipartisan legislation to reform the agency, despite broad support for the bill among Republicans.
During the July 15 hearing, Democrats slammed President Donald Trump for politicizing FEMA by denying federal disaster relief to blue states and diverting personnel and resources to bolster his deadly mass deportation campaign. Instead of assisting disaster victims, FEMA employees were directed to help immigration enforcement agencies recruit new officers, plan raids and patrols, and process arrestees at notorious prison camps in apparent violation of federal law, according to an investigative report submitted by House Democrats.
Not a single administrator attended the hearing to provide a response on behalf of FEMA or the White House. FEMA also did not respond to inquiries from Truthout by the time this story was published....
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More Trump crimes.
New Landmark National Academies Report Affirms the Science Behind Holding Polluters Accountable for the Climate Crisis — Newswire Editor
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) today published an authoritative report, Attribution of Extreme Weather and Climate Events and Their Impacts, that validates the science connecting individual weather disasters and their lethal societal impacts directly to human-caused fossil fuel pollution. In response, Stephanie Brancaforte, climate accountability campaign director with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, issued the following statement:
“For decades, Big Oil knowingly poisoned our atmosphere and deceived the public about the impacts of burning fossil fuels —all the while lining executives’ pockets as communities continue to suffer from extreme heat, floods and fires.
“The science is clear: the extreme heat killing thousands of people in the northern hemisphere this summer is neither an unpredictable event nor an accident—it is the result of corporate crime. With the backing of the National Academies, survivors of climate catastrophes now have strong evidence to pursue justice against fossil fuel polluters to pay for the devastation they have unleashed.”
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Polluters must be forced to pay for their crimes.
New National Academy of Sciences Climate Attribution Report Underscores How Climate Change Fuels Extreme Weather — Newswire Editor
Statement by Dr. Carly Phillips, Union of Concerned Scientists
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report today synthesizing decades of climate attribution research that underscores how heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels makes different types of extreme weather more likely and/or severe. NAS conducted an overview of events like extreme heat, drought, wildfires, tropical cyclones and convective storms. They also touch on event impact attribution, the leading edge of the field that quantifies how climate change has contributed to specific harms like increased human mortality and economic losses.
The report and its contributors have been attacked by the fossil fuel industry in the lead up to today’s release, the latest in a coordinated campaign by Big Oil to undermine climate science and intimidate scientists. Companies like BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell are facing mounting lawsuits aiming to hold them accountable for the climate damages caused by their decades-long disinformation campaign. In April, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Harriet Hageman introduced a bill offering sweeping immunity from liability to these major climate polluters.
Below is a statement by Dr. Carly Phillips, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and co-author of multiple attribution studies, including on forest fires in the western United States and global sea level rise.
“Attribution science confirms what billions of people around the world have experienced firsthand—deadly events like extreme heatwaves are occurring more often and tropical cyclones are more intense due to climate change. Despite efforts by the fossil fuel industry and its cronies to intimidate panelists and misrepresent the research, the Academies’ report affirms the scientific consensus: attribution science is based on rigorous peer reviewed methods and provides critical information about how climate change is driving increases in the frequency and/or severity of extreme events.
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It's past time to take big oil down a notch or two. They have been fucking over us for years. Fight back by cutting our use of their products.
Trump is Following Putin’s “Dictator’s Checklist” and Tonight is the Next Step on the List — Thom Hartmann
Control information. Intimidate opponents. Capture institutions. Rewrite reality. And the final box may be closer than Americans think.
Tonight at 9 p.m., Donald Trump will commandeer prime-time television for what he’s billing as a speech about “free and fair elections,” promising “really big news” and reportedly planning to unveil what his people describe as “newly declassified intelligence” about “foreign (Chinese Communist Party) interference” in the 2020 election.
Two days ago, House Speaker Mike Johnson stood at a podium and told America why the Pentagon needs an extra $350 billion:
“We’re fighting communism on our own shores.”
He followed that up on social media with, “THE BARBARIANS ARE INSIDE THE GATE!”
The communists and barbarians, in case you’re wondering, are you and your neighbors, and the proof is how we voted in Democratic primaries this spring.
Just the idea of returning to the McCarthy era of redbaiting like Johnson is doing here is obscene.
Every day now brings another story like these, and every one of them gets reported as if it was just a new, fresh outrage, each completely disconnected from yesterday’s new, fresh outrage.
But these steps Trump and his lickspittles are taking aren’t even remotely random. They’re part of a classic dictator’s checklist, and we know exactly what the checklist looks like because Vladimir Putin already worked through it, step-by-step, between 2000 and 2012, converting a struggling democracy into the police state that Russia is today. And he wasn’t the first; this goes from the days of Machiavelli through 20th century Europe to here, now.
Putin’s first move was the media. In 2001, masked “tax police” raided NTV, Russia’s last independent television network, and handed it to a state-controlled company; within a few years every national network answered to the Kremlin.br>
Here, Trump began by suing the networks for “defamation” (just like Putin did). Next, the FCC became a weapon aimed at broadcasters, the president slanders reporters from news organizations he dislikes, and Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon imposed press restrictions so severe that dozens of reporters turned in their credentials rather than sign away their independence, all while media consolidation shrinks the number of independent newsrooms every year. Trump’s loyal toady at the FCC is trying to blow up the 39% of ownership rule so a billionaire nepo-baby Trump ally can take over CNN along with CBS and dozens of other media outlets.
Putin’s second move was the oligarchs. In 2003 he arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, and the message was instantly understood: wealth in Russia would henceforth serve the Kremlin or be confiscated by it. Loyal oligarchs got massively richer as I pointed out last Friday; disloyal ones got prison or exile. Here it’s more subtle, but the message is the same.
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Putin. Trump wants to be him so badly. But he now knows he will never be. Thus the barrel of bullshit he threw out last night. Trump is over!
Trump Confirms 'This Russhur Thing With Trump And Russhur' 100% True, What A Dumbass — Evan Hurst
Nailing it as usual, sir.
We would like to direct your attention to something we wrote Tuesday about Donald Trump’s much-hyped (by himself and his regime) address to the nation, which, we were assured, would CHANGE EVERYTHING:
Before you let this stress you out, though remember what buffoons these people are, and remember how comically every one of these plays backfires in their dumbass faces.
Just mock the shit out of them instead. We sure will.
Well kids, nothing to retract there.
WONKETTE RETRACTS NOTHING. NOTHING!
Last night, Trump, who is notoriously bad at reading and notoriously bad at being coherent after dark, attempted to give a primetime address to the nation on election security. What kinds of dumbfuck conspiracy theories was he going to advance? What kind of bald-faced lies about the 2020 election being stolen from him? Uhhhhh, well, none of that, really. Like Pete Hegseth summoning generals from around the world to priss at them about hairstyles, Trump decided to My Fellow Americans us last night to accuse China of sometimes looking at American elections funny, but didn’t really accuse them of doing anything of value.
Go directly to the transcript and find a real accusation he made. We’ll wait.
He began his speech by explaining that when Joe Biden was president, “We had transgender for everybody, men in women's sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore.” (Trump also claimed this week that the CHIPS Act required people to be transgender to get money to develop computer chips. Those Biden IDIOTS.)
One of the most solid accusations he made was that during his first term, China wanted to undermine the people’s confidence in him (as if China needed help there, the babbling dumbass was ruining his own first term for himself).
“They wanted to make you shound like your preshident washn’t sho hot,” explained Trump, accusing China directly of wanting to make you shound like your preshident washn’t sho hot.
Once Trump got to the fucking point last night, he didn’t actually really get to the point. He claimed he was releasing/declassifying a bunch of documents he clearly didn’t/can’t read (more hilariousness on that in a second) that showed “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.”...
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There's more to read on the link. We can't overstate the dumbfuck's desperate fake lying that has reached its zenith of absurdity!
Let’s Be Real, The Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak Is Trump’s Fault, Not Taco Bell’sLet’s Be Real, The Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak Is Trump’s Fault, Not Taco Bell’s — Frank Landymore
On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had linked the outbreak of cyclosporiasis, an infection notorious for inducing explosive diarrhea, to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms that was supplied to Taco Bell.
Per the reporting, Taco Bell said it was voluntarily pulling the lettuce from select states where it received the contaminated produce: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. An announcement from the CDC warned the public not to eat food items with shredded lettuce from Taco Bell, but hasn’t identified Taylor Farms as the source.
But while Taco Bell may have served the tainted lettuce, it would be remiss to lay all of the blame on the fast food chain (although one aggrieved customer is already suing it after contracting the illness).
The contamination occurred at the farms or facilities where the food was processed, from a single supplier in Mexico, Food and Drug Administration officials said. The supplier, Taylor Farms, has been involved in previous outbreaks, including another outbreak of cyclosporiasis in a salad mix in 2013.
Taco Bell, to its credit, also immediately pulled its ingredients from some of its locations last week as soon as it learned about the situation, according to local reports.
And then there’s the broader political context that many experts are drawing attention to: how the Trump administration has slashed funding to the CDC and paralyzed the nation’s food safety bodies.
Last February, shortly after Trump took office, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) dissolved its National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which provided scientific guidance on food safety policy. Ryan Cooper at The Prospect notes that the committee was working on advice for foodborne illness outbreaks before being terminated. The FDA also shut down its National Advisory Committee on Meat and Poultry Inspection.
Not spared during the wave of cuts that wreaked the federal government, the USDA lost over 20,000 workers last year, with 913 of them coming from its Food Safety Inspection Service....
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Of course. But the rest of the sickos that ignore Trump's retardedness and support his failed mission are the part of the disaster America can't overlook!
Devastating humiliation served to Trump as TV networks snub speech — for these shows — Nicole Charky-Chami
NBC News, according to TV Insider, is scheduled to feature its series "The Americas," a nature documentary narrated by legendary actor Tom Hanks. This week's episode was set to focus on the Gulf Coast and its swamps and wetlands that are home to black bears and alligators.
The network said it planned to broadcast a special report following the address, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
ABC plans to air the Elizabeth Banks-hosted game show "Press Your Luck" during that hour, TV Insider reported.
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America no longer cares for the lying felon's bullshit. His whining no longer matters. Stick a pitchfork in him.
America endangered by a sociopath who will stop at nothing to get what he wants —- Robert Reich
The real message to be drawn from Trump’s address to the nation last night is that he will call into question the votes of every state and city that chooses a Democratic senator or representative in the 2026 midterm elections. He’ll push Republican governors and mayors not to certify the results. He’ll demand recounts and audits.
We’ve been here before, but this time he’s even less restrained than he was in 2020 and is surrounded by people who will do his bidding.
His address tonight was absurd. It was riddled with so many lies that I’m reluctant to dignify them with rebuttals, but you should have them.
He mentioned a newly-declassified investigation into a voter registration group in Muskegon, Mich. that apparently had invited fraudulent registrations in 2020 — but Trump didn’t mention that the applications had been caught and none of them had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly. The F.B.I. closed the investigation, stating “the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.”
He alleged, once again, that foreign powers have hijacked votes, or that federal or state officials plotted to rig either the 2020 election. But no evidence has ever emerged showing that vote counts have been manipulated or corrupted. Intelligence reports, state audits of vote tallies and lawsuits have repeatedly affirmed official results in 2020 and other years. Nothing suggests China manipulated votes. Instead, U.S. intelligence assessment says China “probably also continued longstanding efforts” to gather information on U.S. voters and public opinion and to use that information to influence U.S. policy “as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008.”...
"And also endangered by a bunch of sycophants who continue to try to placate him rather than send him to where he belongs, namely prison for the rest of his life." — Dave (comments)
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Might as well have been Putin doing the talking. This megalomaniac must be rejected if we are to have a future.
Let him rant from a cell the remainder of his life.
Voters on both sides sneer at Trump's 'disgraceful' Big Lie speech — Matthew Rozsa
Now that the speech was delivered, conservatives are joining liberals in roundly mocking it.
"This affordability speech will turn it around for the Republicans," Rick Wilson, the Republican co-founder of the anti-Trump GOP group The Lincoln Project, sarcastically posted on X, referring to how Trump's speech focused on his disproved claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Another conservative commentator, Jim Hanson, wrote that "ProTip: When this guy's cakehole is openCake is going in and BS is spewing out."
Sarah Longwell, a polling expert for the conservative site The Bulwark, posted that "Trump is really terrified that Democrats might have some oversight after the 2026 election, so he preemptively working to delegitimize America’s elections. That’s all this speech was. Undermining American elections. Outrageous."
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Anyone who'd believe this lying murderer doesn't deserve to live in this country.
Massie On Trump's Speech: How Can There Be Voter Fraud When We Won Elections? — John Amato
The narcissistic buffoon's last ditch attempts to revive the Save act will only help the Democratic party.
Rep Thomas Massie was asked about Trump's Thursday night ridiculous voter fraud speech, and he told the Morning Joe panel earlier today that complaining about voter fraud is ridiculous since Republicans control the House and Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.
Trump sees the writing on the wall for the 2026 midterms and is trying to pivot away from the Iran war disaster and force his enablers in the Senate to pass the draconian Save Act that is just a voter suppression bill renamed....
MASSIE: I don't think the problem is that our elections aren't secure, because we control the House, we control the Senate, we control the White House, and in some degree, we control the Supreme Court.
So I ask my Republican colleagues, why are you complaining about election fraud?
The fraud that's going on is we're not holding ourselves to the promises that we made of fiscal responsibility, putting America first, making America healthy.
The problem is we're wasting the opportunity that we were given in these elections, that we won all of them
Rep. Massie explains the idiocy of Trump's speech, while he reneged on all their economic promises.
Nero Trump fiddles on lies and conspiracies while the country burns.
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FACT: The criminal knows he will lose his immunity when he leaves office. He's desperate and will DO ANYTHING TO PREVENT IT!
SEND HIM BACK TO HELL!
WH Screams Over Reporting On Trump’s Lying Speech
The Daily Beast reports:
The White House has freaked out at the response to President Donald Trump’s crackpot primetime address. In an address from the East Room of the White House on Thursday, the 80-year-old tried to convince the nation of “shocking vulnerabilities” in U.S. election security. China, he said, rigged the 2020 election.
Trump had promised to reveal “really big news” during the address, but, in truth, he pored over familiar grievances and proved Republicans, said to be “scared s—less” about what he was going to say, right. The only thing that was “big,” in fact, was the level to which the media quickly dismissed the president’s 27-minute rant.
The reaction from the White House, in turn, was even bigger. Lackeys running the “Rapid Response 47” account were tasked with going on X to individually call out the hosts, correspondents, contributors, and networks that didn’t willingly lap up Trump’s rambling.
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Russia is documented as interfering, you motherfucking Nazi bastards! Trump was indicted! WTF is wrong with these traitors?
The fact that Trump did this bullsnit screed shows just how it is nothing but MORE BULLSHIT!
Tuberville: “Four Or Five Senators Didn’t Legally Win”
Alabama.com reports:
U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville claimed that multiple colleagues in Congress were illegally elected Thursday, without evidence.
In a Newsmax appearance Thursday ahead of President Donald Trump’s address on election integrity, Tuberville claimed that several of his colleagues in the Senate benefited from rigged elections.
“They put the screws to him [President Donald Trump.] There’s no doubt. I’ve seen the evidence,” Tuberville said. “We probably have four or five senators that didn’t legally win. They shouldn’t be up here. The American people need to know how crooked these Democrats are.”
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How about you, cracker shitbag? You mean your lying self! The asshole who does NOT live in the area he represents! LOCK HIM UP!
Gleeful Watters Predicts “High-T” Troops Will Commit Rape: “These Guys Are Going To Be Wild Animals”
Raw Story reports:
Fox News host Jesse Watters was called out online Thursday after trying to crack an off-color rape joke that backfired. The co-host of “The Five” commented on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to screen troops for low testosterone when he attempted to make a crack, which left his fellow hosts silent.
“You know what’s going to happen? The guys that don’t need it are gonna take it — triple boost. And then they’re going to get out there and women on base, you better be careful,” Waters said. “Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be wild animals and you better watch out.”
"Yes, Hegseth has turned the U.S. military into an international laughingstock." — carswell (comments)
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Did someone say "low IQ?" Too bad he can't get injections for that!
FBI Deploys “Evidence Team” To Lincoln Reflecting Pool
The New York Times reports:
An F.B.I. evidence-gathering team visited the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Wednesday afternoon after the landmark was drained so that crews could repair peeling sections of its newly installed blue lining.
Photos taken by a New York Times photographer showed people wearing F.B.I. insignia and standing on the dry, grime-covered pool floor. They appeared to be documenting the scene in detail, with some using laser-scanning and measuring equipment. A spokesperson for the F.B.I. said that the team was assisting the U.S. Park Police in investigating damage to the pool.
The Trump administration spent more than $16 million to repair the century-old pool this year, giving out no-bid contracts to improve its filtration system and to apply a layer of waterproofing across the pool’s 2,000-foot-long concrete floor. The contracts were rushed through, bypassing normal procedures, so the pool would be ready for the country’s 250th birthday on July 4.
"Imagine being an FBI agent and having to play along with this farce because an 80 year old pedophile can’t admit that he fucked up." — Greg (comments)
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Chief inspector, Tom Foolery, will be in charge.
GOP Rep Suggests Bombing Iran “Into A Parking Lot”
“What we had for the last four years before President Trump was back in office was massive weakness. No one was afraid of America. They bullied us. They tried to take advantage of us. But peace through strength is back in the White House.
“And Iran needs to understand something very clearly: If you do not negotiate with the president and you continue to try to kill American troops, and build bombs, and build missiles that you’re going to use to attempt to kill Americans, we will turn you into a parking lot. They might try to push the envelope, but we’re driving the mail truck and we’ll run them over.
“Iran has no navy, they cannot control the Strait of Hormuz. We’re not going to let them. They need to understand who holds all the cards. They might try to push the envelope, but we’re driving the mail truck and we’ll run them over.” – GOP Rep. Addison McDowell, drawing enthusiastic agreement from Newsmax hosts.
McDowell, a freshman and former Blue Cross Blue Shield lobbyist, says that he was spurred to run for Congress after his brother died of a fentanyl overdose. This is his first appearance here.
Rep. Addison McDowell: “Iran needs to understand something very clearly. If you do not negotiate with the president … we will turn you into a parking lot … they might try to push the envelope, but we’re driving the mail truck and we’ll run them over.”
"Remember when we had leaders who didn’t feel the need to take their dicks out and slam them on the table?" — Paul (comments)
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This poor little child doesn't know we tried that in Vietnam. Son, it didn't work then and it won't work now. It's a total waste of resources.
Prices Already Spiking at Trump’s Mysterious Gas Stations That Promised Cheap Fuel — Frank Landymore
Liberty-loving patriots who got themselves amped up about president Trump’s new gas stations are in for a rude surprise.
When the White House announced the “Freedom Fuel” network last week, it bragged that the price at the pump would be just $3.47 per gallon — in honor, of course, of “our 47th president.”
But using data on the gas price tracking platform GasBuddy, The Hill found that the locations had prices that were at least $3.57 per gallon, with multiple videos on social media reflecting the same.
Unless Trump is planning to be president again four decades from now, we’d say this attempt to glorify himself has missed the mark.
Though some Freedom Fuel prices are lower than the national average — which is hovering around $3.80, according to the AAA — they’re still fluctuating as much as what you’d see at a typical gas station. One location in New Jersey climbed past the national average to $3.89 on Wednesday, before falling again to $3.57. Some had prices as high as $4.49.
A White House representative acknowledged that Freedom Fuel wasn’t immune to the routine fluctuations of a volatile market, not to mention local pricing.
“The prices at the gas stations will fluctuate — possibly coming down even further — depending on the market and the location,” the representative told CBS News.
Experts have needled the stunt, convinced that it won’t work out in the long-term....
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WTF else did anyone expect?
Tim Pool: “I've spoken with individuals who work in national security who believe that we are barreling towards a war with China” — Media Matters Staff
TIM POOL (HOST): This could be World War III. Unlikely. Perhaps people will say it's sensationalist or hyperbolic to make the claim. But I've spoken with individuals who work in national security who believe that we are barreling towards a war with China for a variety of reasons.
First, when you take a look at the Strait of Hormuz, Chinese crude oil imports dropped by 44% since the start of this war. They're switching to electric vehicles, and they are suffering. One of the arguments that I've made is that Donald Trump's intention with the war in Iran is actually to cut off the Strait of Hormuz because it's strangling out China. Now why would Donald Trump do this? It's not just Trump. It's the entire administration. It's his allies. Well, there's the obvious. China is set to displace the United States as the dominant global economy. The U.S. is not gonna tolerate that. Some estimates put it at 2027, but this was a decade ago. Now it's 2032 and moving largely because they are losing access to their principal source of oil, which is through the Strait of Hormuz.
There's another reason. And you can say that Donald Trump isn't a strategist. You can make every argument you'd like about him. But how about this? Donald Trump believes that China was trying to steal the election for the Democrats, and thus, he is now accusing them of this publicly. And we're going to hear about it tonight at 9 p.m. in an address to the nation....
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More on the insanity that is Trump.
How Donald Trump Created the Worst Diarrhea Outbreak This Century — Ryan Cooper
A big problem for trust in government is that high-quality governance is usually invisible. When the various agencies designed to protect the American people from all manner of threats are working perfectly, most potential disasters are detected and prevented before they happen. A lot of highly trained government workers do diligent and difficult work for little pay and less recognition, heading off crisis after crisis, and the ignorant swing-voting layman assumes that all his tax dollars are being squandered.
So one hopes that the voting public is learning a hard—or I should say watery—lesson about how important good government is, by way of the manifold consequences of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert Kennedy hacking away at American state capacity. The latest consequence can be heard in the groaning emanating from thousands of bathrooms across the country: the worst cyclosporiasis outbreak in American history. It deserves a name, so I’m calling it the MAHA Trots.
Cyclosporiasis is caused by Cyclospora cayetanensis, a single-celled parasite that lives exclusively in humans and causes particularly violent and long-lasting diarrhea. Infection is almost always through ingesting food or water contaminated with feces containing cyclospora oocysts; these take many days to become infectious, so person-to-person transmission is very unlikely. The oocysts are difficult to wash off and resistant to common disinfectants, including vinegar and bleach, so the only reliable way to kill them is by cooking past 158 degrees Fahrenheit.
In an American context, cyclosporiasis outbreaks are almost always caused by improper sanitation at farms or food processing facilities. Farmers around the world routinely refuse to provide adequate toilet or handwashing facilities for their workers if they think they can get away with it, to save money. When exploited raspberry or spinach pickers have no choice but to relieve themselves in a hole next to the field of crops, the potential consequences are obvious. A 2013 outbreak in Texas, for instance, was tied to contaminated cilantro. Contaminated irrigation water is another potential culprit.
On the food side of the equation, Trump has wreaked havoc on American food safety infrastructure.
Now, it is difficult to prove with 100 percent confidence that this outbreak would not have happened under a Democratic president. One can’t demonstrate that one of the food safety experts fired by Musk, Russ Vought, or Kennedy would have discovered its source and thus squelched the outbreak by now, precisely because they weren’t on the job. But the circumstantial case is overwhelming.
On the food side of the equation, Trump has wreaked havoc on American food safety infrastructure. As part of his initial wholesale attack on state capacity in February 2025, he dissolved the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which was set up under President Reagan in 1988 to provide scientific advice and coordinate best practices for defending against dangerous microbes at all levels of government. Wouldn’t you know it, just before being destroyed the committee was working on advice regarding foodborne illness outbreaks....
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Trump must make anyone get the shits.
Military Leaders Quietly Prepare for Battle in Cuba: Report — Sarah K. Burris
Military leaders are putting together military options for President Donald Trump possible actions against Cuba.
While Trump has rebooted his war in Iran, he's also looking at what's next and they're trying to keep it quiet, CBS News reported on Wednesday.
"Military planners have in recent weeks examined a range of options for possible action against the island, including an Army-led air assault involving thousands of U.S. soldiers to be carried out by the 101st Airborne Division, the only unit trained for such a task, according to multiple U.S. officials with knowledge of the discussions," the report said.
Officials who spoke to CBS News did so anonymously and stressed that there's no final decision by Trump on whether he'll carry out the operation.
The report noted that such an operation would "confront the Pentagon with a significant problem because much of the U.S. military's attention and some of its most valuable offensive capabilities are already committed elsewhere."
In June, the U.S. military met to conduct a "concept-of-operations briefing," which dealt with the early-stage military planning that could involve a Cuba attack, the officials said.
CBS News said that such briefings are "routine" because the military wants to give the president a large range of options and "contingencies."
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The U.S. has become the leading terrorist nation on the planet.
Trump's National Socialism — Robert Reich
It is centralizing ever more economic power in Trump's hands
Friends,
Quietly and without any fanfare, the Trump regime is becoming a shareholder or profit-sharer in an array of corporations thought to be critical to the nation’s security.
For example, in one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history, the U.S. chipmaker Intel’s shares have more than quadrupled in value since March 2025. The stock has surged 464 percent in the past 12 months, with the company hitting a market cap of $608.7 billion.
A year ago, Intel was on life support. Many predicted its death. What happened?Intel’s rebirth is partly due to the AI boom, which requires huge quantities of computer chips known as CPUs, which are Intel’s specialty.
But a far larger factor in Intel’s stunning resurgence has been the Trump regime’s direct interventions — not only into Intel but also into other tech corporations: Apple and the giant super-chip maker Nvidia.
The Trump regime has justified this on grounds of national security. But it’s socialism because the downside risks are broadly shared by the public.
Yet the upside the benefits go to the U.S. government and to top corporate investors and executives.
Call it national socialism....
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The pornography of power.
Trump Dismisses Responsibility for Minab Massacre, Saying Photo Evidence Is “AI” — Sharon Zhang
The US is widely acknowledged to be responsible for the strike, including within internal Pentagon investigations.
As calls for transparency grow, President Donald Trump has waved away the idea of accepting U.S. responsibility for the massacre of schoolchildren in Minab, Iran, on the first day of the U.S. and Israel’s war — and has suggested, heinously, that photo evidence of U.S. munitions used on the school “are AI.”
Asked about a letter from Democrats this week calling for the release of the U.S. military’s investigation into the bombing of the elementary girls’ school that killed 168 people, including over 100 children, Trump refused to say if that investigation would ever be released to the public.
“You know, I don’t think anyone’s ever going to be able to say what happened there,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.
This is despite widespread acknowledgement that the U.S. was behind the strike, including within internal U.S. military investigations, as well as video and photo evidence showing U.S. Tomahawk missiles and missile fragments being used on the site of the elementary girls’ school on February 28, the day of the U.S. and Israel’s initial strikes on Iran.
Later, Trump was asked about the photo evidence, as well as recent reporting finding that the U.S. bombed the school as a result of a collapse in targeting protocols, with commanders bypassing warnings about outdated information in the rush to strike as many targets as possible on the first day of the war....
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Trump is responsible for these murders. They will haunt him until his dying day.
Hegseth Announces Testosterone Testing as Part of Push for “Lethal” Military — Chris Walker
Hegseth has previously told servicemembers that troops will have to meet “the highest male standard.”
On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced a new policy aimed at increasing testosterone levels for servicemembers — a move that has been discouraged by health experts.
In a social media post announcing the policy, Hegseth stated that the most “decisive tactical advantage” the U.S. military has “will always be the individual warfighter.”
“We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage, which is why we must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience, and your long-term health,” the Defense Secretary stated. “To meet that commitment today, I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.”
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Have we ever seen a man more uncertain of his gender? How about an effective military rather than lethal?
Midterm Elections: The Con Always Works, Right Up Until the Moment it Doesn’t — Thom Hartmann
Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark…
Tomorrow night at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.” For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger.
An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November
To understand what we’ll actually be watching Thursday night, we have to go back to 1973, to a Manhattan night spot called Le Club, where a 27-year-old Donald Trump, freshly sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to Black families, met the most feared lawyer in New York. It’s a story I tell in detail in The Last American President.
Roy Cohn had made his reputation as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, wrecking careers with accusations he never had to prove. His advice to young Trump, as Cohn’s own cousin later recalled it, was blunt: “You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter.” Don’t settle. Don’t apologize. Attack the accuser.
So instead of quietly signing the consent decree his father’s regular lawyers recommended, Trump called a press conference and countersued the federal government for $100 million. A judge tossed the countersuit, the Trumps eventually signed roughly the deal they’d been offered at the start, and Cohn declared total victory anyway.
He understood something that’s become the operating system of Donald Trump’s entire life: the court of public opinion matters more than any court of law, and a lie defended with absolute commitment will usually beat a truth defended halfheartedly.
Over their thirteen years together, Cohn drilled three rules into his student: Attack, never defend. Deny everything, admit nothing. Claim victory no matter what actually happened....
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The con that is Trump.
Doctors Roast Hegseth’s New Testosterone Policy
The Daily Beast reports:
Medical professionals have torn into Donald Trump’s defense secretary for his plans to test military personnel’s testosterone and offer hormone replacement therapy to those with low levels. Pete Hegseth announced his latest proposals on X on Wednesday. “We must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience, and your long-term health,” Hegseth, 46, told servicemembers in an X video captioned, “The High-T Department of War.”
Stuart Phillips, a medical professor at McMaster University, said Thursday that testosterone is normally prescribed only for people with unusually low levels of testosterone. “[A blanket policy like] we’re going to screen everybody over the age of 30, is kind of a ridiculous notion,” Phillips said, adding his voice to a chorus of doctors who have slammed Hegseth’s scheme. Adriane Fugh-Berman, a Georgetown University professor of pharmacology and physiology, warned in comments that Hegseth’s claims are “non-evidence-based and could cause harm.”
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Cause harm? Are we aware this is part of the most harmful administration that the U.S. has had in its history?
Blanche's loyalty to Trump sends him to a dark place as judge issues stunning rebuke — Steven Harper
...Early in Blanche’s confirmation hearing on July 15, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) asked him about his relationship with Trump.
“I’m his lawyer,” Blanche replied, before correcting himself to say that he “was” his lawyer.
Blanche’s initial impulse was closer to the mark. And he has already compromised his professional reputation and personal integrity.
In the service of Nixon personally, John Mitchell was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury in connection with his role in the Watergate break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and subsequent cover-up. He spent 19 months in prison and lost his law license.
Will Todd Blanche see how his loyalty to Trump personally—rather than to the nation he has taken an oath to serve—is leading him to an unfortunate destination? Probably not.
Will he learn anything from Judge Williams’s stunning rebuke or the ethics complaints he already faces? Probably not.
Will enough Republican senators stand up and refuse to confirm Blanche, who is blatantly unqualified to be the next attorney general? Probably not.
All Americans will bear the consequences of his failures.
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Apparently, Blanche doesn't know that the POTUS has a lawyer: The White House Counsel. Pitiful.
White evangelicals now regret the deal they made with the devil: report — Alex Henderson
Rihanna Teixeira, a former Trump supporter who was raised evangelical in Arizona, views evangelicals as cult-like when it comes to Trump.
Teixeira told the i Paper, "I wish I had a logical answer as to why I voted for him, but the truth is that the evangelical church is a cult. I started following historians and people who I felt could give neutral and honest reporting on what was happening. I also moved out of the small town that I was living in and moved to Los Angeles where I met and became friends with people who were being directly impacted by Trump and his policies. I also worked with a lot of DACA (immigrant) students who were having to give up their dreams of bettering their lives. Seeing first-hand how he was impacting people made me start to question everything I had been taught previously."...
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The Devil or The Devil's Son-in-law?
Trump Administration Linked To Growing Explosive Diarrhea Outbreak — Ed Scarce
“Have the funding cuts to public health impacted the current activities related to the Cyclospora outbreak? I think they have,” said one academic.
'Is anyone surprised that this administration makes people shit themselves?" — LBJsPNS
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Are Trump's diapers holding up under the strain?
Trump Instantly Fires New Top Seattle Prosecutor
The Associated Press reports:
President Donald Trump fired the new top U.S. prosecutor in Seattle on Wednesday less than an hour after the attorney was unanimously appointed by the federal judges in the district, highlighting tensions between the courts and the president over the powerful positions.
Roger Rogoff, a former judge and veteran state and federal prosecutor, was sworn in as U.S. attorney before 8 a.m. at the U.S. courthouse in downtown Seattle. In a phone interview, he said he then went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and asked to meet with Charles Neil Floyd, whose 120-day interim term in the position ended in February. As he waited in a lobby, Rogoff said, he received an email from the Trump administration informing him he’d been removed.
Trump named Floyd, who previously served as an immigration judge, interim U.S. attorney last October but never forwarded his nomination to the Senate. When Floyd’s time as interim U.S. attorney expired, Trump simply shifted his title, a tactic the administration has also tried in other federal judicial districts: It named him first assistant U.S. attorney, while leaving the top post empty.
"Trump would enjoy killing American citizens if SCOTUS gives him the nod," — Tomcat (comments)
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The criminal scumbag crmies again! It will be this way until we put a final end to him!
Panels Minimizing Slavery Return To Philly Memorial
The Philadelphia Tribune reports:
Hours after federal agents removed the restored panels at the President’s House slavery memorial and replaced them with new ones, attorney Michael Coard of the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, or ATAC, condemned the move. The action marked the latest chapter in an ongoing dispute between the coalition and President Donald Trump’s administration over how slavery is represented at the site of the nation’s first executive mansion.
Unannounced federal officials overnight replaced original panels that highlighted the nine Africans enslaved by President George Washington with new panels that deeply minimizes slavery’s role. “To say that we’re outraged is an understatement,” Coard said Wednesday afternoon while standing between the President’s House site and the Liberty Bell on Independence Mall.
"I have every confidence that the original panels will be restored, but when this piece of shit, corrupt and utter failure of a president & human being at long last snuffs it, he will have no control over the steaming piles of truth that said, printed & displayed about him, and all of his monuments to himself and attempts to subvert history will be torn down" -- Uncle Mark's Mugshot (comments)
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Land of the Happy Negro President strikes again against truth, justice and the American way!
Trump officials' stunning confusion over birth control laid bare in new emails: report — Alexander Willis
A tranche of newly obtained emails revealed widespread "internal confusion" among senior State Department officials over a warehouse full of reproductive health products, with some officials apparently unable to distinguish contraceptives from abortion-inducing medications.
The internal State Department emails were obtained by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which sued the Trump administration over its decision to destroy at least $10 million worth of reproductive health products being stored at a warehouse in Belgium.
The products were earmarked for distribution under the U.S. Agency for International Development before the agency was gutted early on in the second Trump administration, and under the guidance of then-billionaire Elon Musk.
“The unnamed official listed two different contraceptive devices – a subdermal implant and an intrauterine device – and the daily oral contraceptive Levonorgestrel. None of the three items are classified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as abortifacients used to induce abortions in pregnant women.”
Liz McCaman Taylor, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights – which sued the Trump administration in part to force the sale of the products – offered a blistering rebuke of the administration's decision to let $10 million worth of reproductive health products perish rather than sell them.
“This administration talks a lot about waste, fraud and abuse, and trying to root it out, but this is waste, fraud and abuse,” Taylor told the Post."
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These retarded asswipes still think the earth is flat!
WH Exposes Rare Historic Docs To “Harsh Conditions
City Cast DC reports:
It’s the latest in a string of troubles involving upgrades around the National Mall unveiled as part of America’s 250th birthday celebrations. In this case, the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft opened to the public on June 25 and displays rare copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, both bearing the original signature of President Abraham Lincoln. The documents – treasured turning points in the nation’s effort to end slavery – date back to the 1860s and are worth millions.
But three National Park Service employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, described a facility with faulty security measures. Notably, the employees said, the Park Service has struggled to maintain proper conditions for its rare and delicate documents.
Screens designed to shield the records from harsh light have been defective and temperatures inside the display case have repeatedly reached more than 80 degrees, according to the Park Service officials. Experts say that’s a violation of professional standards for housing historic documents and hot enough to accelerate decay....
"He's so fucking stupid and narcissistic, he thinks that surreptitiously destroying our nation's revered historical artifacts is the same as destroying our history. He's butthurt because he will never be revered, except by those who aspire to be as ignorant and twisted as he is." — teeveedub (comments)
"Trump doesn't give a fuck. He can't even read or understand those documents." — TK-Fla (comments)
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Trump wipes his ass with these documents! The racist motherfucker!
Sixteen Nobel-Winning Economists Warn That Major AI Job Losses Are Coming — Maggie Harrison Dupré
Over 200 economists, researchers and industry executives, including sixteen Nobel Prize winners, signed an urgent letter warning that AI could radically transform the economy at an unprecedented pace and scale — and that policymakers and governments need to move to mitigate the fallout.
Titled “We Must Act Now,” the letter is brief. It predicts that “AI may become radically more powerful over the next ten years,” and that acceleration in the tech’s capabilities “could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame.”
While possible risks include “large-scale job displacement,” there may also be “opportunities,” the letter suggests, citing “major gains in living standards.” But neither the risks nor the benefits of AI can be harnessed if leaders across policy, government, and industry don’t act quickly to understand the scale of AI’s potential impact on the workforce.
“Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI,” the letter declares, “and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”
Signees include Nobel-winning Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, New York University economist and Nobel winner Michael Spence, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, former OpenAI researcher-turned-critic Zoë Hitzig, current OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar, and Anthropic cofounder Jack Clark, among many others.
That said, despite the many big names who signed on, the letter doesn’t actually propose any solutions to the issues it raises. It’s more of a general awareness campaign about the scale of the problem society is facing.
But as the New York Times noted, perhaps the most notable thing about the letter is the intellectual breadth among signees, from AI optimists who have long predicted radical change, to skeptics who are less convinced of AI’s capacity to transform labor and the economy....
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Remove its access to power.
State Dept Offers Millions To European Far-Right Groups
The Telegraph reports:
Donald Trump’s administration is offering grants of up to $3m (£2.2m) to European civil society groups that share its views on censorship, mass migration and Western civilisation. On Monday, the US state department announced it would provide up to $5m (£3.7m) to groups that “address national sovereignty, migration, censorship, and lawfare challenges in line with our shared political philosophy, law, and Western heritage”.
The White House expects the funds to be distributed among two or three groups, with up to $3m on offer for the main recipient. The programme marks a first practical step in the White House’s long-running campaign to reshape the continent in line with its views on the direction of Western society.
The public notice posted on the State Department website refers to Marco Rubio’s speech at the 2026 Munich conference, where the secretary of state called for “renewing the US-Europe partnership” to “address modern challenge like mass migration and violations of free speech”.
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Tourism baby, Lil Marco, offers bribes to Hitler's descendents in Europe!
Health Care Workers Furious as NYC Replaces Nurses With AI — Frank Landymore
Twelve nurses in New York City were laid off on Sunday and replaced with AI software, according to their union — a move that comes not long after nurses went on strike and fought for safeguards against AI.
One of the laid off workers, Marilyn Shuler, had worked at Montefiore hospital in the Bronx as a utilization nurse for 39 years before suddenly losing her job. Utilization nurses review patient charts to show that their care is medically necessary so that an insurance company will cover it.
“I’ve always, always taken so much pride in the organization that I’ve worked for all these years, and just to be treated this way,” Shuler told The Guardian. “It’s disrespectful, and it’s very disheartening, and my colleagues feel the same way as well.”
The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), which represents the healthcare workers, issued a statement earlier this month warning that Montefiore intended to replace nurses with AI. That has now come to bear. It also drew attention to the fact that the company providing the AI software, Datavant, has partnerships with Palantir, the surveillance tech firm which has stirred considerable controversy for its collaboration with ICE....
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AI is an outrage to humanity. Rules must be put in place or we will see a huge disaster strike us!
Fund Families, Not Cruel Crackdowns — Alliyah Lusuegro
As working Americans struggle, the money for ICE’s cruelty comes right out of SNAP and Medicaid.
President Donald Trump and other Republicans like to say the United States does not have money for programs that address the needs of ordinary citizens.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said recently, saying that the nation had more important things to do, like “fighting wars.”
But in fact, the nation has plenty of money for such programs. It’s just that Trump wants to spend it on other things, like funding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.
In a largely party-line vote this June, Congress granted the Trump Administration another $70 billion for ICE and others to conduct mass deportations and detention. This colossal increase came less than a year after Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which allocated an unprecedented $170 billion through 2029 for his cruel immigration crackdown.
American families are grappling with a cost of living crisis; many are struggling to cover rent, groceries, electric bills, and health care. Yet rather than helping working people make ends meet, Republicans have, in these two bills, authorized a staggering $240 billion for the systematic separation of families and disruption of communities.
This new total equates to eight years of funding for ICE and Border Patrol. It is a sum greater than the gross domestic product of 161 nations.
Meanwhile, public approval for immigration enforcement agencies has plummeted as Americans have watched ICE agents invade cities, separate families, and brutalize citizens and non-citizens alike. We’ve seen people locked up in inhumane detention centers, where record numbers of people have died in custody. Others have been deported to countries they’ve never before set foot in, often without due process.
Worse still, the money funding these abuses comes directly out of programs that actually help families. The $240 billion windfall didn’t come from just anywhere. It’s paid for by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s severe cuts to Medicaid and SNAP—two essential and popular programs that provide health care and food aid to millions of working families. ...
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It's time for our government to start caring for us and to stop punishing us!
ICE Murders Continue — Robert Kuttner
After the third ICE murder in a week, including at least two victims who were not even intended targets, the Department of Homeland Security continues to lie about what actually occurred.
In Biddeford, Maine, Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, in the U.S. legally, was killed Monday when ICE agents mistook him for someone else. Four bullet holes in his windshield suggest that trigger-happy agents killed him in cold blood. Video of the aftermath shows his car aimlessly driving in circles, with the driver presumably unconscious or already dead, and an ICE vehicle ramming it to bring the car to a halt, and then dragging out Guerrero’s limp body...
And in Florida on Tuesday, a still unidentified man had an encounter with ICE agents at a gas station. He tried to leave, and was killed on the highway by an oncoming tractor trailer. It has not yet been disclosed whether he was the target of an ICE operation, or another case of mistaken identity.
Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare, the top prosecutor for Houston, said that the actions of federal immigration agents “in no way resemble” the tactics of “every law enforcement agency” he’s worked in. “Either these agents are completely untrained, or intentionally putting themselves in situations where they can justify firing into cars.”
Even after Secretary Mullin was posturing to reassure people in Maine, other administration officials were boasting that nothing had changed. Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said the order was only “a short pause just to make sure we’re doing the right thing,” in an interview with Fox News. “Operations continue. Arrests are at record numbers. Deportations are at record numbers.”
President Trump then explicitly directed ICE to reverse the suspension and let traffic stops continue. In posts on social media Wednesday morning, Trump declared that giving up traffic stops “won’t happen on my watch.” He later added: “[W]e must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”...
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Trump does not care how many murders are on his watch.
Goose-stepping police worker fired for Nazi regalia at high school ceremony: report — Tom Boggioni
Two employees of the Chicago Police Department were fired after one of them wore Nazi regalia and performed gestures associated with the Third Reich on a high school stage, according to a new report.
According to a report from WTTW, the firings came to light Wednesday by the city's Inspector General David Glockner, who reported that the young cadet appeared on stage in a Nazi uniform, executed a military march, and displayed the "Sieg Heil" salute before an audience.
"The uniform, march and salute created the impression that the individual was evoking Nazi Germany," the inspector general concluded, stating the performance brought "discredit" upon the entire police department.
The incident spiraled into additional misconduct when a second CPD employee circulated photographs of the cadet in the Nazi outfit among colleagues at police headquarters, creating what investigators described as "an offensive work environment."
During the investigation, the second employee also provided false statements to the inspector general, compounding the disciplinary violations, and was subsequently fired, with the report noting that both have been designated as permanently ineligible for rehire.
A CPD supervisor also received a department reprimand for failing to properly report the misconduct through established departmental channels.
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Nazis may not and cannot serve!
Political commentator fact-checks Trump and Cruz's claims on the economy — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
President Donald Trump celebrated on Truth Social a June consumer price index decline of 0.4% and an annual inflation rate of 3.5%, claiming credit for reducing "Democrat-caused inflation."
"Great News America!" He began, "The Dumocrat caused inflation is way down from what it had been, and we will bring it down still further. MAGA!"
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) reacted to Trump's claims, writing, "Media doesn’t want you to know this." He, however, attached a CNBC clip reporting the news.
Political commentator Andy Ostroy fact-checked Cruz, pointing out a critical detail: inflation stood at 3% on January 20, 2025, when Former President Joe Biden left office, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Furthermore, Ostroy clarified, with inflation now at 3.5%, the rate has actually increased since Trump took office, not decreased.
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Cruz caries a certified lying wuss card. Safe to say that most Americans know the economy is in the tank due to the Nazi retard.
'Pillow over Minnesota's face': Trump stuns with surprising early morning endorsement — Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump's decision to endorse ally Mike Lindell for Minnesota governor early Wednesday morning stunned critics who argued it would hand victory to the Democrats.
Lindell, known as the founder of My Pillow and an outspoken election denier, will face off with Republicans House Speaker Lisa Demuth and Kendall Qualls in the Minnesota August primary.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is expected to be the leading Democratic nominee and has gained a "massive fundraising advantage," according to the Minnesota Reformer.
Trump offered his "complete and total endorsement" of Lindell in a post on his Truth Social platform, calling the CEO "one of America's greatest and most hard working Patriots."
Critics online were quick to respond to the announcement.
"Trump endorsing Mike Lindell is the political equivalent of putting a pillow over Minnesota’s face," the account SundaeDivine, an active political commentator with more than 129,000 followers, wrote on X.
"The insurrection pillow man?This is a guaranteed way to give [Klobuchar] a huge landslide victory in the governor's race this November, heading right into the 2028 presidential primaries," law professor and former chief White House ethics lawyer Richard W. Painter wrote on X.
"Months after his ICE thugs terrorized Minnesota for months and murdered two of our citizens, Trump claims 'I love Minnesota' while endorsing Mike Lindell for governor. (Lindell has 0 chance of winning a general election here)," journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X.
"Mike Lindell in Minnesota, Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin; election-denying gubernatorial candidates in the Midwest. The only difference is the mustache," political writer Dan Shafer wrote on X....
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Scumbags, Inc.
Mike Lindell - for the record.
Secret Criminal Past: My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell’s Drug Addiction, Arrests, Divorce & Bankruptcy Exposed
Sweet Dreams, Nightmare Past! My Pillow Inventor Confesses: I Was A Crackhead
Jury finds leading proponent of ‘The Big Lie’ defamed former voting equipment employee
Trump lashes out at 'Corrupt Dumocrats' after 'pillow man' endorsement draws mockery — Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump lashed out at Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on Wednesday after his endorsement of My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell for Minnesota governor raised eyebrows among critics.
Trump got defensive in a post on his Truth Social platform, attacking the longtime Democratic lawmaker and gubernatorial candidate.
"Amy Klobuchar, the lightly respected Senator from Minnesota, is running for Governor to take the place of the current Corrupt and Incompetent Tim Walz," Trump wrote.
Klobuchar has opted not to seek re-election to the Senate in 2026 and is expected to be the leading Democratic nominee with a "massive fundraising advantage," according to the Minnesota Reformer. She launched her bid in January after Gov. Tim Walz announced he would not seek a third term....
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Trump: "Are you makin fun of my hat? I like hats! They come straight from China! This one is so pretty, white and all - know whut I mean? It DOES NOT MEAN U STUPID ASSHOLE!
Omar Files Resolution Opposing Rubio’s ICC Threat as He’s Sued for ICC Sanctions — Sharon Zhang
“If we respect human rights,” Rep. Ilhan Omar said, “we have nothing to fear from the ICC.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) has introduced legislation urging the U.S. to join the International Criminal Court (ICC), pushing back against Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s campaign to “dismantle” the institution. The move comes as Rubio has been slapped with a new lawsuit accusing him of unconstitutionally sanctioning the court’s officials and a UN human rights expert.
Earlier this week, Rubio announced that the U.S. is engaging in an all-out campaign to attack the ICC, which was created as a mechanism to prosecute individuals responsible for carrying out grave violations of human rights, like genocide and war crimes. The Trump administration has already taken sweeping actions against the ICC, including a wide-reaching sanctions campaign against the court that seeks to erode its ability to carry out its mandate.
On Wednesday, Omar said that she’s introducing a resolution, similar to one she introduced in 2022, that would call on the U.S. to become a full member of the ICC, joining 125 other countries that are party to the court’s founding statute.
Rubio did not mince words when he threatened the ICC in a video and op-ed published Monday, saying that the U.S. is undertaking a “whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the court, especially with regard to its ability to prosecute U.S. officials and soldiers.
Omar has condemned Rubio’s argument that the U.S.’s sovereignty is threatened by the existence of the court. “Secretary Rubio’s announcement that he will dismantle the International Criminal Court is reckless and dangerous,” Omar said in a statement on Monday....
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Lil Marco Polio should be condemned. He's a worthless tourisim baby! Ship him out, Trump!
The Fight Against Surveillance Cameras Is a Struggle for Democracy — Ed Vogel
In a growing movement, over 80 communities have canceled, rejected, or deactivated automated license plate readers.
When residents of Madison County, North Carolina, sought to speak about the county’s AI surveillance cameras at a recent Madison County Commissioners meeting, commissioner Michael Garrison’s response was simple: “You will not speak on Flock tonight.”
A clip capturing Garrison’s move to prevent public comment soon went viral, resonating with others waging similar battles in their communities. This sort of democratic abuse is not unusual when it comes to the fight against Flock Safety, automated license plate readers more broadly, and other forms of surveillance.
To thousands of people across the country demanding an end to the use of automated license plate readers, it has become abundantly clear that the struggle is deeper than surveillance. At its core, organizing to end the use of automated license plate readers is a fight to imagine and build meaningful practices of democracy.
While companies like Flock Safety, Axon, and Motorola Solutions (among others) sell cameras to cities and police departments across the country under the auspices of improving public safety, these AI surveillance cameras are much more powerful than the companies pushing them suggest, and it is increasingly clear that they actually make us all less safe. These misnamed cameras are always on, collecting data on passing cars at all hours, and do more than just document license plates of driving cars: They can make essentially all information captured in a photo — including the make of a car, color, manufacturer, if the car has dents, bumper stickers, etc. — searchable by police and corporate customers.
This past year has exposed just how dangerous automated license plate readers are as Flock Safety’s products have reportedly been used in immigration enforcement, abortion monitoring, repeated incidents of stalking, and experienced major cybersecurity breaches. But Flock is not alone. Motorola Solutions has long partnered with federal immigration enforcement, while Axon has deep ties to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a history of major ethics violations. Flock has rightfully earned the public’s ire, but these problems are constitutive of the police surveillance industry more broadly....
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We got rid of cameras taking photos at intersections. What's the difference with this invasive crap? Put an end to it!
Why are Trump and the GOP Tearing America Apart? — Thom Hartmann
One year after Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," millions have lost food assistance and healthcare while billionaires pocket massive tax cuts. The bigger question is: why?
Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.
They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.
That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.
She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.
In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.
And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.
None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food...
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America has so rejected Trump and his folly that he must get even. It doesn't matter he destroys himself in the process. He knows it is a suidice mission.
Trump Overturns DHS Decision to Suspend ICE Traffic Stops After Killings, White House Says — David Gilmour
President Donald Trump personally intervened Wednesday to overturn an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) decision to temporarily suspended Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) traffic stops in a move that has reinstated the practice.
Fox News correspondent Alexis McAdams reported the clarification issued by the White House, which said Trump reversed the suspension on Wednesday morning, just hours after he demanded ICE resume using traffic stops in immigration enforcement operations in a Truth Social post.
According to the White House, the DHS memo circulated to field office directors on Tuesday was an internal directive that was “quickly overturned,” and argued the memo did not represent a broader administration policy....
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No need to deport! Murder them all!
Hair Hitler speaketh!
‘Inside Job’: Widow of Man Killed in Trump Assassination Attempt Believes Government Was Behind It — Sean James
The widow of Corey Comperatore, the former fire chief who was killed in the 2024 assassination attempt against President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, believes the government was behind the shooting.
Helen Comperatore shared her thoughts in an interview with NewsNation’s Rich McHugh on Monday.
“I believe it was an inside job, inside the government somewhere,” Comperatore said.
“And this was a political [plot]?” McHugh asked.
“Oh yeah, absolutely,” Comperatore said.
“Have you seen evidence to that?” McHugh followed up.
“Oh, I’ve been told things,” she said. “But I have something that happened with me that just afterwards and you’re starting to put the pieces together, it just made total sense.”
NewNation interviewed Helen Comperatore two years after her husband was shot and killed at a Trump rally while shielding his wife and two daughters....
"The administration has apparently learned how to heal a flesh wound to the ear in a matter of a few days unless it's a matter of divine intervention." — I_phantom (comments)
"Once the Secret Service played along for the victory power photo pose, I think we all knew the assassination attempt had been faked.
It's just so Trumpian." — Dahlia White (comments)
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The cheap wrestling trick is the dead giveaway.
‘I’m Not an Election Denier’: Trump’s New DNI Nominee Says Under Oath Joe Biden Won the 2020 Election — Kathianne Boniello
President Donald Trump‘s nominee for director of National Intelligence acknowledged under oath Wednesday that his boss did not win the 2020 election against Joe Biden.
Jay Clayton was appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee for his confirmation hearing when the moment occurred.
Under questioning from Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Clayton gave a carefully worded response when he was asked about Biden’s White House victory:
MARK WARNER: If you confirmed, you’re gonna make sure that you speak truth to power, and that means even if the truth is not the preferred narrative that somebody wants to hear. So let me just ask you what it should be a simple question.
Do you deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 election?
JAY CLAYTON: Senator, I’m not, I’m not an election denier. Joe, Joe Biden was certified as the president of the United States.
WARNER: Election denial is something we cannot have, um so I will take that as you do not deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
CLAYTON Yeah, I’m, I’m not, I’m not I think, let me just be clear. We, we have substantial work to do and I’ve made — in improving our electoral processes. It’s part of national security, um, and I, I feel strongly about that....
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Itty bitty Baby Trump can't wrap his head around reality as about all of us can. If confirmed, how long can this Clayton guy last at his job before Trump beheads him?
The anti-woke Westerners fleeing to Russia — Rachel Cunliffe
Do you feel like your country no longer represents your values? Are you struggling to recognise the community around you? Has migration, in your mind, fundamentally altered the place you call home? If so, here’s a radical idea: become a migrant and move to a country that is actively welcoming people like you. The catch? That country is Russia.
In 2024, Russia launched the “shared values” visa – or “anti-woke” visa, if you prefer. There’s no employment requirement or language test; all disillusioned Westerners have to do is denounce “the destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes” of their homelands. The Russian government claims to have received nearly 3,400 applications – although, as the presenter Dan Hardoon caveats, these numbers are difficult to verify. What’s not difficult is finding people eager to share their stories of escaping Western oppression by embracing the conservative utopia that is Russia under Vladimir Putin. They might not want to talk to Hardoon about it (the biased BBC can hardly be trusted), but they’re happy to hit the influencer circuit, making viral videos about their marvellous new lives, where the streets are clean, people are friendly, and politics is not run by the “gay agenda”.
The “moral migrants” who do speak to the BBC are more nuanced. A Christian man from Texas who believed moving to Russia was his “destiny” has since become concerned about the censorship in the country others portray as a free-speech paradise and admits he misses “the freedoms that have shaped the American personality”. A former Tory council candidate from Essex who emigrated to be with his Russian wife has no such qualms. Isn’t moving to Russia – and running a business encouraging other Brits to do the same – in the midst of Putin’s war quite a political thing to do? “I don’t really get involved in that. I’m not here as a politician.”...
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Must be a life of endless chaos to be "anti-woke" when it is more important than ever to not be sleeping on the job!
“ICE is everywhere”: In Houston, fear and grief permeate Latino neighborhoods after fatal shooting — Alejandro Santos Cid
As Latino and immigrant communities mourn the death of a Houston man, undocumented neighbors remain in hiding for fear of being next.
“He has a different bark for everything,” said Clara, who was born almost 55 years ago in Tamaulipas, Mexico, jumped the border into Texas 26 years ago, and has been living in this corner of Magnolia Park, a neighborhood in east Houston, ever since. “But whenever he howls, it’s because he hears the ambulance.”
Clara and her family had grown used to sirens echoing through their neighborhood, so they didn’t think much of it. She kept working around the house — cleaning, cooking, getting the day going.
As the morning went on, the noise outside increased. Clara, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she is undocumented, began to hear movement on the streets, helicopters flying over them.
The bad news didn’t take long to arrive. A friend called her husband, Juan, and told him a Mexican worker had just been killed. The ambulance Buddy howled at was heading toward 6812 Canal St., barely two minutes from her home, to aid Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 55-year-old man who had just been shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent as ICE tried to stop the van he was driving after he picked up fellow construction workers to start their shift.
Salgado Araujo, a father of three who had lived and worked in Houston for 35 years, died in a nearby hospital. It was the first of two fatal ICE shootings within a week — an agent killed a 26-year-old immigrant from Colombia in Maine on Monday, also during a traffic stop.
On Tuesday, President Trump ordered ICE officers to halt most vehicle stops, The New York Times reported. That order came just hours after a tractor-trailer struck and killed a 28-year-old man who tried to run from ICE agents at a gas station in St. Augustine, Fla.
“This changes nothing. The raids will continue,” said 44-year-old community organizer Jessica Campos. “Families will still be terrorized in their homes, and people will still be targeted at their places of employment, putting even more people at risk of harm or even death. We are not safe anywhere.
“Vehicle stops were never the real problem,” she added. “The problem is the people behind the guns who keep killing our people, ICE.”
Trump’s mass deportation program has sent ICE agents into neighborhoods across Texas and the nation, hunting for undocumented immigrants. Agents first arrived in Magnolia Park months ago and started to arrest people. Neighbors went into hiding and warned each other about ICE sightings, suspicious unmarked vans parked near major intersections, friends being taken away....
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Trump has made life a misery for a large segment of its population. This is an act of terrorism.
Wisconsin Commission Finds Musk Likely Broke Law in Handing Out Checks to Voters — Chris Walker
Musk gave three voters million-dollar checks, encouraging them to vote in the 2025 state Supreme Court election.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC), a bipartisan panel that manages the elections process in the Badger State, has referred two felony-level complaints against Elon Musk to a local prosecutor’s office after he handed out checks to voters, encouraging them to vote in the 2025 state Supreme Court race.
The world’s first trillionaire (whose net worth recently slipped into multi-billionaire status) poured millions of his own dollars into that election, backing conservative, Trump-aligned Brad Schimel over the liberal candidate Susan Crawford. Musk also provided funding for a group that created deceptive ads during the campaign, spreading misinformation about Crawford in radio and TV ads.
Crawford wound up winning the election, defeating Schimel by nearly 10 percentage points in the most expensive court race the country has ever seen.
Despite his substantial spending in the race, it was Musk’s decision to reward would-be voters with million-dollar checks that resulted in the WEC investigating his involvement in the race
Last week, the WEC, which is composed equally of Democratic and Republican members, voted 5-1 in favor of referring Musk to the Brown County District Attorney’s office, relating to his million-dollar checks to voters in Green Bay. District Attorney David Lasee, a Republican, will have 40 days to decide whether to seek charges against Musk....
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Has he bribed them too?
'Completely unprecedented': Why Trump keeps lying about 2020 — Amy Goodman
We get an update on elections and voting rights in the United States from Mother Jones's national voting rights correspondent, Ari Berman, who warns of President Donald Trump's escalating attempts to “try to claim dictatorial power” and commit an “unprecedented intervention” into the 2026 midterm elections. Whether it takes the form of claims of foreign interference, canceling mail-in voting or requiring proof of citizenship, “[t]he bottom line here is they keep lying about the 2020 election so that they can justify massive interference in the 2026 election,” says Berman. “That’s something that we all need to be very vigilant about.”...
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The mentally ill Trump is obsessed with being our dictator and commanding every aspect of our lives. What's the mystery?
In fact, we have never seen a larger bunch of racist, bigoted, treasonous, murdering asswipes in our government in our history. Can we understand this yet?
Inside Trump's secret network preparing for civilizational collapse — The Conversation
Politics of the end times
...Over the centuries, political leaders have often invoked fears of decline and collapse. In ancient times, Augustus, the first Roman emperor, championed the narrative that Rome faced moral collapse to justify concentrating power in his own hands. Yet the current moment of “end-times politics” is different on several fronts. Threats, both real and imagined, spread faster than ever, diffused through social media algorithms that favour hysteria and conspiracy.
In Silicon Valley, influential figures routinely discuss AI as either humanity’s salvation or an extinction event. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has described the AI race as “our Oppenheimer moment”, when the world’s rich nations must decide whether to halt the development of a dangerous technology or tip the balance of power in its favour.
Yet the phenomenon extends beyond eccentric tech circles. End-times narratives have made their way into the halls of power, as political figures seize the opportunity to propagate radical politics....
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We live in precarious and unstable times. Our doom may come at any moment. The wages of failure to grasp a disasterous situation. Make no mistake.
The Lie About Mitch McConnell—and Who It’s Really For — Cliff Schecter
From there it goes somewhere bigger. Cliff’s argument is that McConnell did not just enable this era—he built the machine that produced it.
They are lying to your face about Mitch McConnell—and they are betting you will not trust your own eyes. In a livestream that ran an hour and a half and never once dragged, Cliff sat down with Kait Justice and Ellie Leonard to take apart the AI-polished story that McConnell's up, energetic, and racing back to work after cardiac arrest and CPR at eighty-four. Watch Scott Jennings’s eyes as he repeats it.
Then ask the question the whole episode is built around: who benefits when a party manufactures a recovery and dares you to disbelieve it?
From there it goes somewhere bigger. Cliff’s argument is that McConnell did not just enable this era—he built the machine that produced it. Citizens United, a captured judiciary, dirty money he all but extorted out of corporate America, judges he blocked and those he rammed through: pull the thread and you arrive at the predator class the Epstein files keep exposing....
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We have been hoodwinked. We've been had. We've been bamboozled.
Report: FCC Officials Took Pricey Gifts From Paramount
ProPublica reports:
The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.
The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.
Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.
Five months earlier, Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty cast a decisive vote approving Paramount’s historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Now, the commissioner and a guest enjoyed the star-studded celebration thanks to tickets gifted to her by Paramount worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.
The other commissioner who approved the merger watched from a prized perch. FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.
"The glory of unabashed corruption." — Forteaneye (comments)
"The people who took them AND the people who gave them belong in prison." — Greg (comments)
"1). Donald Trump took office eight years ago, pledging to “drain the swamp” and end the domination of Washington influence peddlers. Now, he’s opening his second term by rolling back prohibitions on executive branch employees accepting major gifts from lobbyists, and ditching bans on lobbyists seeking executive branch jobs or vice versa, for at least two years. Trump issued a Day 1 executive order that rescinded one on ethics that former President Joe Biden signed when he took office in January 2021.
2). On February 10, 2025, President Trump removed the director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), David Huitema. Huitema, appointed to a five-year term by President Biden, took office in December 2024 after his confirmation by the Senate. — DaddySnark (comments)
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Carr has been nailed! The old Paramount Payola Roll Blues! The corruption runs deep in these FCC bribes.
Please submit your resignations. Then we expect arrests, indictments and prison for all these Trump criminals!
Civil Rights Leaders Plan Voting Rights March On DC
Reuters reports:
Civil rights leaders announced plans for a Washington march ?to defend voting rights, saying on Tuesday that recent court decisions have weakened key federal protections against racial discrimination in voting. The coalition — led by Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and joined by Martin Luther King III, Arndrea Waters ?King, and labor and civil rights groups — will host the “March on Washington 2026: Defend the ?Vote” march on August 28.
That will mark the 63rd anniversary of ?the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a ?Dream” speech. The campaign centers on the Supreme Court’s April ruling weakening Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a key provision used to challenge voting laws and electoral maps that discriminate on the basis ?of race or dilute minority voting power.br>
"A 10 million man ARMED OPEN CARRY march on Washington might be more effective. Minorities have 2A protections too.
Surely that would give ICE something to think about." — Maternal Fornicator (comments)
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Prepare for Trump to literally murder them! Return fire!
Iran Threatens To Halt All Energy Exports From Region
The Associated Press reports:
The U.S. reimposed a naval blockade on Iran and intensified its airstrike campaign early Wednesday in retaliation for Tehran’s attacks on ships trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The American strikes hit an Iranian army barracks, killed at least seven troops and wounded more than 260 people across the country, Iranian officials said.
Days of back-and-forth strikes by the U.S. and Iran across the Middle East — and renewed threats to the waterway crucial to global energy supplies — have shredded the interim deal to end the conflict and the region could tip back into all-out war.
Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard threatened Wednesday to halt all energy exports from the Middle East over the blockade. “The export of oil and gas from the region will be either for everyone or for no one,” it said.
"Children from every country in the region are growing up seeing the USA as aggressors and destructors… they will grow up to hate us ( if they are not bombed to death by us) …. Meanwhile, the richest oil countries in the Middle East that specialize in producing terrorist just sit back and give billions more to Jared to “invest”…. playing the long game while stinky plays into their hands." — Hell-No-Kitty (comments)
"That's been the case for decades. I remember seeing an Iranian being interviewed at the start of this current mess who said something along the lines of he 'hates the Iranian government, but trusts the American government even less because he saw what it did to Iraq.'" — archiveit (comments)
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A friend of mine said to me, "We don't want them to have a nuclear bomb." My answer is: I don't want ANYONE to have a nuclear bomb!
Ossoff: Trump Is A “Committed Lifelong Racist” [VIDEO]
“Just consider for a moment that we understand the president may be threatening to declare sitting United States senators illegitimate. If that is the course of action he pursues, he is calling Georgia voters illegitimate. From the very moment Georgia voters rejected him in 2020, he’s been on the warpath because he was humiliated by the rebuke that Georgians dealt him. And he was humiliated and furious in particular, as a committed lifelong racist, that it was Black voters in Georgia who were instrumental in his defeat.” – Sen. Jon Ossoff, speaking to MS Now.
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Jon Ossoff for President 2028
If Letterboxd sells out to Netflix, the people lose ‘ Coleman Spilde
The film-logging platform is weighing a sale. Its users are weighing a mutiny
...Since its expansion into original content, Netflix has made it clear that its sole priority is Netflix, not its customers, and certainly not art. For a platform like Letterboxd, which has built its brand on reverence for film and all those who love it, selling to a company like Netflix would be a cold act of back-stabbing betrayal....
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Capitalism, for its few good points, is largely a stemroller over freedom.
Unltimately, the lust for money ruins everything. Just look at Trump.
‘Really, Really Big News!’ Trump Previews His Thursday Rigged Election Announcement — Kathianne Boniello
The Washington Reporter claimed Trump’s speech would include the claim that Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff (D) and Raphael Warnock’s (D) razor-thin election victories were “illegitimate,” prompting both elected officials to respond.
Both Ossoff and Warnock won in contests that went to run-offs, and their elections helped Democrats take control of the Senate.
Ossoff slammed the idea that Trump would attack him.
“Donald Trump’s spiral continues. The failed president, pocketing billions as he drives up prices, is afraid to lose the midterms,” Ossoff wrote.
“So he will reheat debunked election conspiracy theories and tell bizarre new lies to deny his 2020 defeat and attack voting rights. This is a disaster for Trump puppet Mike Collins,” he added, speaking of his Republican challenger.
“Already mired in scandal, Mike will now have to double down on conspiracy theories toxic in the General Election,” Ossoff continued.
“From the start, Trump’s obsession with Georgia elections revealed his fury that Black voters were instrumental to his defeat. I’m asking concerned citizens nationwide to join me and support our voter protection efforts in Georgia.”
Warnock also spoke out.
“Donald Trump is at war with our democracy and Georgia is ground zero,” he wrote on X. “But this is John Lewis’ Georgia. We are not intimidated. We are not moved. Mr. President, instead of attacking our democracy, why don’t you do something about the high cost of gas, housing, and health care?
Warnock added: “Donald Trump is trying to cast doubt on 2020 to justify interfering in 202,” he added. “We see what he is doing and it will not work. Stay vigilant.”
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Donnie, America can't abide a LOSER or a LIAR!
Trump Finally Pays E. Jean Carroll $5.6 Million After Exhausting His Appeals — Sarah Rumpf
President Donald Trump has finally paid E. Jean Carroll the $5.6 million judgment he owes her for one of the two lawsuits she filed against him, after exhausting his appeals.br>
The cases arose from Carroll’s allegations in a 2019 article that Trump had raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. Trump vociferously denied the accusations and launched a series of attacks on Carroll, all leading to her suing him for defamation and a separate civil claim for the alleged rape. The ex-president’s deposition included several shocking moments, including one where Trump — who had been adamant that Carroll was “not my type” — mistook a photo of her for his second wife, Marla Maples.
In May 2023, a New York jury found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, and awarded $5 million in damages.
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The chiseler finally pays a debt! Has hell frozen over yet?
Pete Buttigieg: Time for Radical Change — Tim Miller
Democrats tend to defend the institutions that Trump is tearing apart, but Pete Buttigieg says the party should be focusing on the bigger, deeper structural problems the country is facing and the need for political reform. The kind of radical institutional changes he’d like to see include: expanding SCOTUS and the House of Representatives, statehood for Washington, D.C., and directly electing the president by popular vote. Plus, Pete gets candid about the “most fucked-up thing” that’s ever happened to his family, the big opportunity for Dems in Iowa in November, and Pete’s stumping for candidates in places where Fox News reigns....
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All issues supported by we here at LOTHN !
Trump Keeps Bombing, Nothing Keeps Changing — William Kristol
The National Mall has a new feature. No, not the once-again-drained Reflecting Pool. And no, not the mysterious gash the president insists some vandal (or “Vandal”) made in it—the length of which has grown, somehow, to 300 feet since the last time he complained about it. No, the new feature is a 10-foot “participation trophy” to Donald Trump for his war in Iran, installed by an anonymous protest-art group near the Martin Luther King Memorial. Not everyone can be a winner, right? Happy Tuesday.
Destruction Alone Doesn’t Win Wars
by Mark Hertling
The United States can destroy more targets than Iran. It can sink ships, eliminate missile batteries, strike command centers, and impose military losses that Tehran cannot reciprocate. But Iran does not have to match American firepower to achieve its goals. It must only keep commercial shipping at risk, energy markets unsettled, Gulf governments nervous, American bases under threat, and U.S. forces responding to the next crisis.
Washington may be winning most exchanges of fire, but Tehran has the initiative: It still decides, for the most part, where the conflict occurs, which American assets must be defended, and how many additional missions U.S. forces must assume.
The Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran called for an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations,” but it was never a peace settlement. Its vague language governing commercial shipping through the strait virtually guaranteed competing interpretations. Halfway through the MOU’s sixty-day negotiating period, questions about Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions, and U.S. force posture also remain unresolved.
With the resumption of combat in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States is being pulled into multiple overlapping campaigns: striking Iranian nuclear and military capabilities, protecting commercial shipping, suppressing coastal missile systems, defending regional bases, and reassuring Gulf partners. But there is no clearly articulated political end state. This is mission creep...
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The helpless and hopeless!
Marco Rubio Gonna Put An End To This Whole 'International Law' Bullsh*t — Gary Legum
We don’t know how to tell everyone this, but the United States has declared war again. The enemy this time? The insidious globalists, rogue bureaucrats, and power-mad leaders of the ... International Criminal Court?
That’s right, those power-mad whores have rampaged through the world long enough, with their sense of justice and their desire to enforce “so-called international law,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio sneered in a video released on Monday. So-called! Sir, the Geneva Conventions would like a word.
The video and an accompanying (incredibly stupid) op-ed in The Wall Street Journal were part of a rollout of this new Trump administration initiative to discourage the rest of the planet from holding our nation accountable when we do shit like kill people and blow stuff up just because we feel like it. We are America, dammit, and we will drone-strike all the unarmed Colombian fishermen we want.
Here is how Rubio — or more likely some State Department hack — began his op-ed in the Journal:
Most of us would struggle to imagine a world in which U.S. soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents and elected leaders could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America.
God forbid the world should try to hold the United States to any sort of standard. God forbid anyone should say Excuse us, Mr. America with your gigantic American penis, sir, but would you mind not starting unprovoked wars that cause untold suffering? We’d be ever so grateful.
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Marco Polio: The Little Nazi Snot! All to cover-up Trump and his Criminal Syndicate!
Trump’s Plan to Corrupt American Science — Robert Kuttner
Ever since World War II, the American system of peer-reviewed grants to support science has made our great research universities the envy of the world, and has been a key source of commercial innovation as well. President Trump has already substantially weakened that system with a series of cuts and delays in federal research funding, as a way of punishing universities. Now, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025, proposes to finish the job.
Under OMB’s proposed rule, all federal research awards, hundreds of billions of dollars every year, would be reviewed by Trump political appointees, who could veto them if they didn’t fit the president’s agenda. Even existing grants could be terminated on the same grounds.
The rule was put out for comment on May 29. The deadline for comments was July 13. As of the weekend, a record 93,000 comments had been received, the vast majority of them negative. The relatively few positive ones were mostly variations on the same form letter.
The proposal has created wall-to-wall solidarity in the scientific community. “This latest move is a brazen power grab by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to buck the will of Congress and the American people and will make future discoveries less likely,” Sudip Parikh, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, warned in a statement.
Political control of science could veto all research on climate, on diseases that happen to afflict different ethnic groups differently, and could blacklist scientists who even incidentally have been associated with affirmative action programs. It could also block data sharing and participation of American researchers in international conferences or consortia that include people from nations that have annoyed Trump. The ramifications are endless.
While the threat to scientific research has gotten most of the attention and resistance, the OMB proposed rule is not limited to science. It directly politicizes all federal grant funding, from agencies ranging from the National Endowment for the Arts to HUD, the Agriculture Department, and the Department of Transportation.
All told, the federal government spends $1.2 trillion a year in grants and cooperative agreements. According to Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program director at the National Institutes of Health, who now writes a Substack, “Federal grants are not peripheral to how states and communities function. They represent, on average, 36 cents of every dollar a state spends.”
Can Trump and Vought get away with this extreme power grab? Vought’s rulemaking calls for the new system to be finalized by October 1, conveniently before the November election when a new Congress might act to reverse it. Reviews of comments are required by law. There is no time between now and the end of September for OMB to review all the comments, but that is not likely to stop Vought....
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Trump's hatred, greed and destruction know no bounds. End his pillaging!
Trump's Reflecting Pool fiasco takes a turn as onlookers zero in on motorcade tire tracks — David Edwards
Critics zeroed in on photos of tire tracks scarring the floor of the newly drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where the presidential motorcade drove weeks earlier.
President Donald Trump drained the pool Monday, insisting vandals had left a 300-yard gash in its lining. But reporters and on-the-ground onlookers told CNN they saw no gash.
Photos of the scene that appeared to show tire tracks on the pool's floor quickly went viral on social media.
Back in May, Trump's motorcade had rolled across the freshly sealed pool floor, leaving tire marks caught on camera. When the pool drained Monday, Washington, D.C., photographer Joe Flood posted images of the basin floor showing two long parallel lines in the blue coating.
"...for Reflecting Pool fans: take a look at the drained sections. If there's a 350-foot cut in it, I don't see it yet," Flood wrote on X, including photos showing what appeared to be tire tracks.
The criticism was instant, with political commentator Keith Edwards highlighting the photos on X to his 1 million viewers. "BREAKING: Trump drained the reflecting pool, and it DID reveal damage... tire marks," Edwards said.
Attorney and political commentator Seth Abramson connected the damage to Trump's motorcade visit.
"Evidence has mounted that the supposed 'gash' in the Reflecting Pool is... tire tracks Trump caused by insisting his many-ton presidential convoy drive on the pool's fragile surface. Why? He was too lazy to walk. Per his own edict, he must now do 10 years in federal prison," Abramson wrote on X.
The Trump administration has not publicly explained why the motorcade needed to cross the unfinished pool floor. Three days before the May 7 drive, Trump had boasted the coating was indestructible.
"If you had a knife, you can't even cut it," the president said on May 4. "So strong, so powerful. It's like powerful rubber."
After Trump's vandalism theory didn't hold up to scrutiny, White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers dismissed it as "dumb and unfounded."...
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How fucking dumb is this fuckwit? This fucking dumb!
Marco Rubio Threatens to “Teach” the ICC the “Full Meaning of American Resolve” — Jake Johnson
The secretary of state announced what he characterized as a “campaign to dismantle” the International Criminal Court..
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday announced what he characterized as a “campaign to dismantle” the International Criminal Court, the Hague-based tribunal tasked with investigating and charging individuals with war crimes and other violations.
In a video posted to social media, Rubio accused the international court of “waging a war against our country — not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law.” The top American diplomat threatened that the US “will teach the ICC the full meaning of American resolve.”
The US State Department said in a statement that Rubio’s new campaign against the ICC would “feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the court’s “ability to operate, target American servicemen or officials, or otherwise threaten American sovereignty.” The US is not party to the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established the ICC.
US President Donald Trump and his subordinates, who have been accused of myriad violations of international law, have adopted an increasingly aggressive posture toward the ICC since taking power last January.
In a February 6, 2025 executive order, Trump declared “a national emergency to address” the purported “threat” posed by the ICC and announced sanctions against court officials, including its judges. The president’s order cited the ICC’s “investigations concerning personnel of the United States and certain of its allies, including Israel,” which is also not party to the Rome Statute....
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The full meaning of fascist criminality since Hitler! This little Nazi must be leveled! Even Al Capone wasn't this bad! These Trump Nazis are world-class outlaws!
The Oligarch's Warning: This Fall, America Decides Which of Russia's Four Futures to Follow — Thom Hartmann
The permanent fence around Lafayette Square isn't just about security. It's the latest warning that oligarchy is preparing to defend itself from democracy.
Friday afternoon the Trump administration released a formal proposal to ring Lafayette Square with a permanent fence up to ten feet tall and to install gates across Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th and 17th Streets, all of it designed so officials can seal off America’s most famous protest ground within minutes.
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton had already introduced legislation to stop Trump, warning that we shouldn’t leave “citizens peering at their democracy from behind permanent fences.”
Lafayette Square is where Alice Paul and her Silent Sentinels stood through freezing winters demanding that Woodrow Wilson support women’s suffrage, and where peaceful protesters were gassed and beaten in June of 2020 so Donald Trump could stroll across the park for a photo op, Bible in hand.
For over two centuries, every president since John Adams has had to look out his window at Americans exercising their First Amendment right to tell him exactly what they think of him.
This administration proposes to end that tradition with steel pickets spaced four inches apart, and to have the whole apparatus ready as we head toward a November election that could break the GOP’s grip on Congress or see open corruption of our election by Trump’s goons, which would inevitably lead to mass protests.
Governments that trust their own people don’t wall themselves off from them; fortress states do....
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Trump totalitarianism must be defeted. America will revolt.
Judge's 'scalding' Trump takedown opens the door: 'Impeachment is next' — Brett Wilkins
A progressive US senator on Monday welcomed a federal judge’s ruling that found President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an illegal act of self-dealing, while calling for the Republican to be impeached for a third time.
Trump and his two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, “acted in bad faith and for an improper purpose by ‘collusively filing a lawsuit with claims subject to multiple dispositive defenses solely to provide cover for a collusive settlement,’” US District Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams—who was appointed by former President Barack Obama—wrote in her 56-page ruling.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called Williams’ order “a scalding, blistering judicial opinion calling out Trump’s sham litigation, striking down his corrupt IRS immunity, and holding his sycophant lawyers to account.”
“That’s a good start,” the senator said. “Impeachment is next.”
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Trump will be impeached this time. But he will refuse to leave office.
Trump niece says president facing 'perfect storm' of rapid decline — Thomas Kika
Mary L. Trump, the niece of President Donald Trump, claimed in a new interview that her uncle's deterioration is being hastened by "decades" of living with untreated "psychiatric disorders," which has created a "perfect storm," per The Daily Beast.
The younger Trump is the daughter of Fred Trump Jr., the president's late older brother, and a clinical psychologist. Over the last several years, she has emerged as the only real critic of her uncle's political agenda from within his own family, calling out his policies in numerous books and interviews, while also warning of the family histories and conditions that have created his warped psyche.
On Monday, she spoke with former CNN White House correspondent Jessica Yellin for a discussion facilitated by Big Tent USA. As The Daily Beast reported, she was pressed about "how she would assess the president’s current mental and physical state as someone who knows him personally," and surmised that he is currently dealing with a "perfect storm" of circumstances, worsened by leaving serious psychiatric disorders untreated for "decades."
“He’s somebody who has lived for decades with longstanding, undiagnosed, and untreated psychiatric disorders," she said. "As with many illnesses, including psychiatric illnesses, when they’re left untreated, they worsen over time.”...
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Who cares? He reamains souless.
Trump Marks Butler Anniversary By Discussing 'Very Handsome' Sean Hannity's Love Life — Conover Kennard
Fox's Lawrence Jones marked the two-year anniversary of the Butler rally shooting, you know, that thing before Trump's ear grew back, by asking the President how he's feeling about it now.
Trump's answer skipped the question entirely, instead launching into how long he's known Ainsley Earhardt and her connection to Sean Hannity — capped off by a jab about why she was drawn to him in the first place. Whatever emotional reflection Jones was fishing for, he didn't get it.
Remarkably, at one point, Jones said, "You don't want to talk about yourself," and I'm not gonna lie: My sip of root beer (don't judge me) might have come out of my nose a little from laughing.
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Damaged ear cartilage does NOT grow back. This is nothing but bullshit for the suckers who eat it up.
Maine Man Killed By ICE Was In US Legally [VIDEO]
NBC News reports:
There is anger and outrage in the wake of a deadly shooting in Maine involving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. And officials now say the man who died was not the man agents were looking for. According to two state officials, Secreteary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told them the man kiled was not the target of the warrant being served. New surveillance video shows the final moments of that man’s life.
The white car circles an intersection in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday morning before an SUV hits it and both vehicles come to a stop. Moments later, the driver was shot by ICE agents. Immigrant rights groups say that man was a 26-year-old father from Colombia who was legally authorized to work in the U.S. “The family is just feeling absolutely devastated and distraught,” said Ruben Torres of the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition.
"They shot him, dragged his lifeless body onto the pavement, and handcuffed his corpse while his 3-year old daughter wearing Bluey pajamas watched in horror. If you say you voted for this you are an empty soulless vessel." — Warren (X)
"Susan Collins voted to fund ICE 70 billion dollars and this innocent father was shot dead." — Seafalls (comments)
"There may come a time where the people start shooting back and when they do they will be aiming above the vest (neck) and below the vest(groin)." — Thewolflam (comments)
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Indeed. But there are many retarded and soulless supporters of state murder. This is another murder by Trump. Yet he still orders his death squads to do this.
Republican Idaho AG Accuses DOJ Of Ethics Breach
Democracy Docket reports:
Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office accused President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice of potentially violating state ethics rules by threatening the state’s top election official with a criminal prosecution while suing him for the state’s voter rolls.
In a sharply worded letter sent Friday, the office of Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador told DOJ Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon to stop contacting Secretary of State Phil McGrane (R) directly and urged the department to dismiss its lawsuit seeking Idaho’s unredacted statewide voter registration list.
“First, you can stop threatening your friends in Idaho,” James Craig, a division chief in Labrador’s office, wrote. “Second, you can voluntarily dismiss your lawsuit against Secretary McGrane. As Secretary McGrane repeatedly made clear, he has taken significant steps to ensure that Idaho’s voter registration list only includes eligible U.S. citizens, and he has previously provided you with a copy of the public version of the voter registration list.”
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LOTHN has been saying the DOJ is corrupt for some time. Glad to see someone caught up with us.
Trump Opens Utah National Monuments To Drilling
The Washington Post reports:
President Donald Trump on Monday signed orders to shrink two national monuments in Utah by more than a million acres each, potentially opening up vast wilderness and sacred tribal lands to exploration for minerals, oil and gas.
The orders reduce the size of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument from about 1.87 million acres to about 181,500 acres, and Bears Ears National monument from about 1.36 million acres to about 121,100 acres. Both sites are home to spectacular expanses of Utah’s famous red rock cliffs and canyons, sandstone formations that are iconic among hikers and outdoor enthusiasts. That surpasses how much Trump initially shrank the two protected areas in 2017, a move that was undone by President Joe Biden.
Trump has declared a national energy emergency and rolled back dozens of environmental protections, seeking to aggressively boost drilling for oil and gas and mining for critical minerals that are essential to energy infrastructure. The two national monuments contain significant deposits of coal, uranium, oil and gas.
"Mike Lee pushed Fat Donnie into reducing the monuments and opening them up to drilling. On his own, Donnie might not even know where Utah is." — amy cuscuriae (comments)
"Seriously, there is NO security reasons and NO national emergencies of any kind out there! That Stupid Idiot, who is the real national emergency, is using such phrases as an excuse to exploit the entire nation and the world for personal gain.
Expect mass protests coming everyone who appreciate the beauty of the national monuments." — Owosso Harpist (comments)
"Anyone pushing for the expansion of extractive industry in the Americas right now is a literal enemy of humanity." — HunterSterlok (comments)
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I wonder how he would react to his family being assaulted? This is the same thing to America, you klutzfucker!
Does no one care about our country?
79-year-old Mitt Romney thinks no one over 80 should hold office — CK Smith
Romney, Trump, McConnell and Graham reignited questions this week about experience, fitness and succession in D.C.
Mitt Romney has reignited a debate that has followed American politics for years: When does experience become a liability?
The former Utah senator and 2012 Republican presidential nominee said this week that people in their 80s should not hold the country’s most powerful positions, arguing that the demands of modern leadership require a level of physical and cognitive ability that can become more difficult to maintain with age.
“I basically think people who are 80 and above really should not be running the world or running the country,” a 79-year-old Romney said in an interview with “Deseret Voices” while discussing the future of Republican leadership and the 2028 presidential race....
While there is a constitutional minimum age for public service — 30 for the Senate, 25 for the House and 35 for President, there is not a maximum age. Eighty percent of Americans believe there should be a maximum age to hold office
Romney’s comments ultimately raise a larger question than whether any individual politician is too old: How does America balance the wisdom of experience with the need for generational change?
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By 80 we've seen all the wisdom we need from a politican.
If we don't institute term limits we must use an age limit!
And Trump is a criminal. He should be treated like one!
Trump let ‘mask slip’ in overlooked ‘bombshell moment’: Jim Acosta Show — Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump uttered a remark Sunday “that didn’t get nearly enough attention,” according to the "Jim Acosta Show" Substack, one that saw “the mask slip in a bombshell moment” that carried with it a troubling implication.
Trump called into NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday to discuss the recent and sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and while the bulk of the discussion centered on the South Carolina Republican, Trump snapped at NBC News' Kristen Welker when she briefly steered the conversation elsewhere.
Welker asked Trump whether the Strait of Hormuz was open as his administration had claimed earlier that morning, despite Iranian officials declaring it to be “closed” the day before.
“I don’t want to talk about it because I want to honor the life of Lindsey Graham,” Trump said. “So I don’t want to talk about it. I told you that before the call!”
Welker responded by saying “yeah” before pivoting back to Graham, an exchange that Acosta flagged as troubling.
“That sounds an awful lot like there were demands set in exchange for this interview that were consistent with what went down on CNN,” wrote journalist Tommy Christopher in an analysis published Monday on Acosta's Substack.
“It also seems like even if those demands weren’t explicitly agreed to – although Welker did say ‘Yeah’ – both anchors largely complied with them and got back in line when Trump became displeased.”
Another anchor was hit with scrutiny over their Sunday interview with Trump: CNN’s own Jake Tapper, who was widely mocked Monday for failing to push back on the president as he dictated the direction of their interview.
“The exchange was a bad look,” Christopher said of Tapper’s interview with Trump. “He’s also taking heat for the volumes of insanity he ignored, after spilling gallons of ink calling the widely-known aging of President Biden ‘a cover-up.’”
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And Trump is a criminal. He should be treated like one!
You can't say it too many times!
Majority Of Workers Thinks Americans Should Get Half Of AI Profits, Since It's Stealing From Us Anyway — Robyn Pennacchia
Artificial intelligence is a bit of a reverse Robin Hood situation.
It steals from us, the relative-to-a-billionaire poor, in order to give to the rich. It steals water, it steals jobs, it steals people’s likenesses, it steals art, music, literature, journalism, research from people for the purposes of making a ton of money for already-rich billionaires, and also enhances their finances by making it so they don’t have to pay human beings to work in order to make their money.
Well, some folks are starting to think that may not be the most fair arrangement in the world.
Recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders has been suggesting that, since the way AI works is by stealing from us and possibly rendering us all unemployable, that we ought to get half of the profits. In June, he introduced legislation called American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would require all of the biggest AI companies in the United States to give the American public a 50 percent ownership stake....
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"Stealin', stealin', pretty mama don't you tell on me. I'm stealin' back to my same old used to be!" — Stealin', Stealin — The Memphis Jug Band, 1928.
Louisiana Youth Pastor Hit With 90 Molestation Charges
Shreveport’s ABC affiliate reports:
Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office detectives launched an inquiry on June 29 regarding four underage victims who reported abuse that allegedly took place between 1989 and 1995. Investigators subsequently identified 72-year-old David Mercer as the suspect. According to records, Mercer lived and worked in the area during that timeframe, serving as a youth minister at Cypress Baptist Church of Benton until his resignation in 1995.
With assistance from the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office, local detectives traveled to Folsom on July 10 to take Mercer into custody. Authorities also executed a search warrant at his home. At the time of his arrest, Mercer was working as a youth pastor at a church in Folsom.
Mercer was transferred to the Bossier Parish Maximum Security Facility,. He was booked on 90 counts of forcible fondling molestation of a juvenile. His bond is set at $2.5 million. The investigation is active, and authorities anticipate identifying more victims and filing further charges.
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This one bit the dust a couple of days ago. Now he has 90 counts thrown against him!
State Attorneys General Sue to Stop Paramount Skydance's Corrupt Takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery — Free Press Action Fund Feed
Free Press hails state-led effort to defend consumer choice and journalism against a billionaire push to censor and control the media
WASHINGTON — On Monday, 12 state attorneys general launched an antitrust suit to block the proposed $111 billion merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. California Attorney General Rob Bonta led the multistate lawsuit, joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.
“The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.,” Bonta said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.
The combination of these two massive entertainment and news companies would create a media colossus with CBS, CNN, HBO, Nickelodeon and the Warner Bros. and Paramount film studios — among other major media properties — all under one roof. The deal’s announcement in 2025 spurred widespread protests led by a coalition of First Amendment advocates, unions, consumer-rights groups, and Hollywood actors and directors.
Free Press and others opposing the mega-merger explain that the deal would give one company the power and incentives to raise prices, lay off thousands of workers and limit consumer options, while giving the Trump-aligned Ellison family the power to shape public discourse at the president’s direction in exchange for the administration’s regulatory approval. That’s why administration officials like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have openly rooted for the Ellisons to obtain CNN, based on their documented promises to make “sweeping changes” to the network to please Trump....
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Foiling the fascist takeover of our American media!
Law School Bans Laptops and Phones as AI Cheating Scandal Grows — Frank Landymore
Classes are going to look a little different for the University of Chicago’s first year law students.
On Thursday, the law school said it was banning the use of phones, tablets, and even laptops in class for freshman-level courses, as it rejigs its curriculum to be more “AI-resilient” and encourage more deliberate use of the tech.
An announcement from the school didn’t explicitly mention AI cheating. But the changes come amid a backdrop of significant public concern over generative AI’s impact on education, and plunging literacy and numeracy skills among students.
“With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation,” the statement said.
Device bans are not unusual in classrooms. Rarely, however, do they extend to laptops, and they’re typically enforced at an instructor’s discretion, rather than as a university-wide policy. The university claims the decision was made after both faculty and students reported positive effects after some professors experimented with device bans...
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Make 'em show their work!
Latest ICE killings expose a horrifying — and unexpected — truth — John Casey
I almost didn't write about Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
He was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer on the morning of July 7, 2026, during a traffic stop in Houston, Texas.
And, as I was putting the finishing touches on this column about Lorenzo, It happened again.
On Monday, an ICE agent fatally shot a man in his 20s in Biddeford, Maine. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the individual was given an order to leave the country and "weaponized" his vehicle by driving it toward an officer before he was shot.
Does that sound familiar? Two more migrants killed by ICE, two more agency statements claiming self-defense. We can only imagine the lies and cover-ups that will try to shield the real story about what happened in Maine, the same way the lies and cover-ups are trying to hide the truth about what happened to Lorenzo.
When I first read about Lorenzo, I felt something I'm not proud of: nothing much. A disgusted shrug. And “F-ICE” under my breath. Less of a reaction than I had when Alex Pretti and Renée Good were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis in January.
Then, I moved on to the next story.
Last Friday, speaking on Morning Joe, The Bulwark Managing Editor Sam Stein elaborated on one of his social media posts where he wrote about how numb we’ve all become by treating events that in any other time — a normal time — would be front-page news. He included the death of Lorenzo.
That's when I realized what I had done to Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.
Stein's point was about how repetition doesn't make something like another senseless ICE murder smaller; it just makes us smaller for absorbing it without flinching. And I had to admit: he was talking about me.
How had I become so casual that I clicked forward before taking the time to recognize what happened to Lorenzo?
So I stopped and took a close look at what happened in Houston, because I owe that man more than a disgusted shrug. We all do....
This is exactly what they did with Pretti, Good and Ruben Ray Martinez, a U.S. citizen shot on South Padre Island last year, whose family's lawyers say that video contradicts the government's account.
How, for all that is good and decent, do we accept these murderous thugs' words as truth? They leap to a lie to defend themselves before any of the facts have even been investigated. That's why we know, right off the bat, that ICE and the Trump administration are lying through their teeth about what happened to Lorenzo....
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These Trump atrocities must come to an end!
Federal agents shoot and kill a man in Maine — Sarah K. Burris
Federal agents have shot and killed another person, this time in Maine.
According to the Bangor Daily News, agents working for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed a man in Biddeford, which is a little over 15 miles south of Portland. Thus far only one person has been pronounced dead.
Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, who represents Biddeford, released a statement after the incident detailing everything he knew thus far and noting that he expects the FBI to take over the investigation, as they have with all shootings involving federal agents.
“These are the details that I have at this time. I will provide further updates, as they are relayed to me,” Fecteau said.
It's the second person killed by ICE in less than a week. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who has lived in the U.S. for decades, was driving his construction crew to a site in Houston, Texas, when he was killed...
The deaths are only the latest in the violent immigrant crackdown since President Donald Trump entered office and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin took over the department. Trump had campaigned on getting "criminals" out of the U.S. The Bangor Daily News said that of the nearly 200 detainees in the state, only 11 had criminal convictions. They said it "[undercuts] the Trump administration’s claim that it was targeting the 'worst of the worst.'"
This equals nine people who have died under Mullin's leadership, an AP report cited. At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 alone. So far, 19 have in 2026, Axios cited.
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More murders of brown people. Obviously this is Trump racisim at work.
Jake Tapper calls out Hegseth over hunt for 'leakers' with damning reminder — David Edwards
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced backlash Monday after announcing a new task force to hunt and prosecute "leakers," drawing an immediate rebuke from CNN anchor Jake Tapper.
Hegseth posted a video to X Monday morning announcing that the Pentagon and the Justice Department had created a joint task force to identify and prosecute anyone who leaks sensitive military information.
"Some call them whistleblowers," Tapper fired back. "When they're alerting the public to government lies and malfeasance, for instance."
"To leak sensitive national defense information and secrets betrays the men and women who wear our nation's uniform," Hegseth said in the video. "Those who betray that trust will be met with the full force of the law."
In a second post, Tapper linked to the Pentagon's own inspector general report on Hegseth's use of Signal, a commercial messaging app. "I know of one leak that put our brave pilots at risk!" Tapper wrote.
That report, released in December 2025, found that Hegseth had shared sensitive strike details — including the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory — on an unsecured app hours before those pilots launched their mission over Yemen. The Pentagon watchdog concluded Hegseth "did not comply" with department policy. The journalist who received the information had been inadvertently added to the chat by then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
"Not as dangerous as installing an angry adolescent at the Pentagon to play 'Secretary of War' and botch an armed conflict in the Middle East," former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood wrote on X, also pushing back against Hegseth's announcement....
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Lies and mafeasance, Hegseth! I think he means you!
Judge slaps Trump DOJ with sanctions and a lecture for 'manipulating' legal process — Sarah K. Burris
A federal court judge got "really worked up" in a ruling against President Donald Trump and his Justice Department on Monday.
Legal analysts posted the ruling in Trump's IRS case, in which the judge decided the lawsuit and creation of $1.8 "anti-weaponization fund" was improper as Trump was in control of both sides of the negotiations and litigation.
One of the findings from the judge is that the plaintiff's attorney, Alejandro Brito, is being referred to the Florida Bar for an investigation to decide whether disciplinary actions are warranted. Another attorney, Daniel Z. Epstein, "will be denied for one year" admission "pro hac vice in the Southern District of Florida."
According to legal reporter Chris Geidner, who runs the Law Dork substack, "Judge Kathleen Williams also sanctions Trump's lawyers, issues monetary sanctions and harshly criticizes DOJ's 'untenable' conduct."
Trump legal foe Norm Eisen took a victory lap, commenting on BlueSky, that the ruling "Knocks out any legal basis for the $1.8 billion, Also undermines the accompanying settlements, And opens the way to ethics [and] financial SANCTIONS."
Among the comments from the judge includes the accusation that Trump "abused the judicial process" in what amounts to a sham case just to have "access to taxpayer funds and exemption from audits and other investigations."
"It is risible to suggest there was ever adverseness between the parties," wrote Judge Williams....
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Trump will get pounded by the law until the day he dies.
Drained Reflecting Pool betrays Trump’s claim of '350-foot' gash in liner — Sarah K. Burris
The ongoing saga of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool continued Monday as the water drained, revealing the damage that was visible. Thus far, there is no 350-foot gash in the lining.
Photos from Washington D.C., activist Joe Flood and Democratic Party strategist Matt Rein show the slow process of the pool draining. Rein's photos in particular show that as the pool drained along the parts of the pool that were reachable by the public, there were no gashes.
U.S. District Attorney Jeannine Pirro has charged individuals with intentionally damaging the pool. In one case, Olympian David Hearn was accused by Pirro at a press conference of “forcefully and violently” pulling up the Reflecting Pool liner "with both hands." But the charging documents only say he "maliciously did injure, break and destroy certain property."
"The president said that somebody took a box cutter—" a reporter began to ask during Pirro's press conference.
Pirro agreed, "Yeah." She added, "Someone intentionally did a tremendous amount of damage to the pool, and you can actually see where all the cutting is. They took a sharp object and cut for many feet along the pool."
For someone to have made such a gash, it would be along the side, unless someone jumped into the pool and began cutting the bottom.
The reporter asked Pirro if there were photos confirming her claims.
"When I file a charge, I'll be happy to show you a picture. All right? What I'm trying to do is we're trying to find out who did it. Okay? And until we get to that point, I'm not going to be able to get to that point. I'm not going to be able to you know, discuss anything more than there was tremendous damage that was caused," Pirro said at the time.
President Donald Trump went further with his box-cutter conspiracy theory, saying, without proof, that "vandals" had sliced the gash into the pool.
"No, we had vandalism ... no, vandals," Trump said at the end of June when asked about it. "We have a 290-, I think 300-foot slit right through, probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind."...
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Have the fake "vandlism" charges been dropped yet, you idiots?
Trans writer makes explosive allegations against Lindsey Graham — Nicole Charky-Chami
A transgender author and actress has alleged in a viral post that staunch anti-LGBTQ+ lawmaker Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had hired the writer for sex work, The Advocate reported on Monday.
Jesse James Rose, author of "Sorry I Keep Crying During Sex," wrote a three-slide post on Instagram detailing the accusations against Graham, who spent much of his long political career pushing back against civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community, transgender rights and gender-affirming care for people transitioning, according to The Advocate....
Rumors about Graham's own sexuality surfaced throughout his life, Advocate reported. In 2018, he denied he was gay, responding after comedian Chelsea Handler trolled him on National Coming Out Day.
"The bitter irony of this record is that Graham spent much of his political career denying rumors and speculation about his own sexual orientation — a task that became more difficult in the social media age," according to the outlet.
Other allegations about his personal life have emerged in recent years.
"However, while Rose’s recent post following Graham’s death is one of the most direct instances of a queer person alleging that Graham had hired them for sex work, it isn’t the first," The Advocate reported.
"In 2020, porn performer Sean Harding posted online, implying that an unnamed Republican senator had hired multiple gay sex workers, including him. People connected the story to Graham based on the nickname 'Lady G,' a codename sex workers in D.C. allegedly used to refer to the South Carolina legislator. The nickname followed Graham for what would turn out to be the final years of his life."
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We can expect more on this in the coming days.
Lawsuit Claims the Mayo Clinic’s Use of AI Is Butchering Patient Care — Joe Wilkins
One of the largest health networks integrating AI into the medical space is facing allegations that its high-tech tools are ruining patient’s lives.
In a new civil suit, former Mayo Clinic research director and AI compliance lead Traci Tamiko Eto alleges that the globally recognized hospital retaliated against her for blowing the whistle on its disastrous implementations of AI health tools.
According to reporting by Minnesota Public Radio, Eto first joined the Mayo Clinic in 2023. After flagging potential privacy problems linked with the hospital’s Mayo Clinic Platform, an AI-integrated data system, Eto says her supervisor ignored her concerns. Instead, she says her boss “insisted” that fixing the issue would “jeopardize the pace on ongoing research projects, which in turn would compromise Mayo’s competitive advantage.”
Eto continued, MPR reports, flagging multiple failures of Mayo Clinic higher-ups to follow federal regulations on review processes of new tech, like MAYA, the clinic’s AI-integrated digital assistant. According to the lawsuit, the team working on MAYA deleted unflattering test results, mischaracterized the tool’s abilities, and made decisions that put data security in jeopardy.
Tucked inside her ten separate whistleblower complaints, MPR notes, is the allegation that the team working on MAYA knew the tool had an error rate as high as 67 percent. Eto alleges that instead of flagging that horrifying number, MAYA staffers tried to hide it.
As a result, Eto says she began to be excluded from executive meetings in early 2025, before being told she was a “poor cultural fit.” She was offered a choice, the lawsuit alleges: either resign, or face alterations to her personnel file “that would render her unemployable at Mayo and would impede her career outside the institution.”
As the major lawsuit moves forward, the threat of career-ending backlash remains.
“When an individual decides that they are willing to file a lawsuit against a public goliath on matters that are hot button issues in our country, she is literally risking her career,” Eto’s attorney, Artur Davis told MPR. “She is risking being attacked professionally. She is risking her reputation, and for her to do that tells you something about her level of confidence that she’s right.”
Mayo was pretty tight-lipped in response to the suit....
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Is the rot running deeper than we can imagine?
The Mafia shows more restraint than Trump as 'casual butchery' becomes US norm: column — Daniel Hampton
Veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn used his weekend column in The i Paper to argue that President Donald Trump's second term has normalized the killing of civilians, and that the administration's conduct resembles organized crime.
"For the US government, casual butchery of the innocent has become the norm," Cockburn wrote in the Saturday piece.
The column, headlined "Trump looks like a mobster past his peak," pointed to two campaigns: the Feb. 28 strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran, and the ongoing U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
Iranian authorities put the Minab death toll at at least 165 people, most of them schoolgirls between 7 and 12. CNN reported earlier this month that senior U.S. commanders bypassed embedded warnings that targeting intelligence was badly out of date, a decision two sources said was made for "expediency." The Pentagon has not released its investigation. A White House official told CNN the inquiry is ongoing and that "the United States does not target civilians."
Cockburn tied that to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's cuts to the Pentagon's Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, which CNN reported reduced the Central Command team from 10 staffers to one. Hegseth has summarized his approach as "maximum lethality, not tepid legality" — a phrase already drawing fire from more than 120 House Democrats.
The columnist argued the administration behaves like "the gangster underworld, pitiless in targeting the weak and defenceless," adding that the American Mafia "arguably operates with greater moderation," because it distinguishes civilians from rivals....
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Murder Inc. is the Trump policy.
GOP demands investigation into veterans group for 'politically charged' satire — Matthew Chapman
Republicans in Congress are threatening one of America's most prominent nonpartisan veterans' organizations for their promotion of a satirical image they find offensive.
According to CNN, House Veterans Affairs Committee chair Mike Bost (R-IL) "has asked VA Secretary Doug Collins to investigate the Veterans of Foreign Wars after the satirical cartoon meant to protest cuts to veterans benefits appeared on T-shirts being sold on behalf of the group."
The cartoon in question depicted suited people labeled as "bureaucrats" and "media" aiming rifles at fatigue-wearing veterans, alongside the phrases, “Punishing Service,” “Removing Benefits” and “Waste and Fraud."
Bost, along with Rep. Jack Bergman (R-MI), complained in their demand for an investigation that “VFW has repeatedly authorized the use of its name, trademarks, and likeness on commercial merchandise depicting graphic, inflammatory, politically charged imagery surrounding pending veterans’ legislation," and this particular cartoon “can reasonably be interpreted as glorifying or normalizing political violence,” and "inflaming public anger toward public officials.”
VFW is a nonpartisan organization known for its presence in Republican-dominated communities. However, the group sometimes takes a stand on relevant political issues, as when it condemned Trump for attacking a Gold Star family during the 2016 campaign.
More generally, Republicans have increasingly moved to threaten opponents' political speech under the guise of policing "violent" language....
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Stultified Nazi brains have no sense of humor.
Feds and Deputized Cops Stockpiling War Machines for Deportation — Whitney Curry Wimbish
Federal agents and local cops are inking thousands of deals to collaborate on immigration law enforcement, while stockpiling historic amounts of military-grade weapons. That’s the takeaway from contractual agreements, federal procurement records, Department of Defense property data, and information obtained through records requests, the Prospect found.
A year after President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act poured a record amount of money into his mass deportation project, which after a second law passed this year now comes to nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars, the United States is in the grip of a heavily militarized joint force whose goal is to throw one million people out of the country annually. It stands to harm immigrants, protesters, and community members in general, because the federal government rapidly hired 12,000 officers and agents to staff it without requiring they meet rigorous standards or background checks, immigration advocates, attorneys, and researchers told the Prospect.
An Associated Press investigation found, for example, that the new recruits include those who failed to graduate from a police academy, were caught lying in a police report “to justify a felony charge against an innocent woman,” used excessive force, and faced lawsuits alleging misconduct in prior law enforcement positions.
“The number one thing I worry about and think about all the time with the basically doubling or tripling the size of ICE is they attempted to do that at a time when there’s a nationwide shortage of law enforcement officers,” said Kenneth Lowande, associate professor of political science at Rice University, who researches military equipment in law enforcement and was a creator of an interactive map on the topic. Police departments can’t find qualified applicants to fill jobs, he said, but immigration agents don’t have to meet the same standards to get hired, nor must they undertake the same length of training.
“So basically you put military-style weapons in the hands of undertrained, likely unqualified applicants, or applicants that wouldn’t have otherwise found a law enforcement job,” Lowande said. “It is now the largest federal police force there is, and by any measure it’s a low-quality police force when you compare it to, say, the LAPD … To me that’s why there was such a conflagration in Minnesota.”...
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An army that will throw anyone they don't like out of our country, including you or me!
Turn, Turn, Turn. Tabs, Mon., July 13, 2026 — Evan Hurst
Well, good morning, and now we shall look at some of the news.
But first, if you haven’t stopped by The Moral High Ground in the past couple days, you should come by and subscribe, as we are grappling with an accusation from a weirdo Christian pastor that WE created the “gay Jesus.” Did we, sir? Did we do that? Because from where we are sitting, that guy is the one talking about Jesus’s perfect abs. [The Moral High Ground]
Amy Klobuchar is one of several Democratic senators who could read the room and understand that nobody cares about their Senate “collegiality,” and could have simply chosen to say less after the death of Lindsey Graham, rather than telling us about all the good times they’ve had with the fascists who are trying to destroy this country and maim and kill as many people as they can during the process.
Amy Klobuchar is one of several Democratic senators who could read the room and understand that nobody cares about their Senate “collegiality,” and could have simply chosen to say less after the death of Lindsey Graham, rather than telling us about all the good times they’ve had with the fascists who are trying to destroy this country and maim and kill as many people as they can during the process.
(photo/comment posts)
I ain’t readin’ all that.
Cory Booker is another:
(photo/comment posts)
Guys, this is one of the things we’re talking about when we say some of you are clearly on Team Fight and others are not.
What in Christ’s name is Ka$h Patel talking about, saying the FBI is doing all it can to assist in the aftermath of Graham’s death? Is there an investigation? Did something nefarious happen? Or is this just Ka$h being fucking pathetic again, trying to performatively show Daddy that he’s busy working and not currently drunk on the taxpayer dime? [Daily Beast]
Especially since Ka$h reportedly got hauled in to the White House for an ass chewing at the beginning of the weekend, after yet another serious of embarrassing moves and headlines by Ka$h. [M$NOW]...
What are the 10 worst states to live in quality-of-life-wise, according to CNBC’s big new study? You will be shocked by this list:
1. Tennessee
2. Texas
3. Indiana
4. Louisiana
5. Georgia
6. Utah
7. Missouri
8. Alabama
9. Oklahoma
10, Arkansas
When there’s so many shitty states on your list there’s not even room for Mississippi!
What is this list all about? CNBC explains:
To score the states for quality of life, we use hard data on factors like crime rates, air quality and healthcare. We also consider the cost and availability of childcare, inclusiveness of state laws, and reproductive rights.
In other words, all the things that makes places livable, and hellholes as far as Christian fascist perverts and scumbags are concerned. They probably could just rank states by how accommodating they are to Christian fascist perverts and scumbags are and they’d get the same list. [CNBC]
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For certain, they got #1 right.
Wanna Know Why Todd Blanche Should Never, Ever Become Attorney General? — Robert Reich
Now is the time to phone your senator
Friends,
On Wednesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche heads to the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing to become attorney general.>br>
If the rule of law means anything, the Judiciary Committee should not send Blanche’s name to the Senate for confirmation. And under no circumstances should the Senate confirm Blanche as attorney general.
Blanche, who used to be Trump’s private lawyer, has treated the Justice Department as Trump’s private law firm. He still acts as though Trump — not the United States — is his client.
Consider what Blanche has done for Trump, rather than for the United States.
1. Illegally suppressed the Epstein files
Blanche has conceded that the Department of Justice violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act by making improper redactions in the public release of Jeffrey Epstein’s records but continues to drag his feet. Under Blanche, the department is currently battling lawsuits from journalists and demands from the state of New Mexico to unseal the unredacted documents.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the department to either unredact and release specific files — including emails, potential co-conspirators, and interview notes summarizing allegations against President Trump — or justify why they must remain withheld. But under Blanche’s direction, the department has repeatedly missed or delayed fulfilling orders to unredact the records completely, leading plaintiffs and transparency advocates to accuse Blanche of ongoing noncompliance.
Blanche also personally interviewed Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison, before Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security facility. Minimum-security prisons are generally reserved for inmates with far shorter sentences than Maxwell’s 20 years. Did Blanche make a bargain with her? We don’t know.
2. Prosecuted Trump’s “enemies”
Blanche has assured White House officials that he will move faster and more efficiently against Trump’s targets, and at executing other White House priorities, than did his predecessor, Pam Bondi. Bondi was fired presumably because she didn’t deliver what Trump wanted quickly enough.
At Trump’s insistence, Blanche is moving ahead with investigations into several targets whom Trump regards as enemies — including John O. Brennan, the former CIA director who helped investigate Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Blanche is overseeing the Brennan inquiry, examining whether he lied to Congress in testimony in 2023, and relating to what Trump’s allies have cast as Brennan’s involvement in a “grand conspiracy” by Obama and Biden administration officials to keep Trump out of office each time he ran.....
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One look at his face should tell you who and what this fraud is.
Trump's 'half-hearted' and 'flimsy' new stunt perfectly sums up his huge decline — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump has touted a new initiative to try and address a major economic pain point for midterm voters, but as a new piece from MS NOW argued, it is a "half-hearted" and "flimsy stunt" that perfectly encapsulates the collapse of his presidency.
Earlier this week, Trump took to Truth Social to tout "Freedom Fuel," a network of 25 gas stations in Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey that would be "lowering the price at the pump to $3.47 for our 47th President." As reporter James Downie noted in a Sunday piece for MS NOW, the post and an accompanying video were meant to give viewers "the impression that the administration, whether through subsidy or takeover, was directly intervening to lower gas prices."
It remains unclear at this time who is actually behind the Freedom Fuel locations and how they are managing to lower prices at their pumps. The only information available about its incorporation, per materials from the Delaware Department of State, shows that it was set up on June 23, and nothing else. The situation also drew some criticism that Trump was engaging in precisely the sort of "communist" government intervention policies that he has recently been railing against Democrats for supposedly espousing.
"But whoever is behind Freedom Fuel, Trump’s praise is emblematic of his second year back in the White House: a half-hearted, poorly thought-out stunt," Downie wrote about the whole affair. "Trump is apparently hoping for copycats. For days, he has complained that gas prices are not as low as they were before he recklessly started a war with Iran. Now he is lobbying for other retailers to do what Freedom Fuel has done. 'This Retailer is taking the lead,'” he wrote in that social media post praising the mystery retailer. 'And others should follow.'”...
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What's next? "Greater Groceries?"
The Madness Of King Don: He Orders Alcatraz To Be Re-Opened — Susie Madrak
Uh, Lumpy? It's already a national park.
El Lumpo says he is directing the government to reopen and expand Alcatraz, the notorious former prison on a California island. There's not a lot of usable land left! Plus, IT'S ALREADY A NATIONAL PARK!
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It's all about cruelty!
A Proper Obituary For Lindsey Graham -- Tengrain
All the fawning Democrats should stop and consider all the things Graham has done. And not done.
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Don't overlook the comments here. They tell us a great deal about the late Miss Graham.
Trump Posts Call To “Criminalize Democratic Socialism” And Deport “Hardcore Communist Bastard” Mamdani
Mediaite reports:
President Donald Trump shared a video on Sunday from conservative pundit Michael Savage calling for the U.S. to criminalize and deport “hardcore communist bastards” like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D).
Trump posted the video on Truth Social as he has been ripping socialism and communism over the last month. The president continued that trend this weekend with a few posts on Truth Social where he warned Democrats they were stupidly letting “unattractive” socialists like Mamdani — and several other democratic socialist candidates who won primaries recently — “take over” the party.
Savage went even further in the searing 49-minute rant that Trump posted on Sunday. The veteran radio host said Americans should not be fooled by Mamdani — whom he called a “smirking bastard” — and the other democratic socialists who are rising through the Democratic ranks.
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We know who the smirking bastard is here, Don. Take gas, Nazi! If anything needs to be criminalized it's your fascism!
Big Tobacco Buys End To CDC’s Anti-Smoking Push
The New York Times reports:
The ads were jarring: a man with a hole in his throat where his larynx, or voice box, had once been. A woman whose teeth and jaw had been removed after oral cancer. Another woman speaking in a robotic voice, which was altered when her larynx was removed: “I wish I’d never seen a cigarette in my entire life.” A black screen followed, saying she died two days later.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 14-year ad campaign, called Tips From Former Smokers, was highly memorable and, research shows, highly effective in motivating people to quit. Last year, though, as tobacco companies gave millions to political organizations related to the Trump administration, the campaign went dark.
There is no definitive evidence linking the donations to the lapse of the ad campaign. But the decision to terminate it was one of several steps the administration has taken to unravel federal government antismoking initiatives that had long had bipartisan support during a time when the administration has delivered significant policy wins to tobacco companies.
"RFK jr is a pusher. Always was, always will be.
Reprehensible asshole." — Karl Dubhe IV (comments)
"I can't believe this. Isn't it billions and billions world wide who died from tobacco related illness?
I swear if the iron lung manufactures pressed that stupid son of a bitch, polio would be back big time." — New Jamieboy Highballs (comments
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The retarded killers at work. Be like the human wreck, JFK jr? May these people all get slow terminal cancer!
Waltz Declares Cuba To Be “National Security Threat”
The Hill reports:
United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz on Sunday said Cuba’s regime is “a national security threat,” as the Trump administration keeps its sights on the Caribbean island nation amid rising tensions. Waltz accused China and Russia of “collecting information around our military bases in Cuba” during an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo.
“The Cuban regime is not only a threat to its own people, it’s a national security threat, and this administration’s not going to stand for it any longer,” Waltz told Bartiromo. Waltz said China and Russia “still have intelligence posts, signals, collection posts and military officers in Cuba right off our shores.”
"WALTZ OVER HERE YOU BITCH AND SUCK MY DICK" — Dwight Williamson (comments)
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We haven't murdered enough people worldwide yet, Mike? What a disgrace to America you are!
Resign now! You've already bankrupted our country! China and Russia are your problem but you don't have the money to attack them, brave boy!
REPORT: USAID Cuts Have Resulted In 700,000 Deaths
The New Yorker reports:
Atul Gawande, who was a leading administrator at U.S.A.I.D. until the Trump Administration’s DOGE initiative, led by Elon Musk, set about defunding and destroying the agency, is a surgeon and a longtime New Yorker contributor.
In our latest conversation for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gawande uses Rhodes’s concept to help describe the colossal human cost that Musk and DOGE have exacted on the world.
Gawande, backed up by recent academic studies, says that the decimation of U.S.A.I.D. around the globe has been responsible for some seven hundred thousand deaths, and that number will likely ascend into the seven figures.
The policy is not only immeasurably cruel, Gawande argues; it is also stupid, badly undermining what remains of American soft power and prestige, from Africa to Latin America.
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The Death Machine of Trump and his killers.
FBI Analysts Fired For Refusing GA 2020 Election Probe
MS Now reports:
Two Atlanta-based FBI intelligence analysts were fired last week after refusing to participate in the Trump administration’s investigation of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, three people familiar with the matter told MS NOW.
The analysts, a husband and wife, told colleagues they did not believe the investigation was justified under FBI and Justice Department policies, the people said, adding that the couple was escorted out of their office. The FBI neither confirmed nor denied that the two analysts were fired.
“The FBI will always investigate credible allegations of matters related to federal elections,” an FBI spokesperson told MS NOW. “Every employee at this FBI is to uphold our mission and adhere to our standards, any deviation will not be tolerated.”
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And we will always hold election suppressors responsible for crimes against our nation, you pipsqueak! This means you! Go to hell!
New ICE boss, same old lies — Amanda Marcotte
A fatal ICE shooting in Houston shows Markwayne Mullin is just a male Kristi Noem
When Kristi Noem was pushed out of her job as the secretary of homeland security and replaced with Oklahoma’s GOP senator — and wannabe MMA fighter — Markwayne Mullin, the public was assured he would make all those pesky problems with Immigration and Customs Enforcement go away.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., described the concentration camp-style immigrant detention centers and the killings of two American citizens during immigration raids as “a little hiccup” and promised a “course correction” under Mullin. The New York Times heralded Mullin’s “warmer and fuzzier tone” during his confirmation hearing as a “sign that the administration wants to project a more moderated approach.” Various Republican leaders praised Mullin as a “good guy” who “likes dogs.”
But savvy people weren’t fooled. This is still Donald Trump’s presidency, an administration that is at least partially being run by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a man so paranoid about foreigners he floated the idea of banning pregnant women from even visiting the U.S., lest they give birth here. (His wife, podcaster Katie Miller, followed up by suggesting mandatory pregnancy tests of anyone suspected of being female coming through customs.)...
ICE remains what Noem always wanted it to be: a rogue organization staffed by people who are too sadistic or unqualified to meet already too-low standards for regular police work....
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The corruption of a criminal administration!
Maggie Haberman stops podcaster cold with new Trump revelation — Daniel Hampton
New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman recounted a moment on Sunday's episode of the podcast "Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso" that left the host doing a double-take: President Donald Trump, she said, did not realize how high his own tariffs on China had climbed.
The account comes from Regime Change, the book Haberman co-wrote with fellow Times reporter Jonathan Swan. She said the rate on Chinese goods reached 145% before the president registered how far it had gone, and that his reaction was disbelief.
"At one point he couldn't — he didn't realize how high China's tariff burden had gotten," she said. "It was up to 145%. And his reaction was, you know, like 'Holy s---.' At another time he was just talking about China, and he says put them in for 10. So that's not a formula; that's a gut feeling...."
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So, this guy knows what he's doing? C'mon people, wise up!
Fox Host Brazenly Lies About ICE Murders Of Alex Pretti And Renee Good — Heather
These soulless ghouls continue covering for Trump's ICE thugs in the wake of yet another killing in Houston. Instead of talking about how ICE is suppressing witnesses to keep the truth from coming out, here's what viewers were treated to on this Saturday's The Big Weekend Show on Fox from shameless racist liar Joe Concha:,br>
LAHREN: And oftentimes our ICE agents are going into these situations with a specific target who's often a violent individual. So they're already going into it knowing they're entering a dangerous situation. Whether a vehicle is now coming at them, that's another discussion.
CONCHA: A vehicle or Alex Pretti literally on several occasions took a gun, right, to confront ICE agents, right? And then eventually he got shot because somebody saw a gun.
If you bring a gun to a confrontation these things could happen. Renee Good tried to ram an ICE officer. She got shot and we saw it here as well.
Again, unless they're perfect, unless the situation is something where we can completely control it and see exactly for what it is, ICE will be painted by Democrats as the evil ones who need to be eliminated.
LAHREN: Well, even when we do see the footage, they still claim the same thing.
CONCHA: A very good point.
"Soviet Pravda: Ivan, these people make us look like amateurs." — Bmw528 (comments)
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"If you bring a gun to a confrontation...?" WTF, dude! Your Nazi cohorts have a long record of doing just that! Wake the fuck up, you blind asshole!
These two cover-up for murder. May they be indicted as co-conpirators.
Trump Melts Down Over Maggie Haberman’s Tame Remarks About His Mental Health — NewsHound Ellen
Maggie Haberman told MS Now viewers she did not “feel equipped” to answer whether Americans should be concerned about Donald Trump’s mental acuity. She said she and her co-author, Jonathan Swan, “see what you see, which is he is 80, which is that he is clearly - doesn't speak with the same crispness that he did 30 years ago, 20 years ago, ten years ago. as people who turn 80 tend not to.”
Haberman also said Trump’s health “is like a black box inside that administration, much more than almost any other issue.” She added that “if there is an area of failure in the reporting” in her book with Swan it was about Trump’s health, not just his mental health but “why he has gone to Walter Reed several times, and they have released less and less information.”
But Haberman also said that in their hour-long interview with Trump, “there was nothing that felt, ‘Oh, this is unusual. This is different. It was actually quite the same. … this was very much pure Trump.”
As an example of “pure Trump,” Haberman related a jarring anecdote about the interview in which he boasted about being compared to Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
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Trump appears well on his way to meeting a similar fate as his heroes.
Vance Has A Cringe-Inducing Marie Antoinette Moment — Chris capper Liebenthal
J Divan Vance once again demonstrated how he has a complete disconnect from what's going on in the country with a Marie Antoinette moment. While Americans are struggling to make ends meet and having to choose between food, medicine, and gasoline, Vance is bragging about how posh his life is:
Vance was speaking with Mike Rowe on his podcast when he couldn't contain himself:
Like, my life is - dude - totally transformed.
I don't go to the grocery store anymore. People go to the grocery store for me. Most of my meals, like, when I cook a meal - it's like, I love to cook, actually, big baker. I like to cook for my kids as a special occasion, but I don't have to cook anymore because I've got an army of people who are willing to like cook me my food. My life is so weird. I fly around on a 757, no more TSA lines for for me and the kids. It's so weird, but it can become the sort of thing that if you internalize it, you start to be an entitled asshole.
Oh, wow, J Divan, dude, like that ship has totally sailed, dude. I can think of only one person who is a bigger entitled asshole than you are, and his initials are President Pedo....
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This poor guy has no idea he's been on an acid trip for nearly two years!
Trump Administration Scrapping Nuclear Energy Rules Requiring Plants to Keep Radiation Levels “As Low as Reasonably Achievable” — Joe Wilkins
As government agencies go, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has left a lot to be desired, often operating less like a government watchdog and more as an industry partner. There’s fee recovery, for example, which effectively mandates the industry pay its own regulators’ salary, as well as the NRC’s habit of trusting voluntary leak reports from reactor operators, not to mention its history of hiding internal safety data to protect its reputation.
As if those deficiencies weren’t bad enough, president Donald Trump is now stripping what’s left of the commission’s mandate down to the bone. Last week, the NRC proposed a bold amendment to its long-standing nuclear safety principles: deleting a line requiring nuclear plant operators to keep radiation exposure “as low as is reasonably achievable.”
According to the Hill, the NRC justifies the move by saying it will remove “unnecessary ambiguity.” But critics say this rule is the whole reason energy companies bother keeping radiation levels as low as possible in the first place.
“Facility owners felt like… ALARA [as low as reasonably achievable] was forcing them to go well below the allowable radiation limits and spend a lot of money to do that,” director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists Edwin Lyman told the Hill. “This is opening the door for sloppier practices,” Lyman continued, and “worse management.”..
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Coming soon: The United States of Chernobyl!
Meta Caught Running Ads for Child Abuse — Victor Tangermann
For many years now, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has run rampant on Meta’s platforms. The Mark Zuckerberg-led company has been accused of trying to underplay the severity of the issue and even purposefully dismantle child safety guidelines.
And the situation is only getting worse. According to a shocking new BBC investigation, Instagram has been profiting off paid adverts that promote CSAM in India, a shocking revelation that highlights glaring holes in Meta’s efforts to get ahead of the problem.
Earlier this year, Meta announced it was trying to reduce its reliance on third party human moderators by — you guessed it — switching to AI. But considering the latest news, these systems are seemingly inadequate to stem a tidal wave of deeply disturbing content on its platforms.
Some of the incriminating ads reviewed by the BBC include terms like “rape video” and “child video” and link the platform’s users to shadowy Telegram channels, where the material can be bought for as little as $1.
The shocking revelation has sent shockwaves through the country’s government. Over the weekend, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a notice to Meta, calling it to immediately disable all ads and content that promote the sale of CSAM. According to Indian broadcaster DD News, the ministry is giving Meta until July 11 to provide a “detailed explanation.”
After the BBC reached out to Meta for comment, the company claimed to have disabled several adverts and suspended any associated accounts for violating its policies. A Meta spokesperson argued that “no system is perfect, and our review process may not detect all policy violations.”
“We continue to run proactive detection technology on ads once they’re live, and anyone can report an ad to us that they think breaks our rules,” the spokesperson told the BBC.
Telegram also told the British broadcaster it had removed “more than 274,000 groups and channels related to child sexual abuse material in 2026.”
Former Facebook vice president Brian Boland argued that Instagram’s algorithms were designed to maximize profit.
“I think what’s sad and tragic is over time, the trade-off of revenue and user experience became a more core part of the conversation,” he told the BBC....
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Meta seems to be rubbing up against Epstein.
OpenAI Is Shutting Down Its Browser That Was Supposed to Change Everything — Victor Tangermann
In October, OpenAI unveiled an AI browser dubbed Atlas, purportedly designed to help you “understand your world” and “achieve your goals” by putting ChatGPT front and center.
A special “agent mode” was meant to book flights or buy groceries online on your behalf without you ever having to lift your finger.
“The browser just changed,” OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT boasted at the time, calling it a major step in ChatGPT evolving into an entire AI operating system.
But the cracks started to show almost immediately. There were glaring cybersecurity concerns, including a major vulnerability to prompt injection attacks. Its agent worked at a frustratingly glacial pace — it took the browser ten full minutes to add three items to an Amazon shopping cart, as The Verge found out the hard way. It even ignored huge portions of the internet like the plague, highlighting ongoing legal battles over copyright.
And now OpenAI is pulling the plug on the nonstarter browser, a mere nine months after launching it.
In an announcement, the company said it was updating browser extensions designed for Google Chrome — which still dominates the global web browser market — by building on “what we learned from Atlas.”
“Atlas is scheduled to stop working on August 9, 2026,” the company wrote in separate ChatGPT release notes.
Atlas joins a growing graveyard of OpenAI products — distracting “side quests,” according to OpenAI CEO of applications Fidji Simo, herself now leaving the company — that failed to take off.
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Did they use their own AI to create a failure? Try a Magic 8 Ball next time.
Christopher Nolan Has No Time for ‘The Odyssey’ Backlash or GenAI — Justin Carter
All Nolan wants is for people to see 'The Odyssey' with an open mind and recognize the sincere effort on display.
First and foremost is the “casting controversy” drummed up by racists and transphobes making a stink online. In the film, Lupita Nyong’o and Elliott Page respectively play Zeus’ daughter Helen of Troy (and her sister Clytemnestra) and Greek warrior Sinon, which has sparked a predictable backlash. To those complaining about the actors’ presence in the film, Nolan’s content to not give these folks any true attention or even hold them in any real regard, since he knows they’re just opening their mouths before seeing the full film....
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What's the fuss about? Helen of Troy is a Greek Myth. Artistic license. Ever heard of it?
How Lindsey Graham, Eager to Serve Trump, Became a Useful Idiot for Putin — David Corn
Within moments of the early Sunday morning announcement that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had died, there was much obvious commentary about his journey from Trump foe to Trump suck-up. During the 2016 GOP presidential primary, when Graham was competing with the onetime reality TV celebrity, he blasted Donald Trump as a “demagogue” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He urged voters to tell Trump to “go to hell.” He predicted his party would be “destroyed,” if it nominated Trump.
Yet after Trump won, Graham became a full-fledged Trump lackey. He played golf with his new buddy and relished the access to power he now possessed. After the 2020 election, he joined Trump’s effort to pressure Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to rework the state’s vote count so Trump would prevail. And when Graham won a hard-fought Senate primary last month, he lavished praise on Trump, exclaiming, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”
Graham lavished praise on Trump, exclaiming, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”
One sign of Graham’s descent into the abyss of Trump toadyism is not likely to receive much attention: his acrobatic flip-flop on the Trump-Russia scandal.
After the 2016 election, during which Russia mounted a covert hack-and-leak attack and an extensive clandestine social media operation to cause chaos, hinder the Hillary Clinton campaign, and boost Trump, Graham was one of the Republican legislators who was boiling mad. He proclaimed, “I think they did interfere with our elections, and I want Putin personally to pay the price.” Graham even lobbied Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, to lead the Senate’s investigation of the Russian assault. (McConnell opted to hand the probe to the Senate intelligence committee, where it would be less visible to the public.)
In this regard, Graham was at odds with Trump, who had falsely denied Putin had interfered in the 2016 election and who derided the scandal as a “hoax” and not worthy of an investigation, which he repeatedly called a “witch hunt.” Graham also joined with Sen. Marco Rubio to press the Trump administration to impose tough sanctions on Russia—which Trump was not keen on doing....
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Sorry, Lindsey. God can see behind him.
Christopher Nolan Unloads on AI Slop — Frank Landymore
Director Christopher Nolan has a reputation for tortuous storytelling. His movies elliptically jump across time (“Memento”), or move backwards through it (“Tenet”), or toy with solipsism to have us question what’s real (“Inception”). We suspect his upcoming adaptation of the classic Greek epic “The Odyssey,” which hits theaters later this month, won’t be any different.
But when the famed director decided to give his thoughts on AI, he didn’t prevaricate; instead, he straightforwardly explained why everyone — and especially the younger generations — absolutely loathe the tech.
“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime,” Nolan said in a new interview with The Telegraph. “So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.”
Nolan jumped on the topic after praising Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, two young directors who got their start on YouTube and whose debuts, “Backrooms” and “Obsession,” were massive hits this year. In particular, he was cheered by their ambivalence towards AI, which he saw as emblematic of how the tech is being rejected by Gen Z at large. He also cited his own for children, who are in their late teens and early 20s, as further evidence.
“Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh,” Nolan said of the youths. “They see it for what it is very quickly — and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well.”
“And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in filmmaking it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time,” he added. “After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”...
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Thank you, Mr. Nolan.
Grok Linked to Sickening Crime in Lawsuit That Puts SpaceX in Crosshairs — |Frank Landymore
According to boosters of AI, the tech was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented productivity, leisure time for workers, and scientific discovery. But in reality, it keeps being linked to crimes so ghoulish that they’re almost unbelievable.
In a particularly horrifying example, a man used Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot to generate some 7,000 sexually explicit images of his stepdaughter by feeding the AI a photo of her that was taken when she was 11 years old, a lawsuit alleges.
The allegations, as reported by Ars Technica, were made in a proposed class action lawsuit against xAI — now owned by SpaceX and rebranded as SpaceXAI — which accuses it of building AI tools to “nudify” people without their consent and shielding predators from law enforcement.
According to the suit, brought by a group of girls who say they were victimized by obscene Grok generations, the stepfather’s horrific activity almost went entirely unnoticed by Grok’s safety systems. It failed to flag the countless images depicting incest and rape, per Ars. It was only after a specific prompt for a “gang rape” that it sent a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), who alerted authorities.
But xAI “obstructed” the investigation that followed “at every turn,” the suit alleges. It refused to provide more information on the user behind the requests, including critical identifying details like an IP address. Police tracked down the man anyway, finding a vast collection of AI-generated images of his stepdaughter, identified only as Jane Doe 4. Two days after being released on bail, the man fatally shot himself, upending the young girl’s life even more than he already had....
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Another blessing on humanity. /S
A Study Tried to Quantify How Many LinkedIn Posts Are 100% AI. It’s a Lot — Mike Pearl
It's not shocking that people on LinkedIn use AI, but they use it *so much.*
Pangram is the company behind the most prominent AI text detector tool out there. For that company to release a study looking at how much AI-generated content there is on social media is a little like Charmin releasing a study revealing an epidemic of skid marks. But hear them out anyway. Their findings are both eye-popping and plausible.
Pangram’s marquee finding is that 41% of longform LinkedIn posts are “flagged as fully AI-generated,” as is 30% of short form content on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is reportedly much more AI-saturated than any other social media platform, unless you consider Medium a social media platform, in which case I regret to inform you that 31% of the longform content you’re engaging with is fully AI generated.
On X, Pangram says 29% of longform content is AI generated—but who is reading those awful longform X posts anyway? Pangram notes that longform X posts are arguably more AI saturated than LinkedIn posts if you count human-AI hybrid content. It claims that “only 53.2% of X articles [get flagged] as fully human-authored,” so keep that in mind if you’re actually thinking of reading one of those. Meanwhile, only 9% of normal X posts are fully AI generated.
On Reddit, 13% of longform writing is fully AI generated, compared to 3% for short form....
Trump's CDC Stopped Monitoring A Parasite. Guess What's Spreading Now. -- Conover Kennard
You put a guy who thinks raw milk is a health food in charge of disease tracking, and a disease started spreading untracked. Shocking.
A nationwide outbreak of explosive diarrhea is currently underway, and it's tied to a parasite the CDC quietly dropped from federal surveillance back in July 2025. That timing lines up almost exactly with the Trump administration's broader gutting of health and science agencies under the "government efficiency" banner, HuffPost reports.
A parasite called Cyclospora has sickened over 1,000 people across 29 states, with Michigan getting hit the worst of all. The CDC would probably have caught this sooner — if it hadn't stopped watching for it.
The agency's FoodNet program used to track eight foodborne pathogens, until that surveillance simply stopped. Cyclospora, Campylobacter, Listeria, Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia were tracked. But in July 2025, right around the time the Trump administration started gutting federal health agencies and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushed out scientists and researchers, that surveillance ended.
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Blessed are we. /S
Pete Hegseth's Beard And Fat-Troop Purge Isn't Going Great, And He's Noticed — John Amato
A weirdo against beardos.
One would think the Iran war, which was spiraling out of control, would be the Department of Defense's Pete Hegseth's most important function right now.
If you thought that, you'd be wrong.
Whiskey Pete is getting upset that his no-beards and fat-troops edicts are not being adhered to by the rank and file.
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Blanket party material!
How Republicans paved the way for white nationalists to invade DC — Oliver Willis
The white supremacist group Patriot Front brazenly marched in Washington, D.C., on Independence Day. Their faces covered in white ski masks and their eyes obscured by sunglasses, the identically dressed group of men celebrated our country’s 250th anniversary by waving the pro-slavery Confederate flag, chanting about wanting to “reclaim America,” and carrying signs and banners promoting their pro-white racist ideology.
Even in an era where President Donald Trump regularly spouts racist rants from his position as the head of the U.S. government, the Patriot Front display was shocking to millions.
In a television appearance on CNN the next day, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum steadfastly refused to condemn the Patriot Front when anchor Dana Bash questioned him about the racist display.
Members of the Patriot Front hold flags on the National Mall during the annual March for Life, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, in Washington.
Members of the Patriot Front hold flags on the National Mall during the annual March for Life on Jan. 23 in Washington. AP
“I think what they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with, but one of the foundational principles of the United States that makes democracy messy is free speech,” Burgum said.
At best, Burgum’s statement was a tepid signal at disagreement. But it was far from a full-throated repudiation of the group’s white supremacy.
Prominent conservative media figures went in an even more absurd direction....
Fox News host Laura Ingraham said the protest was “fake” and “looks more like Antifa in costume.” Ingraham even added, “No one should be allowed to cover their faces.”...
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Unless there's a viral epidemic, sleepers!
Losers from the Land of the Happy Negro!
Patel Tasked To Oversee “Leak” Probe Over Qatari Jet
The New York Times reports:
The White House directed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, to oversee a leak investigation into reporting by The New York Times about security issues with the new Air Force One, leading to a flurry of subpoenas to several Times reporters Friday night, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Patel scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than F.B.I. headquarters — a major departure from historical practice. Mr. Patel also briefed senior administration officials on the investigation, two people said.
The White House’s deep involvement in the case came after officials said that President Trump was enraged about the coverage of the Qatari-donated plane, which The Times reported Thursday lacks the same defensive countermeasures of the previous Air Force One.
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Let the criminals investigate their crime? Great idea.
Ground the plane,Shorty!
Critics react with horror to ‘insane’ revelations about Marco Rubio: ‘impeachable’ — Brad Reed, Common Dreams
Some critics of the Trump administration are reacting with horror to revelations that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been serving as the de facto ruler of Venezuela.
According to a Saturday report in The New York Times, Rubio for the last several months has been acting informally as the “viceroy” of Venezuela ever since its recognized president, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted by the American military in January and brought to the US to face charges related to “narco-terrorism.”
The Times’ sources revealed that Rubio “effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources, and its government” and “is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations,” while maintaining regular contact with acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez....
“We are literally back in the Dollar Diplomacy days of the 1910s,” Simpson wrote, “when the United States invaded countries and took over their financial systems and ran them as effective colonies. Flagrantly illegal, enormously corrupt. Where is the organization of American states or UN in denouncing this?”
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Lil Marco needs a Banana Republic to fuck over as dictator!
'If He Touches It,' It Turns 'To Dogs**t': Former Trump Official Blasts President's Qatari Jet — Anthony Orrico
"All of it is tied into each other, and the plane is an example of that, right?" said Anthony Scaramucci.
Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci skewered President Donald Trump’s retrofitted Qatari Air Force One jet on Friday.
Scaramucci was speaking with “Runaway Country” host Alex Wagner about recent reports that Trump was forced to switch planes while returning from the NATO summit in Turkey. Wagner suggested that Trump, who called himself “no.1 on the kill list for Iran,” thinks the idea is “kind of cool.”
“Yes, he’s trying to make it sound cool,” Scaramucci agreed. “That is part of his brand, you know, the ‘fight fight fight’ when the shots were fired in Butler, are all part of his brand, and I get that, and he’s very good at disassociating himself.”
He theorized that the Qatari jet debacle is just another example of the “Trump effect.”
“All of it is tied into each other, and the plane is an example of that, right?” he went on. “It’s an unfinished plane. We have an unfinished, fractured East Wing. We have an unfinished, now, reflecting pool. And so this is Donald Trump. If he touches it, it’s gonna turn to to dogshit.”...
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At least, Scaramucci was always entertaining.
Palantir Insiders Disgusted by Company’s Leadership — Joe Wilkins
As tech companies go, the surveillance giant Palantir plays it looser than most. Specializing in deadly military targeting software and domestic police technology, Palantir isn’t afraid to lean into the reactionary, dystopian schtick.
That’s not an exaggeration. In a since-deleted post on X-formerly-Twitter, Palantir’s head of “strategic engagement” Eliano Younes shared an AI-generated propaganda video depicting the company logo surrounded by cult imagery, bloody crosses, and the grim reaper.
While the edgy ragebait is part-and-parcel of Palantir’s favored type of marketing material, the video evidently ruffled some feathers, exposing a deep cultural rift within one of the largest military tech firms in the world.
Speaking to the Financial Times, one former staffer explained that the incident caused the company to have an “absolute internal meltdown.”...
Politically, it all reads a bit like Mordor’s orcs registering HR complaints about Sauron’s management style. The objection is noted, but you’re still helping the guy conquer Middle Earth; Palantir, after all, is named after a fictional orb in JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” that corrupts anyone foolish enough to peer into it.
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Then send Gandalf in to correct it!
AI Is Pushing Older Employees Straight Out of the Workforce, New Report Finds — Joe Wilkins
So far, the narrative of AI in the workplace has had a consistent victim: the recent college grad, supposedly first on the chopping block as large language models automate the types of low level tasks that traditionally provided an on-ramp to office careers.
New evidence, however, suggests the tech may be impacting a surprisingly different segment of the workforce: those closest to retirement.
In a recent study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, economics professor Geoffrey Sanzenbacher took a hard look at labor data in order to map AI’s impact on older workers in the United States. Comparing government job data against an AI-exposure index — a data set that tracks the degree to which certain occupations hinge on tasks that AI can do — Sanzenbacher compared the number of workers 55 and older leaving the workforce before and after the release of ChatGPT in 2022.
Though the researcher caveats that the “impact of AI on any workers, let alone those near retirement, remains an open question,” his findings point to an alarming shift. Prior to ChatGPT, older workers in the most AI-exposed jobs — highly-trained knowledge worker gigs like coding and tax preparation — were more likely to work later into their lives compared to those in manual labor....
Though that general pattern still holds overall, Sanzenbacher observes that after the release of ChatGPT, the share of workers 55 and up leaving white collar work is surging. That’s not necessarily because folks are taking early retirements either; as Sanzenbacher writes, “after the ChatGPT launch… AI-exposed jobs saw relative increases in total transitions out of work and specifically to unemployment (but not out of the labor force).”
Said another way, growing numbers of older white collar workers are being pushed out of the airplane before they’re ready to jump, with little more than a blue Walmart vest as a parachute....
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Having been emplyed in management and in close reach of HR, I found that older employees are more reliable and experienced in their jobs.
The AI Industry Has Finally Found the Perfect Customer: Bloodthirsty Terrorists — Victor Tangermann
AI chatbots has been a dream come true for criminals.
The tech has been a boon for scammers. Hackers are using the tools to infiltrate networks and steal sensitive data. Art forgers are even generating fake invoices to certify the authenticity of dupes.
In a perhaps-inevitable escalation, chatbots are even giving a major leg up to terrorist groups. As detailed in a new paper by University of Cambridge international security expert Antonia Juelich, former Boko Haram members recounted using frontier AI model chatbots to “assist in combat and day-today operations.”
The research highlights how easy it still is to circumvent AI chatbot guardrails, making them an excellent resource not just for average users doing work tasks or planning a weekend getaway — but for bloodthirsty terrorists as well.
“It has aided in attack planning, weapons troubleshooting, and the design of explosive devices, as users have successfully circumvented some safeguards,” Juelich wrote in her paper....
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Trump must spend his nights with one or more of these sadistic devices.
Climate Scientists Aghast at How Bad Things Are Getting, and So Fast — |Victor Tangermann
The July 4 holiday weekend wasn’t just a scorcher — it was so hot it disrupted public events and strained power grids as temperatures soared into the triple digits.
Across the pond, Europe is bracing for yet another devastating, record-breaking heatwave. And it’s barely out of the last one, which was responsible for at least 1,300 excess deaths.
Even climate scientists, who have long watched as global warming rears its ugly head, are astonished at the accelerating trend. As Bloomberg reports, their models have long predicted rising temperatures due to human activity and the burning of fossil fuels. Yet the trend is speeding up to a degree that has caught even experts off guard.
The year 2023, in particular, was so far off the charts that researchers are still trying to make sense of what exactly happened. Even when adjusting for extra water vapor from volcanic eruptions, or natural climate variability, the month of September of that year was such a spike, it bored a hole through even the most pessimistic climate models.
“We could call them super-extremes or mega-extremes,” University of Exeter climate change and Earth system science chair Tim Lenton told Bloomberg. “We’re starting to see extremes on a spatial scale and a magnitude that’s really surprising.”
“Extreme events are so far outside anything we have expected,” Imperial College London climate scientist Friederike Otto added. “It’s not so important whether it’s what we expected as experts. It’s whether it’s what we expect as people on the ground.”
If there’s one certainty, it’s that it’s bound to get worse. A slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a system that circulates warm ocean water northward, where it cools back down, could mean even more extreme heat for Europe. Scientists fear that a collapse of the AMOC is no longer a matter of if, but when....
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No one seems to give a shit. Trump and his Crime Syndicate are trying to destroy every advancement we've made to turn it down.
Louisiana Youth Pastor Arrested On Child Sex Charges
New Orleans’s Fox affiliate reports:
A youth pastor at First Baptist Church of Folsom was arrested Friday (July 10) after investigators said he sexually abused multiple children during the 1990s, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s Office said.
David Mercer, 72, was taken into custody Friday afternoon and is being held at the St. Tammany Parish jail.
Deputies also searched a residence owned by First Baptist Church of Folsom on Friday as part of the investigation. Investigators believe there may be additional victims who have not yet come forward.
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Oh, dear! Another Xianist bites the dust!
Fox News reporter slapped down for saying Trump subpoenas 'should alarm every American' — Kathleen Culliton
A Fox News journalist who criticized President Donald Trump's decision to subpoena reporters whose work left him feeling "embarrassed and angry" faced immediate backlash Saturday for her perceived lack of loyalty.
Chief National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin took to X Saturday to condemn subpoenas sent to New York Times journalists over their coverage of Trump's Qatari plane and the security it could not provide him.
"This action by the US government to subpoena reporters for reporting legitimate news on security concerns about Air Force 1 should alarm every American," Griffin wrote.
The Fox News correspondent then quoted David McCraw, whom she named as the Times’s top newsroom lawyer, whose response appeared to mirror her own.
“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” he said.
This defense of the Constitution shocked Griffin's followers who defended Trump's decision to penalize journalists who reported on the $400 million jet he faces mounting tensions abroad.
"If you had a security vulnerability that could assist your adversary in assassinating you, would you be okay if the press reported it out?" replied Sarah Adams, host of the podcast The Watch Floor. "You can say all you want in this country, but choices still must have some consequences."
Conservative political commentator Matthew Buckley took a sterner tone.
"You use the words 'reporter' and 'American' in the same sentence," he said. "Because because I have often heard that they are not the same thing. Which one are you first? Does a reporter have the same responsibilities as an American citizen? Or are you somehow a disinterested 3rd party observer?"
Defense attorney Doug A'hern argued the journalists would be protected by due process and therefore could be legally subpoenaed.
"As long as the journalist did not participate in the unlawful acquisition of the classified materials, they won’t be charged criminally for its dissemination," he wrote. "They are not immune from criminal subpoenas."
Courtney Fosnight, a self-described MAGA Republican, condemned Griffin outright for her response.
"You should be investigated," she wrote. "Maybe if a few of you are held accountable the rest of you will become reliable again."
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Amdt1.4.1 Freedom of Press Overview
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Where does it state here any conditons to a free press? A free press is as good as any religion, boys and girls. Investigated? Playing the fear card I see. Does being held accountable apply to religion, Courtney?
'Necrocracy in action': Trump torpedoes mental fitness defense with single baffling word — Kathleen Culliton
President Donald Trump shot himself in the proverbial foot Saturday with a lengthy rant that raised the precisely the concerns he meant to dismiss.
Trum's assertion that he remains in perfect health included a single word that rang alarm bells for Daily Beast reporter Sarah-Jane Collins: "Just."
"President Donald Trump has sparked fresh health concerns after bragging that he “just” completed a physical exam at Walter Reed Medical Center," she wrote.
"The 80-year-old president was golfing at the time of his post on Truth Social on Saturday, according to White House press pool reports, and there have been no reports of him undergoing another medical exam after his last one in late May."
Trump's Truth Social post targeted journalist Maggie Haberman after she fielded questions about his mental health on MS NOW Saturday morning.
That interview took place after a week of gaffes that saw him refer to Iran as the "Islamic State of Japan" and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Vladimir Putin.
"His health is like a black box inside that administration," Haberman said. "They have released less and less information."
Trump's response was to call Haberman "maggot" and boast about his cognative health.
"Also, I just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed, I do it every six months, and I requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all — Got every question right," he wrote. "Few people in Washington, D.C., could do so, including Maggot."
The Daily Beast reporter was not alone in her lingering confusion about Trump's usage of the word "Just."
"'Just finished a perfect physical'?" asked Olivier Knox, senior national political correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. "Another one? Or is this the May physical?"...
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Who am I? Where am I? And what am I doing? Great Caesar's Ghost!
Texas Is Fast Tracking AI Data Center Construction Using a Permitting Loophole — Evan Simon , Floodlight
Texas regulators are using permit regimes usually reserved for gas stations and dry cleaners to open the door to AI.
Omaira Garcia didn’t realize life on her small ranch in Abilene, Texas, was about to change forever until clouds of dust — kicked up by a mysterious project next door — began to engulf her home.
The Air Force veteran said she found out about OpenAI’s plans to build its flagship Stargate data center directly beside her property only after construction began in the summer of 2024. Today, the site’s natural-gas-powered electrical plant sits roughly 500 yards from her house, the exhaust stacks clearly visible from her kitchen window.
“We weren’t given any time to understand what this impact was going to be on us,” the mother of two said thr
OpenAI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Stargate’s developer, Crusoe, told Floodlight that the data center has “contributed meaningfully to the economic development” of Abilene, and its investments are “funding new fire trucks, school expansions, and road improvements across the city.”
As President Trump seeks to fasttrack AI development across the country, he has found a willing ally in Texas governor Greg Abbott, who has previously referred to the industry as the state’s “gold rush” — though his enthusiasm has recently dampened in the face of widespread opposition.
With some 300 data centers already in operation and 200 more in development, Texas could surpass Virginia as the nation’s leading data center market by 2030. Amidst the frenzy to capitalize on the AI boom, a regulatory loophole has allowed dozens of data centers like Stargate to quietly construct massive power sources that emit harmful pollutants with little to no public notice, a Floodlight investigation has found.
Typically, before you can build a major source of new emissions, you have to get a major air permit, which includes extensive environmental reviews and engagement with the local community. But in Texas, regulators have allowed some data centers like Stargate to avoid that process by first obtaining so-called minor air permits — the kind more commonly associated with dry cleaners and autobody shops and rubber-stamped with minimal review....
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Debemos destituir tanto a Trump como a Abbott si queremos liberarnos de la corrupción fascista en Texas, mis amigos.
Fatal Houston ICE Shooting Follows Agency’s Turn to Increased Street Arrests — Alex Nguyen & Colleen DeGuzman
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo killing was the result of the kind of operation ICE increasingly relies on to meet quotas.
mmigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Texas and across the country have increasingly targeted people who are not already in law enforcement custody, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of federal data.
In Houston, where the killing of an immigrant by an ICE agent has garnered national attention, the monthly number of ICE arrests outside of detention facilities has more than quadrupled, even as in-custody arrests are still more common. The number of arrests in public spaces and homes jumped from a monthly average of 150 under former President Joe Biden to more than 640 under the first 13 months of the Trump administration. Those made up nearly a third of all ICE arrests in the city as of early March 2026, rising from 16% under Biden.
Statewide, the share of community arrests jumped from 14% to 36% of all arrests. Meanwhile, the increase nationwide was smaller, growing from 34% to 43%.
This shift in strategy from jail pickups to arrests in broad daylight can raise risks of violent altercations in public places, an immigration professor and immigration lawyer warn.
That’s what happened this week when ICE agents fatally shot 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, they said....
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Trump no longer cares who they take out. It could be you, me or a member or your family. Hitler's Germany is upon us, America. We must be wieighed in the balance!
The FBI Has Deputized Local Cops as Federal Agents. Communities Are Resisting — Marianne Dhenin
Organizers are fighting the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, gaining momentum from the broader anti-ICE movement.
As the Trump administration widens its crackdown on immigrant communities and progressive activists, federal task forces are playing an important behind-the-scenes role. Organizers warn that institutions like the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) are targeting vulnerable communities and sharing the kind of information that facilitates Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. But some say the current political climate also presents opportunities as appetites grow for local and state agencies to cut ties with the federal task forces endangering their communities.
“We have an opportunity for more allies because more people are upset, more people feel that they are impacted, more people see their neighbor being dragged away, and they don’t like it, and so the body of people that feel like something should be done is larger,” Tracy Rosenberg, advocacy director at Oakland Privacy, told Truthout. “We should take advantage of that to protect people who have been vulnerable this whole time.”
JTTFs deputize state or local police officers as federal agents, meaning a local cop who is contracted to work with a JTTF has the same policing powers as an FBI agent, and the Department of Justice can shield them from litigation and local oversight. Often, those police officers no longer have to follow their own departmental regulations on the use of force or body-worn cameras. The arrangements also come with federal dollars and gear.
“The laws that apply to [local and state law enforcement agents in JTTFs] are the federal standards,” Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel at Muslim Advocates, explained to Truthout. That means that “if there are more protective standards around privacy or around sanctuary that operate in a city or locality, then typically the agreements that underpin these task forces make the federal law the standard — sanctuary becomes kind of obsolete, and additional privacy protections don’t apply.”
There are about 200 such task forces nationwide with hundreds of participating state, local, and federal agencies. Other federal or state agencies have similar programs, such as ICE’s Border Enforcement Security Task Force and the network of state-owned and federally funded fusion centers. The task forces have well-documented records of profiling low-income and immigrant communities, as well as communities of color. They also have histories of targeting Muslims and civil and human rights groups....
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Fight the Trump takeover of the USA!
Ex-White House lawyer: Trump ‘stacking every card in the deck’ ahead of midterms — Sophie Brams
Former White House attorney Ty Cobb warned Friday that President Trump's decision to fire the remaining Democratic members of an independent election administration commission this week is part of a "deliberate plan" to put his thumb on the scale of the upcoming midterm elections.
"You can't look at the termination of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) as anything other than another effort by one side to try to take over part of the referee role for the elections," Cobb said during an appearance on MS NOW.
Trump removed Democrats Benjamin Hovland and Thomas Hicks from the commission on Thursday, with the White House citing his authority to do so under the Supreme Court's recent decision in the recent Slaughter case.
The justices ruled in a 6-3 decision that the president can fire the heads of most independent agencies at will, overturning a nearly century-old precedent that allowed Congress to insulate those bodies from political interference.
"The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America's elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted," a White House official said in a statement. "The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so."
A third commission member, Republican Christy McCormick, also resigned this week.
The EAC, established in 2002, is an independent board that provides funds, training and assistance to state election officials to help them prepare for federal elections and facilitate voter participation. It also certifies voting technology and handles nation voter registration forms, among other duties....
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We must vote this year to stop the Trump takeover. Know where you vote. Plane to vote. Know what to do if you f encounter resistance. We must win or die!
USPS maintenance technician removed from Minnesota facility for demanding cleanup of human feces — Anthony Bertolt<br>
On June 20, Alex Azevedo, a maintenance technician at the U.S. Postal Service’s St. Paul Processing and Distribution Center in Eagan, Minnesota, was escorted off the property by police and referred for a psychiatric evaluation. Management ordered the evaluation after he became distraught over its refusal for more than 24 hours to clean up human feces that had been smeared across mail-sorting equipment.
The incident exposes the systematic degradation of working conditions across the USPS under the “Delivering for America” (DFA) restructuring plan. Facility consolidations, staffing cuts and the elimination of millions of work hours have intensified the pressure to keep equipment operating despite dangerous conditions. Four workers have died in two years at the Palmetto Regional Processing and Distribution Center in Georgia, where an independent inquiry by the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee has documented reports of inadequate safety protocols and emergency medical resources.
Azevedo’s removal also follows a documented pattern of harassment and retaliation at the St. Paul facility. Steven Linell Smith, a maintenance mechanic at the plant, endured five years of racial harassment, stalking, death threats and management retaliation before being fired on a pretext. He won a federal hostile work environment case against the USPS, while the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which had declared his case “unwinnable,” refused to fight for his reinstatement.
Azevedo, an electronic technician, spoke to the WSWS about what happened on June 19 and 20. Nearly three weeks later, he remains on leave with no expected return date....
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2 + 2 = 5 in Minnesota!
Dissapeared. This is totalitarianism at work. We may, in fact, be a shithole nation as we are allowing the Nazis to do what they want.
Out of Time: Expert Says America May Be Nearing Its Point of No Return — Sarah K. Burris
Canadian lawyer and author Omer Aziz is warning Americans that fascism has not only arrived, but it's also been alive and well in the U.S. for some time. The real chore is in ending it before it goes too far.
In his book Shadow of the Republic, Aziz explains that it appears the pro-fascist group “is using the machinery of constitutional government in a partisan way to make it subservient to the political party and then to turn it against ordinary citizens, dissidents, free thinkers, journalists."
It's something that horror writer and anti-fascist activist Stephen King explained, "should be an alarm bell announcing that the American house is on fire."
Speaking to Zeteo's Mehdi Hasan, Aziz walked through America's long flirtation with fascism that is too often glossed over in a history that prizes American exceptionalism above reality.
“By the time the fascists are building the camps, it’s already too late and we have lost," Hasan read from the book. It prompted him to ask just how close the U.S. is.
Aziz said that currently, Trump likes to "cosplay as a fascist," using things like his "weaponization fund" and "the prosecution of political enemies" as examples. Republicans dismiss such claims as hyperbolic and symptoms of the imagined "Trump derangement syndrome" or "paranoid liberals."...
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The disgrace and shame of a once great nation.
Police State: Are We Already There and Just Don't Know It? — Thom Hartmann
History shows that police states aren't declared: they're assembled piece by piece, until one day ordinary people realize the freedoms they once took for granted have quietly disappeared
Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century.
He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.
By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”
ICE says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement.
The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.”
The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”
The president of Mexico announced this week that her government will pursue legal action against the United States over the killing. The historical inversion packed into that sentence is complete: Mexico is now appealing to international bodies to protect its citizens from American police violence.
Which brings us to the question people keep asking me on my radio show and on social media: “Are we in a police state yet?” And the question underneath it, the one that really matters: “How would we know?”...
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Like minds...
Whistleblowers expose Trump's Kennedy Center scheme in new bombshell claim — Adam Lynch
The New York Times reports President Donald Trump’s love of no-bid contracts with connected contractors and flunkies have ruined another Washington, DC., project, this time at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Whistleblowers say renovations at the center “were rushed to meet the deadlines driven by the president’s desire to host official events at the center [and] federal contracting laws and regulations were ignored.”
In one case cited in Congressional internal documents a new bathroom floor in one of the center’s three presidential boxes was ordered torn up last year and redone after the White House complained about the beige color of the tiles.
“The 82-page submission to Congress was made under a law designed to protect federal employees who disclose allegations of wrongdoing from retaliation. The lawyers who sent it, David Seide and Dana Gold, work for a nonprofit that represents government whistle-blowers,” reports the Times. “ … Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which received the submission, wrote to the Kennedy Center on Thursday demanding information related to the renovations. Mr. Whitehouse, an ex officio member of the center’s board, said the submission raised ‘serious questions’ about whether public funds were being spent properly.”...
The whistleblower submission also raises questions about potential favoritism. Representatives of Low Country Flooring, the South Carolina company selected without competition for a five-year, $8 million flooring contract, posted photos on Facebook showing themselves praying with Trump at the Kennedy Center before being selected for the lucrative deal. One company official commented on the image: "He asked, and the president said of course.
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Keep your stnking hands off America's KENNEDY CENTER!
Corrupt 'mobster' Trump staggered that some people can’t be bought: analysis — Adam Lynch
Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio says it really throws a corrupt man when other people don’t respond to bribery. This is the confusion facing President Donald Trump in his doings with more principled international leaders — even in the terrorist state of Iran.
Someone like Trump believes “everyone has their price,” Cartoggio told the Dispatch. “… Team Trump’s One Neat Trick to get Iran to accept its interpretation of Paragraph 5 was to offer the Iranians the fattest envelope America could stuff.”...
“Trump is amoral whereas the Iranian regime is immoral, but they are immoral actors in the pursuit of long-term goals, enshrined in the Islamic Revolution of 1979,” said Catoggio. “No amount of resistance appears capable of convincing the president that foreign nationalism usually can’t be broken by buying, bullying, or bombing it into submission. Occasionally, it can: The predators who rule Venezuela rolled over meekly when Trump demanded fealty. But Ukraine fought on after the U.S. cut off military aid. Canada began organizing a western counterweight to U.S. power after Trump challenged its sovereignty. And Denmark continues to defy White House threats to sabotage NATO if it doesn’t cough up Greenland.”...
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Hell, yes! He's pig of the first order!
Judge tears apart new Trump lawsuit as his lawyers make a confession — Clark Kauffman, Iowa Capital Dispatch
The attorney for President Donald Trump argued in court Friday that while he has no evidence to support a claim that a 2024 pre-election poll constituted fraud, the president’s lawsuit against The Des Moines Register and its pollster should be allowed to proceed.
The president has claimed in court that the opinion poll, published just three days before the November 2024 election and showing him trailing his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, by 3 points in Iowa, was fraudulent. He is suing the newspaper and pollster J. Ann Selzer, alleging consumer fraud and citing the fact that he ultimately beat Harris in Iowa by more than 13 points.
The Register and Selzer recently filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that an election poll, regardless of its results, does not fit the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act’s definition of a commercial transaction, and that the lawsuit is also barred by the First Amendment’s protection of free speech.
In written briefs filed with the court this week, Selzer’s attorney, Robert Corn-Revere, called the legal claims made by the president and his attorneys “not just wrong — they are ridiculous.” He asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that even if all of the president’s factual assertions were deemed true, there’d still be no legal basis for the lawsuit....
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Indeed. The dumbass doesn't know how anything works! The worst person to ever occupy our Presidential office!
There is no basis for Trump, ever!
Judge Erases Jan 6 Cases Against Top Proud Boys
Politico reports:
It’s over. The Justice Department’s most significant case stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol — the seditious conspiracy convictions of high-ranking members of the far right Proud Boys — has officially been erased. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who presided over the six-month trial that led to the jury convictions, reluctantly granted a Justice Department motion to drop the case on Friday, concluding that he had no power to second-guess prosecutors once they decided to abandon it.
Kelly’s decision ends one of the last lingering loose ends from the violent attack on the Capitol by a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters, a riot that threatened the transfer of presidential power from Trump to Joe Biden, forcing Congress to flee for safety and leaving more than 100 police officers injured.
During trial, prosecutors cast the group’s leaders — including its national chair Enrique Tarrio — as a pivotal driver of the violence that day, assembling a “fighting force” that arrived at the Capitol even while Trump addressed a crowd of supporters near the White House. Members of the group were present for and involved in multiple breaches of police lines. One of them, Dominic Pezzola, ignited the breach of the Capitol building when he smashed a Senate-wing window with a stolen police riot shield. They later celebrated their roles in the breach.
"All these fucking traitors need to go meet with Ashley and Charlie." — Thewolflam (comments)
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Simon Wiesenthal has passed but I say someone like him will come along and take care of these Nazi thugs who will never escape justice!
DOJ Subpoenas NYT Reporters Over Qatari Jet Stories
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration issued subpoenas on Friday to several journalists for The New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.
The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations. In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.
The Times denounced the administration’s actions. “The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” said David McCraw, The Times’s top newsroom lawyer, in a statement on Friday evening.
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The DOJ piles of Nazi shit never heard a a free press.The biggest fucking Trump chickenshit stooges that ever lived!
Reuters: WH Tried To Force Voting Machine Changes
Reuters reports:
The White House spent months looking for ways to bypass a federal election agency and use emergency powers to force changes to ?voting machines, before President Donald Trump ousted its leaders on Thursday, four people familiar with the matter said.
Some officials were frustrated with what they saw as the Election Assistance ?Commission’s slowness in updating guidelines for states on voting machines, the sources said, while some also wanted it to add a proof-of-citizenship requirement to its national mail voter registration form and address other election-related priorities of the administration.
Democratic lawmakers criticized the firings as an attempt to increase its control over U.S. elections, which are the purview of the states, and as undermining election integrity ahead of November’s midterm elections, when control of Congress will be at stake.
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Trump continues his "Reign of Terror" over us! we must bring him to justice just like in the end of Mississippi Burning!
New normal of Trump’s America: bigotry, cowardice and blind obedience — Jordan Liz, Common Dreams
On July 7, an Immigration Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national. According to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Araujo “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.” As of the time of this writing, the agency has yet to provide any evidence.
This shooting comes days after a massive surge in ICE arrests. Between June 26 and June 30, 10,000 people were reportedly detained by immigration agents.
This is a tragic story—one that we have seen many times before.
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Listing of known murders by Trump's Gestapo. There are many more he has murdered in boat attacks. We are an evil nation led by an insane killer!
If we don't wake up soon it will be too late when the nuclear bombs fall on us this time.
Trump's 'incredibly vulgar' threat reveals secret tactic: Ex-State official — Kathleen Culliton
President Donald Trump's promise to "decimate and destroy all areas of Iran" stunned a former Obama administration official Saturday morning.
Richard Stengel, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, shared his alarm over Trump's recent Truth Social threat with MS NOW viewers.
"The fact of an American president threatening genocide against the whole people in case he's assassinated is more than unseemly," Stengel said. "It's it's incredibly vulgar and undiplomatic language."
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It's criminal!
Unmasking Hate: Whose Country, Our Country — Abby Zimet
What better way to mark the 250th anniversary of a nation founded on lofty ideals now plunged into ugly discrepancies than to double down on hate-and-fear-mongering? Cue a Racist-In-Chief who stays silent when 400 masked Nazis march in D.C. but goes online to assail graduating kindergarteners in Minnesota for wearing hijabs - goading his followers in vicious lockstep to screech, "Deport them, big and small!" Stay classy, MAGA.
Somehow, we still manage to be shocked at how ludicrously low the bar's sunk. Never mind the unhinged May hearing where House Repubs attacked the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), following up on equally unhinged fraud charges, by directly quoting a letter from the same hate groups unhappy they'd been named hate groups. In a blistering response, a Dem rep called out their "embrace of white nationalist rhetoric" with the melted clock from the KKK’s 1983 firebombing of the SPLC, charging, "They’re trying to turn back the clock (on) some of the darkest days of our past.”
Then there's the Kentucky pastor of a Baptist church "befuddled" by this year's backlash against a 30-year-old ritual of their vacation Bible school wherein men in military garb march down their church aisle, pull "sinners" outside to a mock firing squad and pretend to open fire. Pastor Dewayne Walker blamed "misinformation" - "part of what this generation has become" - for outrage at “nothing more than a small part" of their school helpfully aimed at identifying good and evil. Others called the ritual "depraved" and "appalling abuse," noting, "There’s not enough context in the world to make this okay."
Same, alas, for much of what passes these dark days for political discourse. On America's 250th birthday, it was reported, about 400 neo-Nazis from the white nationalist Patriot Front joined the day's tawdry mayhem in D.C. by marching in masks and uniforms - seeking "the menace of a mob with none of the accountability" - chanting "Reclaim America." They looked unsettling enough that many on the right uneasily dismissed them as bad actors or imaginary Antifa; Laura Ingraham sneered, "I call fake," then righteously, nonsensically added, "No one should be allowed to cover their faces."
One image of the day went viral: A lone, young, tense Black woman, sitting on the Metro, surrounded by Nazis. "I have taught this photograph before," wrote a longtime teacher on I Fucking Love Australia, describing the September day in 1957 in Little Rock, AR. when 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, trying to integrate Central High School, was stopped by the National Guard. In the image, she walks alone in the white dress her mother had sewn for her first day through a screaming, snarling white mob. Asked for their response, one of today's students inevitably offers, "Look at their faces. They wanted to be seen."
"They believed history would agree with them," notes the teacher. "The men on that Metro" - in their masks and khakis - "did not." In the 1940s and '50s, states in the Jim Crow South passed laws banning masks in public, their nod to the brutal presence of the KKK; even they understood that a man who covers his face is not expressing an opinion - he is issuing a threat. "In 1957, the mob showed their faces because they thought history was on their side. In 2026 they hide their faces because they know it is not," the teacher wrote. "That is not nothing. That is 69 years of progress, measured in cowardice."...
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The collapse of a once great country...if we allow it to continue.
Trump Has To Fly Old AF One Out Of Turkey For Reasons — Tengrain
Told ya he rushed it and the plane doesn’t have all the defense bells and whistles it is supposed to have, and now that we are in a shooting war with Iran (AGAIN!), he cannot fly this thing home, hence another older AF-1 is going to pick him up. So we get to pay for the fuel X2.
The Affordability Prznint.
Anyway, here’s the dopey liar try to gild the turd:
To honor our brave men and women of the Military, we are sending the brand new, and truly spectacular, Air Force One to Mildenhall Air Force Base, in the United Kingdom, to give them a chance to tour the Aircraft – Everybody is so excited, and we thought that they should be the first. For old time’s sake, we’ll be taking the former Air Force One, from Turkey to Mildenhall, a short trip that is totally worth doing in order to give our Great Military Heroes a chance to appreciate our beautiful new addition to the Air Force Fleet! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Yeah, I’m sure that they will be thrilled to tour this thing.
OK, Congress: time to make sure he knows that this bird is not his personal toy, and if he wants to keep it, he has to pay for this $400M bribe + upgrades himself, out of his own pocket. I defy the Republicans to try to make it some sort of tribute to the Grifter-in-Chief....
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The King of Failure strikes out again!
WTF Is Trump Doing With The White House Columns? — NewsHound Ellen
While Americans struggle with skyrocketing health insurance, gas and food prices and while Trump has mired the U.S. in a needless war he finds too “boring” to focus on ending, he seems to have an endless interest in tarting up the White House. That is, when he’s not tearing down parts of it.
Trump's latest project is “repairing” the White House columns. The New York Times reported that “the White House described the construction as standard restoration work, including stone repair.” The Times also quoted Interior Secretary Doug Burgum saying, “We’re restoring the plaster … all the way up to the crowns of those towers.”
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Haven't you heard? It's all about security bulking up for ...what?
People on X Are Getting Fooled by the Dumbest AI Slop We’ve Ever Seen — Joe Wilkins
As the World Cup enters its final stages, soccer-themed AI slop is proliferating on X-formerly-Twitter.
Sure, it’s no secret that X has suffered some major brain drain under the Musk regime. But the latest deluge of World Cup drek is so ridiculous, it makes the app’s crypto scammers look like Pulitzer finalists.
First spotted by Out Sports, the deluge of AI engagement bait mostly revolves around semi-erotic scenarios playing out in the grandstand.
In a clip with over 7 million views, one clickfarm account shared an AI-generated clip apparently playing on the distracted boyfriend meme: a woman’s boyfriend looking on jealously as she devours a buff, shirtless Norwegian soccer fan with her eyes.
“And with us, the first divorce case in the World Cup 2026,” the caption reads. The entire thing is AI-generated, but that didn’t stop lower-tier clickbait purveyors from circulating it to all corners of the social media platform.
Beneath the spam is a deluge of commenters taking it at face value, seemingly with no idea it isn’t real.
“She looked at him like a nice, juicy steak,” wrote one dupe. “Back to the hamburger, sweetheart.”...
More to read at the link....
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Slop on X? Are you kidding me? X marks the slop!
White House Ends Protections For Endangered Species
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration on Friday moved to open the habitats of imperiled animals to farming, drilling, mining, real estate development and other activities in what environmentalists characterized as the most severe erosion of protections for wildlife in half a century. It did so by recasting a single word, “harm.”
For more than 50 years, the federal government has used a broader definition of harm to animals under the Endangered Species Act, a bedrock environmental law. It included any significant “modification or degradation” of habitat that kills or injures animals by impairing their ability to eat, shelter or breed.
The Supreme Court upheld this interpretation in 1995, ruling against property owners who argued that harm should only mean directly killing or injuring an endangered animal. But on Friday, the Interior Department and the Commerce Department announced a final rule that rescinded this longstanding interpretation. Under the rule, destroying an endangered species’ nest or habitat would no longer be considered illegal.
Read the full article.
Habitat loss is the #1 reason species go extinct. But the Trump admin has finalized a rule under the Endangered Species Act that would allow the widespread destruction of endangered species’ habitats.
Earthjustice has protected endangered species for decades. We’ll see the Trump admin in court.
— Earthjustice (@earthjustice.org) July 10, 2026 at 2:31 PM
The Trump administration has moved to allow drilling, mining, and construction in all endangered species’ habitats.
— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) July 10, 2026 at 3:25 PM
For those who love to kill endangered species……
“MAY YOU ALL ROT IN HELL”
— JCMartinofBA (@jcmartinofba.bsky.social) July 9, 2026 at 6:24 PM
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Does this include Nazis?
Prophetess: I Opened A Portal Over The White House So Trump Can “Easily Get Intel From The Holy Spirit”
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit...
Rigney last appeared here in February 2025 when she claimed to have opened a portal over the White House to “cleanse it of all evil and witchcraft” left by President Biden.
Rigney appeared here in February 2024 when she declared that she rode a giraffe with Jesus in heaven, after which a friendly gorilla pushed her on a swing.
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May the hellhounds drag his sorry ass back to hell!
Cops: Pastor Used City Credit Card To Fund Youth Camp
Gainesville’s ABC affiliate reports:
The community development manager of Dunnellon was arrested on Thursday in connection with the misuse of a city-issued credit card. According to an arrest report, William Grady Ary, 33, was accused of charging $14,874.53 to a city card to purchase tickets for his youth group to attend Real Life Camp, a Christian summer camp.
Sheriff’s deputies say the Dunnellon financial officer, Schonna McLean, reported this suspected unauthorized use. Ary initially denied knowing about the charge in a sworn statement but later claimed it was an accident while dealing with church payments. Ary is a pastor at this church.
Ary faces charges of grand theft, unauthorized use of a credit card, and perjury. He was booked into the Marion County Jail on Thursday and released on Friday after posting a $6,000 bond.
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Oh, yes... the sheep of his pasture...
FCC Chair Suggests He’ll Pull Disney/ABC’s Licenses
Mediaite reports:
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr told CNBC on Friday that it’s a “long putt” for Disney to keep its broadcast license if he deems the company isn’t operating “in the public interest,” adding, “broadcast licenses are not sacred cows.”...
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Neither are FCC power-drrunk arrogants.
House To Vote On Making Daylight Saving Permanent
Inside Congress reports:
House GOP leaders are planning to put legislation on the floor next week that would make daylight saving time permanent in hopes of softening a revolt led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.
According to four people granted anonymity to describe internal party strategy, GOP leaders are moving ahead with a vote on the so-called Sunshine Protection Act because the bill is a major priority for Florida Republicans, including Luna.
Luna helped tank a procedural vote before the July 4 holiday in protest of the Senate not having passed the GOP elections bill known as the SAVE America Act, forcing the House to leave early for its weeklong recess. She has still not committed to allowing legislation to go through when Congress is due to return Monday.
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Drop this Luna-tic arrogant fool like a bad habit!
Trump: I’ve Ordered Iran’s Destruction If They Kill Me
The New York Post reports:
President Trump on Friday told The Post he has “left instructions” should Iran succeed in their plots to assassinate him — and there’ll be hell to pay.
“I’ve been on their list for a long time. That’s what we’re dealing with,” he said. “… The only thing is, I’ve left instructions — if anything happens, to just literally bomb them at levels that they’ve never seen before.”
"If you die, no one has to follow your instructions." — ASFT (comments)
"If they kill you, Fatty, world peace and joy will break out like you've never seen before." — xzargo (comments)
"The consequences of his martyrdom would be unbearable.
I'd rather have a concerted effort to humiliate our President into resignation. That way his name will be removed from everything." — cowboy (comments)
"If they kill you, you’re no longer president and your orders are moot.
Besides, you’re such a useful idiot. Why would they kill you?" — Todd20036 (comments)
Read more laughers at the link above!
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Iran wants you dead, Donnie? Gosh, I would think it would be more like "WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE!" with posters in every post office in the world with a huge cash reward! ROTFLMAO!
Trump Is “Fortifying” White House’s Front Entrance
CNN reports...
But unlike many of Trump’s projects around the White House — from hanging gold signage to paving the Rose Garden — the work on the front door is not cosmetic, and instead focused on enhancing its security, the White House official said. The US Secret Service did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment....
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Paranoia strikes deep! What do they know that we don't know? An invasion of DC on the docket?
Trump’s late-night ‘shock move’ leaves experts horrified over midterms: ‘My stomach sank’ — Alexander Willis
A national security expert was left stunned Friday after President Donald Trump purged the leadership of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Thursday night, a move effectively “disabling the only federal agency devoted solely to election administration” at a time when the president is pushing to enact sweeping changes to election law.
“As of this morning, the commission charged with helping states safeguard ballots and securely administer elections is rudderless, just four months before a national election,” wrote Miles Taylor, who served in the first Trump administration as Homeland Security chief of staff, in an analysis published on his Substack Friday.
“This is the clearest sign yet that Trump plans to meddle in the midterms and that he may have plans to circumvent Congress to carry out a sweeping voter suppression scheme. At first my stomach sank when I saw the news.”
Trump has already moved to impose restrictions on mail-in ballots for the upcoming midterm elections, a move that a federal judge has since declined to pause but remains blocked in 23 states. He’s also aggressively pushed GOP lawmakers to advance his controversial bill known as the SAVE Act, legislation that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote, which critics have described as a form of “voter suppression” that could disenfranchise millions of voters.
And on Thursday, according to the nonprofit organization Votebeat, Trump “fired the three remaining members” of the EAC, leaving the commission with no commissioners.
Taylor called the development “a little more than just an ominous sign,” and said what he feared most was what “Trump’s team might try to do with the organization’s powers now that it’s leaderless.”
“The EAC holds one power that matters enormously right now. It controls the federal voter registration form,” Taylor wrote. “That should set off alarm bells.”
Taylor theorized that Trump's gutting of the EAC could serve as a "Trojan horse" to force through his push to seize control of states' voter rolls. Trump has already enacted rules compelling states to share voter roll data with the federal government by threatening to withhold federal funding, and the SAVE Act includes a provision that could force under-resourced states to hand over that data as well....
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SOS, America1 If you don't wake up and fight like hell you will lose the country that you love. We are being raped by a filthy son-of-a-bitch that has no moral core and we are doing nothing to stop him. The disgrace will be upon you and your family for the remainder of world history!
"And you would have people do what?" someone asks. Die on your feet and not on your knees, I say!
Trump 'doesn't care' to sign bipartisan bill that would help desperate Americans: Analyst — Kathleen Culliton
The clock is ticking for President Donald Trump to either sign or veto a bipartisan bill that could help renters and prospective homeowners nationwide, reports show.
The housing legislation will go into effect midnight Friday as the 10-day deadline to either sign or kill the bill elapses. Despite the bill's strong bipartisan support and the pressing need for housing, Trump has taken no action, noted political analyst Amy Suskind.
"It’s one of the least politically astute moves that I can remember," she wrote on X. "He just doesn’t care."
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act aims at ease the nation’s affordability crisis and passed in both the House and Senate last month.
But Trump canceled his signing ceremony on June 24 as he demanded Congress push the SAVE America Act forward instead, an MS NOW report notes.
"The housing legislation represents one of the rare major bipartisan achievements of the 119th Congress," MS NOW reported, "bringing together lawmakers from both parties around a package intended to increase the nation’s housing supply and lower costs for renters and prospective homebuyers."
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Our military can't win a war in the middle east due to incompetent leadership. Trump is pushing Americans to their limits. No good can come from it. Mark my words. Revolution is at hand!
“You Are a Parasite”: Elon Musk Humiliated for Criticizing Zohran Mamdani — Tangermann
During a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of American independence last week, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani took aim at the richest person in the world to make a salient point about growing inequality.
“We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry, while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more,” he said.
Elon Musk, who temporarily became a trillionaire following his company SpaceX’s IPO last month, didn’t take kindly to the slight.
“Mamdani has built nothing,” he tweeted angrily in response. “He is a taker, never a maker.”
But his knee-jerk retort didn’t exactly land. The most-liked reply pointed out that Musk’s empire had been built on tens of billions of dollars of government handouts. One user called him out for being the “biggest single recipient of US taxpayer dollars of all time.”
One particularly scorching takedown came from grassroots political organizer Jay Ponti, who pointed out that many of Musk’s business successes were built on the shoulders of others.
“[Martin] Eberhard and [Marc] Tarpenning founded Tesla,” he wrote, referring to the EV maker’s original CEO and CFO before Musk joined in 2004. “You didn’t invent eBay or Twitter.”
“Your wealth is from acquisitions, hostile takeovers, and stealing credit,” Ponti added. “Everything you have was built by workers and you fight to keep from unionizing while you receive [government] welfare.”
“You are a parasite,” the political organizer concluded....
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Amen and Hallelujah!
Trump is trying to imprison Americans for joining internet chats he doesn't like — Jordan Green, Investigative Reporter
The 94-page indictment unsealed against 15 anti-ICE activists in Minnesota last month as part of the Trump administration’s latest “antifa” prosecution includes page after page of accusations that defendants attended meetings or joined Signal groups.
Among the 15 people accused of participating in a criminal conspiracy to impede immigration enforcement operations during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis earlier this year, the allegations against at least two defendants — Erik Davis and Brian Stillwell Apland — largely amount to attending meetings and participating in Signal group chats.
Another defendant, Treasure Thoreson, is accused of carrying a homemade shield to block traffic during a protest near the Whipple Building, a federal ICE facility, in January. The indictment also accuses her of using her Subaru to tow a trailer to and from the federal building. There’s no mention of the trailer being used for a so-called “hard blockade” the government alleges was used to forcibly obstruct federal immigration enforcement operations.
The indictment outlines Thoreson, a special education teacher, and other defendants’ alleged involvement in a second blockade at the Whipple Building, including 22 specific references to her allegedly moderating a meeting; coordinating on Signal to organize volunteer marshals; and then on the day of the March 1 protest handing out radios, carrying a bullhorn, and getting detained by local sheriff’s deputies. The Hennepin County District Attorney dismissed Thoreson’s charge of disorderly conduct three weeks later.
“These charges are brought months after the federal forces were forced to retreat by the people of Minnesota,” Bruce Nestor, Thoreson’s lawyer, told Raw Story. “They rely heavily on Signal chats that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Minnesotans took part in to coordinate the monitoring and observation of ICE.
“It’s very much a crackdown on the right to dissent and the right of citizens to oppose their government’s policies,” he added. “It occurs in the context of the administration being defeated in Minnesota, and retaliating months later by going after this group of defendants.”...
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Remove the Nazi filth that is Trump!
'Be ready': Expert warns Trump's 'boyhood pal' on verge of enacting major midterm 'scheme' — Alexander Willis
Former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor sounded the alarm Thursday over what he warned was an imminent “scheme” to “hijack the midterm vote” – an alleged plot that at its center is President Donald Trump’s “boyhood pal.”
The “boyhood pal” in question is Peter Ticktin, an 80-year-old Florida lawyer who first met Trump in the 1950s at the New York Military Academy. Ticktin was in the Oval Office as recently as last week according to Taylor, and has vigorously pushed Trump to declare a national emergency over unsubstantiated claims of foreign election interference in the 2020 election.
“Ticktin insists the proof of the grand conspiracy is coming any day now, once [Venezuelan President] Nicolás Maduro starts talking from federal custody. And some have speculated that the Trump administration is trying to induce the Venezuelan leader to go along with such an admission in exchange for leniency,” Taylor wrote in an analysis published on his Substack Thursday
“Trump’s pal also claims Democrats are plotting to steal enough seats in November to impeach both Trump and Vance and install Hakeem Jeffries in the Oval Office. I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too. This man sounds like a quack. Well, yes. He sure seems to be a quack. And that’s actually why I’m taking him seriously.”
Ticktin has already helped draft an executive order “to declare a national emergency based on alleged 2020 foreign election interference,” CNN reported earlier this week. And, with Trump having already attempted to impose limits on mail-in voting, Taylor feared that the president could very well follow through on Ticktin’s calls to place the midterm elections “under federal control” by declaring a national emergency.
“If this guy, Ticktin, wants Trump to declare a 'national emergency,' let’s be prepared for the president to declare one – and be ready ourselves to say within seconds that it’s a farce," Taylor wrote.
“It's our expectation that the president will undertake more illegal and unconstitutional actions to steal the midterms. He will dispute the outcome if his side loses, even if the loss is decisive and beyond dispute. And he will – in all likelihood – try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to the political opposition. After all, he’s done it before. But this time we’re better prepared to fight it. And we need to stand together.”
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The filthy bastard will try it! Resist! Redemption is drawing nigh, America!
The American people are going to take control of their country! IT IS COMING! We will overthrow this occupation by murderers and petty criminals!
'Not acceptable': CNN panel shuts down stuttering conservative as he tries to defend ICE — Matthew Chapman
A CNN panel exploded into argument on Friday morning, after conservative Terry Schilling defended the ICE actions under scrutiny regarding the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston.
Schilling opened with a disparaging response to Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who threatened legal action over the shooting. "Game on," he said.
"You want to sue over this?" said Schilling. "I guess we'll have to sue over the hundreds of thousands of young men and women in this country that have died from fentanyl overdoses or, or even the hundreds of people that have had violence inflicted on them that have been raped and sexually assaulted."
Schilling then added, "There were seven deaths by ICE and 11 deaths in 2024. That's when there was like no immigration enforcement at all ... so it seems like there's some violence embedded into illegal immigration in the first place."
Former federal prosecutor Elliot Williams had a sharp retort to Schilling's claims, pointing out that he had experience working with ICE, and the idea there was "no immigration enforcement" in 2023 is "just not accurate."
"You're still talking about deporting 400,000 people a year, even under the low points of any administration's immigration enforcement efforts," said Williams. "More enforcement is happening now than happened in 2023. But ... I don't think that that those numbers are reflective of enforcement simply not happening in detention centers."
New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro chimed in, adding, "I will also say that the implication that somehow enforcement is violent and therefore these deaths are somehow acceptable is, is not acceptable."
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"I guess we'll have to sue over the hundreds of thousands of young men and women in this country that have died from fentanyl overdoses or, or even the hundreds of people that have had violence inflicted on them that have been raped and sexually assaulted."? You Nazi shit, Trump has murdered shitloads of people over alledged fentanyl running! Step down, you imbicile!
What Happens When Trump Voters Realize They Want the Same Thing Progressives are Working For? — Thom Hartmann
They don't agree on politics. They do agree that the American Dream is slipping away, and that could change everything.
Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal.
It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now.
In a long-abandoned subway station deep under lower Manhattan, progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, largely on the simple promise that New York could once again become “a city we can afford.”
And at that very same midnight — because Republicans refused to extend them — the enhanced Obamacare subsidies expired for more than twenty million Americans, jacking their health insurance prices overnight into stratospheric amounts that are now pushing families to skip pills, skip meals, and skip the doctor entirely.
One honest man took office swearing that he’d help ordinary people afford to live, and at that same moment, millions of working class people lost the ability to afford their insurance because Republican politicians consistently put their morbidly rich individual and corporate donors above all else.
Even Newsweek, no one’s idea of a radical rag, noticed the thing our media generally misses: the same cost-of-living fury that carried Donald Trump back into the White House in 2024 was the same fury Mamdani rode to City Hall a year later.
When Louise and I lived in a boat in a marina in Washington, DC back during the 2016 election year, we knew quite a few people retired from the Navy and Coast Guard who generally called themselves Republicans, but were split between Trump and Bernie for their vote. Why? Because both were promising real, meaningful change.
I’ve told you before about my dad. Carl came home from the Second World War, finally got a good union job in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, and on that one paycheck he raised us four boys, bought a house, put a new car in the driveway every couple of years, sent us toward college, took my mom on vacation, and retired with a pension that let the two of them travel the world.
That wasn’t wealth: that was the ordinary American middle class, and in 1981 — the year Reagan decided to destroy our unions, cut those “socialist benefits,” and freeze the minimum wage — two-thirds of us Americans lived in that middle class on a single income. Today it’s closer to only 40 percent of us, and it takes two full paychecks to reach what one paycheck used to buy.
Particularly over the past few years, America has politically bifurcated: One side is characterized by a guy in a red hat who’s dead certain that brown-skinned immigrants took his job and he wants them gone. The other is a young organizer knocking on doors for Medicare for All and tuition-free college.
Every cable network, every consultant, every party fundraiser will tell you these two are the opposite poles of our politics, the “far right” and the “far left” of our political spectrum. But in reality, they’re both looking at the same problem....
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Are you sure their heads don't pop like a pumpkin, Thom?
Aftermath: War’s On — David Dayen
Yep. We’re back to where we were in early March; the U.S. is attacking targets in Iran, and Iran is attacking targets throughout the region, in Bahrain and Kuwait and Jordan, though those last ones were intercepted. Where international shipping was starting to revive, that now has ended, and I’d expect the reimposition of the blockade, following the U.S. revocation of Iran’s license to sell oil internationally.
In retrospect, this was not a hard thing to predict. Donald Trump gets ornery when he doesn’t get his way, and there was no way to get his way in this war. Iran has asserted operational control of the Strait of Hormuz, with eventual fees inevitable, and it was only a matter of time before there would be tensions around that. Trump’s usual style of bullying didn’t interact well with negotiations either, which have been called off multiple times due to his threats.
There is no scenario which returns shipping back to being open and free, with a nuclear deal that is in any way better or different than the Obama deal that Trump tore up, that somehow doesn’t give Iran cash or other financial incentives. Those were the terms that Trump sought before the war, and that war was lost. And since Trump won’t admit that, there’s an increasing likelihood of seeing bombs lobbed back and forth through the duration of his presidency....
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Trump continues to fail in his never ending fool's journey.
Appeasing Trump Is a Futile Sugar High — Makela Reid and Keyian Vafai
When Dr. Steven Kahn, a distinguished physician specializing in diabetes, published a co-authored editorial in April in the journal Diabetes Care criticizing the Trump administration’s proposal to cut the National Institutes of Health’s funding by $5 billion, he had no way of knowing that the article would result in his forcible ejection from the American Diabetes Association’s annual Scientific Sessions just two months later. Well-placed sources tell us that the removal was ordered by the ADA’s own top officials, likely fearful of offending the administration. The ADA’s CEO, Charles Henderson, later apologized. It’s another case of a large institution making a futile effort to appease the Trump White House at the expense of its own principles.
Dr. Kahn’s sin was his effort to distribute copies of his editorial, in a flagship journal published by the same ADA. In a video published on MedPage Today, Kahn, with colleagues Drs. Justin Ryder and Aaron Kelly, is seen handing out packets of paper when they are confronted and hustled out by a motley crew of security personnel, local law enforcement, and ADA leadership. Kahn’s papers are aggressively yanked away by a facility security guard.
It’s another case of a large institution making a futile effort to appease the Trump White House at the expense of its own principles....
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¡Cabeza vacía, mis amigos!
From Hateful Hoax to Presidential Policy — Cathy Young
THE CLOCK IS TICKING FOR HAITIAN REFUGEES, hundreds of thousands of whom are likely to lose their Temporary Protected Status in two weeks, now that the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a green light to end protections for Haitian and Syrian nationals. The work permits of Haitians with TPS expire today, making it illegal for them to be employed. While their absence from the workforce will likely be most keenly felt in Florida and other states with major eldercare needs, the issue also has particular resonance in Springfield, Ohio, the site of a sick hoax implicating Haitian migrants in stealing and eating pet cats—a story boosted by Donald Trump and especially JD Vance, whose tweet mentioning reports that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country” got over 11 million views and nearly 100,000 likes.
Those “reports” were thoroughly disproved almost immediately (a week after the debate, the Wall Street Journal ran a comprehensive report on how the Trump campaign promoted sensational claims that local Republican officials had told them were false). Yet in recent weeks, right-wing accounts on X have once again been recycling the pet-eating hoax, claiming that the story was never debunked but simply unconfirmed, and that even if the Haitians in Springfield weren’t eating cats, they were definitely eating ducks and geese from the city parks.
Even a photo of a black man carrying a dead Canadian goose has popped up again as supposed confirmation—even though it was taken in Columbus, Ohio, not Springfield, and showed a man (who may or may not have been an immigrant) removing two dead geese that had been hit by a car.
While these attempts to revive the racist hoax have not gained much traction, the story is still worth revisiting—both because it’s a particularly vile slander against a community that is especially vulnerable right now and because the bad-faith players involved have yet to take responsibility for promoting the lie. Vance defended his role in this sorry tale by explaining that he had to “create stories” to get the media to notice the plight of small-town Americans allegedly suffering from the influx of migrants. (He didn’t quite admit the falsehood, asserting that he had relied on “firsthand” accounts by his Ohio constituents.) Culture warrior Christopher Rufo, who tried to back up the Springfield hoax with a (highly dubious) report on an African immigrant supposedly barbecuing cats in a different city in Ohio, also stuck to his guns in his recent interview on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast....
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FACT CHECK: Springfield Rebuts: A city official told Lead Stories (Lean Left) there were "no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused," nor of immigrants "squatting or littering in front of residents' homes" or "deliberately disrupting traffic."
Of course, facts do no good on the retarded. Unfortunaley for us they are permitted to vote. This is the crowd that needs to be carded!
Trump family grift now extends to guns — Heather Digby Parton
...As the administration rolls back gun safety measures, Donald Trump Jr. is a beneficiary
Following an executive order signed by Trump in February 2025, the entire government has been deployed to ensure that anyone, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, is entitled to pack heat at all times. The president has instructed the Justice Department to investigate “ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens,” which, in practice, means they are going after state and local regulations, challenging state bans on semi-automatic weapons and restrictions on the sales of certain handguns. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms no longer has zero-tolerance for criminal gun dealers, who have basically been given immunity if they are caught illegally selling guns. The Department of Veterans Affairs is allowing veterans who have been declared incompetent to handle their own money to purchase firearms. Health and Human Services is no longer tracking gun deaths or properly funding research into prevention. It’s all hands on deck....
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This sounds like an assassin with a weapon could whack anyone, anywhere at anytime now. This is living in a safe environment? Give me a fuckin' break!
ICE Kills, DHS Lies: The New Normal of Trump’s America — Jordan Liz
On July 7, an Immigration Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national. According to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Araujo “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.” As of the time of this writing, the agency has yet to provide any evidence.
This shooting comes days after a massive surge in ICE arrests. Between June 26 and June 30, 10,000 people were reportedly detained by immigration agents.
This is a tragic story—one that we have seen many times before.
Silverio Villegas González: On September 12, Villegas González, a Mexican national, was shot and killed by an ICE agent. This occurred during the agency’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in the Chicago area.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleged that the ICE agent “was hit by the car and dragged a significant distance. Fearing for his own life, the officer fired his weapon.” DHS further claimed that the agent “sustained multiple injuries.”
These were lies. Bodycam footage collected by Franklin Park police officers show the ICE agent saying he “got dragged a little bit” and describing his own injuries as “nothing major.” Surveillance video shows that Villegas González did not drive toward or hit either agent. Several eyewitnesses further refute DHS’ narrative.
Marimar Martinez: On October 4, Martinez, a US citizen, was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum. In a statement, DHS described this as “defensive fire.” They alleged, without evidence, that Martinez and her fellow “domestic terrorists” “ambushed” and “rammed federal agents with their vehicles.” On social media, FBI Director Kash Patel posted a video—from an unrelated incident—of a black SUV aggressively ramming an agent’s truck as “proof” of Martinez’s crime.
These, too, were lies. Bodycam footage shows the agents already had their weapons drawn as one of them turned the steering wheel toward Martinez’s car. One agent can be heard saying, “It’s time to get aggressive.”
Text messages reveal the “big time” support Exum received from then-Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks, and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in the aftermath of this incident. Hours after the shooting, Bovino even offered to extend Exum’s retirement with CBP “in light of [his] excellent service in Chicago.” He added, “you have much yet left to do!” ...
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The same bacteria that lives in a cesspool.
40 Epstein-Tied Billionaires Have Injected $1.6B Into US Elections, Report Finds — Sharon Zhang
Over 80 percent of this spending went toward Republicans or conservative causes, a new analysis finds.
Billionaires with ties to Jeffrey Epstein have spent nearly $1.6 billion on influencing U.S. elections since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision unleashed a deluge of such spending on the electoral system, a new report finds, demonstrating the vast power over politics held by the so-called Epstein class.
Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund reveals in a new report Thursday that 40 billionaires and billionaire families with ties to Epstein have injected over $1.57 billion into U.S. elections since 2010.
According to the group’s analysis, 84 percent of this spending, or over $1.3 billion, went toward Republicans or conservative causes.
This is despite a roughly even split between Republicans and Democrats among the billionaires, which include people who formerly donated to the Clinton family. Only 7 percent went toward Democrats and aligned causes, while the remaining money went toward lobbying efforts that target members of both parties like AI and Israel.
The report includes spending from people like President Donald Trump, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Elon Musk, current U.S. ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, Jared Kushner, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, among many other prominent figures across the business, tech, and sports sectors. The ties to the convicted child sex offender range from mentions in Epstein’s black book or in the Epstein files to extensive business and personal relationships, like Trump’s reported close friendship with Epstein.
Trump’s various presidential campaigns and super PACs supporting him have received $282 million from this group of Epstein-connected billionaires, the analysis found.
“Our tax and political system is badly broken, and nothing illustrates this more than billionaires with credible ties to Jeffrey Epstein continuing to spend millions to exert their influence on American democracy,” said David Kass, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund, in a statement. “We can’t allow billionaires to keep undermining our economy and democracy.”
The report suggests that it was, in fact, Epstein’s own personal wealth that helped him to avoid consequences for his sex trafficking and assault for so long....
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These billionaires must be de-billioned!
Bluesky Users in Texas Subject to Age Verification -- Michael McGrady JrMichael McGrady Jr
Users of the social network Bluesky who log in from Texas IP addresses are reporting being subject to age-gating, amid a state law that targets mobile app stores with liability if minors view explicit content on apps like social networks.
According to users, they are being met with an action screen prompting them to verify their age and identity by requesting the last four numbers of a user's social security number, a credit card confirmation through Stripe, or an ID scan using AV provider Veriff....
...Others joked about the app's userbase, which skews towards liberals and older millennials. Many joined Bluesky after the 2024 presidential election and Elon Musk's takeover of X, though its core user base has remained mostly flat since.
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Why do they want this info? It is Nazi intimidation. These criminals must be removed from office.
They are repressing free speech with this. It is very easy to see. They know it. We all know it!
FIGHT THE ARROGANT AND CORRUPT POWER OF THE BULLSHIT FASCIST COWARD STATE OF TEXAS!
Vote them out of office forever! These people are NOT AMERICANS!
General reveals huge problem for Trump as insiders say he’s 'embarrassed' by AF1 flop — Sarah K. Burris
Brigadier General John Teichert handed Fox News a harsh reality that President Donald Trump's new Air Force One plane from Qatar isn't equipped to handle the president's high security needs.
Returning from the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump was forced to use the old presidential plane due to a credible Iranian assassination threat revealed by Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
MS NOW reporter Carol Leonnig likewise revealed Thursday that one former national security official believes the new Air Force One isn't fully secure.
“This plane was built for aesthetics, not mission,” they said. “We know about its paint, its leather seats. But we don’t know its capabilities.”
Speaking to Fox, Teichert made it clear: "No matter what you do to retrofit a Qatari jet, it's never going to have the defensive capabilities of a tailor-made Air Force One built from scratch."...
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Donnie thinks he has a long life ahead of him and will be flying around in his "personal" jet. Deluded, as usual!
Trump Torched His Own Iran Deal On The World Stage — Cliff Schecter
There is a war being restarted, a ceasefire torn up within weeks of the handshake, and a corporate press still reaching for the both-sides life raft. You will want to see it for yourself. From there it only gets richer.
On this episode of Amped Up, Cliff Schecter and David Shuster pull up their chairs—with Lawrence Winnerman along for the ride—and watch a president narrate his own unraveling on the world stage, one mangled acronym and invented country at a time. The Islamic Republic of Japan was perhaps our favorite.
There is a war being restarted, a ceasefire torn up within weeks of the handshake, and a corporate press still reaching for the both-sides life raft. We are not going to tell you which moment made the guys put their heads in their hands. You will want to see it for yourself. From there it only gets richer.
A Senate nominee whose campaign is coming apart at exactly the wrong moment. A Texas attorney general whose airport photo op raises more questions than his indictments ever did. A World Cup run that a certain someone found a way to make about himself, right up until an entire locker room danced back.
And then the turn nobody expects...watch it and read the rest at Blue Amp Media.
https://www.blueamp.co/p/trump-meltdown-platner-out
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He needs to read "How to Fight a War - 101." The fruit cake clown show!
Witnesses Say ICE Lied About Fatal Texas Shooting
The Washington Post reports:
The three men who were arrested during an immigration operation that resulted in the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo said a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle and that at no point did the driver veer in his direction.
The migrants are disputing key elements of the Department of Homeland Security’s account of what transpired during a chaotic traffic stop in a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood in Houston on Tuesday. They spoke from immigration detention with attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, who shared their written and oral accounts with The Washington Post.
DHS released a statement hours after the deadly shooting saying that Salgado Araujo had rammed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle and “weaponized” his white work van “in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”
“That is a lie,” wrote Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, in a handwritten statement. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over … there were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”
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“In an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” They already used this fictional excuse in Minnesota. These people are the dregs of humanity -- a terrorist organization. Liars of the first order. Murderers of the lowest degree! And another murder on Trump's record!
TX Lt Gov: Talarico “Couldn’t Lift A 10-Pound Weight”
“He’s a lightweight. He’s a 90-pound weakling. He couldn’t lift a 10-pound weight in the gym if you helped him. I don’t think Jasmine (Crockett) and the black community will come out and support him and that will sink him.” – Right wing radio host/Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, on Fox.
Last month Patrick earned national headlines for declaring that Talarico will “go to hell” for his views on the bible.
You will recall that Patrick got a sudden $5 million donation just before he presided over Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial. Obviously, Paxton will not go to hell for adulterously fucking those women, even though it’s a Top Ten no-no in the book of fables.
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If he's "going to hell" why are you shaking in your booties so, Miss Dan?
Most of us think we're already living in hell in Texas with assholes like you running things.
Let's see how long you and the rest of your two-bit fascists remain in offce as the days go by.
Kayleigh McEnany: Socialists Want To “Defeat Christian Nationalism And Rip Up The Moral Fabric Of America”
“We need to tell people what socialism is. They want to build a coalition of religious people with socialist values to defeat Christian nationalism. What is Christian nationalism, okay? They want to defeat the moral fabric of this country. Rip up Article I – no Senate. Rip up Article III – no Supreme Court. They want noncitizen voting – no electoral college. They want to change the fabric of this country and rip of the constitutional foundation of America. That’s what socialism is and we need to educate people.” – Fox host Kayleigh McEnany, last night.
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Too late. We already know what Trump fascist "Christian nationalism" is and we don't like the stink on it or on you!
DOJ Accused Of Obstructing Epstein Ranch Probe
The New York Times reports:
New Mexico’s attorney general on Thursday accused the Justice Department of obstructing the state’s criminal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein’s activities on a sprawling high-desert estate south of Santa Fe by withholding unredacted records.
Raúl Torrez, New Mexico’s top law enforcement officer, first requested original documents related to the convicted sex offender’s Zorro Ranch property in February. He said he reiterated the request five times in the following months, through a range of channels, but Justice Department officials so far had not responded.
The records, he said, contain names of survivors, witnesses, co-conspirators and other individuals who may aid the long-delayed state investigation into the deceased financier’s crimes in New Mexico. “The U.S.D.O.J.’s continued withholding of unredacted records is causing real and escalating harm,” Mr. Torrez wrote to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, in a letter sent last week but made public on Thursday.
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More goddamn Nazi cover-up by Tump's Criminal Syndicate!
Dinosaurs on Noah’s ark? A MAGA theme park clings to creationism
Kentucky's Ark Encounter turns 10, and its founder Ken Ham is as bitter as ever
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ROTFLMFAO! Try studying hsitorical dates. You will find someone wanting! There is no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible — why? FACT: Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago (at the end of the Cretaceous Period), after living on Earth for about 165 million years. Noah had no dinosaurs to load and knew not one whit about their existence!
The Un-Mysterious Case of the Socialist Surge — Harold Meyerson
It was one of those steam-bath D.C. days where your shoes start to sweat. I was behind my desk reading Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and wondering why he had to rewrite the thing 17 times, when she slinked into the office. She’d clearly gone to the Lauren Bacall School of Slink, but her eyes were wild with alarm.
“Sit down,” I began, “and tell me all about it.”
“It’s the pundits,” she husked, huskily. “They’re all over the map when they try to explain why there are so many”—she paused here to collect her thought—“socialists.”
More from Harold Meyerson
“They say some foreign power is paying them,” she continued, pulling out a Wall Street Journal op-ed from her lip gloss bag. “They say they were seduced by Marxist professors. They say this is what happens when we let billionaires get taxed or Lee Greenwood doesn’t get a lifetime Grammy.”
“Pfoo,” I replied. I walked to my bookcase, picked out Werner Sombart’s 1906 tome Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? and gently threw it at her. “Check out Sombart,” I said. “In America, he said, socialism runs aground on the reefs of roast beef and apple pie.”
“He was a vegetarian?” she asked. “No,” I replied. “He said American mass prosperity—relative to Europe’s, anyway—negated the need for socialism. But he didn’t address what would happen if broadly shared prosperity up and left.”
“Where did it go?” she asked.
“It got a super-luxe first-class ticket,” I answered. “Wealth and income and political power climbed their way up to the very top of the totem pole. What your precious pundits don’t seem to remember is that the number of American socialists and communists ballooned during the Depression. We’ve been here before, babe.”
“As much as now?” she asked.
“No, again. So long as they ran on third-party tickets, they couldn’t win squat. And the commies only started picking up members when Stalin told them to make nice with Roosevelt. In 1934, they’d called him a fascist. In 1936, when Uncle Joe changed his mind, FDR became the commies’ superhero. Real good commies had this thing for amnesia. Helped to forget what you’d said a couple months earlier.”
“Then this guy Harrington—this was in the ’70s—said that the commies had been smart to go to work with unions and the Democrats, but they should have been open about who they were. That’s what socialists should do, he said. Third-party candidacies had their place, but that place usually wasn’t America. And when Bernie Sanders and AOC and this Zohran character validated that, it gave socialists some running room. They could grow.”
“So socialism surged when Mike Harrington was saying this?” she asked.
“Well, no,” I responded. “I was a member of DSOC and DSA when they formed in the ’70s and early ’80s. But we hadn’t gone plutocratic yet. The banks hadn’t taken over the economy then, the big boys weren’t offshoring our smelters and our shoes yet, rich people still were paying taxes, there were barely any billionaires …”
“No billionaires,” she gasped. “How can there be an America without billionaires?”
“Believe it, babe. And we were happier then. So DSOC and DSA chugged along with just a handful of members. There were still lefty kids and some oldsters who could sing Spanish Civil War songs, but they didn’t register that capitalism was beginning to be let out of its cage and money would begin trickling upward. Then zooming upward.”
“Socialism is catching on now,” I continued, “because Americans can see that capitalism just isn’t working for them. There’s a poll in today’s Wall Street Journal that shows that a majority of Americans say capitalism isn’t working well. That’s up from about a third a decade ago. When an -ism isn’t cutting it, people may conclude it’s time for a different -ism.”
“But why socialism?” she squeaked.
“Why not Rosicrucianism,” I came back with. “Because socialists aren’t afraid to tax billionaires to provide affordable child care. Because Rosicrucianism and Theosophism are still formulating their position on that.”...
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Imagine no billionaires. I wonder if we can?
Confederate Nana Marsha Blackburn Plays With Her Food, Racistly — Evan Hurst
Have a gander at this new Marsha Blackburn for Tennessee Governor ad and tell us if you would have given her permission to do this, were you her husband and/or pastor. (It is unfair to assume Blackburn chose this herself, as conservative white women in the fascist Christian system she is fighting for really aren’t supposed to be wilding out like this without written permission.)
Have a gander at this new Marsha Blackburn for Tennessee Governor ad and tell us if you would have given her permission to do this, were you her husband and/or pastor. (It is unfair to assume Blackburn chose this herself, as conservative white women in the fascist Christian system she is fighting for really aren’t supposed to be wilding out like this without written permission.)
A few notes/questions, aside from “wow, that’s racist”:
1. How many times did she run her lines? Because her delivery is extremely awkward and stilted and mush-mouthed and “Fiddlesticks, Mamaw left her teeth in the ladies’ room at the wine bar in Franklin again.”
2. To be clear, the entire commercial looks and sounds like Marsha filmed this after a long afternoon at that wine bar, which we are somehow sure exists.
3. How many goddamned fortune cookies did Blackburn take?
4. How many goddamned fortune cookies did she proceed to play with and smush in her granny claws?
5. As a home ec major from the Mississippi State University class of 1973, Marsha Blackburn should know that none of this is how we eat fortune cookies.
6. Did she even go to cotillion? And if so, can they see her now, with crumbs in her hair like she spends her days at saloons?
7. You are really supposed to only have one fortune cookie, maybe two if you get a garbage one on the first try like “Put on a red dress and go dancing!” That is not a fortune, and the user is entitled to one (1) more try. Not 46 more tries while she furiously, ravenously searches for a fortune that says “CHINA COMMUNISS PARTY SUX.”
8. Did Marsha clean up after her own nasty ass, or did she leave the employees at the Chinese restaurant she invaded to do that?
9. Speaking of, were they amused by this display from Confederate Nana?
10. Is this even the first time she’s done this?
For God’s sake, look at this:
(video)
In the commercial, Marsha’s narrator says that as governor, she will “hunt down every communist,” which is slightly unhinged. But again, with that home ec major, we do not know what in her background (besides mouth-frothing, ignorant redneck racism) makes her think she’s got the skillset to do whatever she imagines it takes to “hunt communists” as the governor of Tennessee. Also not sure what she thinks going after China will do to rescue Tennessee from its status as a backwoods pigfuck state with nothing going for it besides the musical contributions of liberals in Nashville and Memphis whose political voices fascists like Blackburn are always trying to smack down
Haha just kidding, she’s one of them backwoods racist pigfucks, pandering to her fellow backwoods racist pigfucks. Backwoods racist pigfucking is all any of them understand. That’s why she’s going after China.
(see photo)
If you get this fortune you are entitled to free egg rolls for life. Sorry, those are the rules.
Also, does she know (of course she doesn’t, she’s an absolute moron) that fortune cookies, if they actually come from anywhere in Asia — they’re kind of thoroughly American these days — come from Japan, or as Donald Trump calls it, the Islamic Republic of Japan? Indeed, there is lots of Japanese shit in that video, including the soy sauce.
But again, she’s a dumb racist pig, from a long line of dumb racist pigs. The last thing on her mind is trying to see through her overly hairsprayed Southern lady Designing Women meets walk-of-shame bangs to try to tell Asian people apart.
The gong at the end of the commercial is a nice racist touch.
In case you missed it, here is a fun video from last week where a reporter asked Marsha why, considering how she is running for governor, she won’t hold town halls or actually talk to voters in any meaningful way. Confederate Nana was NOT pleased. And then the elevator she had been waiting for, which she had just entered, started betraying her, hilariously....
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Hunt down every commnunist? I can see even the current day Nazi hunters haven't gotten to her and her kind as yet. Don't give up! There is still hope!
Climate Change Denier Tapped As WH Climate Czar
Politico reports:
The Trump administration has reconstituted a governmentwide program that tracks how climate change is transforming the country, after having gutted it last year as part of a purge of programs that didn’t line up with its worldview. The U.S. Global Change Research Program is now headed by Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist, according to his public postings on social media and confirmed by a second person familiar with the program, granted anonymity over fears of reprisal.
Wielicki, who calls himself a “professor in exile” and who frequently critiques climate science on social media, will be in charge of the program’s primary product, the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive report released every four years that shows how American infrastructure, lives and the economy are affected by climate change. “For too long, the USGCRP has been used as a vehicle for political agendas instead of sound science,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement.
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Because fucking of course!Trump would promote a “professor in exile” Keep up your retardedness! It's just more votes for the opposition to your sick fuckery this fall! LMAO!
Newsmax Host: It’s Time To Talk About Nuking Iran
“You want to win? This is the cold hard truth. It’s mass destruction. And newsflash, we’re going to run out of 500 pound JDAMs before Iran runs out of people who hate us. War is hell. But if you’re unwilling to be as ruthless as your enemy, you have already lost.
“This is what’s really going to send the people screaming. Hold a meeting with global nuclear powers and make sure Iran sees you do it so they know what you’re talking about. Have a legitimate discussion of the threshold of a nuclear strike.
“If you’re gasping right now — I know. But when you’ve put friends in bags because of these people in Iran, you have a bit of different perspective on this.
“Look, if you’re a purple-haired barista who’s never even so much as had to pay rent because you live with your parents in their basement and you’re writing articles for other liberals to read, let me see if I can find f’s to give about your opinions.
“But we have people in this country and even in this administration, believe it or not, who are so risk averse, I swear, if we had a zombie apocalypse, they would fund zombie rights groups while they ate their friends right in front of them.
“That is essentially what, like, gays for Palestine is. Those are the types of people who are opposing dealing with Iran correctly right now.” – Newsmax host Carl Higbie.
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Ever heard of "innocent bystander?" Collateral damage of a neclear bomb will kill more innocent people than your God, Trump has already murndered. Not to mention a vast wasteland that is too hot for human life for 200 years! This isn't 1945 and we are NOT the only nation that has a nuclear weapon! And I know you're covering for your broadcast from your paternts basement with your comments because you've hit rock bottom in your miserable life working for Newsmax Nazi News!. But we will continue to laugh and make fun of you and the rest of your Zombie team before it's over, wise guy.
West Virginia’s Anti-Woke Institute Gets One Student
West Virginia Watch reports:
Only one student has registered for courses at West Virginia University’s new Washington Center, an academic program mandated by Republican lawmakers for the campus. State lawmakers have allocated $3 million in state dollars to the “Washington Center for Civics, Culture and Statesmanship” in the last two years ahead of it officially opening this fall.
Del. John Williams, D-Monongalia, opposed lawmakers mandating the Washington Center at his alma mater, WVU. “I’m not happy about it,” he said. “Now we’re in a position where we’ve allocated so much money towards this program, and only one person is taking advantage of it.”
Lawmakers gave Gov. Patrick Morrisey [photo] the task of appointing its director in consultation with the Senate and WVU’s Board of Governors. Morrisey, who publicly supported the center, named Dr. Patrick Lee Miller to the position last October 2025. The state funding goes to Miller’s annual salary of more than $300,000.
Road Kill Whale Head Raccoon Penis Felcher ridiculed him on-camera for being obese.
Only one student has registered for courses at West Virginia University’s new Washington Center, an academic program mandated by Republican lawmakers for the campus, reports @amelianews.bsky.social. Lawmakers have allocated around $3 million to the Washington Center in the last two years...
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These morons are so strung out on their "but hey ain't like me" hate drug they may go into withdrawal when they realize they are the evil enemy of America with their backward brain failure.
LMAO!
MAGA Pastor: Jesus Wasn’t Effeminate, He Was Butch “With Six Packs, The Most Ripped Guy You’ll Ever Meet
“America has created this gay effeminate Christianity. They view God through a western lens. They think Jesus was a tolerant guy. We view Jesus carrying a nice little lamb. Every picture you see, his hair is flowing.
“That’s not the Jesus I see. The Jesus I see was a bold and courageous man. People wanted to kill him for what he said.
“So America created this gay version of Jesus Christ. Jesus was not effeminate. Jesus was a bold lion.
“I always tell people Jesus was not a soft guy. He had six packs. He was the most ripped guy you’ll ever meet. He flipped tables in the temple. He got a whip out. He literally destroyed people.” – Pastor Martin Sedra.
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America, didn't create that. You need to study a little more. Jesus was a Zealot! Saul, "Paul" of Tarsus created that image you're upset by after he appropriated his ministry from Jesus's brother, James. No one wanted to kill him until he fucked up on Passover. Do some study, boy!
Yes, he did ruin those money changers in the temple. That vandalism got him crucified. by the Romans.
And BTW, tell where in the fuck you've ever seen a real picture of Jesus of Nazareth? The closest you can claim is an image from the shroud of Turin and that's very debatable.
New normal of Trump’s America: bigotry, cowardice and blind obedience — Jordan Liz, Common Dreams
On July 7, an Immigration Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national. According to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Araujo “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.” As of the time of this writing, the agency has yet to provide any evidence.
This shooting comes days after a massive surge in ICE arrests. Between June 26 and June 30, 10,000 people were reportedly detained by immigration agents.
This is a tragic story—one that we have seen many times before.
Silverio Villegas González: On September 12, Villegas González, a Mexican national, was shot and killed by an ICE agent. This occurred during the agency’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in the Chicago area.
Araujo was not the first of ICE’s victims. So long as the agency exists, he will not be the last.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleged that the ICE agent “was hit by the car and dragged a significant distance. Fearing for his own life, the officer fired his weapon.” DHS further claimed that the agent “sustained multiple injuries.”
These were lies. Bodycam footage collected by Franklin Park police officers show the ICE agent saying he “got dragged a little bit” and describing his own injuries as “nothing major.” Surveillance video shows that Villegas González did not drive toward or hit either agent. Several eyewitnesses further refute DHS’ narrative.
Marimar Martinez: On October 4, Martinez, a US citizen, was shot five times by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum. In a statement, DHS described this as “defensive fire.” They alleged, without evidence, that Martinez and her fellow “domestic terrorists” “ambushed” and “rammed federal agents with their vehicles.” On social media, FBI Director Kash Patel posted a video—from an unrelated incident—of a black SUV aggressively ramming an agent’s truck as “proof” of Martinez’s crime.
These, too, were lies. Bodycam footage shows the agents already had their weapons drawn as one of them turned the steering wheel toward Martinez’s car. One agent can be heard saying, “It’s time to get aggressive.”
Text messages reveal the “big time” support Exum received from then-Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino, Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks, and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in the aftermath of this incident. Hours after the shooting, Bovino even offered to extend Exum’s retirement with CBP “in light of [his] excellent service in Chicago.” He added, “you have much yet left to do!”
In a group chat, Exum bragged about how he “fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes.”...
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"Don't you see or don't you give a damn?" — Handwriting On The Wall — Hamilton Camp from Here's To You Warner Bros. - Seven Arts W1737 LP, 1968
New York Priest Arrested On Child Porn Charges
Buffalo’s ABC affiliate reports:
The U.S. Attorney’s Office says a Diocese of Buffalo priest has been charged by criminal complaint with receipt and possession of child pornography. The criminal complaint states that 46-year-old Jeffrey Nowak of Lackawanna was placed on administrative leave in August 2019 after an investigation into inappropriate contact with children and harassment of a seminarian.
Later that year, investigators found his email address, “pigboybuffalo@gmail.com,” allegedly accessed a New Zealand cloud-based digital storage site with videos and photos of sexually exploited children. But a search warrant executed by the FBI in May 2021 did not find any child pornography, so the case was closed.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, new information from Scotland law enforcement in late 2025 linked Nowak, “PigBoy666,” to a group where child pornography was shared during group Zoom calls. As a result, his investigation was reopened in March 2026.
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And another one bites the dust!
AP: Home Sales Slow As Prices Reach All-Time High
The Associated Press reports:
Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes slowed in June, but a key measure of home prices climbed to an all-time high, adding to affordability challenges for prospective homebuyers. Existing home sales fell 2.4% last month from May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.09 million units, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. Sales rose 2.8% compared with June last year.
The latest sales tally fell short of the roughly 4.21 million pace economists were expecting, according to FactSet. Home sales have been mostly hovering close to a 4-million annual pace going back to 2023, far short of the historic norm that is closer to 5.2-million.
Sales have remained sluggish as mortgage rates have mostly trended higher in the months since the war between the U.S. and Iran started. Expectations of higher inflation amid surging oil prices have pushed up the long-term bond yields that lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans, causing mortgage rates to climb.
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Trump kills the American Dream!
All US Refugee Screeners Deployed To South Africa
NOTUS reports:
In the fall of 2024, the Department of Homeland Security had employees in dozens of countries, from Peru to Turkey, to vet the most vulnerable and persecuted individuals in the world for potential entry into the United States.
Just one year later, those screeners were working in just one country: South Africa, where the Trump administration has singularly focused U.S. refugee resettlement efforts on the country’s white population.
As of June, all but three of the 7,730 refugees admitted into the U.S. in fiscal 2026 were from South Africa, according to newly released State Department data, an exponential increase from the one South African admitted in the fiscal year before Trump took office.
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Racism thrives under Trump!
Nutbag Spencer Pratt Rants That He’ll “Put Commie Animals In Handcuffs” For Stealing Elections [VIDEO]
(Another insane Nazi rant - blah-blah-fucking blah!)
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Another one who will shit and fall back in it!
Seriously, Where Does Trump's Power Come From? — Robert Reich
Not from where you may think.
Friends,
At the NATO summit just ended, Trump lashed out at other NATO members, saying he was “very disappointed with NATO” and asking “Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and they’re not there for us?” He reiterated his desire to take over Greenland, blasted European energy and immigration policies, insulted Spain, and worried allies by declaring that the fighting between Kyiv and Moscow “doesn’t affect us.”
Yet throughout the proceedings, Trump was treated by other NATO powers with as much courtesy and respect as any U.S. president has ever received from NATO — perhaps more. “It was a great meeting, there was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity,” Trump crowed when it was over.
What happened? It’s important to understand the source of Trump’s power.
His power doesn’t come from his being president of the most powerful nation in the world. In fact, his arbitrary tariffs, absurd war in Iran, and outright abduction of Nicolás Maduro and his wife have reduced America’s standing in much of the world.
Nor does his power come from his MAGA base, which is now having second thoughts about supporting someone who got the U.S. involved in another Middle Eastern war, caused prices to rise, and still refuses to release the complete Epstein files.
Nor does his power flow from his strategic brilliance or cunning. Of all U.S. presidents in modern times, he easily ranks as the stupidest.
Trump’s power comes from his willingness to violate all the norms, rules, and laws about how American presidents are supposed to act — to do anything that helps him accumulate more wealth, power, and glory, and wreak vengeance on anyone who has tried to get in the way....
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Sure. He's a goddamned racist Nazi! But it takes cowards in our Congress to back him up by bowing to his crimes. They must pay for it as well!
We used to have real patriots that supported our Constitution!
Planned Texas data centers could emit more greenhouse gases than many countries — Evan Simon, Floodlight
Texas regulators are allowing AI data centers across the state to start up thousands of new pollution sources with no public notice or environmental reviews.
Omaira Garcia didn’t realize life on her small ranch in Abilene was about to change forever until clouds of dust — kicked up by a mysterious construction next door — began to engulf her home.
The Air Force veteran said she was never told about OpenAI’s plans to build its flagship “Stargate” data center directly beside her property until well after construction began in the summer of 2024. Now, the site’s large-scale power plant sits roughly 500 yards from her house — the exhaust stacks of gas-powered turbines clearly visible from her kitchen window.
“We weren’t given any time to understand what this impact was going to be on us,” the mother of two said through tears. “We’re trapped here.”
OpenAI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Stargate’s developer, Crusoe, told Floodlight that the data center has “contributed meaningfully to the economic development” of Abilene, and its investments are “funding new fire trucks, school expansions, and road improvements across the city.”
Garcia’s situation isn’t unique: Data centers like Stargate, along with their accompanying power plants, are proliferating across the country, helping to satisfy an immense demand for artificial intelligence.
And despite lofty promises to fuel data centers with renewable energy, data shows AI companies are mostly relying on gas to satisfy their insatiable energy demands. Nationwide, nearly 60 data centers are planning to build their own gas plants to avoid connecting to the grid, according to research by energy analytics firm Cleanview released last month.
Including Stargate’s Abilene campus, at least 15 gas plants tied to data centers are planned for Texas, according to Cleanview. Available permits reviewed by Floodlight show that nine of them combined could emit more than 130 million tons of greenhouse gases every year. That’s the equivalent annual emissions of 35 coal-fired power plants, according to an Environmental Protection Agency calculator....
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We are entering a cataclysmic science nightmare. The survival of humanity has become a toss-up!
What to know about Houston ICE shooting and other migrant deaths in Texas — María Méndezand Juliana Lightsey
Most migrant deaths in Texas have occurred while they were detained since President Donald Trump began his immigration crackdown. Several were from natural causes.
The fatal shooting of a man in Houston by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Tuesday is the latest in a series of migrant deaths while in federal custody or interacting with agents in Texas since President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man from Mexico whom ICE said was undocumented, was shot after agents attempted to pull his vehicle over early Tuesday, according to an ICE statement. The statement said Salgado Araujo attempted to evade arrest and tried to run over a federal officer.
The shooting — the second of its kind in Texas — prompted local leaders to call for an independent investigation of the incident, as ICE’s description of the shooting mirrors previous contradictory accounts of fatal shootings by the agency, including the killing of 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez in South Padre Island last year.
According to a Texas Tribune analysis of federal detainee death notifications and media reports, at least 14 other people have died in custody in Texas since January 2025.
A crackdown on illegal immigration was a cornerstone of Trump’s 2024 campaign for reelection, which he claimed was fueling violent crime in the country. Since his reelection, he has embarked on mass deportation efforts and deployed thousands of ICE agents across the country. The impact of his immigration enforcement has been particularly felt in Texas, which reportedly holds the most immigrants of any state at its 23 detention facilities.
What we know about Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was identified by ICE as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. Public records searches revealed a 52-year-old Houston man by the same name had no criminal record in the state.
The Department of Homeland Security said agents were attempting to stop Salgado Araujo’s vehicle as part of an unspecified “targeted enforcement operation” in Houston’s East End, a predominantly Latino neighborhood....
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These government sanctioned hoodlums are not guardians. They are guards with guns that will kill each one of us if possible! Put them out of business!
TX Family Demands Justice After Latest Murder By ICE
The New Republic reports:
Speaking at a press conference Wednesday, Ronaldo Salgado, the deceased’s son, gave an emotional account of how he learned of his father’s death.
“I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognized him immediately,” Ronaldo said, his voice breaking. “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street, bleeding out.”
Salgado set off for the area where his father was working construction in North Houston, and remained on the site for hours looking for answers. League of United Latin American Citizens Representative Conchita Reyes connected him to Texas Representative Sylvia Garcia to locate his father at Ben Taub Hospital....
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There are killer gangs in our streets supported by Trump and his Nazi regime!
Trump's Probation Officer — Jaime O'Neill
I read the news today, oh boy, and learned that Donald J. Trump is the first American POTUS to have his own personal probation officer because of his 34 felony convictions.
Fake news? Maybe so, but that would, of course, be true if he were subject to the rules of ordinary convicted criminals, and maybe it's even true of Trump. Lots of things about Trump that are true seem hard to believe, but damn near anything is possible when the East Wing of the White House has been vandalized to the ground by its current occupant and bulldozed without any kind of permission from anyone. The strangest things turn out to be true when schoolgirls in Iran can be bombed without consequences for the man responsible, or when copious evidence of corruption is all but ignored by the authorities.
So, if Trump has a probation officer, it's awfully hard to imagine visits from that poor working stiff who owns but two cheap suits for work showing up at the badly damaged "people's house" to check on how the leader of what was once known as "the free world" is behaving himself.
It's equally difficult to imagine what that the poor schlep in cheap shoes and out of fashion ties might write and turn in on how the world's most famous probationer is complying with or not complying with the rules set for him....
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Probation? The hell you say! He needs plenty of cell time to stew on his crimes!
The Red Scare Returns: Trump Is Calling Us "Communists" Because He Doesn't Want America Talking About the Real Threat — Thom Hartmann
Trump's latest Red Scare recycles one of America's oldest political tricks: invent an internal enemy to distract voters from the policies reshaping the country
So, now Trump says we’re communists, you and me, after having earlier called us “potential domestic terrorists.”
“The Dumocrats, they are horrible. They want to resume the transgender mutilation of our children. They want to restart the war on Christians and churches. And as you saw with the communists elected in New York City recently -- they’re communists, they’re not social Democrats -- they want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life. …
“You’ll live in squalor. There will be no food; there will be no housing; there will be no military; there will be no law and order; there will be no nothing. There will be no nothing. You’ll be a third world inhabitant in every way, and everyone will suffer or die. You’ll suffer or die, that’s what happens, for thousands of years because it’s been happening by different names. …
“The problem is, a couple of years go by, the whole place collapses, always does, always has. But I’m sorry to say, but assassinations of those who oppose them is a very important element of their ideology. Assassination is a big deal for them. They’re animals, they’re animals. ... They hate our country, they hate our people...”
He’s getting desperate, trying in an almost cartoonish fashion to revisit the “Red Scare” era of his first mentor, Roy Cohn (as I describe in detail in The Last American President), and Cohn’s boss Joe McCarthy. It’s also a variation on the strategy of his second mentor, Vladimir Putin.
Ironically, the main tenant of communism is that the government owns the businesses; Trump is the first American president outside of temporary wartime nationalization efforts who’s actually having the federal government take large stock positions in American companies.
So far, Trump has had the feds buy major ownership positions in Intel, USA Rare Earths, Vulcan Elements, MP Materials, Korea Zinc, Lithium Americas, xLight, ReElement Tech, Trilogy Metals, Westinghouse, Nvadia, AMD, and US Steel. And now he’s talking about our government taking parts of OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI companies.
This is a far cry from Barack Obama lending Elon Musk’s Tesla $465 million to keep him out of bankruptcy; having the government actually and permanently own meaningful parts of companies is about the closest you can get to the kind of communism we saw in the old USSR, China, and Cuba....
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Showing us how uneducated Trump really is!
'Oh my God': MS NOW floats 25th Amendment after 'rambling' Trump speech — Tom Boggioni
Donald Trump’s final appearances at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, raised questions about his mental state after he fumbled world leaders' names, misidentified countries and went off on odd tangents that left reporters scratching their heads.
Admitting he is is sympathetic to the rigors of overseas travel and sleep disruptions due to changing time zones when involved in continuous meetings, MS NOW host Joe Scarborough suggested there is a strong case for the Trump Cabinet to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment.
After showing clips of the president stumbling about when speaking, the “Morning Joe” Scarborough pointed to similar worries about President Joe Biden whose own verbal miscues led to his decision to not seek re-election....
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His fellow criminals will push him out? LAMO! You all know what it's going to take!
GOP Lt. Gov. Hopeful Disqualified After Signature Fraud In Massachusetts — Ed Scarce
Anne Manning Martin was found to have submitted 1279 invalid signatures.
Irony or karma? She was campaigning on election integrity.
Source: International Business Times
A Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts has been thrown off the primary ballot after a state commission found that more than 1,200 of her nomination signatures were invalid, many of them allegedly forged.
Anne Manning Martin, a long-serving Peabody city councillor and corrections officer, was ruled ineligible for the 1 September Republican primary by the State Ballot Law Commission.
The commission concluded she fell short of the 10,000 certified signatures required after it struck 1,279 of her 10,692 submitted signatures, some allegedly copied from a voter list and others attributed to people who had died. Manning Martin denies any wrongdoing, has called the ruling 'manifestly unjust,' and is fighting it in court.
The allegations focus not on Manning Martin herself, but on a contractor she hired to collect signatures. According to the commission's ruling and testimony, Joe Bronske, a Weymouth Republican town committee chair, allegedly obtained a list of voters from a database managed by the state Republican Party and used those names to forge signatures on nomination papers.
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OK, then. Donald, are you looking for voter fraud? Here it is in your own crooked party!
Elon Musk Caught Interfering With Our Elections Again — NewsHound Ellen
Elon Musk, a likely fraudulent immigrant, is still in trouble over his last shady election interference.
A firm linked to Elon Musk likely engaged in voter caging. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported, “Election officials in North Carolina and Georgia are warning about suspicious voter-registration mailers linked to Elon Musk.” I am sure it is no coincidence that Senate races in North Carolina and Georgia are two states Musk and his MAGA minions are likely to lose.
As The Post explained, bulk mailings that appeared to be official requests for voter registrations came from a group called “Ready to Register.” At first blush, it appears the group’s work was shockingly sloppy (which tracks with other Musk efforts). The North Carolina State Board of Elections said in a statement that the mailings went “to an unknown number of citizens with an outdated voter registration application which includes four political parties that are no longer recognized in North Carolina.”
Georgia’s Paulding County Board of Elections & Registration said it had “received reports indicating that some mailings have been sent to deceased individuals and that outdated data sources may have been used in the mailing process.”...
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Are we tired of this prick yet?
DeSantis's 'Stop WOKE' Law Struck Down — By A Judge Trump Appointed Himself — Conover Kennard
This is just sad. Sad, as in haha, funny.
A federal appeals panel took a red pen to Ron DeSantis's Stop WOKE Act on Tuesday, handing the governor yet another lesson in constitutional law he apparently didn't attend.
The 11th Circuit ruled 2-1 that the law's higher-ed provisions — which tried to muzzle professors from so much as discussing race and gender in class — violate the First Amendment, because it turns out the government doesn't get to script what college professors say. Bold concept, we know.
The judges didn't mince words either, accusing Florida of "puppeteering" educators — turning them into state-approved mouthpieces rather than, you know, teachers....
LeRoy Pernell, the plaintiff of the lawsuit and a professor at Florida A&M University’s College of Law, responded to the ruling.
“We are thrilled the court has stopped the erasure of topics that have real implications for our students, allowing them to learn, discuss, and develop tools for combating the complex issue of racism in our country without being gagged by those who would dictate that only state-approved thought may be promoted,” he said in a statement.
The 'anti-woke' movement, whose central intellectual achievement is deciding that empathy and concern are a marketing scam, has been spectacularly backfiring with repeated, sweeping legal defeats. Add this one to the pile. The movement was built entirely around folks being mad that other people learned things.
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I guess they're awake now? ROTFLMAO!
Three More Charged With “Vandalizing” Reflecting Pool
CNN reports:
Three more people have been criminally charged with destruction of property at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Officers say they detained Camerontheirs, Sophie Dennison-Gibby and Justin Carreno one Saturday afternoon in June and described in court documents witnessing them peeling and removing pieces of blue paint from the Reflecting Pool.
One officer “witnessed Carreno reach down into the reflecting pool and pull up a piece of the blue paint,” according to the court documents. The officer who detained Dennison-Gibby “found 1 additional piece of the reflecting pool liner” in her purse, the documents said. All three incidents were recorded on the officers’ body worn cameras, they said in the court documents.
The three defendants were arraigned in court Wednesday and pleaded not guilty to the misdemeanor charges of destruction of property with a value less than $1,000. The judge ordered them to stay away from the Reflecting Pool.
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Trump raped and destroyed our reflecting pool. Now he's making innocent Americans pay for his fascist crime!
Trump Again Demands Nobel Prize: “I Settled A War After 15 Million People Had Their Heads Chopped Off”
(insane rant)
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We are tired of seeing this motherfucker's bullshit rants!
Just more proof the man is insane, delusional, arroganc and a threat to humanity.
Federal Judge Upholds Block On DHS Voters Database
Democracy Docket reports:
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has denied the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) request to pause her order shutting down use of its modified Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to certify registered voters’ citizenship status.
In a blistering 23-page opinion Wednesday, District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan berated the federal government’s attorneys for failing to notify her about a related case in Florida. A federal judge in that litigation issued an order Tuesday demanding DHS allow Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Ohio to use SAVE again, saying the agency was bound by a November 2025 settlement agreement with the state.
That led to conflicting federal court orders about the database. The denial means Sooknanan’s injunction issued in June will remain in place while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit hears DHS’s pleas for a reversal.
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Trump's Nazis will continue being rejected until they are eliminated!
Historians Condemn Attack On “Woke” Smithsonian
The New York Times reports:
On July 4, the White House posted a lengthy report condemning the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, accusing it of promoting “extreme ideological activism” while denigrating the nation’s founders and its founding. Historians have started to reply with failing grades of their own.
The Organization of American Historians, the nation’s largest group of scholars of U.S. history, blasted the report in a statement, accusing the administration of presenting a partisan ideological attack in the guise of historical critique.
“The National Museum of American History interprets America’s history through its vast collection,” it said. “This report’s objective is to punish it for doing that in a way that makes U.S. history accessible to and reflective of all Americans. The report is only the latest chapter in a broader, systematic campaign that now targets an institution that was never meant to answer to any single administration.”
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Rad the Florida descison, you filthy scumbags, and weep! Precident is being set!
In time, all of them will be erased!
Supreme Court helps Trump turn early losses into wins — Chauncey DeVega
Birthright citizenship survived this round. But Trump's latest successes show that the fight is far from over
...This strategy of testing the law and institutions, then losing, and then revising and trying again until the barrier is broken or sufficiently bent to exploit, is not coincidental....
The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold birthright citizenship is a real win, and it deserves to be celebrated. But do not mistake one battle for the entire war. America’s democracy is still losing that war — badly. Victory will be won only when its defenders learn to fight with the same patience, discipline, focus, vision and tenacity as the forces trying to tear it down.
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The Trump/SCOTUS crime will go on until we break them for good.
Judge slaps down Trump's last-ditch bid to stop E. Jean Carroll payments: report — Bennito L. Kelty
Trump's emergency motion to stop payments to accuser E. Jean Carroll failed after another judge ordered him to pay up.
Late Wednesday, Judge Eunice C. Lee, who was appointed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by Biden, ruled against a Trump emergency motion filed earlier in the day, Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney reported.
Carroll, a former magazine columnist, successfully sued Trump for defamation after she accused him of sexually assaulting her. A jury found Trump liable for sexual assault, and Carroll successfully sued him twice. She won $5 million in damages from a 2023 verdict and $83 million from a 2024 suit.
However, Trump hasn't paid Carroll. On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered Trump to hand over the $5 million he owed Carroll, and Trump tried to fight that with an emergency motion arguing he shouldn't have to pay because she plans to give the money away....
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It's her money, chiseler! Fork it over, piggy!
Critics roast Trump's 'completely insane' rant about Nobel Peace Prize on Air Force One — Robert Davis
Critics of President Donald Trump roasted him on Wednesday night after video of a press gaggle Trump held on Air Force One was published.
Trump traveled back to the U.S. from his meetings with NATO allies in Ankara, Turkey, where he shocked and horrified some political analysts with the way he treated global leaders. During the trip, Trump spoke to reporters about a wide range of topics, including whether he should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize instead of Venezuelan opposition leader and pro-democracy activist María Corina Machado.
"I would say I should have won that award more than anybody that ever received the Nobel Peace Prize," Trump said, repeating his quizzical claim that he's settled "eight wars."
Machado has previously said she dedicated her award to Trump, although the Nobel Prize committee clarified that her comments don't represent an official transfer of the award.
Trump critics roasted the president on social media.
"It’s so cool how America is essentially numb to the fact that the president of the United States is completely insane," author Jason Overstreet wrote to his more than 57,000 followers on X.
"Omg pls stop," Leslie Marshall, a Democratic strategist, told her more than 97,000 X followers.
"Is he going to call [Gianni] Infantino?" Etan Nechin, a New York correspondent for Haaretz, posted on X, referring to the president of FIFA, who awarded Trump the FIFA Peace Prize last year.
"He should get some psychotropic drugs. The man is ill," author Larry Mason told his more than 20,000 followers on X.
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Trump has embarrased our country long enogh. Remove him from office and get him to a mental health service. Then indict him.
Calls Grow for Independent Investigation Into ICE-Perpetrated Killing in Houston — Colleen DeGuzman
“We don’t expect the truth from the Department of Justice or from the FBI,” said the national president of a civil rights group
Houston leaders on Wednesday said they have received little information from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the fatal shooting of an immigrant Tuesday, while his eldest son publicly praised his father and demanded an investigation.
“He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo Salgado, who works as a teacher, said of his father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, during a press conference.
Salgado said his father was a “man of routine” who always began his day before sunrise and left the house around 6 a.m. to his job building homes in North Houston.
But on Tuesday, after picking up three other men, including his brother, for work, Salgado Araujo’s vehicle was stopped by agents in unmarked vehicles. The Department of Homeland Security said federal agents were attempting to stop Salgado Araujo’s vehicle as part of an unspecified “targeted enforcement operation” in Houston’s East End, a predominantly Latino neighborhood
The agency said Salgado Araujo also ignored verbal commands and tried to run over the ICE agent who shot him. The officer fired in self-defense, the statement said.
Salgado said his father, a Mexican citizen who was in the process of getting a work permit, may have feared that he was about to get robbed.
“One of his worst fears is that someone took away his work tools, because that is how he made his livelihood,” he said.
“Had my father seen an emblem of ICE, or an emblem that says anything about law enforcement agency, my father would have complied,” he added. “He would have not run away, because he feared for his life.”
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There is no truth from criminal organizations. The murders by ICE must be brought to justice.
ICE officer fatally shoots man while conducting traffic stop in Houston, agency says — Karina Tsui, Chris Boyette, CNN
A Mexican immigrant was on his way to finish construction on several Houston homes with a crew of workers Tuesday morning when he was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, his family said.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, was driving in Houston's East End area when ICE agents tried to conduct a traffic stop as part of a "targeted operation" and he attempted to evade arrest, an ICE spokesperson said in a statement to CNN.
"He should have been picking up the last of his guys before heading to North Houston to finish up construction on some houses," Salgado Araujo's son Ronaldo Salgado said at a Wednesday news conference.
"Unbeknownst to all of us, my dad had been shot inside his van … by ICE agents in unmarked cars," he added.
The agency says Salgado Araujo rammed into a law enforcement vehicle and refused to follow several verbal commands before an ICE agent fired his weapon in self-defense.
Salgado Araujo had no criminal history and was afraid when unmarked cars began following him, his son said. He does not appear to have a criminal record, according to the Harris County District Attorney's office.
"Had my father seen an emblem of ICE, or an emblem that says anything about a law enforcement agency, my father would have complied. He would have stopped," Salgado said. "He drove fast, because he feared that someone would take his tools."...
Echoing Garcia's remarks, Rep. Christian Menefee, who represents parts of Houston, said all information gleaned from the investigation must be made public.
"ICE's actions across the country have caused them to lose the faith and confidence of communities," he said on X.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her administration is planning to take action "beyond diplomatic notes" by taking more significant legal measures regarding Salgado Araujo's death.
"We cannot allow the mistreatment of our brothers and sisters who are in the United States, our fellow nationals. So we are proposing other measures," Sheinbaum said in her Wednesday news conference.
Houston Mayor John Whitmire has said he believes federal officials must conduct a "transparent, independent investigation." During Wednesday's city council meeting, he also noted the city's police department was not involved in the traffic stop or the shooting....
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When you look like criminals and people don't see your alleged authority they think they are under attack by criminals. They are right!
Weird How None Of MAGA Rep.'s White Supremacist Posts Feature The Dinesh D'Souza's Daughter He Reproduces With — Robyn Pennacchia
Texas Rep. Brandon Gill, a guy who definitely told his hairdresser to make him look like an extra from Gone With The Wind, is not afraid of people thinking he’s a racist. Indeed, just last week, he posted a picture of his own very serious and/or bored looking face along with text that read “The Left has one debate tactic: call you racist and pray you shut up” and the caption “Calling us racist doesn’t work anymore.”
And when he was bad he was horrid.
As if it ever did! Like, really, at what point, exactly, was the Right cowed by accusations of racism? Did I blink and miss it? And when were we going around randomly accusing them of being racist without them doing or saying something blatantly racist? Because I don’t recall that either. After all, it’s hardly as if they don’t provide us with enough material. And while I fully admit that I’d love for him and others like him to shut up, it’s certainly not for fear that they will make a point so good that everyone will gasp and slow clap while I stand there looking like a fool.
Mostly it’s because they’re terrible and I’d really like to have a more positive view of humanity than the one I am currently stuck with....
Over the last few years, an increasingly large percentage of MAGA chuds have become increasingly racist against Indian people — even attacking those on their side, like JD Vance for being married to Usha Vance, Kash Patel, and former presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy. While some Republicans used to try to pretend that they were fine with immigrants coming “the right way,” most are now comfortable saying that they don’t want that, either. They don’t want any immigrants, and when they say they want a country that they “recognize,” they are talking about a country full of white people.
That is who Brandon Gill was trying to appeal to with this post. That’s whose approval he is after. He knows exactly what his responses would have looked like if he had included a picture with her in it, and he didn’t want to give them any reason to say that his wife is representative of the America that “they don’t recognize.”
Gill fired back at critics yesterday, pointing out that he has previously posted many pictures of his wife, missing the point that she was conspicuously absent from the racial purity dog-whistle post in particular. And, you know, I doubt she cares because she seems like a real piece of work herself, but you gotta feel bad for the kids....
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“You can call me any name you want. I just want my children to grow up in a country that they recognize.” he states. The kids will recognize their country just as we always have. We recognize the times in which we grew up. Well, maybe he doesn't for some reason. I just wish them they can recognize humanity.
Trump Continues Humiliating Self And America At NATO — Evan Hurst
Donald Trump dropped down in Ankara, Türkiye, for the big NATO summit, and wasted no time confirming every European leader’s worst instincts about whether or not the United States is any longer their friend.
You see, the stupid senile bitch Trump still thinks that part of the NATO deal is that the other members should jump up to help every time Benjamin Netanyahu tricks him into starting a war no other American president was stupid enough to start. He thinks they owe that to him. He thinks that’s part of Article 5. He’s the stupidest, most useless brain of any human who’s ever taken up space on God’s green earth.
So he arrived in Ankara and, during a press availability with Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, immediately started in babbling about his Greenland shit again.
He yapped:
“Greenland doesn’t help Denmark, Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States,” the president continued.
Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” he concluded.
Sorry about all this yet again, Europe.
Notably, it was reported this weekend that France has had to prepare for the very real possibility of a “shooting war” with the US over Greenland. Now here comes Trump to start running his fucking mouth about that again, and Danish PM Mette Fredriksen is having to reiterate at NATO that she will defend Greenland, and that it’s “not for sale.”
Trump also continued yesterday to make threats to remove troops from Europe, said hopeful words about a peace deal for his father Putin in Russia and Ukraine (despite how his opinion on the matter is less than irrelevant), and said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a “nice person,” while whining some more that she wouldn’t help him bomb Iran at Netanyahu’s request. This, despite how just this weekend, he was still fanning the flames of the stupid feud he started with her by telling pathetic, unbelievable lies about her wanting to be in the same room with him.
He also recommenced his bitching that if it hadn’t been for the foul fucking dictator he was meeting with at the time, for whom he’s always had a little Trumpy boner, he might not have even come to the NATO summit:
“I was very disappointed with NATO, and frankly, if it weren’t held in Turkey, where my friend happens to be a very strong leader, a very strong person, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have attended. I felt I had to attend because of the fact that, you know, I know he’s gone all out.”
Did y’all hear about trashball Erdogan’s latest stunt, denying a gay cruise ship permission to dock in Istanbul because of the homosexual lifestyle? Motherfucker does not belong in a community of respected nations like NATO, but we understand why they might keep him there as a means of controlling him. (It’s good that Turkey’s bid for European Union membership is forever stalled.)
Of course, the same could probably be said for the United States these days.
Anyway, back to Trump’s humiliation of himself and of the United States!...
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With Trump it is stupid is as stupid does!
The Lie That Changed America — Thom Hartmann
From corporate personhood to Citizens United, the hidden story behind today's billionaire political power - and what we can do about it
My new book, Who Killed the American Dream? The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told, is out today, and it plainly lays out why so much has gone wrong in this country since the Reagan Revolution and how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision came about.
The timing turns out to be almost eerie. Just this week, in a Common Dreams op-ed about California’s Proposition 40, Congressman Ro Khanna posed the question that has become both urgent and existential for America: Are we actually willing to tax billionaire oligarchs, or are we only willing to talk about it?
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once tried to warn us about this very moment, a warning which has echoes throughout history and in dozens of nations:
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Prop 40 is really just the tiniest start, it we’re serious about rescuing both our middle class and our democracy. It would put a one-time 5 percent tax on the wealth of California’s roughly 200 billionaire oligarchs to keep hospitals open as Trump’s Medicaid cuts tear through the state, and the tech billionaires who’d have to pay it are using the power Citizens United gave them to pour tens of millions of dollars into killing it.
Khanna, who’s teamed up with Bernie Sanders on a national version of the same idea, is exactly right to ask.
But there’s a deeper question sitting underneath this: how did a few hundred people get so unimaginably rich, and so powerful, that taxing them at all now feels like a radical act?
How did we arrive at a place where a handful of morbidly rich billionaire oligarchs can spend more on a single ballot measure than working class families will earn in a dozen generations, just to avoid chipping in to save their neighbors’ emergency room?...
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I'll take a guess. By becoming evil, greedy, stupid morons!
POLL: 95% Say US Is Suffering An “Affordability Crisis”
The Guardian reports:
Ninety-five per cent of Americans believe the US is suffering an affordability crisis, as many report trouble with the rising cost of groceries and gas, according to an exclusive new poll conducted for the Guardian. The survey, conducted by Harris Poll, paints a bleak picture of how people feel about the US economy amid the war in Iran and ahead of the key midterm elections this fall.
Despite stable employment and record-high stock markets, more Americans believe the overall economy is getting worse (57%) than in February (46%), when the poll was last conducted and before the war in the Middle East sent gas prices soaring.
Fewer people today also believe the economy is getting better (16%, compared with 28% in February) and more say their financial security has gotten worse. Even rural Americans, a strong base for Republicans, are feeling more pessimistic: 64% say the economy is getting worse, compared with 46% who said the same in February....
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And the evil king is in his accounting house, counting out his grited money as Americans strruggle! Hee, hee, hee!
Sean Duffy: I Have Defunded Biden’s “DEI Bike Lanes”
Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire reports:
A federal infrastructure program used by the Biden administration to fund bike lanes and “advance equity” will go toward fixing America’s bridges, roads, and shipping ports, The Daily Wire has learned.
The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it would be awarding $1.73 billion in infrastructure grants through the Department of Transportation to improve roads and bridges. Under Biden, the department focused on fighting “climate change,” pushing DEI, and funding bike lanes.
“America is fortunate to have a Builder in the White House who knows America is only as great as our infrastructure,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told The Daily Wire. Shortly after taking office, Duffy moved to implement the Trump administration’s policy of eliminating DEI from government programs and policies. He directed department officials to rescind any DEI or climate change-related policies.....
"Bikes are DEI.. I mean, where are you gonna hang your truck nutz?" — Askew (comments)
"And um, HOW is a bike lane 'DEI'" — Tiger Quinn (comments)
"In other words, the funds designated for the bike lanes program will go toward no-bid contracts for Mar a Lago members to turn our roads, bridges, and ports into unusable and irreparable infrastructure projects so president "Only I Can Fix It" can further distract from the TrumpStein Files?
Am I close?" — VegasDragon (comments)
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DEI? WTF has that got to do with riding a bike in a bike lane? What a fucking retarded dumbass! American citizens use the lanes you retarded provincial! They are a part of our infrastructure as anyone with world travel experience can testify to.
Trump Loses Appeal Over Name On Kennedy Center
ABC News reports:
A federal appeals court has rejected the Kennedy Center board’s latest argument for why Donald Trump‘s name needs to be added to the complex.
A three-judge panel on Wednesday denied a stay of a lower court order that forced the Kennedy Center to remove Trump’s name, including from the facade of the front of the arts institution. A tarp has covered the name since then, which otherwise would read visibly, “The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Justice Department attorneys had argued that many “donors and companies, who have given, or will be giving, millions of dollars to the Center were only willing to do so with the name ‘Trump’ on the Building.”...
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IT"S NOT TRUMP'S BUILDING YOU ASSWIPES!
Besides, he's not John F. Kennedy and NEVER WILL BE!
Tell your fucking Nazi donors to shove their cash up their dark hole!
Insiders leak story of Trump’s diplomatic bombshell on Canada — Sarah K. Burris
President Donald Trump is at the NATO summit in Turkey where things grew contentious when he dropped a "diplomatic bombshell" on Canada.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Justin Trudeau kept getting threatening phone calls from Trump before he was replaced by Mark Carney.
At one point in a call, Trump told Canada he would kill a 118-year-old agreement that set the border with the U.S. and its neighbor to the north on maps and on the ground.
The agreement came when Canada was still handled by the United Kingdom, and at the April 1908 Boundary Convention, it was the U.K. that signed the agreement, not Canada. But Trump didn't care, telling Trudeau, “I tear that up, and your whole country unravels.”
Trump seemed confused that the law established the border, but the reality is that a slew of other agreements and treaties set the border, including the Treaty of 1818 and the Oregon Treaty of 1846.
According to the Journal, "Over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Trudeau’s envoys tried to dissuade Trump from absorbing their country. When one Trump aide pointed out Canada’s 41 million people would lean Democrat, the president came up with a neat solution: just split the northern neighbor into two states, one red, the other blue."
It's unclear how Trump would make that work, given that he has an approval rating in Canada of around 22 percent, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
When Carney took over, he asked for a review of Canada's dependency "on one particular country for its data storage, military hardware, payments processing and even food."
The report called it the first move for a country shifting the U.S. from an ally to a threat. It was a stark contrast to what NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte did, which is to encourage members that they had to do whatever it would take to keep the alliance together....
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Your wages of insanity, America! The shithole we have become!
Morally Bankrupt Fox News Claims Dems 'Have No Moral Compass' — John Amato
Sometimes I am almost left speechless listening to craven Republicans on Fox News make the most ridiculous arguments to defend Trump's immorality, lies and crimes along with the entire GOP.
Fox News political analyst Gianno Caldwell - if you can call him that - used one awful Democratic candidate, Graham Platner, to launch a smear campaign against the entire
Democratic party since 2020 as being morally bankrupt by using unsubstantiated and unproven claims by Tara Reade against Joe Biden. Yes, THAT Tara Reade. The one who became a Russian citizen last year. What a coincidence.
I won't bother listing all the sexual deviants, criminals, liars, anti-democratic members of the GOP because it would take too much time.
I will mention one name though. Ken Paxton.
CALDWELL: The moral compass in the Democratic Party has long been dead for many of the folks within the Democratic Party. I think back to 2020 when there was an allegation by Tara Reid Against Joe Biden and women in the MeToo moment said I believe her. But there's no way that I can step out and say that because I want Trump to lose so they've already prioritized winning over anything else.
So this is where we are as a country.You can pick the good guys, which are more likely the Republicans or you can pick the Democrats who? Continuously show us that they are not up for the task.
They're not morally responsible....
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The line-up in the photo should showtheir height like it usually does for criminal suspects. Why anyone with a brain gives them the time of day is one of the biggest mysteries of our time.
‘Truly bizarre behavior': Trump DOJ threatens election officials to promote voting lie — Nick Hilden
On Tuesday, NBC News confirmed that the Justice Department has sent threatening letters to election officials spanning every state and Washington, D.C., asserting that they could “face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting.” According to NBC, the letters are the latest move in President Donald Trump’s effort to promote his false claims of widespread noncitizen voting and “assert more federal control over state elections.”
As NBC explains, “The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain ‘clean voter lists.’” And as NBC notes, noncitizen voting is so rare it’s almost nonexistent, “but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.”
The DOJ letters assert that state election officials “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” any noncitizen voting. They also emphasize that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a voting registration list or who helps noncitizens receive and cast ballots in any way could be subject to criminal liability, and that “an intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation.”
According to Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican election official who received one of the letters, the threats amounted to “truly bizarre behavior.”...
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This is not his area to pull his shit on. This is the act of an insane lickspittle dictator. Throw his ass into the dustbin of history!
Trump 'humiliated because Iran is 'culturally incomprehensible' to him — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump is "lashing out" against Iran and left "humiliated" as his much-hyped ceasefire deal falls apart, and as one veteran reporter explained for The i Paper, it all comes down to the fact that the country is "culturally incomprehensible" to him.
Trump raged against Iran during his visit to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday, saying that the ceasefire with the Middle Eastern nation is "over" after attacks on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and strikes against American military bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. He also called Iranian leaders "sick" and "scum," claiming he had no further interest in negotiating with them.
"They’re sick people, they’re led by sick people. They’re vicious, violent people," Trump said. "If they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over."
Simon Marks is a veteran reporter based in Washington, D.C., and in a Wednesday piece for The i Paper, he explained how this new tantrum from Trump over Iran was "a fresh demonstration" that he fundamentally lacks the skills and temperament to successfully manage a diplomatic deal with such a country. Furthermore, he argued that the breakdown stems from a cultural incompatibility with Trump's understanding of how to make deals in the first place.
"Trump’s latest bout of fury is a fresh demonstration that he has neither the patience nor the diplomatic mindset for the difficult negotiations that were set in motion by the [memorandum of understanding]," Marks wrote. "He expects Iran’s leaders to behave like New York property moguls. But they are not dealmakers in the American tradition, and Trump indicated on Wednesday that he finds their conduct culturally incomprehensible."
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Almost any 6-year old child could do a better job as president!
‘Sundowning' Trump has ensured America’s 'decline': Nobel economist — Nick Hilden
On Wednesday, Americans woke up to a flurry of news regarding President Donald Trump’s hostile meeting with NATO leaders in Turkey, in which it has already been made clear that he intends to further distance the U.S. from its longtime allies. This prompted Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman to warn that a visibly “sundowning” Trump has pushed the U.S. into “precipitous decline.”
As Krugman notes, a recent report by the Wall Street Journal described how Trump’s threats to invade Greenland earlier this year drove European leaders to meet in what was described as a “therapy night” as they vented about the situation. “Yesterday,” writes Krugman, “soon after he arrived in Ankara for the NATO Summit, Trump reiterated his demand that Denmark hand him control of Greenland. But reactions were subdued. As far as I can tell, our erstwhile allies are now treating Trump as the senile uncle who says crazy, outrageous things, but shouldn’t be taken seriously.”
The change, he says, is that Europe has “given up hopes” that the U.S. will return to being the ally they once knew, and they’re preparing accordingly. Here he quotes the Journal at length:
“American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.
“Europeans are running studies on where they would store their data or process their payments should friction with the U.S. escalate, and how well their American-made weaponry would operate without Washington’s authorization. Nations whose empires once spanned the globe are now stuck trying to extricate themselves from their humbling dependency on American technology and military power, without provoking the U.S.”
According to Krugman, this turn from the U.S. has come because they realized that the nation that twice elected Trump “simply can’t be trusted,” while simultaneously recognizing “plummeting perceptions of his power.” In other words, “the world no longer takes him seriously.”...
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The U.S. has lost its standing in the world thanks to this utterly mindless moron.
Treasury Department Ditches Obama-Era Plans For Harriet Tubman On $20 Bill — Antonio Pequeño IV
The Trump administration has dropped an Obama-era plan to place Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, according to comments Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made to Spectrum News, the latest disruption of a 10-year-old plan to put the abolitionist on new versions of the bill....
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said she was “extremely disappointed to hear that Secretary Bessent has halted plans to put Harriet Tubman’s likeness on the $20 bill,” telling Spectrum, “Bessent may be more interested in illegally plastering Donald Trump’s image on a $250 bill.”...
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NO Trump on any money ever! If Harriet isn't worthy then neither is Trump!
US rare earths flow to Asia as domestic demand is slow to emerge — Camilla Hodgson in London
US rare earths produced by Washington-backed companies are flowing to Japan and South Korea, as American demand has yet to materialize despite the Trump administration’s push to develop a national supply chain.
Rare earths products produced by MP Materials, Energy Fuels and Phoenix Tailings—which together have won billions of dollars in US government support—are being sold to companies in Asia, where the scale of magnet manufacturing remains larger than the nascent production in the US.
China’s lock on global supplies of rare earths and critical minerals has become a national security concern in the US and other Western nations, since Beijing started restricting access to them. The metals are crucial to 21st-century technology and are used in the manufacturing of everything from weapons guidance systems to electric vehicle batteries....
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Backward, backward we go.
Trump loyalist heckled and booed at 'hostile' town hall — Thomas Kika
A Republican lawmaker noted for his support and defense of President Donald Trump was not feeling any love from his constituents at a recent town hall, with The Daily Beast reporting that he was mercilessly heckled and booed by the "hostile" crowd as he attempted to tout Trump's agenda.
Rep. Mike Flood is a Republican who has represented Nebraska's 1st District since 2022. On Tuesday evening, he held a town hall for voters in the city of Bellevue, where he attempted to win them over on the supposed accomplishments of Trump and the GOP-led Congress. While the district swung for the president by 12 points in 2024, nearly two years later, they were not having what Flood tried to sell them.
"When asked about benefits for people with disabilities, Flood was promptly booed after mentioning the Trump administration’s signature legislation—the Big Beautiful Bill—that the president signed into law a year ago," the Daily Beast's report detailed....
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Another liar for Trump goes down in a hail of boos! How can these crooks have the cheek to go public?
Trump's health raising alarms in Turkey — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump displayed a bruised hand during his Tuesday trip to Turkey, which is occurring in advance of his upcoming summit at NATO. By doing so, he raised further questions about his physical health.
“Trump’s troublesome appendage has become one of the most prominent and longest-running health concerns amid an array of worrying symptoms,” wrote The Daily Beast’s Harry Thompson on Tuesday. “A neck rash has also been spotted poking out of the top of his collar, and, as was the case in Turkey, he has appeared unsteady on his feet, particularly on stairs.”
Describing Trump’s persistent swollen cankles and arguing that they are part of the same perceived series of health problems as his bruised hands, Thompson characterized Trump’s claim that these are caused by innocuous blood pooling, hand shaking and aspirin taking as dubious....
"When Trump dies, he shouldn't get any of the honors given to Presidents including no lying in state in the US Capital, the one he led an act of sedition on, no procession in DC, no Democrat attend any service and I hope not buried at his Bedminster, NJ golf club with wife # 1." — leonbnj (comments)
"One of the sickest things about this situation are all the flunkies who won't act to get the senile madman out of power. The dude is clearly unfit to serve. But they won't yank him out of the office. Never mind the standards of America from the revolution to the Obama Era, these lame toadies aren't even up to the standards of Regency England in the 1810s when the government acted to appoint the Prince as regent with full powers because King George III had become too mentally gone to rule." — B. (comments)
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Agreed. Couldn't agree more. America owes it all to him for his murders, assaults and damage done.
Duffy's Son-In-Law Compares Himself To Washington, Jefferson — Chris capper Liebenthal
Michael Alfonso, Sean Duffy's son-in-law, defends himself against complaints of his lack of experience by comparing himself to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. We have some bad news for Alfonso.
David Edwards reported that conservatives in Northwestern Wisconsin were not very impressed with Sean Duffy's son-in-law, Michael Alfonso, who is running for Duffy's old congressional seat. Personally, I would be more upset about the fact that Alfonso is a carpetbagger from Florida, who is living in the Duffys' basement while Duffy puts the squeeze on transportation companies to donate to Alfonso's campaign, but that's just me. We know Republicans don't give a crap about the law or integrity.
Alfonso, who is 26 years old, has since defended his lack of experience by comparing himself to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who were both 26 years old when first elected to public office.
Both Washington and Jefferson were indeed 26 years old when they were elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. However, that's where any similarities end.
By the time Washington turned 26 and was elected, he had already served as a surveyor for nine years and was a major in the Virginia militia. And by the time Jefferson reached the age of 26, he was an established and respected lawyer.
In contrast, Duffy was a podcaster and starred in Duffy's reality TV show, which taxpayers had paid for. Hmm, not quite the same, is it?
If it's any consolation, I'm sure that there are plenty of people who are willing to help Alfonso pack and see him off to his home in Florida.
"To be fair, based on contemporary paintings, neither Washington nor Jefferson had come close to matching by age 26 Alfonso's obvious skill in the art of eyebrow plucking and pencilling." — BL (comments)
"Eh? Yet another carpetbagger! What, there are no election deniers in Wisconsin? What is it with the GoP and carpetbaggers? Isn't the GoP supposed to be against immigrants?" — Mike Wilkerson (comments) *See photos along with this comment, all of Trumps wives and spawn, all anchor babies or immigrants!*
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Nazis need only to exist to have experience!
Judge Upholds Block On Trump’s USPS Ballots Order
Democracy Docket reports:
A federal judge declined to pause a ruling that blocked the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from implementing President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order targeting mail voting. The decision means Trump’s dangerous attack on mail voting remains blocked in 23 states and the District of Columbia.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani rejected a Trump administration motion asking her to put on hold, pending an appeal, her June 25 ruling that the USPS cannot refuse to deliver mail ballots unless voter lists are handed over to the DOJ.
This comes one day after the USPS appealed a district court order to block the implementation of Trump’s executive order. Notably, Tuesday’s decision marks a dichotomy between the two lawsuits.
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Justice scores again!
DOJ Sends Threatening Letters To Top Election Officials
The New York Times reports:
The Justice Department sent letters to at least 10 states on Tuesday threatening criminal prosecution of top election officials if ballots cast by noncitizens were counted in upcoming elections. The letters arrived in the midst of an ongoing campaign by President Trump and his allies to tighten election rules to prevent a problem that doesn’t exist: widespread noncitizen voting in American elections.
The effort has, however, continued to sow doubt and distrust in the electoral process, most notably among the president’s base of supporters. And his proposals could have the effect of making it more difficult for eligible voters to cast their ballots — an outcome that many voting-right activists say is the president’s real goal.
The letters sent on Tuesday came from Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division. They are largely identical, according to multiple copies obtained by The New York Times. The seven-page letters detail a host of federal election laws that prohibit noncitizens from voting in elections — laws that have been clear for decades.
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A perverted attack on our voting rights by the criminal Department of Jerk-offs!
Illegal aliens don't cast votes in our elections. You're creating an enemy that DOES NOT EXIST to promote the criminal Trump.
Stick your Nazi letter where the sun don't shine!
Federal Court Boots Bid To Overturn 2020 US Census
Just in via press release:
https://redistrictingfoundation.org/2026/07/07/nrf-thwarts-partisan-legal-effort-to-force-mid-decade-census/
Today, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida granted a motion to dismiss in University of South Florida College Republicans v. Lutnick, a federal case seeking to overturn the 2020 Census count, which was conducted during President Trump’s first term in office.
The motion was filed by a group of intervenor-defendants, supported by the National Redistricting Foundation (NRF), in response to the amended complaint seeking to reopen this case, which the same district court dismissed in February. The NRF-supported intervenor-defendants, which include the Alliance for Retired Americans and Florida college students, were represented by Elias Law Group in court.
“This is a major victory in the multi-front fight to protect the census count from partisan manipulation,” said Marina Jenkins, Executive Director of the National Redistricting Foundation (NRF). “By dismissing—yet again—these absurd legal arguments that have tried to undermine the scientific foundation of the census count in order to force a mid-decade census, the court has sent a strong message that attempts to subvert the census count will not be tolerated.”
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Pathetic, whining losers that can't admit they lost! Twisted children that will never grow up!
Trump Says Iran Ceasefire Is Over: “They’re Scum”
The Associated Press reports:
Iran targeted American military sites in the Gulf on Wednesday after the U.S. launched strikes on several places in Iran and reinstated sanctions on its oil sales. Washington said it was responding to Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
The crossfire raised fears that the war in Iran could reignite, and U.S. President Donald Trump fueled those concerns by saying that the interim agreement to pause fighting was “over,” although he added that he would allow negotiations to continue.
“For me, I think it’s over,” Trump responded when asked about the status of the ceasefire. He added that U.S. representatives can continue negotiations, but he cast doubt on the outcome. “They can talk, but I think they’re wasting their time,” he said.
"Trump is the origin of scum. His scummy tendrils extend throughout spacetime and across multiple timelines.
He is the true singularity of scum, every type of scum originating directly from the evil lightless, frozen void within, swimming in a hideous miasma that reeks of rotten Big Mac, old Diet Coke, and decomposing congresspeople." -- Game-Junkie >>vaxxed&masked<< (comments)
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This from the "King of Scum!" Pot meet kettle!
WH Threatens To Withhold Terror Grants To Blue States
Democracy Docket reports:
The Trump administration is threatening to hold back terrorism-prevention funding from states unless they comply with a sweeping set of election demands — escalating President Donald Trump’s ongoing attempt to seize power over elections that the Constitution gives to states and Congress.
A new FEMA grant notice for fiscal year 2026 says the agency will withhold 20% of Homeland Security Grant Program funding from states and urban areas until they provide proof that they have complied with the administration’s new election security requirements.
The Homeland Security Grant Program is not a small election grant. It is a $1.064 billion terrorism-prevention program that helps states and local governments pay for cybersecurity, emergency planning, training, equipment, protections for crowded public spaces and other public safety needs.
"Blue states will sue and win again. Trump the loser sure does seem to like losing and he does it so well. Maybe Blue states withhold federal tax they pay to the federal government until such time backs the fuck off or dies." -- Thewolflam (comments)
"If there was any justice in this country, this fucking piece of shit would have taken his last breath in a cold federal prison cell years ago." -- Greg (comments)
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Trump is a desperate criminal who knows his time is about up. As such, there is nothing he will not attempt to do to retain power. This is a mobster running a protection racket. He is the worst fascist we have ever faced including Hitler!
REPORT: Ken Paxton Has Voted Illegally Six Times
ProPublica reports:
Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud. “Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted to my office by the Legislature, we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” Paxton said in a February news release announcing the tip line.
Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.
State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.
It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February. Three election lawyers told the news organizations that Paxton may have violated the same Texas laws his office cautioned about in its news release.
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This is no surprise to anyone who lives in Texas. This guy should be run out of the state on a rail. Vote Talarico and end Paxton's corruption.
New DOJ cover-up of Todd Blanche secrets could hide 'unspeakably bad' conduct: experts — David Edwards
Legal experts say the Justice Department is paying off the "Broadview Six" to kill a probe that could expose Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The Department of Justice entered a court filing Tuesday conceding it will pay the defendants' attorneys' fees — which courts can award when a prosecution was conducted in bad faith — while simultaneously arguing there should be no discovery.
The defendants had demanded records of all communications between Chicago federal prosecutors and Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh or Blanche — including cell phone records tied to Singh — covering the entire Broadview Six investigation, according to a discovery motion filed last month....
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Corruption even a blind person can see! Rid our country of these crooks!
Critics ridicule Trump's bizarre 'Freedom Fuel' gas price stunt: 'What a joke' — Matt Chapman
President Donald Trump's White House unveiled a new promotional gimmick this week: "Freedom Fuel," or a network of 25 gas stations offering what is being billed as cut-rate gasoline to deliver savings to American voters.
"FREEDOM FUEL HAS ARRIVED," said the White House official account on X. "The FIRST Freedom Fuel Network gas station has LANDED in Philadelphia, lowering the price at the pump to $3.47 for our 47th President. President Trump is leading the charge to lower gas prices this summer — putting more money in your pocket."
MAGA-supportive pundits instantly lauded the announcement, with far-right conspiracy theorist reporter Lara Logan posting, "Everyone is going to want this." But elsewhere, the idea was met with scorn, as people laughed at the idea of the Trump administration setting prices at a tiny handful of branded gas stations — and others pointed out that gas is only so expensive due to Trump's war against Iran.
"Arsonist puts out fire," wrote political commentator Travis Akers.
"Going through all that trouble and the best they can do is $3.47 per gallon?" wrote Open Measures senior researcher Jared Holt. "What a joke."
"The average price of gas when Biden left office was $3.12," wrote liberal journalist Aaron Rupar. "Trump wants to throw a parade for himself over one station where it's $3.47."
"You raise prices, then pretend when they go down you’re some savior," wrote former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL). "Besides, all your supporters spent the last half year telling us presidents don’t control gas prices?"
"25 gas stations out of 120,000 in the US," wrote blogger Jim Stewartson. "This is Trump’s entire con in a nutshell: Try to fix a problem that isn’t a problem. Make it a problem. Deny you made it a problem. 'Fix' the problem with propaganda instead of a solution. Make the problem worse."
"So I this a state-owned gas station? A Trump-owned gas station? Or does this all belong to one of his rich donors?" wrote the LDS Democrats account. "There is a racket in here somewhere."
"Google says there are 145,000 gas stations in the U.S.
25 "Freedom Fuel" stations will service 0.017% of the U.S. market.
Way to go, Caligula!" — Starkist (comments)
"The book "1984" was not supposed to be an operating manual." — GonzoVeritas (comments)
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Again, admission of failure by a failed administration.
Are the haters happy with this failure they voted for?
Trump’s crazed lies about ‘communists’ demand media debunking — Dan Foomkin
Donald Trump’s latest Big Lie is that Democrats are godless communists who want to destroy the country. They are animals, thieves, and lunatics who want to kill Christians, he says. They pose the greatest threat to our country since its founding and must be rooted out like cancer and sent into exile.
I am not making this up.
But rather than debunk Trump’s wildly dishonest, unhinged, and inflammatory new rhetoric, our major news organizations have responded largely with mild stenography – effectively amplifying his lies.
When they should be definitively stating that Trump is wrong, and that Democrats are not actually godless communists, they instead sanewash Trump’s calumnies by casting the victory of a handful of pragmatic and pugnacious democratic socialists as the Democratic party’s dangerous lurch to the left.
And perhaps worst of all, instead of questioning Trump’s mental status and depravity, they focus their attention on whether his new line of attack is an effective political tactic and they ponder how it will play in the midterms....
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Nothing is beneath the criminal Trump. He will stoop to anything to glorify his lost soul!
'Spectacularly Stupid': Reflecting Pool Becomes Hellhole After Trump Fireworks Disaster — David Edwards
President Donald Trump's massive July Fourth fireworks show fouled the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, choked Washington with record air pollution, and sent dozens to hospitals.
Trump's nonprofit Freedom 250 launched nearly 850,000 fireworks shells from 10 sites on the National Mall — including the Reflecting Pool itself.
"Best fireworks show, EVER!" Trump
wrote on Truth Social after the display
The morning after, workers were wading waist-deep in the pool to scoop out burned debris floating across the murky green water. Scorched fireworks casings and netting were piled along the walkway by the dozen.
The cleanup continued into Monday, when photos showed a large amount of trash in the Reflecting Pool.
"Shooting off fireworks next to the Reflecting Pool was a spectacularly stupid idea,"
D.C. photojournalist Joe Flood wrote on X. "This is the result."
Washington briefly became the city with the worst air quality on earth after the 40-minute show. Officials issued a Code Red alert, warning the air was "unhealthy for seniors, kids, people with medical conditions."
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America loves a sadistic moron as our leader? Bullshit!
Trump Accounts: Scamming Your Babies Out Of Their Social Security — Karoli Kuns
If you haven't heard of Trump accounts before now, perk up and listen because they're the centerpiece of his midterm message, and they are meant to replace Social Security. Oh, not now, not today. But he wants to take your baby's Social Security away with a tiny corporate-funded $1,000 bribe.
Here's how they work: For babies born between 2025 and 2028, a so-called "Trump Account" will be opened for them with $1,000 seed money from the likes of Michael Dell and other corporate barons. New parents, flush with money, can then contribute up to $5,000 a year to them until those kids are 18. These contributions are not tax-deductible and all funds are placed into stock market fund investments. They grow tax-free, and are converted to traditional IRAs at age 18. Withdrawals are subject to a 10% tax if withdrawn for anything other than the exceptions spelled out in the law.
Investments are required to be in index funds that move with the S&P 500. So Wall Street is really happy!!!
Of course those new parents will have all kinds of money to shove into an account! Never mind the diapers, wipes, formula, food. Those babies don't need to eat; they need to be "entrepreneurs" just like Orange Jesus said when he was ringing the bell for the New York Stock Exchange Monday morning....
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The biggest criminal con man enemy America has ever faced!
Trump Threatens NATO Members Over Greenland
CNBC reports:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday resurrected his push for the U.S. to acquire Greenland, and suggested the U.S. could pull all of its armed services members out of Europe in response to the continent’s continued pushback on the issue. The island territory “should be controlled by the United States,” Trump said shortly after he arrived in Ankara, Turkey, for a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.
In a bilateral meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday afternoon Ankara time, Trump vented that Europe’s refusal to go along with his expansionist desire is “what hurt my relationship with NATO.” “Because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark. Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States,” Trump told reporters.
"Our military can't handle Iran, Europe knows this. If we could, we would have and done so without the bother of war crimes. This is another Donnie fail, right on schedule." — Sandy Bottoms (comments)
"to recover from his huge embarrassment with FIFA. He's a fucking moron." — clay (comments)
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Trump must keep his goddamn hands off Greenland. He's pushing for a nuclear war!
Clip of Belgium's locker room mockery of Trump leaves fans musing he's a 'hex' on US — Alexander Willis
Belgian players celebrated their victory over the United States on Monday in a politically charged match by imitating President Donald Trump's signature dance on the field, but video published the next day shows that the players doubled down on the mockery after the final whistle.
Published Tuesday by Het Laatste Nieuws, a Dutch-language newspaper based in Belgium, new video shows players for the Belgian Red Devils – Belgium’s national team – celebrating in a locker room, imitating Trump’s dance while listening and singing along to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” the song that’s become a staple at Trump rallies.
In the video, players could be seen dancing in Trump’s signature style – swaying their hips and punching the air – while others clapped and whistled along with the music.
“I swear this man [is] a hex on this whole country, this is exactly what we deserve,” wrote American recording artist Abbas Hamad in a social media post on X Tuesday to his more than 300,000 followers, presumably referring to Trump.>br>
Rodney Sorensen, a content creator and cryptocurrency commentator, admitted to his more than 160,000 followers on X that Belgium was “roasting us so bad,” and Irlan Simões, a Brazilian sports journalist, sarcastically quipped that the Trump administration would respond by “bringing democracy to Belgium,” a reference to the common euphemism for U.S. invasions and interventions.
The political hostility between the United States and Belgium was sparked after a penalty issued to a star U.S. player last week was overturned following a personal appeal to FIFA directly from Trump. Trump admitted to having meddled in FIFA’s decision on Monday, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) personally thanked Trump for doing so....
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Trump set the trap in which he is now ensnared.
Donald Trump, Arsonist in Chief — Tom Engelhardt<br>
The President from Hell
I know, I know. Recently, Donald Trump has been obsessed with water, at least the algae-green water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that he wants to be a beautiful, pristine blue. But consider that an irony indeed, since when it comes to the planet he now oversees, water is going to be a problem and a half, algae or not.
Phew, in fact, I’m already sweating and I’ve just been reading about the heat in Europe right now, a region which has been warming twice as fast as the global average for quite a while. And mind you, I’m thousands of miles away (although still in a distinctly hot New York City about to soon get hotter still)!
If it were me, the headline during Trump’s recent algal week in the news wouldn’t have been in question anywhere on this planet (of ours?). I’m thinking, of course, about the recent days when the mid-June temperature in Paris, France, hit a wild record of nearly 115 (yes, you read that right!) degrees Fahrenheit and it was in the 106-113 degree range across the European continent. From England to Switzerland and Spain, temperature records of a remarkable sort were being set and then set again (and again!).
No one had ever seen anything quite like it. In the third week of June, it was so hot, in fact, that across Europe at least 40 people drowned just trying to stay wet and cool and four toddlers died trapped in overheated cars. And yet, crisis as it might have been, think of it as just the beginning on this distinctly overheating planet of ours. With at least two and a half more years to go of Donald J. Trump, a fossil-fuel maniac of the first order who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” you can count on this planet becoming ever hotter ever sooner. And count on another thing as well: in the coming years, today’s weather and temperature headlines, however disturbing they might seem right now, are likely to prove all too mild.
In short, we humans -- Trump in his wildly pro-fossil fuel views and acts being just the most obviously mad of our leaders -- are all too literally hard at work heating this planet of “ours” toward the boiling point. Of course, no one should be surprised that this American president has proven to be an arsonist first class, a fossil-fuelized maniac of the first order. (Or do I mean second class and second order, since this is indeed his second time around?)
Once upon a time, in another age, Donald J. Trump’s return to the presidency would have been just a sign of the descent of a great imperial power. But on this planet of ours at this very moment, he represents so much more than that with his bizarre urge to further fossilize-fuelize our world in every way imaginable. Think of him, in fact, as the eerie personification of the decline not just of the United States, but potentially of everything. Yes, the works!...
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Bombs away!
National Guard soldiers kill 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson in Memphis, Tennessee — Jacob Crosse
Two Tennessee National Guard soldiers shot and killed 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson in downtown Memphis early Sunday morning, July 5, the latest and deadliest result of the Trump administration’s military-police occupation of the city.
According to the official account given by Memphis police and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), officers responded shortly before 4:00 a.m. to reports of gunfire near Ida B. Wells Avenue and Union Avenue. Police claim that Johnson was seen carrying a handgun and fleeing on foot. National Guard soldiers assigned to the Memphis Safe Task Force joined the pursuit. Police allege that Johnson turned toward the soldiers with the weapon, after which two Guardsmen opened fire, striking and killing him.
Even in the police version of events, Johnson is not accused of firing at police or the National Guard. The TBI statement says only that he “reportedly fired shots in the area” before the chase began. The official narrative therefore amounts to the claim that Johnson was executed for fleeing and allegedly turning around during a pursuit. As of this writing, no photograph or video of the alleged weapon has been released by authorities or published by major news outlets reviewed by the WSWS.
Johnson died at the scene after two National Guard medical specialists attempted first aid, according to Guard spokesperson Lt. Col. Darrin Haas. No police officers or Guardsmen were injured. Johnson’s cousin, Terracle Nelson, said authorities told the family that Johnson had been shot twice in the chest. The TBI declined to comment on that account, and authorities have not answered questions about how many shots were fired....
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Gunplay.
Trumpism reaches ‘end stage’ after president delivers ‘one final humiliation’: analysis — Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump issued what The New Republic’s Alex Shephard called “one of [his] more brazen” lies ever told over the weekend, one that was so divorced from reality that it reflected what he called the “end stage” of Trumpism and his influence on the GOP.
Analyses have found Trump has lied an unprecedented number of times while president, with The Washington Post counting 30,573 false or misleading claims made during his first administration. The president issued another lie on Sunday by claiming that 422,000 people were waiting to listen to his speech on July 4, and that “at least 150,000” had returned after being evacuated due to inclement weather.
Mountains of evidence suggest Trump’s crowd sizes were much smaller than he claimed, and to such an extent, Shephard argued, that it was the “perfect encapsulation of where we are with this president right now.”
Greg Sargent, speaking with Shephard for the outlet’s “The Daily Blast” podcast, concurred with Shephard’s assessment that the “end stage” of Trumpism had arrived.
“It’s got an end-stage feeling to it, an end-stage cult feeling. We’re in the middle of Late Stage Trumpism, and everybody’s just waiting for it to collapse in on itself, basically,” Sargent said.
“And I think maybe the ultimate tell here is for Donald Trump to inflate the crowd sizes at the 250th event, right, which is supposed to be all about the country. And one last time, he makes it about himself. He makes it about his own crowd sizes. It’s almost the final humiliation.”...
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Trump's shelf life has reached its end.
They're Shocked We Won't Pretend Anymore — Thom Hartmann
The real divide isn't political:?it's between those willing to normalize modern fascism's cruelty and those who refuse.
The “partisan split” of Americans showed up in a big way at Fourth of July celebrations and backyard barbecues last week, but the media, while noting or even complaining about it, rarely mentions exactly why it’s happening.
A few weeks ago Louise and I were having coffee with an old friend who’s known us since the early days of the radio show, and somewhere between the second cup and the muffins she said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Her sister, a three-time Trump voter, had finally called — after months of silence — and demanded to know why our friend had stopped returning her calls.
“It’s just politics,” the sister said. “Why are you taking this so personally?” Our friend, who is queer and married, listened for about thirty seconds and then said, very quietly, “Because you voted for the people who want me to disappear, and you knew that when you did it.”
Then she hung up. She told us she felt awful about it for about an hour, and then she felt nothing at all, and the nothing was almost worse than the guilt would’ve been.
I’ve heard variations on that story dozens of times in the past year, and apparently so have a lot of other people, because a piece making the rounds on Daily Kos a few weeks ago by the writer Vyan put words to something that’s been building in millions of American households since January of 2016.
The piece is bracing and worth reading in full, but the core observation is one that the right-wing media ecosystem genuinely can’t process: their voters are suddenly discovering that their daughters and sons and nieces and old college roommates no longer want to come to July 4th, Thanksgiving, and other holidays.
They’re treating this as some inexplicable “progressive cruelty,” as if the rest of us simply woke up one morning and decided to be petty.
Greg Gutfeld did a whole monologue on it on Fox “News.” The framing, of course, is that you’re the unreasonable one for refusing to “look past” a single political choice your father or your uncle made:
“Can’t you just love them anyway? Why are you being so hateful?”
Here’s the thing they can’t quite bring themselves to say out loud, because saying it out loud would require admitting what they actually did: they didn’t vote for lower egg prices, although that’s the cover story most of them have settled on by now.
They voted for a man who descended an escalator in 2015 and called brown-skinned Mexicans rapists, who described non-white immigrants as “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language historians of fascism noted at the time was lifted almost verbatim from Mein Kampf.
They voted for him again in 2024 knowing exactly who he was, knowing what he’d promised to do, knowing that Stephen Miller had spent two years describing on podcast after podcast a deportation operation that would, in Miller’s own words, require building “very large staging facilities” and deploying the military against the civilian population.
They knew....
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Their moral core has been weighed and found wanting!
Trump 'preference' for 'white people' costs him in blistering court ruling — David Edwards
A federal judge blocked part of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, citing the president's own "preference" for white immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley of the Southern District of Ohio issued the ruling Monday, blocking three U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services policies that had frozen green card and work permit applications for people from seven countries.
"This general hostility to immigration contrasts with an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people," Marbley wrote. "Aside from a stated desire for more Scandinavian immigration, President Trump has sought to welcome white South Africans."...
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Racist Nazis can run but they can't hide!
Donald Trump Launches Personal Attack By Posting Faces Of Kindergarteners — David Edwards
President Donald Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children's faces while targeting them for their religion.
The video showed students at Gateway Kindergarten in St. Paul, Minnesota, celebrating their graduation in caps, gowns, and hijabs. Trump posted it on Truth Social on Monday morning.
"Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota," the right-wing X account @EndWokeness wrote in a post that Trump then amplified — again showing the children's unblurred faces. "Every girl is in a hijab... in kindergarten."
In December, Trump called Somali immigrants "garbage" at a cabinet meeting and said their country "stinks." He told reporters, "I don't want them in our country," according to NPR. He later posted on Truth Social calling for Somalis to be "sent back from where they came," NBC News reported.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a Somali American congresswoman whose district includes the largest Somali American population in the U.S., has warned that Trump's attacks have real consequences....
"Why doesn't he just order a missile strike on the school? That's what he did last time" -- potrzebie (comments)
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It does not matter if it is real or AI! This promotes CHILD ENDANGERMENT! THIS IS NOT WHAT A PRESIDENT DOES!
This is behavior of a psychopath!
Trump must resign immediately for this atrocity!
There is not one shred of decency in this pile of ectoplasm!
Ex-Special Forces colonel torches Trump for leaving the US exposed — Thomas Kika
Writing in a new piece for The i Paper, a former Special Forces lieutenant colonel warned that President Donald Trump is leaving the U.S. "exposed," creating divisions that "our enemies are looking to exploit."
In addition to his time in Special Forces, Mike Nelson also currently serves as the chief of staff and communications director for the University of Pennsylvania's office in Washington D.C. In his Tuesday piece, he wrote that the U.S. "has grown accustomed to coalition warfare," but it is now jeopardizing its most vital coalition partnerships thanks to "Trump’s petulant anger" over European allies opting not to participate in his war with Iran.
"The President seems furious at the fact that countries did not sign up to fight in a war about which they were not consulted in advance, with undefined goals and an unclear, shifting plan," Nelson argued. "His anger lingers today, evident in his personal feud with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who he had previously counted as one of his closest supporters in Europe. His frustration that countries can make individual choices, rather than respond slavishly to his beck and call, seems exacerbated by his conflation of NATO, the EU and the countries that make them up. The Trump administration appears to view our European allies not as partners, but as client states from whom to extract contributions or satrapies from whom to demand loyalty."
He continued: "If the Trump administration were more aware, it might start worrying about whether Europe will show up the next time we need a coalition. It’s hard to imagine a worse approach to enlisting allies than the one the US took in the war with Iran – providing no forewarning, creating economic chaos and then threatening and reprimanding nations for not marshalling resources to solve the problem of our making. Even before this most recent conflict, the seeds of European reluctance were planted by Washington."...
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Doncha feel safer now, America?
Trump Warns U.S. Will Call FIFA Match 'Rigged' If They Lose to Belgium Tonight -- Andrew Holleran
The President of the United States says that we'll say tonight's Round of 16 game was "rigged" if America loses to Belgium.
The U.S. is set to take on Belgium on Monday night. A spot in the quarterfinals is on the line. Kickoff is set for 8 p.m. E.T.
FIFA has sparked major controversy leading into the match, after reversing the red card suspension of Folarin Balogun. U.S's top striker and goal striker will be eligible to play. He received a controversial red card in the Round of 32 win over Bosnia.
President Trump, after being "urged" by fans to take action, did make a phone call to FIFA's president, however he says he didn't demand that anything was overturned.
However, on Monday afternoon, while speaking to reporters, President Trump said that the U.S. will say tonight's game was "rigged" if America loses.
"The game tonight is going to be amazing. We're going to have a full team. Belgium is going to have a full team," President Trump said.
"If they beat us, then they can be really proud. The other way, if they beat us, I'll say it was rigged, just like the election was rigged in 2020, but I won't get into that."
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Naked admission by Trump that his claim of the 2020 election being "rigged" is just TOTAL BULLSHIT! Why isn't our media all over this admission of his big lie?
GA Teacher Forced Out Over Kirk Post Awarded $300K
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:
The Oglethorpe County School District paid nearly $300,000 to settle a lawsuit with a former Georgia teacher of the year finalist stemming from a social media post about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
High school English teacher Michelle Mickens was one of several educators across the country who were removed from the classroom for a post related to Kirk’s 2025 death. In a lawsuit filed in October, she accused the small school system outside Athens of violating her right to free speech. After posting a quote from Kirk on her private social media account, school system leaders pressured Mickens to resign, according to the original complaint.
The district agreed to pay Mickens $270,420 for “alleged emotional distress” and $17,080 to her attorney to cover legal fees, according to a copy of the settlement agreement obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open records request. Mickens agreed to resign from her position and not to seek employment with the district again. The district also agreed to provide Mickens with a positive employment reference.
"This is great, but the problem is that the ones who violated the free speech of people calling out the Nazi Kirk are being held accountable in the least, and the payouts aren't coming out of their pockets." — DaddySnark comments)
"Where is the accountability toward those online starting this? Civil action" — Guestfornow (comments)
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Charlie appears to be a cash source for the disgruntled.
Karoline Leavitt Smoked For Trashing Her Own Generation, Damage Control Did NOT Help — Andrea Thompson
So, the comments section isn't going how you hoped, huh?
"This generation, my generation, I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me, have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them. That's not the values this country was built on.
It was built on meritocracy and hard work, pulling up your sleeves, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, and achieving the American dream, and we need to protect it with all we got.
It's laziness, and it's the liberal indoctrination. You bring up a great point about our education system. However, I will say a silver lining, so many parents that I talk to across the country are homeschooling, are turning to private education, are turning towards Christian schools across the country because they don't want their children being taught these communist and liberal ideas slammed down their throat. It's why President Trump and our, in the White House has advocated so strongly for school choice across the country. We want kids to be taught to love our country. They should. It is the greatest country in the history of the world."...
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So, her retardedness, her dumbshittery, her lying propaganda garbage is all she's got for us? I thought so.
When has she ever had a REAL job?
"I call the three Ps: prison, police, and private property. They don't want any of those things, and those are the ideals that founded this great country 250 years ago."
Before prisons we used fines, forced labor, public restraint, beating, flogging, stocks, maiming, torture, assorted brutalities and death, among our cruel and unsual punitive measures. Then there were the "Slave Patrols" aimed at controlling enslaved populations.
As to the greatest country in the history of the world... what makes it that? Longevity, culture or riches for all? The Achaemenid Empire lasted about 230 years. The Han Dynasty 406 all totaled. The Roman Empore over 1500 all totaled. Of course, the U.S. isn't an empire is it? Just a wannbe.
FIRE Sues DHS After Agents Menace ICE Critic’s Family
Via press release from FIRE:
Five months after a Rochester man, David Streever, wrote a critical email to the then-head of ICE during the agency’s January crackdown in Minnesota, federal officers recently went to extraordinary lengths to confront and intimidate him — even going so far as to stake out his New York City hotel as he returned from an overseas vacation with his daughter.
That’s an outrageous violation of an American’s First Amendment rights. So today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a federal lawsuit to challenge ICE’s efforts to scare Streever and others into silence and remind other government officials that such behavior is un-American, unconstitutional, and unacceptable in a free society.
“Like many Americans, I was deeply upset after the shootings in Minnesota and I felt compelled to do something,” Streever said. “Writing an email to the head of ICE seemed like the least I could do to express my sense of outrage. I never dreamed it would lead to a knock on my door by federal officers or descending on my hotel in the dark of night.”...
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Trump and his Nazi Gestapo ICE do not give a shit about our Constitution.
Luna Calls For House Investigation Into Patriot Front
The Hill reports:
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) on Monday called for an investigation into the Patriot Front white nationalist group after its Independence Day rally and march across Washington, D.C. “What I find odd about Patriot Front is how under Biden they were never investigated. Well funded. Never investigated,” Luna wrote in a post on the social platform X.
“FBI under Biden looked into Catholics instead. So, looks like @GOPoversight should do some digging,” she added, referring to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Patriot Front has distributed the vast majority of white supremacist propaganda since 2019, according to the ADL. Patriot Front formed in 2017 under Thomas Rousseau after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., according to George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. The group’s manifesto calls for the formation of a white ethnostate.
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"Never investigated,” she says. What planet does she reside on?
Has the FBI publicly investigated or infiltrated patriot front members?
MAGA melts down as Bruce Springsteen torches Trump in new interview: 'He is a coward'
MAGA loyalists were furious Monday after music legend Bruce Springsteen said he was a true "patriot" and called out President Donald Trump.
In a PBS special called "Bruce Springsteen: Finding America in Song," the musician talked about fighting for a better America and encouraging others to do the same, Variety reported. Springsteen has been critical of Trump and his administration — and the president has lashed out against the artist, calling him a "bad, and very boring singer."
"I believe in critical patriotism," Springsteen told PBS. "I believe that’s the definition of a patriot, you know, that you love your country so much that you are willing to look at it clearly, recognize its faults, encourage it to be a better place, and believe that you carry in your heart the country that is waiting."
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And I believe all the whining Nazi critics of the Boss are upset twisted pricks at being called out by truth to power.
Tiffany Is Bothered By Black Man Not Appreciating Slavery — Chris capper Liebenthal
Tom Tiffany, a white man running to be Wisconsin's next governor, is running an ad of a sound bite he gave at a sparsely attended event in someone's alley. In the soundbite ad, Tiffany says he has complaints about people like Mandela Barnes, a Black man who is also running for governor. You can already see where this is headed:
You know what really POs me? It's politicians like Mandela, Barnes, and others, and you're seeing it from the socialist left that trash America every single day. And they live off of America's birthright. What our founders gave this country, this great experiment that led to the most prosperous, great nation in the history of mankind, and they trash it every single day. Rather than creating a more perfect union, they want to destroy the union. That's what bothers me.
So what has Trump's Mini-Me so upset?
Four years ago, Barnes made comments at a campaign event about how awful it was that slavery was part of this country's founding and pointing out that Republicans were trying to whitewash it by banning the fact from being taught in schools. Radio squawker Dan O'Donnell, who would later go on to infamy for calling for Governor Tim Walz's assassination, took it out of context to rile up the GOP base against the uppity Black man who was running against Ron Johnson.
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Land of the Happy Negro is this racist's home country!
Elon Musk Is Charging Starlink Customers Gigantic Bogus Fees Because Its Network Is Being Crushed by “High Demand” — Victor Tangermann
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk maintains an extremely close relationship with Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr.
Under Carr’s leadership, Musk’s rocket company has effectively been given carte blanche in its efforts to roll out its orbital Starlink broadband service to more Americans, a glaring conflict of interest that could have profound implications for society.
That’s despite concerns over thousands or even millions of satellites cluttering our planet’s already extremely busy orbit and the environmentally damaging rocket launches that send them up.
And the space-based network is already starting to experience some major strains — as some experts have long predicted. It’s a lesson some Starlink customers are finding out the hard way. As TechDirt‘s Karl Bode highlighted, SpaceX is now charging some users so-called “demand surcharges” of up to $1,500, simply because their address is within a high demand area.
“Starlink is too congested to handle meaningful load at scale so they’re quietly hitting people with $750-$1500 ‘demand surcharges,'” Bode wrote in a recent post on Bluesky. Even worse, those who are trying to contest these charges are facing a “black hole,” since SpaceX doesn’t “invest in customer service.”...
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The new world of Nazi Oligarchs fucking over the suckers we have become!
America’s 250th Survived Trump’s Sabotage — William Kristol
We trust everyone had an enjoyable Independence Day weekend—unless you were on the National Mall and had to deal with (in addition to the usual D.C. heat and humidity) the sad spectacle of the Great American State Fair, the torrential storms, the president’s egomaniacal insistence on being seen by crowds of inconvenienced people, and, well, the president himself.
Andrew Egger is off for two weeks, but somehow we’ll keep this newsletter going until he gets back. Happy Monday.
America Lives Abroad
by William Kristol
Well, it’s July 6. And I think I can say this with some confidence: Donald Trump tried to hijack our 250th anniversary, and he failed. Both the Declaration of Independence and our subsequent history turned out to be too weighty and too elevated to yield easily to Trump’s insane grandiosity and insistent mediocrity.
Before his July 3 speech at Mt. Rushmore, Trump posted a video that showed a kind of golden sculpture of the mountain, with his image added to those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. Trump’s voiceover on the video claimed, “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The president did protest too much, methinks. Deep down, or not even that deep down, he knows that in years to come, no one will think he is in their league. To say the least.
Then there was Trump’s July Fourth extravaganza. For all of his narcissism, even he knew it was a flop. As soon as he returned from the Mall, Trump turned frantically to Truth Social. He posted over 100 times on July 5, lauding his own achievements, attacking his opponents, and generally behaving like someone who sensed that the 250th anniversary, despite or because of his attempts to hijack it, made him look small. Former BBC foreign correspondent Nick Bryant , who covered American politics for decades, put it well: “On America’s 250th birthday, Donald Trump was dwarfed by history.”...
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Bill tells us loudly and clearly.
¡Abejas! Tabs, Monday, July 6, 2026 — Evan Hurst
Laura Ingraham is apparently so humiliated by her own side, full as it is of Klan members and Nazis marching through the streets of DC on America’s 250th birthday, that she’s shamelessly lying like the integrity-free skin tag she is and saying they were antifa in disguise. [Independent]
Shame how somebody with Trump Derangement Syndrome — or maybe the disease itself! — geoengineered the weather to ruin Trump’s we mean America’s birthday. [JoeMyGod]
Speaking of, he is a dangerous pathetic and delusional liar. Also senile.
Nobody went to Trump’s fucking loser speech. [Washington Post]
Trump, still pathetic, still lonely, still the biggest walking Stranger Danger in human history, is self-soothing from his big loser weekend by trying to restart his bullshit about Italian PM Giorgia Meloni stalking him. Will she even dignify the ugly bitch with a response this time? [Independent]
World Cup news: Apparently Donald Trump corruptly intervened with FIFA head Gianni Infantino to get the red card lifted to reinstate American striker (and birthright citizen!) Folarin Balogun. Was it a shitty call to begin with? Yes. Was it corrupt as fuck and literally everything wrong with FIFA the way Trump was able to call the FIFA head who’s been kissing his asshole for years to fix it? Does it help push narratives that the fix is, in fact, in with FIFA? Also yes. [New York Times]
Belgium, who the US men are set to face today, is fucking pissed. [Politico]
US Attorney Judge Boxwine is so clown-ass full-of-shit and out of her league in her current job, what a joke. Here she is trying to justify how she tricked a grand jury into indicting a former Olympian canoeist for touching Trump’s brokedick Reflecting Pool:
“America needs to grow the fuck up.” This article from Karen Attiah is excellent. [The Golden Hour by Karen Attiah]
Karoline Leavitt, 28, who is married to a man roughly five times her grandfather’s age, is explaining how these Gen Z are lazy shiftless communists.
Those are some big opinions! Did her grandpa we mean husband we mean dad we mean grandpa-husband-dad give her permission to share them?
“The Pacific Ocean is running a fever. Why that’s an ominous sign.” Great. [Washington Post]
According to the inbred Nazis in the Trump regime: “White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can’t be trusted.” Eat my fucking ass, whiny titty baby boys intimidated by mean educated people who run museums. These people are such an errant cumstain on world history, I swear to God. [AP]
“What Bucha taught me about Ukraine’s will to fight.” Remember the stories about Bucha, the Kyiv suburb, when Putin started his war? Revisit it. [Washington Post]...
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Evan explains issues like no other.
Johnson Vows “Legislative Fix” On Birthright Citizenship
The Hill reports:
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Sunday his conference is “looking at all angles” to legislatively address birthright citizenship, after the Supreme Court ruled against President Trump’s executive order restricting it. “We do need to address it. We’re looking at all angles,” Johnson told host Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.”
“If there’s some legislative fix, we’ll advance that immediately,” he added. “If it’s a constitutional amendment … it takes a little more time. But we’ve got to address this. It really is a serious, serious issue.”
Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, also said Sunday that the 14th Amendment has “been devalued” due to “birth tourism,” or visiting the country with an intent to give birth on U.S. soil. “It’s a threat to the rule of law and national security,” the Louisiana Republican added.
"Of course there's a 'legislative fix.' It's called a Constitutional Amendment. To date, there has been one Amendment repealed by such an action. One. And that one prohibited alcohol. Good luck with that "legislative" correction, Mr. Johnson." — boatboy_srq (comments)
"so pure and godly he'd do anything the orange pedophile calls for..." — biff murphy (comments)
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Creating solutions to problems that don't exist is the mantra for these jerkwad retards like this vile and tiny speck of a man.
America has been welcoming these babies for longer than this asshole has been living and polluting us with his hate.
IT'S IN OUR CONSTITUTION YOU FRAUD!
FRC: “Normal-Looking” People Tend To Be Christian
From the Family Research Council’s website:
Recently, I was researching a car accident that killed a family of four for a story — two married parents and two children. When the news article listed the mother’s occupation as “stay-at-home mom,” I thought, “I wonder if they were Christians.” Sure enough, I soon learned that the family had been heavily involved in an evangelical church of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
This journalistic hunch has proven correct more than once, and its accuracy is not even limited to news reports. My wife and I enjoy watching cooking competitions, and we can usually predict which contestants are Christians simply by observing how normal they are. Is the person happily married to a person of the opposite sex? Check. Does he or she have children and enjoy their company? Check. People whose lives look “normal” are most likely Christian, at least based on my anecdotal but careful observation.
Christians have a very good reason for still looking “normal.” Christians do not need to indulge extravagant desires or take extreme measures to make themselves happy. Christians find their fulfillment in God. In him, they enjoy a deep, rich happiness and joy far greater than any worldly counterfeits can produce. Christians don’t need fancy hair, excessive jewelry, or revealing clothing to give themselves worth (1 Timothy 2:9), nor do they need to jettison demanding family responsibilities to achieve their deepest dreams.
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So normal that their clerics molest our children.
Doug Burgum Goes Off When Pushed On Reflecting Pool 'Vandalism' — John Amato
Burgum was very non-committal when he claimed they had evidence of vandals ripping a 350 ft. hole in the bottom of the reflecting pool.
U.S. Interior Sec. Doug Bergum lost his temper when CNN host Dana Bash refused to buy into the multitude of lies Trump and his minions have spewed while trying to cover up for the shoddy work done by Trump's no-bid reflecting pool contractor....
Giving us pictures of a 350-foot gash in the bottom of the pool is not proof that vandals did it. If Burgum had actual proof that shows vandals gouging the bottom of the pool they would be all over Fox News by now.
What a shit show.
It is impossible for Trump ever admit to a problem. No matter how minute it is. His fallback position is to claim a left-wing bogeyman that hates him did it.
And while we're at it, why couldn't Dana Bash answer his question about why she keeps asking with a simple statement? Because your answers don't fly, Doug.
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Your boy found scapegoats! Nobody cut the goddamn pool!
Burgum is a slug. A knot on a log. Another liar for Trump.
Ex-RNC chair torches Doug Burgum's Reflecting Pool story: 'We know that did not happen' — Kathleen Culliton
U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's attempts to blame a sea of reflecting pool troubles on D.C. vandals instead of D.C. incompetence left one Republican sputtering.
Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, took to X Sunday afternoon to share his views on a tense CNN interview that saw Burgum snapping at anchor Dana Bash.
"I'm not sure why you and others and the media think you want to question the whole thing," Burgum spat at Bash.
"You're a hundred percent sure that what happened with the liner was vandalism?" Bash asked. "You can prove it?"
Burgum said he could — Steele wasn't so sure.
"You know there are cameras on the Pool 24hrs (sic), right?" he wrote. "You do not have photographs of anyone submerging in the Reflecting Pool to cut a gash longer than a football field. But we do have video and photos of the liner peeling from the floor of the pool."
Then Steele made a request of Burgum.
"Stop it," he said. "As soon as you are asked to prove vandalism, you whine about why you are being questioned about it."
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STOP PERSECUTING AMERICAN CITIZENS FOR YOUR INEPTNESS!
WSJ: “Zombie Congress” Is Threatening Trump Agenda
The Wall Street Journal reports:
A growing number of GOP lawmakers have little incentive to come to work or toe the party line, putting critical legislation in danger as Republicans lurch toward the midterms. Some are privately calling it the zombie Congress.
GOP leaders are increasingly concerned that members will lose motivation to show up, or may break with the party if they do, potentially stalling or killing some bills, according to lawmakers and aides. While the Senate has been the main focus of GOP cracks, the House is also facing an uncertain summer and fall, with attendance issues and a renewed sense of independence among retiring, defeated or angry members threatening to upend the Republican agenda.
“If you’re not at least a little bit frustrated right now, then I question your, maybe your sanity. Nobody signed up for this,” said Rep. Steve Womack (R., Ark.), who worried problems passing bills could hurt GOP chances in the fall. “Right now it’s almost like shooting ourselves in the foot,” he said.
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Zombies or vampires? The Undead for certain!
Trump Now Claims 422,000 Attended July 4 Speech
The Washington Post reports:
President Donald Trump said Sunday he personally overruled a recommendation to cancel the July Fourth “Salute to America” event on the National Mall after approaching storms forced a chaotic evacuation of hundreds of thousands of revelers and triple-digit heat cast a sweltering pall over much of the day.
The president — who took the stage just after 11 p.m. Saturday after a more than three-hour delay in the planned programming — on Sunday declared the event a rousing success in a Truth Social post.
“When I heard that it was cancelled, I immediately overturned that decision,” he wrote. He congratulated law enforcement officials for quickly rescreening people who wanted to return once the storms passed. Trump said the crowd at 7 p.m. was 422,000 people and that at least 150,000 returned after evacuating. Officials did not provide immediate confirmation of those figures.
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The pouty little piss boy can't abide a vacuum!
Let’s fix America with grammar — Kirk Swearingen
In the MAGAsphere, sloppy language leads to foolish thoughts, and much worse
...Trump knows he can blather about anything at all and not be considered by his loyal followers the utter fool the whole world considers him.
...Trump said he loved the poorly educated because his Dark Triad deceit as a con man relies on them. In addition, our oligarch overlords want to convince young men that being educated is somehow unmanly.
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We can all brush up on our English. Trump needs to start with 101.
Trump Makes Stunning Confession in Truth Social Rampage — Cameron Adams
...But a single sentence in one of the posts raised eyebrows after he boasted that he personally ignored expert advice to make sure his “Salute to America” was not derailed by potentially lethal extreme weather. In the post, Trump admitted he “overturned” a recommendation to cancel the evening’s festivities despite fears that going ahead could put people’s lives at risk.
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The nutball cares not one whit for the life of one American! It's him or nobody!
MAGA flies into frenzy over Alicia Keys' July 4th video Daniel Hampton
Alicia Keys turned the nation's 250th birthday into a flashpoint over women's constitutional rights on Saturday — and MAGA world erupted.
The singer marked July 4th with an Instagram video highlighting that women still "don't have an explicit guarantee to equal rights under the U.S. Constitution."
"Can you believe that? I couldn't even believe that was real. I mean, women are not asking for special rights, just equal rights," she said, later adding: "If it's the 250th celebration of the country, isn't it time to update some things?"...
MAGA pastor Jordan Wells accused the singer of "manufacturing division for clout."
"Sorry Alicia, but women in America already have equal rights — and then some," Wells wrote. "We're celebrating 250 years of freedom, not rewriting history to fit the victimhood script."...
"For those morons, the list is too long for what women don’t get in equal rights. The Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass. Finally, a last state ratified, but the repubes in congress said it was too late. There is no end date for ratification. They made that crap up…..For the moron who is waiting to hear what women don’t have first on the list is f-ing healthcare!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" — J Lintecume (comments)
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Said a "pastor" whose line of work appears to be one of suspicious motives and convictions with their record here!
I had a dream last night
I asked for my equal rights
Someone said 'Mom, you're next'
And there I stood with a rope around my neck! — Moms Mabley At The 'UN' 1961 Chess LP 1452 Live Uptown Theater Comedy Phila.
Nazis are too repressive to understand any rights but their own!
Critics School Ron DeSantis As 'Embarrassing' Social Media Post Backfires Spectacularly — Ed Mazza
The Florida governor might need a history refresher after this one.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) fired back at a meme on Sunday with what he thought was a clever comeback.
But he got one key detail wrong, and his critics were quick to correct the record.
An X account called No Context Brits - which posts memes, jokes and snark - marked America’s 250th birthday by pointing to a pub in Britain that’s far, far older:
That seemed to get under DeSantis’ skin.
“And if it wasn’t for America the insignia on the pub would be written in German,” he wrote in response as he shared the original post.
But as critics were quick to point out, the United Kingdom repelled Germany’s assault during the Battle of Britain in 1940. It was the Nazis’ first major defeat of World War II - and the U.K. pulled it off with no help from the United States, which didn’t enter the war until more than a year later.
DeSantis, who has a history degree from Yale University, got hit with an awkward community note correcting the record - as well as plenty of responses pointing out his flub:...
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The moron needs a refresher course in history and humanity
Donald Trump Is Bringing Back ‘Death Panels’ — Jonathan Cohn
There’s a good kind and a bad kind, and it looks like we’ll be getting both.
Blast from the Past
Back in the long-ago days of 2009, when Barack Obama and the Democrats were in the middle of their grueling fight to pass what would eventually become the Affordable Care Act, they adopted a proposal under which doctors who sat down to discuss end-of-life planning with patients could bill Medicare for the time.
It was a bipartisan, seemingly innocuous, plan. The idea was to make these conversations easier to arrange, so that people would have more agency over how they spend their final days. Then a conservative commentator named Elizabeth McCaughey discovered the provision in the legislative text.1 And all hell broke loose.
McCaughey went on Rush Limbaugh’s show and insisted the provision would “absolutely require” doctors to meet with patients, advising them on how to “decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care . . . all to do what’s in society’s best interest or in your family’s best interest and cut your life short.” She went on to write a New York Post column called “Deadly Doctors” in which she claimed Obama health care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel, who supported the idea, wanted to ration care for people with Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, and other disabilities.
The swipe at Emanuel, an oncologist and bioethicist who had been writing about how to help the kind of families he had seen as a practitioner, was as egregious as the description of the provision was dishonest. But McCaughey’s argument took on a life of its own in the right-wing universe, especially after former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin got involved and started talking about how the legislation was allegedly proposing to create “death panels.”2 Eventually Democrats removed the end-of-life provision entirely. But the smear campaign had a lasting impact. Polling from the research organization KFF found that in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act became law, four in ten Americans still believed it had death panels.3
I am writing about that history now because death panels are back—only this time, it’s not coming from the Democrats. It’s coming from Donald Trump and his top health care advisers....
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Josef Mengele returnes to power under Trump.
This visionary saw Trump's rampage coming — and knew how to end it — Thom Hartmann
Hundreds of people died last month across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse.
Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.
In nature, there are natural predators and natural prey; foxes and rabbits are the classic example.
Rabbits, like most prey animals, have wired into them by evolution a response called “tonic immobility”; we used to think that when a rabbit or mouse was seized by a fox or eagle and went limp that they were playing dead (“thanatosis”) but, in fact, we now know their body is suddenly flooded with hormones, chemicals, and nervous reactions that essentially put them into a coma to either/both fool the predator or avoid experiencing the pain of being torn to pieces.
Predator animals — including humans — also have this instinct/mechanism; we see it when people “faint from fright” or are paralyzed by PTSD. But it’s far less frequently activated in predatory animals, particularly social animals like apes and humans, largely because we invent social systems to discourage predation.
Among modern humans, according to psychology, predation against other humans is a form of psychopathy, twisting the predator instinct our species once used to hunt food, instead, against others of our own kind, whether it be via physical/sexual violence or via theft and fraud.
As Thomas Jefferson wrote to his dear old friend and advisor Edward Carrington on January 16, 1787:
“If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves.
“It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”...
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We have become irresponsible of our duty during our watch time over our country. Yes, we must WAKE UP from our slumber!
Burgum Won’t Condemn Patriot Front Marching In DC
...DANA BASH: “Do you condemn this group and what they were doing, and most importantly, what they stand for?”
DOUG BURGUM: “Well, I think that certainly what they stand for is nothing that I could possibly agree with. But one of the foundational principles of the United States, which makes democracy messy, is free speech. And there are plenty of things that I see that I might personally find offensive and reprehensible. But in America, free speech is allowed, and this is by the whole spectrum of things.”
DANA BASH: “As Interior Secretary, will you recommend to the President that he condemn this group? And what they were trying to message — what they did try to message here in Washington?”
DOUG BURGUM: “Part of my response to that is that there are protests on the Mall that people say things that I think are irreprehensible (?) about President Trump, and yet they’re allowed to go on because of free speech in our country.”
Burgum went on to attack the media’s “myopic focus” on groups like Patriot Front instead of glorifying Trump’s “beautification” of Washington DC.
The cult has spent years claiming that Patriot Front is an undercover operation by the CIA and FBI to embarrass Trump.
But yesterday, in thousands of replies to videos of Patriot Front, the new claim was that the group is a “paid psyop” by the SPLC.
Others, such as paid Kremlin tool Benny Johnson, continued to cling to the “federal agents” idiocy.
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Here's some messy free speech for you, Doug!
What do you expect from a Nazi pushing the goddamn "both sides" puke? Burgum is just another traitor who will face justice sooner than later. Which side are you on?
Barrett's damning question exposed the Supreme court's dangerous double standard — Sabrina Haake
This week the Supreme Court contradicted itself in such glaring terms that a conservative justice admitted it could not be legally justified.
In Trump v. Slaughter, the republican majority ruled that Trump can fire federal agency commissioners and directors without cause, despite statutory language requiring cause, and despite Supreme Court precedent dating back to 1935 protecting for-cause only removal. Thanks to Slaughter, Trump can now fire any director for revenge, for political purposes, or for no reason at all. Any federal regulator who rules against Trump’s corporate donors will now be on the chopping block.
But the Court contradicted this holding in Trump v. Cook. In Cook, the majority prevented Trump from firing Lisa Cook, a Governor of the Federal Reserve, pending the outcome of an underlying case on whether there was proper cause for her removal. In the underlying case, Bill Pulte, Trump’s partisan henchman, presented Trump with unproven allegations of mortgage fraud against Cook, which Trump then used to fire her.
The contradiction between the two decisions is unsettling. Under Slaughter, no cause is necessary before Trump can fire directors of dozens of federal agencies who, until now, were expected to perform their statutory duties free of political interference. But under Cook, Trump cannot remove directors without cause, but only for the Federal Reserve....
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One step closer to Totalitarianism, you fucksticks!
America just set itself on fire as it descends further into chaos Alex Handerson
It was 250 years ago, on July 4, 1776, that the American Declaration of Independence was signed at the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia. The United States' America 250 celebrations come during a time of great political turbulence in the United States, and in The Guardian, Canadian author/podcaster Stephen Marche (host of the "Gloves Off" podcast) argues that future historians will struggle to understand the "American self-destruction" of the Donald Trump era.
"The United States of America, established to overthrow a mad king, has elected, 250 years later, a mad king of its very own," Marche argues in a 4th of July op-ed for The Guardian. "America is setting itself on fire at its birthday party. It always had a dramatic streak. In 30 or 40 years, scholars of history, if they exist, will want to know how the richest country in history, with the world's most powerful alliance network, and a scientific and research capacity fueled by the talent of the world, chose to throw it all away."
Marche notes that when he was working on his 2022 book "The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future," he "interviewed hundreds of experts, trying to fathom the underlying causes and structures of the decline."
"I met with extremists on the left and right," Marche recalls. "I argued that the dark dawning was coming. And yet, in some part of me, I didn't really believe they would do it. The American self-destruction, I can only inform those future historians, is a mystery to us, too. When did it all go wrong?"...
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Becoming racsts, Becoming uneducated, failing to manage economy for all, greed, avarice and arrogance. Wearing red hats like Nazis wore swastikas. When these things became our tenets.
Military expert horrified by Trump's July 4th treatment of Gold Star families — Matthew Rozsa
A former professor at the US Naval War College denounced President Donald Trump’s 4th of July speech for showing disrespect to Gold Star families, or immediate relatives of soldiers who died on active duty.
“Oh my God,” wrote The Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols on the social media platform X. “Trump pays tribute to the Gold star families and then says ‘we have medals for you backstage’ like they are failed contestants on a game show.”
The Republican leader has a long history of controversial behavior toward Gold Star Families. In May, while attending an Arlington Cemetery wreath-laying ceremony to honor them for Memorial Day, Trump left the Gold Star Families standing in the rain while he was protected from the elements. Looking “exhausted, unsteady, and vacant,” according to Republican strategist and former President George W. Bush adviser Steve Schmidt, Trump’s appearance proved to be “the perfect metaphor for this vulgar and degraded age in American life,” and in the process offered a snapshot of “the truth of Trumpism better than any poll, speech or slogan ever could.”
He added, “It was a weekend of humiliation for the country. Abraham Lincoln described the war dead as those who gave ‘the last full measure of devotion.’ Donald Trump has spent his political life mocking devotion, degrading sacrifice and insulting honor. He mocked John McCain for being captured. He called dead Americans ‘losers’ and ‘suckers.’ He turned Arlington into a campaign backdrop. He transformed Memorial Day into another spectacle centered on himself, his grievances and his vanity.”...
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Then why doesn't our military recognize Trump is a DOMESTIC ENEMY? They swore to protect us against such.
Trump Admits No End In Sight For War With ‘Totally Defeated’ Iran — NewsHound Ellen
Trump can’t even figure out how to message his unnecessary war.
Donald Trump, the draft dodger who bungled his way into the unnecessary and unpopular Iran war, made it clear he has no strategy to get us out of it.
Looking like a beached whale that can’t sit up straight, the elderly Trump defended his now four-month-old war that was supposed to last only four to five weeks.
“We were in Vietnam for 19 years (In April, he said 18 years), but we were in Afghanistan for like 10 years. We were in the Korean War forever. I don't even mention World War I and World War II; they're biggies,” President Bone Spurs said....
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As we accurately predicted, this war will last you for years!
Judge: Trump Can’t Delay Payment To E. Jean Carroll
USA Today reports:
A federal judge rejected President Donald Trump’s request for more time to respond to New York writer E. Jean Carroll’s demand for $5.8 million she won in a civil lawsuit against him.
Carroll asked a federal court in Manhattan on June 30 to order Trump to pay her the money she was awarded when a jury found him liable in 2023 for sexually abusing her and then for defaming her by calling her assault allegations a “con job.”
The Supreme Court had denied Trump’s request on June 29 to review the jury’s decision in the case. Trump asked for more time to respond to Carroll’s request. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in New York denied the request in a one-sentence order July 4. Trump must now reply by July 7.
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Since when do convicted criminals not have to pay for their crimes, America? Waiting for your answer.
Voldemort: Trump Is President By “Divine Providence”
Yahoo News reports:
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller says he’s conducted careful analysis and decided that God intervened to make Donald Trump president for the 250th birthday of the United States. In a bizarre, sycophantic post on X on July 4, Miller wrote that the presidency was in Trump’s hands because God had made it so.
Divine providence is a belief in God’s intervention in the universe. It implies that a higher being, creator, deity—who depends on the religion—built the universe and continues to guide events, sometimes even directly interfering.
The statement, which positions Trump alongside revered figures in both Christianity and Judaism, like Moses—who God spoke to directly, gave his commandments, and parted a sea for—and the Virgin Mary—who god impregnated with a son—is the latest in a long line of bizarre attempts by members of the Trump administration, and even Trump himself, to position the president as an almost Christ-like figure.
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Illustrating the perversion that all religion becomes.
Fox News host’s response to white supremacist rally leaves ex-GOP lawmaker floored — Alexander Willis
As dozens of masked men from the white nationalist group Patriot Front marched in the nation’s capital Saturday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham floated a theory in an apparent attempt to distance the GOP from the neo-fascist march, a theory that left one former Republican lawmaker floored.
On Saturday afternoon, journalist and writer Richie McGinniss uploaded a video of himself questioning people who appear to be members of Patriot Front standing in front of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.
Despite there being countless reports by reputable news outlets on Patriot Front’s march through the nation’s capital, Ingraham floated a bizarre theory regarding McGinniss’ video.
“I call fake,” reads a social media post on X published Saturday by Ingraham’s account, responding to the video published by McGinniss “Looks more like Antifa in costume. No one should be allowed to cover their faces.”
Adam Kinzinger, a former GOP U.S. House member from Illinois, issued Ingraham a blistering rebuke.
“Yes of course. Fake. That's the only defense you have to this?” Kinzinger wrote Saturday in a social media post on X. “How about condemning it?”
Billy Ray, a notable film director and screenwriter, also issued Ingraham a fierce response.
“Laura, why is it so scary for you to admit that this exists amid your party – and your audience?” Ray asked in a social media post published on X Saturday. “If you were an actual journalist, you’d have to.”...
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I see the KKK has abandoned their sheets and wear a new uniform. Still retarded after all these years!
The egg drips off the face of Fox News. Too many good comments here to print.
Lawyers remain in disbelief over ‘fascist Hellscape’ July 4 display in DC — Olivia Rosane, Common Dreams
“Absolutely terrifying to have white supremacist hate group Patriot Front march through our streets today in Washington, DC,” human rights lawyer Mai El-Sadany wrote on social media. “Their manifesto calls for a white ethnostate, excludes people of color from their definition of citizenship, and is deeply antisemitic and xenophobic.”
In one video shared by WTOP reporter Mitchell Miller, members of the group stood in a line outside DC’s Union Station chanting, “Life, liberty, victory” and “Reclaim America.”
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"Reclaim America?" It was never theirs to begin with!
Fascism has no place in America or this world. It has no right to the protection of our tenents as it stands in opposition to them. Fascism must be elminated from America by any means necessary.
'Misquoted the Declaration': Outrage mounts over Trump's July 4 speech stumble — Kathleen Culliton
President Donald Trump drew scorn from conservatives and liberals alike for a July 4 stumble that threw his patriotism, and his education, into question.
Trump addressed the nation on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence with stern, and inaccurate, words for his opponents.
"And as our Declaration of Independence tells us," Trump said, "we are all made in the image of one almighty god. And a communist will never say that."...
"The Declaration of Independence does not say 'we are all made in the image of one almighty god,'" the message reads. "It states that 'all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.'"...
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Trump is severely brain dead. Of course he didn't write his speech. Some unqualified moron wrote it. Trump doesn't know it's wrong because he's a fool.
The word "God" appears four times in the Declaration of Independence. It references God in the context of natural rights and divine providence. The word "God" never appears in our U.S. Constitution. Nor does the word "Christian" for that matter.
It's all GIGO with the idiot, Trump.
Masked men with Confederate flags storm D.C. on July 4: video — Bennito L. Kelty
Hundreds of Confederate flag-bearing men marched into Washington, D.C. on July 4th, according to multiple reports.
In a post on X, journalist Mitchell Miller, a reporter for WTOP News, shared a video of what he described as "a group of masked men gathered at Union Station" with Confederate flags and calls for "reclaiming the country and getting rid of immigrants."
Miller added, "They have been marching across Capitol Hill."
He wasn't the only one who captured the spectacle. PatriotTakes, which follows right-wing extremism, estimated in a post on X, "around 400 white nationalists Patriot Front members are marching in D.C. today with Confederate flags, etc."
PatriotTakes reported that "a streamer with the group described it as a 'total Aryan victory.'"
Spencer Allan Brooks, a local D.C. reporter, also posted video of the masked men.
"White supremacist group Patriot Front is marching around Washington, DC this morning," he wrote. "They were seen at Union Station and in Capitol Hill neighborhoods."
Videos showed that some of the flags were also upside-down American flags. Reuters noted in photo captions that Patriot Front members were also seen in nearby New Carrollton, Maryland.
"It's funny that they would rather die than wear masks during covid to save lives but gladly wear them to threaten lives." — Every One's Fool (comments)
"Why are these big brave men afraid of being identified? Surely the members of the master race have nothing to fear? Maybe they are taking a day off from ICE?" — cahern 1968 (comments)
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Members of the retarded traitor caste crawl out from under Land of the Happy Negro rocks to show us why they are a lost cause.
Trump's Fascist Friends Showed Up For His Big Party — Red Painter
Patriot Front had a surprise march in DC on America's Birthday!
Looks like some of Donald Trump's best fascist friends have shown up in DC for his big party! Heat be damned, ICE and lots of feds took a day off to show their support, donning khakis, dark polo shirts, face-covering gators, hats, and wraparound sunglasses. Oh, and they were carrying American flags and chanting Nazi rhetoric.
Who are they?
PATRIOT FRONT!
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The same malignant asswipes as in the previous article. Not to be confused with human beings.
The Real Meaning of July 4, 2026 — Robert Reich
Friends,
On this July 4 — the 250th anniversary of the start of this country — many people, including the current occupant of the Oval Office, believe that celebrating America means waving the flag or standing for the national anthem or shouting, “America First.”
That’s not what real patriotism is.
Real patriotism means sacrificing to keep America going.
It means paying taxes proportional to your wealth. I’m talking to you, Donald Trump, and you, Jeff Bezos, and you, Elon Musk.
It means paying your workers a living wage so they can thrive. I’m talking to you, John Furner, CEO of Walmart, and you, Chris Kempczinski, CEO of McDonald’s.
It means fully reckoning with how racial oppression and white supremacy have shaped this nation, not whitewashing our history and ignoring racism’s continuing legacy. I’m talking to you, Ron DeSantis, and other lawmakers trying to prevent students from learning the roles slavery and genocide have played in our history.
Real patriotism means protecting American democracy and our form of government, not trying to overturn an election that was upheld by 60 federal courts and the Supreme Court, or lying about election fraud when it barely exists, or seeking to suppress the voting rights of people of color.
I’m talking to you, Trump, along with traitorous members of Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election, and you, state legislators who have advanced nearly 400 voter suppression bills, and you, Supreme Court justices who have gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Real patriotism means not flooding our politics with big money, so the voices of the people can be heard. I’m talking to you again, Elon, as well as Charles Koch, Timothy Mellon, Miriam Adelson, and Michael Bloomberg.
And it means putting the interests of our country over partisanship. Do you hear me, Mike Johnson and John Thune?
Finally, real patriotism means using your position of power in the media to inform and educate the public rather than weaponize lies and promote extremism to get more clicks. I’m talking to you, Mark Zuckerberg, and you, David Ellison, and you, Rupert Murdoch, and, once again, you, Elon.
On this July 4, the 250th anniversary of America, we must recommit ourselves to real patriotism — the hard work necessary to make American democracy survive..
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Yes, we can!
Is America Celebrating 250 Years on the Wrong Side of the Revolution? — Thom Hartmann
The founders threw out the Redcoats. So why does America's 250th birthday feel like they're back in charge?
Tomorrow America turns 250 years old, and instead of a celebration of the republic those 56 men who signed the Declaration risked the hangman’s noose to create, we’re getting a MAGA rally.
Donald Trump has taken the nation’s 250th birthday, the once-in-a-lifetime anniversary that belongs to all of us, and rebranded it as a tribute to himself.
He shoved aside the bipartisan “America 250” commission that Congress created a decade ago, stood up his own White House-controlled operation ironically called “Freedom 250,” and steered our taxpayer money toward his own vanity celebration while the congressional commission was left begging for the funds it was promised.
He staged a violent, brutal UFC cage fight on the White House lawn to satisfy his own bloodlust. He sent a fleet of eighteen-wheelers loaded with white supremacist PragerU’s cartoon versions of American history rolling across the country. And this weekend, on the same National Mall where Americans once gathered to mourn Lincoln and to hear Dr. King, he’s throwing what he actually called, in his own words, “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.”
Two hundred and fifty years ago we declared our independence from exactly this. From a man who conflated himself with the country. From a ruler who believed the government, the honor, the lives and sacrifice of generations were his personal property, to be used for his own personal glory and profit.
When our nation’s Founders overthrew a king in 1776, they paid a huge price for it. Altogether, seventeen of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were wiped out by the war they declared....
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As Thom states: Are we a nation ruled by MAGA-aligned oligarchs or by We, the People?
Even Trump voters think his 16-day MAGA festival is a bust — Alex Henderson
Organized by the Donald Trump-associated Freedom 250 group, the Great American State Fair launched on Washington, DC's National Mall on June 25 and continues through July 10. The event is Trump's MAGA-themed celebration of the United States' 250th anniversary, but according to Talking Points Memo (TMP), even MAGA Republicans and Trump supporters are feeling disappointed by it.
TMP's Josh Kovensky, in an article published on the 4th of July, reports, "As I entered the Great American State Fair on Monday, I saw a red-faced older gentleman, looking upset. 'I'm mad at Trump!' he exclaimed, adding the event didn't resemble any fair he had been to before…. He was far from alone in having that reaction to the Great American State Fair, which is taking up the National Mall with a tiny model of Trump's triumphal arch, broken air conditioning, sagging tarps, and more for the next few weeks."
Kovensky adds, "Many of those at the Fair seemed to be a mix of confused and underwhelmed by the whole thing. In other ways, it was like a microcosm of the modern conservative movement's vision of America: lots of God, a warped view of the country's values, much of it a scam."...
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The con man has taken the joy away from us. It's time to put an end to him.
Historian details how Trump has killed American patriotism to satisfy his own — Sarah K. Burris
An American historian and former Republican would normally be the perfect audience for America's 250th celebration, but both agreed that President Donald Trump has turned what should be a moment to bring the country together into his own ego fest.
The Bulwark's publisher, Sarah Longwell, an ex-Republican and longtime pollster, commented that she is the patriotism suffers because Trump is trying to tie love for America to love of him. People are recoiling from the idea, but with it has come a slump in Americans' love for America too.
"In a normal time that would be a great unifier," Longwell said of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. "And [it] could help bring people together around some of our lofty national ideals, but it's no secret that the Trump years have complicated a lot of people's relationship with patriotism."
She cited a recent Fox News poll showing that just 27 percent of Democrats consider themselves to be "proud" of the country.
A Gallup poll also recently found that a record low (58 percent) of U.S. adults say they are extremely or very proud to be an American, the pollster cited....
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Trump is robbing us of more than just our money!
College Students Are Testing at the Level of 10-Year-Olds — Joe Wilkins
Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”
According to a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development — a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries — a not insignificant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at a level which, in a more functional society, would be alarming for a middle schooler.
The survey, first spotted by the Economist, tested around 160,000 people of all ages, across all 38 member states. It found that across all OECD member countries, a full 8 percent of college students are reading at the level of a ten-year-old, if not worse. While countries like Germany and France rang in at under 5 percent, countries like Poland, Israel, and the United States blew the curve at 21, 20, and 14 percent, respectively.
The numbers aren’t much better when it comes to math. Across OECD countries, 9 percent of college students do math at or below a ten-year-old level. In Italy, the US, and Slovakia, that figure jumps to over 15 percent — only outdone by Israel, where roughly 21 percent of college students were underachieving at the same low benchmark....
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Does this mean their reading comprehension has progressed about a 5-year old? Nothing like progress.
Major Union Livid After 1,000 Factory Workers Were Replaced With 50 Robots — Joe Wilkins
One of the most powerful labor unions in the United States is furious, as over 1,000 workers at General Motors’ leading Detroit factory are being pushed out to make room for dozens of new robots.
According to Crain’s Detroit Business, the lack of work coincides with the installation of 50 AI-integrated manufacturing robots, which GM installed in its Factory Zero plant, a major all-electric vehicle facility in Detroit. When the industrial robots went online, the UAW says the factory idled the thousand-odd workers, a situation in which employees aren’t allowed to work, but aren’t fully fired either (as Crain’s explains, the vast majority of these workers have functionally been laid off.)
“It’s always a concern when you see a robot coming to a plant, especially after they have laid off over a thousand people,” UAW local 22 president James Cotton told Crain’s. “They say it’s the wave of the future, and if that’s so, they’re taking away jobs from people.”...
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Who thinks this is a good idea? The future is bleak for humanity if this is acceptable. Extiction comes..
The Army Took Down Its Page Commemorating a Civil Rights Icon — Chasity Hale Chasity Hale
Back in March, I wrote about the late Sarah Keys Evans, a Black veteran who played a key role in desegregating interstate travel. Before the summer of 1952, the 23-year-old private first class had never even taken part in a civil rights protest—but after she was arrested and jailed overnight in her Women’s Army Corps uniform for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white Marine, Keys Evans spent years fighting for justice through the courts, paving the way for Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders.
I discussed Keys Evans’ underappreciated but important case with the author Amy Nathan, whose latest book, Riding Into History, tells her story. Her profile had risen in recent years, as I wrote at the time:
In 2020, nearly 70 years after Evans’ arrest, Roanoke Rapids installed a series of murals about the veteran’s fight for justice, which Evans told a Time reporter she saw as a tribute to all the overlooked women who “kept the spark going” during the Civil Rights Movement.
But weeks after that first piece ran, I received a tip that the Army had removed an article about Keys Evans from its official website. Based on screenshots captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the article by T. Anthony Bell, first published in February 2014, was taken down last July, at the height of the second Trump administration’s campaign to scrub Black history from public monuments, institutions, and records. It remains unavailable....
On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, which the administration has commemorated through sanitized displays seemingly designed to paper over the country’s complex past, the lessons of Keys Evans’ fight for justice and equality feel especially pertinent. Her story serves as a reminder that, in the words of T. Anthony Bell, the author of the Army’s now-spiked article:
The modern civil rights movement was much broader than the contributions made by the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP or Rosa Parks in changing America’s unjust racial climate.
It was more about the thousands of unheralded, everyday citizens whose brave actions and collective voices blended together to create rumbles that shook the country’s consciousness, giving rise to individuals and organizations that would lead the struggle.
Pfc. Sarah Louise Keys was one such citizen.
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We are rapidly losing our legacy to the rasict fascism of Trump. This is an act of war on our heritage as a nation. He must be punshed for this. It's a disgrace to our honor and our military.
Benjamin Franklin, Champion of the Wealth Tax — Harold Meyerson
When we consider which of the nation’s Founding Fathers still provides wise counsel to us today, 250 years after they wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, may I submit for your consideration one Benjamin Franklin, who argued that wealth taxes were both proper and necessary.
Indeed, Franklin’s ideas about private property suggest he’d be writing and speaking in favor of the one-time wealth tax on California’s billionaires were he with us today. In December of 1783, shortly after he’d negotiated and signed the peace treaty with Britain in which Britain relinquished its claim to the 13 united states, Franklin wrote a letter to his fellow Founding Father Robert Morris in which he assessed the rival claims of taxpayers to their property and the government’s power to tax or even expropriate it:
All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
With multiple California hospitals reducing services and laying off staff due to the cuts in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, the “Welfare of the Publick” certainly appears to require a tax on “Property superfluous to such purposes” as “the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species.” Whether the flight of billionaire Sergey Brin, the leading funder of the anti–wealth tax campaign, from California to Nevada constitutes “retir[ing] and liv[ing] among savages” I leave to keener minds than mine....
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America has choices it must make and make them soon.
USPS rural carrier kidnapped and murdered in North Carolina — Jane Wise
Brandi Byrd Reynolds, a 35-year-old USPS rural letter carrier, was kidnapped and murdered Friday, June 26, while delivering mail on her route in Hays, North Carolina.
Deputies responding to reports of a shooting found Reynolds dead inside her USPS vehicle on Montieth Acres Road. William Craig Durham, 56, of Roaring River, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping. Investigators allege Reynolds had been restrained and moved from one location to another without her consent before she was killed.
Reynolds’ murder leaves her two young daughters orphaned. Her husband, Brent Andrew Reynolds, died only six months earlier, on December 23, when the truck he was driving ran off the road, struck a tree and overturned in Wilkes County. Brent Reynolds, also 35, died at the scene, according to the North Carolina Highway Patrol....
On social media, a Texas carrier near the Sam Houston National Forest wrote that “most of the time my GPS and phone don’t work,” and described having a gun pointed at her face during a medication delivery requiring a signature.
A retired Oklahoma carrier wrote, “Rural carriers are sometimes in secluded areas during delivery. I was one for 30 years in Oklahoma. I had some very sketchy areas I delivered in rural woodsy areas!” A former North Carolina rural carrier wrote, “It’s scary when you have a package to deliver at the door and you go down a driveway that’s a quarter of a mile long with a ‘no trespassing’ sign with a gun on it.”
Several carriers pointed to the danger of late delivery and the unpredictable nature of the job. One carrier who briefly delivered on an Oregon rural route wrote, “It was fine during daylight hours, but after dark when days are short in winter was stressful.” Another wrote, “Our jobs are so freaking dangerous ... back roads all alone, often after dark and people know where we will be every freaking day.”...
The growth of violence against postal workers is one expression of the broader social breakdown in America, where decades of job destruction, poverty, addiction, isolation and the collapse of public services have produced increasingly desperate and unstable conditions. Reynolds was killed in Wilkes County, in the foothills of northwestern North Carolina, where median household income is only $53,189, per capita income is $28,753, 15.5 percent of residents live below the official poverty line and only 17.3 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree....
USPS management, however, is preparing to make this social crisis worse by threatening to close “unprofitable,” mostly rural post offices. At a June Senate hearing on USPS finances, Postmaster General David Steiner identified the Postal Service’s basic public obligations as the source of its financial crisis, stating that 52 percent of rural delivery routes are “financially underwater,” adding that “in a normal business” such routes would be adjusted or stores closed.
In reality, the post office was founded during the American Revolution as a public service, not as a revenue-generating enterprise, in order to provide the entire country with affordable, reliable access to mail, newspapers and information needed to participate in a democratic society. This principle is now under attack....
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Our country continues to lose sight of where we came from and who we really are. Can we not get a grip on ourselves and stop our descent into total collapse?
MAGA investors lost their shirts in 'legal scam' that brought Trump billions — Alex Henderson
...Times reporters Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany, on the Fourth of July 2026, explain, "Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump's memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion. The analytics firm's assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025."
Trump, Lipton and Yaffe-Bellany report, "profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down" and "collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens" — which he promoted on his Truth Social platform. But crypto investor and 2024 Trump voter Nicholas Pinto, according to the Times reporters, wasn't so lucky....
Pinto told the Times he invested roughly $500,000 in the $TRUMP digital coin and has lost around half of that investment.
New York University Stephen Gillers said he wouldn't be surprised if Trump and his crypto partners face a class-action lawsuit from investors who lost money.
Gillers told the Times, "Trump, back when he was a real estate developer, boasted that he plays 'to people's fantasies.' Here, he seems to have encouraged supporters to invest with the expectation they could anticipate riches — even as he himself was cashing out."
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The con man runs his con and we watch him get away with it. What does that say about us?
Joe Walsh Nails It: Donald Trump Is A Traitor — NewsHound Ellen
Isn’t it time we all stopped beating around the bush about Trump’s attacks on elections and our democracy?
Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh summed up the five-alarm fire in our democracy better than I have heard from a single establishment Democrat.
On MS Now Thursday night, Walsh reacted to Jack Smith’s warning about Donald Trump sabotaging the midterm elections. “These are the actions of a traitor,” Walsh said. He called it devastating that that is happening, but “what do we call someone who attacks our elections process? What [else] do we call that?”
“Think about what [Smith] said,” Walsh continued. “He called on all of us - elected officials and the rest of us - to anticipate what the president of the United States is going to do to attack our elections.”...
“I'm tired of beating around the bush,” Walsh added. “This guy is a traitor. The guy in the White House is a traitor.”...
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How long do we have to keep telling you this before we put a stop to it?
Energy Secretary Applauds The End Of Federal Wind And Solar Subsidies — Ed Scarce
"I'm thrilled to report that after 35 years, on July 4th, we will end the subsidies for new wind and solar projects, thanks to President Trump’s Working Families Tax Cut," said Chris Wright.
Idiocracy indeed.
And as a reminder, before leading the U.S. Department of Energy, Wright served as the CEO of Liberty Energy, North America's second-largest hydraulic fracturing company.
"Suicide by stupid" is a pretty good summation." — Medium Dave (comments)
"Indeed it is 'suicide by stupid.' Green Energy already employs more than 4 times as many Americans as the entire fossil fuel industry. Hurting Green Energy hurts an awful lot of working Americans. Think they will remember this in November?" -- Mike Wilkerson (comments)
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The goddamn retardedness is strong in this reprobate. Deport him.
Pope Leo Marks July 4th By Praying For Migrants
The Associated Press reports:
Pope Leo XIV, who has sparred with the Trump administration over its immigration crackdown, spent the Fourth of July on Saturday in the epicenter of Europe’s migration debate to honor the tens of thousands of people who have died trying to reach Europe to find freedom and prosperity.
While the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with rallies, parties and fireworks, history’s first U.S.-born pope traveled to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa to pray at a migrant cemetery and celebrate a solemn Mass for the island’s residents and newest arrivals.
A treeless strip of rock 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) long, Lampedusa is closer to Africa than the Italian mainland and is the main port of entry into Europe for hundreds of thousands of migrants who crossed by boat from Libya or Tunisia, often smuggled by human traffickers.
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We don't usually pray but we could all use a good prayer today.
Trump Pardons Top Donor Convicted In Infamous Case
The New York Times reports:
The White House announced on Friday that President Trump had issued pardons to 11 men, most of whom had been convicted of crimes related to the Clean Air Act, a bedrock environmental law. The president also pardoned Adam Kidan, a major donor to Republicans, including Mr. Trump. He had served about two and a half years in prison for his role in a fraud scheme involving the disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Mr. Kidan had pleaded guilty in 2005 to conspiracy and fraud charges involving his purchase of a casino boat fleet with Mr. Abramoff, who became a poster child for Washington corruption in the pre-Trump era. Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Kidan were each sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay a total of $21.7 million in restitution related to the $147.5 million purchase of a cruise ship line in 2000.
Mr. Kidan served less than half of that prison sentence and became an executive in the staffing industry. It is not clear whether he paid the full amount of the restitution. A pardon typically wipes away any remaining financial obligations. He has donated millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and groups over the years.
"Hair Furor has wiped out hundreds of millions in restitution for victims with his mob boss pardons." — Jay Silversmith (comments)
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The Trump Crime Syndicate perverting our law and fucking over victims like a big dog! Happy Birthday, suckers!
Trump Floods DC With 5000 National Guard Troops
The New York Times reports:
Last August, President Trump ordered hundreds of soldiers and airmen from the National Guard to duty in the capital. He claimed he would “rescue” the city from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor,” even though violent crime had fallen to a 30-year low. They soon began appearing at landmarks on the National Mall, in other tourist areas and around some subway stations, mostly replanting grass, washing off graffiti and picking up bags of trash.
Now, nearly 5,000 Guard troops are in Washington — roughly equivalent to about eight Army battalions. They are still mostly in tourist areas and are expected to be on hand for the Fourth of July celebrations, with temperatures forecast to reach around 100 degrees.
The Guard troops deployment now is about 30 percent more troops than Gen. Douglas MacArthur commanded in the city when he crushed the Bonus Army veterans protests on the National Mall in 1932, and more than triple the number of Guard troops who confronted the largest anti-Vietnam War protests in Washington during the May Day protests of 1971.
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Guards not guardians!
Happy Birthday, freedom lovers!
Belgian Diamond Merchants Gift Trump With Massive Jewel-Encrusted Ring After He Drops Tariffs On Industry
The Associated Press reports:
Dozens of diamonds spell out two giant letter “T” next to the Stars and Stripes and “1776” and “2026.” Dozens more frame the numbers 45 and 47 in the shape of Superman’s logo. A diamond-winged eagle carries a ruby shield and clutches an olive branch of emeralds, below a radiant “250” and atop the phrase “250 YEARS USA” etched in 18-karat gold. All told, 321 diamonds, 56 sapphires, 13 emeralds and six rubies encrust the watch-sized gold ring presented this week to Bill White, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, to give to President Trump.
“A very special thank you to my friends from Antwerp for the magnificent Freedom 250 ring,” Mr. Trump said in a prerecorded video message during an event marking America’s 250th birthday in Brussels. Isidore Mörsel, president of the Antwerp World Diamond Center, or AWDC, gifted the ring on behalf of the centuries-old diamond community in the Belgian port city. The gift comes months after Belgium’s diamond industry won the removal of U.S. tariffs on diamond imports.
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Trump's greed ruins it for all of us. We must stop it or die.
Meatball McPeenerToilet Proud To Be An American, Where At Least You Can Eat Chick-Fil-A In The Car — Evan Hurst
Better to eat in the car where your penis can stay dry.
Well, when you don’t have free healthcare or paid family leave or the freedom to be sure your kids won’t get murdered at school;
When you have a Defense secretary with such severe masculinity issues he insists on being called the secretary of WAR! even though he clearly has a less-than-zero understanding of the grown-up planning parts of war;
When you literally just started a war with a theoretically much weaker nation only to lose it on the first fucking day, because you’re the only president and Defense secretary in recent American history stupid enough to let Benjamin Netanyahu convince you that’s a good idea;
When you can’t say for sure you have a vice president whose penis doesn’t have a severe case of duvet-burn right now;
When that same vice president, with the zeal of a baby convert, is also in the midst of a feud with the very pope himself over who’s more Catholic;
When your president brags sometimes more than once a week about how he takes a dementia test every time he goes to the doctor and they say he picks out “camel” perfectly;
When affordability is at record lows;
When the government murders innocent people in the street for peacefully trying to stop the feds from taking their neighbors to murder/rape concentration camps;
When women aren’t allowed the freedom to decide if they’d like to carry a pregnancy to term or not, even if it’s an ectopic pregnancy that’ll kill them and their nonviable fetus both;
When the Supreme Court is made up of illegitimate partisan hacks who would skullfuck the Constitution to unholy death given the first opportunity, and are indeed licking their lips to do just that;
When the alleged adults in charge take orgasmic pleasure in cruelly hurting people, hurting immigrants, hurting children, hurting immigrant children, hurting trans children, hurting children in other countries, murdering children in other countries;
When your country is such a laughingstock to its own people and worldwide that literally nobody with two brain cells to rub together has any interest in being caught dead at the country’s 250th birthday celebrations;
Then we guess you have to get creative when you’re coming up with reasons to be proud of your country on its 250th birthday.
Matthew Whitaker, AKA Meatball McPeenerToilet, the former (acting) attorney general and underdeveloped oaf who once tried to invent a toilet for men with such huge penises they couldn’t shit without flushing their dick down the toilet — we refuse to believe this happened to him personally, but maybe he was trying to make life better for some conservative man he was being subservient to — is now the ambassador to NATO. Why? Well maybe NATO keeps flushing its big cock down the toilet too, and they’re all uncircumcised in Europe so it probably makes an even bigger and more embarrassing sound there, something like a combination between an underwater WHOOOOOOSH of hot tub jets and the poot-farting sound of an untied balloon flying around the room as it gives up its air.
In a French accent.
Point is, Meatball is a serious man with a serious job, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have time to sit down with Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends and tell him what about America turns his potty-dipping peener right side up again
And it’s, um. Well. It doesn’t take much.
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Happy Birthday, America! May we live to see 300!
Ex-ambassador calls out Trump 'communism' — and Republicans for going along with it — Alex Henderson
U.S. President Donald Trump is quick to attack Democratic Party opponents as "socialists," and he even calls New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani a "communist" (although Mamdani identifies as a "democratic socialist," not a promoter of communism or Marxist-Leninism). But according to political science professor and former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, Trump is embracing "communism" when he favors the federal government obtaining partial ownership of private companies.
McFaul's comments stem from CNBC's recent interview with Trump.
During the interview, Trump defended asking tech company Intel to give the federal government 10 percent of the company.
Trump told CNBC, "You know, we had virtually nothing. We didn't make chips anymore. And Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, 'I can solve your problem, but I want 10 percent of the company.' They said, 'What?' I said, 'I want 10 percent of the company.' And he agreed to it."
The president continued, "And the stock has gone through. So, I think we made $60 or 70 billion in eight months. Do I get credit for that? No. Somebody said, 'That's not very American.' I said, 'No, I think it's very American, actually.' And I've done that with other deals. ... It worked out well from our standpoint. We really had no investment."
On X, formerly Twitter, journalist Aaron Rupar posted video of that part of the CNBC interview. And the 62-year-old McFaul had a strong reaction to Trump's comments.
McFaul posted, on X, "State ownership of companies is communism. Shocking to me how passive Republicans have reacted to these Trump actions. I thought they believed in capitalism, free enterprise and the like."...
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Nope. Not Trump. He's the only one who should accumulate money in his fascist morass.
Analysis reveals Trump’s extensive downtime — Sarah K. Burris
The Daily Beast did an analysis of President Donald Trump's schedule and his use of "executive time" and found that he's not rolling into the office until at least 11 a.m. most days.
According to the report, for the last three months, the Beast calculated three public appearances by the president in Washington in the whole month of June. The few public events he did have were isolated to anything beginning at 11 a.m. or later. The only exception is the G7 summit in France, where Trump came in 45 minutes late to a meeting.
On all but four days in June, Trump had "executive time," which he spent beginning at 8 a.m.
The same thing happened in May, when Trump spent all but five days out of the month having his "executive time." In May, all of his public schedules listed his "executive time" as starting at 8 a.m.
In May, 26 out of the 31 days that Trump had "executive time" in the morning, he had 11 appearances before 11 a.m. Four were him playing golf, three were while he was 12 hours ahead while visiting China, the analysis found. That leaves four days and in those four days, one event was at 10:25 a.m., the following day he gave a commencement speech to the Coast Guard Academy. On May 5, he was scheduled to sign a proclamation at 10:30 a.m., but showed up an hour late. On May 26, he was on his way to Walter Reed Hospital to get his third annual physical.
In April, there were six cases of pre-11 a.m. public events. One was his disastrous appearance at the U.S. Supreme Court during the oral arguments of his birthright citizenship case, which he ultimately lost. The Easter Egg Roll started at 10 a.m., though he didn't speak until 10:48 a.m. That weekend he left to play golf, and another he did an executive order signing at 9 a.m. After that, no one saw him for a week until he welcomed King Charles just before 11 a.m.
It was a running joke in his first term that "executive time" meant watching cable news, rage-posting on social media about it or calling in to defend himself. Now it appears that the "executive time" might be a moniker for getting some extra sleep....
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At his age there's no telling what meds he's on. Many of them can make you nod right off when you're 80.
John Roberts has a message for Democrats planning to use Trump's powers — John Stoehr
..."Trump has discovered, or created, powers that no president has ever had that have been sanctioned by a rightwing Supreme Court,” said the head of the Center for American Progress. “Trump has widened the aperture of the powers the federal government has.” That aperture, Tanden said, can be used by a Democrat to "create a kind of new social contract.”
Not if John Roberts has anything to say about it.
It doesn't matter how much "Trump has widened the aperture of the powers the federal government has." The next Democratic president can't change America without changing the court. It is not politically neutral. It does not serve the law. It is profoundly corrupt. And only a fool would forget that what this court gives, this court can take away. It must be held accountable for its impunity for the law, same as everyone. So expand its number, impose term limits, strip its jurisdiction, throttle its budgets – whatever it takes, because there will be no new dawn as long as there's a rightwing supermajority that's prepared to veto it.
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Earth to John Roberts: None of you motherfucking traitors will live forever.
Trump’s Corruption Has Poisoned America’s 250th Birthday — NewsHound Ellen
Donald Trump has already enriched himself by at least $2 billion in the less than two years since he returned to the White House. So, you’d think he could at least keep his predatory hands off July 4th celebrations, especially when it’s our country’s 250th birthday. But no.
A new report from Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee reveals how Trump and his cronies set up the official holiday celebrations as an opportunity to grab more money for themselves – and never mind the law. This, as most Americans greet the holiday faced with higher prices, thanks to Trump’s war and tariffs, and loss of health insurance and other government services, sacrificed for the sake of billionaires’ tax cuts.
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The most corrupt POTUS in our history.
Ken Paxton Busted Flying To Iceland With ANOTHER Mistress — Cliff Schecter
Much like his moral exemplar Donald Trump, it’s still sometimes hard to fathom Ken Paxton actually exists. The grotesque, grifting MAGA Senate candidate with the self-control of a masturbating bonobo actually seems to want to get caught living his best 1970s leisure-suit life.
Four months and change. That’s all we have left in this election cycle. Can this porn-theatre-floor of a man not keep it in his pants for just four months as he pretends to be “Christian?” Or anything other than a newly discovered carbon-based STD?
Once you know that Paxton allegedly kept a separate apartment in Austin so he could meet his Uber-driver girlfriend without the missus catching on—back before the wife had to 86 their marriage “on biblical grounds”—it’s easy to get how Paxton fits in so well with 90 percent of the GOP in 2026. Or the leading lights of the predator-based life-forms knowns as MAGA.
So it feels like time to bring you up to speed on just the latest trashy behavior from Texas-toast Ron Jeremy. Check out the video and go to BAM to find out what Paxton actually did this time...
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Cliff, we in Texas all know what the definition of corrupt scumbag is here: Ken Paxton!
Amazon Is Spewing a Record Breaking Amount of Pollution to Power Its AI Data Centers — Joe Wilkins
Amazon is breaking all kinds of records on the back of the AI boom, and not the good kind.
According to new reporting by Axios, Amazon’s AI buildout has fueled an unprecedented leap in the company’s emissions, a black mark on a corporation that pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 not even a year ago.
In its newly released environmental report, Amazon disclosed that its total electricity use jumped by a whopping 34 percent across 2025, fueling a 16 percent rise in greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a new record for the corporation, which noted that its data centers also hoovered up nearly 2.5 billion gallons of water last year.
Meanwhile, carbon emissions from “indirect sources” — corporate speak for “manufacturing supply chains” — were up 10 percent compared to last year, and over 21 percent compared to 2019.
Notably, the data table disclosing all of this information is tucked into the 46th page of the 51 page document. Amazon does a good job of trying to pre-empt these findings, with buzzy initiatives aimed at fluffy targets, like a pledge to combat the rise of “super pollutants.”
“Some pollutants are far worse for the climate than carbon emissions,” the report boldly declares — a statement clearly meant to downplay the company’s overall record-breaking carbon footprint.
Though Amazon brags that the pledge aims to commit $100 million to eliminate super pollutants, it fails to disclose how much of that funding will actually come from Amazon. First signed back in March, the super pollutant pledge is a collective greenwashing effort by corporations like Google, Figma, Salesforce, and JPMorgan, and there’s no telling how much or how little Amazon will contribute.
Reading the report, it’s clear that initiatives like these represent an effort by Amazon to appear sanctimonious while silently ratcheting up pollution for its own gain. That kind of corporate greenwashing isn’t new for Amazon, but the immense scale of AI-driven pollution certainly is.....
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Mammon lives!
Bessent Shrugs Off Trump’s $1.4B In Crypto Grifting
CBS News reports:
In an exclusive interview with CBS News, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he doesn’t believe the recent disclosure of President Trump’s billions in crypto earnings is problematic for the president. “I don’t think there’s an appearance problem,” Bessent told CBS News anchor and MoneyWatch correspondent Kelly O’Grady regarding Mr. Trump’s earnings.
Congressional Democrats have criticized Mr. Trump’s crypto windfall, arguing it presents a conflict of interest since his administration has sought to loosen regulations on cryptocurrency.
“This is an innovation presidency,” Bessent told CBS News. “So whether it’s digital access, whether it’s AI, whether it’s everything that is going on in the tech ecosystem that, you know, all Americans are benefiting from that.” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told CBS News on Tuesday that “there are no conflicts of interest” in the disclosure.
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Isn't Bessent just a wax figure?
MAGA Extremist To Lead Texas Election Integrity Unit
The Texas Tribune reports:
State Rep. Nate Schatzline, R-Fort Worth, resigned from the Texas House Thursday to take a new position as Gov. Greg Abbott’s senior adviser on election policy. Schatzline, who was among the most hardline conservative members of the Texas House, is set to lead “policy development and legislative strategy efforts related to election integrity,” according to a Thursday announcement by Abbott’s office.
The two-term lawmaker had been floated in recent weeks as the governor’s potential choice for secretary of state, Texas’ top elections officer, according to unconfirmed media reports that The Texas Tribune could not independently verify. On June 2, Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced she would step down from the office in mid-July, just months before a blockbuster midterm.
The hard-right lawmaker authored a bill during the 2025 legislative session that would have further restricted voting by mail in Texas, limiting the practice exclusively to voters who are 65 or older. The bill, which failed, would have removed all other eligibility to vote by mail, which currently includes those with a disability or illness, those who are absent from the county and those confined in jail before a conviction.
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Fort Worth, hmmm, let's see. Oh, right. The Panther City! Still not aware we are in the 21st Century.
Trump risks being ‘genuinely prosecuted’ for ‘dangerous’ Freedom 250 mishap: journalist — Alexander Willis
A close call involving performers at the Great American State Fair could land President Donald Trump behind bars, one journalist cautioned on Thursday.
Performers narrowly avoided injury Thursday when a section of the stage at the Washington, D.C. event appeared to give way, sending debris crashing down just feet from where they stood. According to Drop Site News founder Ryan Grim, however, the incident could end up haunting the president.
“This is incredibly dangerous stuff. Trump cutting safety corners with stage building is the kind of thing somebody can genuinely be prosecuted for if someone dies, which is not uncommon if you slap it together like this,” Grim wrote in a social media post on X to his more than 530,000 followers. “This equipment is deadly when falling from those heights.”
Organized by the Trump-linked group Freedom 250, the fair got off to a rough start last week after most of the artists previously slated to perform at the event backed out after learning of its connections to Trump. The fair has also experienced power failures that melted perishable foods and stalled a Ferris wheel, and has been ridiculed over what appear to be near-empty fields and booths.
Fair organizers have yet to release a statement regarding the incident Thursday, which had been initially flagged by independent journalist Aaron Parnas but since picked up by several news outlets.
This is incredibly dangerous stuff.
Trump cutting safety corners with stage building is the kind of thing somebody can genuinely be prosecuted for if someone dies, which is not uncommon if you slap it together like this.
This equipment is deadly when falling from those… https://t.co/FayYxhwwh7
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) July 2, 2026
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More failure by the Beast.
AI Industry Is Creating a New Age of Imperial Extraction and Labor Exploitation — Amy Goodman & Juan González
In our July Fourth special broadcast, we revisit our interview with longtime technology reporter Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, which unveils the accruing political and economic power of artificial intelligence companies — especially Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Her reporting uncovered the exploitation of workers in Kenya, attempts to take massive amounts of freshwater from communities in Chile, along with numerous accounts of the technology’s detrimental impact on the environment. “This is an extraordinary type of AI development that is causing a lot of social, labor and environmental harms,” says Hao in an extended interview.
We turn now to the Empire of AI. That’s the name of a new book by the journalist Karen Hao, who’s closely reported on the rise of the artificial intelligence industry with a focus on Sam Altman’s OpenAI. That’s the company behind ChatGPT. Karen Hao compares the actions of the AI industry to those of colonial powers in the past. She writes, quote, “The empires of AI are not engaged in the same overt violence and brutality that marked this history. But they, too, seize and extract precious resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence: the work of artists and writers; the data of countless individuals posting about their experiences and observations online; the land, energy, and water required to house and run massive data centers and supercomputers,” she writes.
Karen Hao is a former reporter at The Wall Street Journal and MIT Technology Review, where she became the first journalist to profile OpenAI. Democracy Now!’s Juan González and I spoke to her. I began by asking her to explain what artificial intelligence is....
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Like fire; it can cook your supper or burn your house down.
Abortion Is as American as Apple Pie — Lauren Rankin
Abortion has been legal in some or all parts of the country for more than 180 years of US history.
It has been 250 years since the U.S. declared independence at one of the most tenuous moments in our history. We now stand at another tenuous moment. With an autocrat firmly in the White House, a sycophantic legislative branch, and a judiciary dominated by far right conservatives, it feels hard to celebrate the United States and its “democracy,” which hangs by a thin thread.
In the run-up to this anniversary, patriotic reflections have abounded, whitewashing U.S. history and seeking to erase its more sinister chapters. This pageantry has also erased any mention of a positive practice that has run throughout American history — the practice of safe abortion.
That’s right, abortion has been a part of American life since the very beginning. Despite attempts by far right extremists to eradicate it out of existence and erase its history in U.S. colonial and republican history, safe abortion has been a consistent throughline over the past 250 years and beyond.
Abortion access has been decimated in recent years. Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Republican-dominated state legislatures successfully forced the closure of more than 160 abortion clinics from 2012 to 2019 alone. States like Alabama and Texas passed draconian early abortion bans, designed to force the Supreme Court to test and potentially end the constitutional right to an abortion. Finally, in June 2022, after Donald Trump successfully appointed three far right justices during his first term, Roe v. Wade fell in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Writing for the majority in the Dobbs ruling, Justice Samuel Alito argued that abortion is “entirely unknown in American law,” and the right to a legal abortion is “not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” In this interpretation, Alito, as he so often finds himself, is flat-out wrong....
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...And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace... Imagine, John Lennon.
Acting AG Blanche Can't Get A Word In Over DC Protesters, Hegseth Lashes Out At Crowd — Conover Kennard
Awww, how sad.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Acting AG Todd Blanche spoke at Meridian Hill Park in DC, hosting a DC Safe & Beautiful Task Force Ceremony, and it didn't go down well for either of them. Bummer.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche showed up in DC on Wednesday to deliver some rousing remarks to National Guard troops, only to find the noise of protesters outdid whatever he was trying to say.
Pete Hegseth ran into the same wall of sound and, swallowed up by the noise of protesters, rather than take the hint, decided to spin it: "This background noise is perfect," he announced, before diagnosing the crowd as "ingrates" too "blinded by ideology" to appreciate what he was selling....
Two members of the administration, one deployment of troops used as a backdrop, and a crowd that made its opinion of the whole spectacle very clear. In response, Hegseth called Americans "ingrates." Keep it up, big guy.
Aside from Hegseth, an Acting Attorney General doing rally-style remarks to National Guard troops is something else — The DOJ doesn't command troops, doesn't run military operations, and has zero business doing a hype speech for a deployment. It's just another loyalty photo-op, the same genre as Blanche's whole "Trump's guy in the room" act since he took over from Pam Bondi.
Hegseth rightfully got a taste of the same treatment Acting AG Blanche just received — a crowd that wasn't interested in hearing him out — and instead of reading the room, he decided to gaslight it. Nothing says "I have everything under control" quite like reframing your own heckling as a personal accomplishment.
Poor Todd and Pete. Trump has lost his juice, so they were left flailing. And I'm not even sure what juice had to begin with, unless it's labeled 'gaslighting.'
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"Blinded by ideology?" The fruitcake reprobate is one to talk! Was he actually ever in combat? If so, it is surprising he wasn't killed by friendly fire. What a clown show!
Setting A Thermostat Is Not Communism, Fox News — John Amato
How childish and desperate do you have to be to attack a mayor asking to be prudent with electricity during a heatwave?
Fox News and the entire GOP is so terrified of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's success that they are mocking him for asking New Yorkers to be careful with their thermostats during an extreme heat wave. This is the same advice Trump's Energy Department has suggested as well.
Not only do they look foolish, but they appear desperate in their efforts to smear and ridicule a popular political rival.
This morning on Fox and Friends, the three co-hosts were beside themselves that the mayor of New York City would ask residents to turn the thermostat higher to conserve energy so that there aren't any blackouts during this massive heat wave....
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They have a check box on their hiring form for "lamebrain." If it is not checked, they don't get the job! LMAO!
Trump So Mad About Empty Fairgrounds, His Own Staff Deleted The Evidence — Conover Kennard
Sure, because if you delete it, it never happened!
Turns out throwing yourself a 250th birthday party doesn't guarantee anyone shows up to the cake-cutting.
According to a new CNN report, Trump grew furious behind the scenes after his kickoff speech for the "Great American State Fair" on the National Mall drew a crowd so thin it left acres of empty field visible beyond the stage.
Trump reportedly didn't even clock it in the moment — it took an aerial photo circulating afterward to set him off, and multiple White House staffers who'd posted that photo scrubbed it from their accounts once the boss saw it. Problem solved!...
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Tell him to use crowd photos of Woodstock 1969. That's what he dreams about!
GOP Rep: “We Gotta Put A Big Bedsheet Over The Statue Of Liberty, She’s Gotta Go To Sleep For Awhile”
The Huffington Post reports:br>
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) has proposed a 10-year moratorium on immigration - then suggested covering up the Statue of Liberty to block its immigrant-friendly message. “We gotta put a bedsheet - a big bedsheet - over the Statue of Liberty,” he told journalist Pablo Manríquez. “She’s gotta go to sleep for a while ’cause we’re not letting anybody in anymore.”
Nehls’ proposal came after the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship. That’s the constitutional guarantee that children born in this country are automatically citizens. His proposal didn’t stop with a sheet over the Statue of Liberty’s head. “Instead of having a torch, maybe it needs a stop sign,” he suggested, miming the statue’s torch-hoisting arm.
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It takes a villiage idiot!
Leavitt: Send Lazy Young People To Iran And Cuba
blah -blah- blah! Look at me! blah -blah- blah! Bootstraps! blah -blah- blah!
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What bootstraps did this bimbo ever use?
Go back to bimboland from where you were harvested.
The comments say it all about this one.
Energy Sec: No More Subsidies For Wind And Solar: “Sun Doesn’t Always Shine, Wind Doesn’t Always Blow”
blah -blah- blah! Look at me! blah -blah- blah! Sun! blah -blah- blah! Wind!
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Old shit-fer-brains don't always think!
And oil doesn't always flow, you fucking retard!
And yes, this is a stupid time to be alive!
Trump wrecked America’s 250th in DC, but other blue cities will save it — Amanda Marcotte
Christina Aguilera, Chris Stapleton and Jelly Roll — real stars — headline July Fourth parties in liberal towns
Donald Trump’s well-documented ability to destroy everything he touches has come for what should have been the easiest of tasks: making the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence fun. If there is one thing the world’s oldest democracy is good at, it’s throwing Independence Day parties, hosting outdoor concerts, and filling out state fairs with charmingly schlocky entertainment and ice cream stands. Producing the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C., was considered such a layup for the Trump-led Freedom 250 organizers that it’s no surprise Fox News, eager to showcase a MAGA win, set up a broadcast tower, seemingly intent on giving the event wall-to-wall coverage for its full 16-day run.
As anyone who has been on social media can attest, this was a mistake. Clip after clip has gone viral of Fox News hosts claiming huge crowds in front of a live backdrop showing that few are bothering to show up. The initial roster of musical performers, which mostly consisted of nostalgia acts from the 1980s and 1990s, dropped out, leaving Trump to insist his mere presence would be enough to draw massive crowds. Instead, NBC News estimated that about 1,000 people attended the opening ceremony, far short of the 45,000 the president pretended had swarmed to hear his usual tired, whining speech. A poorly constructed plywood-and-vinyl version of the 166-foot stone arch he has proposed building as a monument to himself was hastily erected — and immediately started falling apart. The only Trump-driven project that seems to be drawing the crowds is his disastrous repainting of the Reflecting Pool, which people are visiting to mock, resulting in the arrests of at least seven....
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The disaster of Trump failure will be erased by real America! Long may we reign!
Florida University Withholds Diplomas Unless Students Each Make Apology Videos For Silent Anti-ICE Protest
The Orlando Sentinel reports:
Back in March, a handful of students at Florida International University stood up at an event where the school president was speaking and showed off their T-shirts. They didn’t say anything to interrupt the program or speakers. Instead, they simply revealed shirts that said they wanted the state school to stop coordinating with ICE on immigrant crackdowns on campus via the slogan: “ICE OFF FIU.”
Now, months later, the school is trying to discipline the students — even threatening to withhold their diplomas — if they don’t apologize for expressing their opinions. In one of the creepiest twists, the school told the students that the only way they can escape punishment and “receive a diploma” would be to make a two-minute “video reflection” swearing they now understand what they did wrong.
It sounds like a hostage video. Except in this case, the hostages are being forced to apologize for free thought and expression. Such is life in the “Free State of Florida.” Once upon a time, college students were encouraged to be free-thinkers. That is, in fact, what Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida’s other GOP leaders claim to believe … when they’re renaming roads after Charlie Kirk anyway.
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The right to protest is as American as apple pie. The so-called right-wing Florida International University must be sued for every dime it has for violating the constitutional rights of Americans. FIU is comitting a rights violation with this Nazi chickenshit.
Louisiana AG Indicted Over Threats To Democrats
New Orleans’s Fox affiliate reports:
An Orleans Parish grand jury has indicted Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill in connection with a probe into alleged threats she made to New Orleans city leaders in May, according to a source with knowledge of the indictment. The counts Murrill was charged with weren’t immediately available.
The decision comes after sources told Fox 8 Tuesday evening the grand jury began investigating letters Murrill sent Mayor Helena Moreno, District Attorney Jason Williams and five city councilmembers in May.
In those letters, Murrill warned the officials their actions could trigger “serious consequences” under Louisiana law, including possible removal from office. In response to the indictment, Governor Jeff Landry posted on X that he will pardon Murrill “as fast as the law allows.”
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Landry better tread softly.
'Not you!' Jeanine Pirro snaps at reporter during indictment announcement — Nicole Charky-Chami
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro snapped at a reporter asking about Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol during a press conference Thursday announcing a federal indictment against a three-time Olympic athlete who was arrested last month after allegedly touching the detached paint of the $14 million renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
David Hearn, who was indicted by a grand jury after his arrest, now faces up to 10 years in prison, Pirro said.
Pirro made the announcement and started taking questions from press when a reporter tried to raise the question.
"How can you square charging this alleged vandal when this DOJ has...," the reporter asked, before Pirro cut him off.
"Already this is a problem," Pirro said.
"Over 1,000 January 6 rioters caused millions of damage — ," he continued.
Pirro interjected and yelled back.
"Are you really talking about January 6? I'm not. Who's next? Not you! No!"
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The miscreant Pirro is no longer merely the laughing stock of America. She is one of the most dangerous fascist pigs in the criminal regime of Trump. She is a threat to Americans and must be put away for good.
Pirro: Olympian Indicted For Pool “Vandalism” [VIDEO]
CNBC reports:
U.S. Olympian canoeist David Hearn was indicted by a grand jury in Washington, D.C., for destruction of property in connection with willfully damaging sealant in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro said Thursday.
Pirro said Hearn made a “violent effort” to rip up the sealant in the Reflecting Pool, whose renovation has been a top priority for President Donald Trump this year.
The charge against Hearn in District of Columbia Superior Court is a felony. He faces a maximum possible sentence of 10 years in prison. “These landmarks and monuments belong to all of us, and they must be protected for generations to come,” Pirro said.
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The perverted and disgusting cesspool of terror this woman has cast over our justice system will forever be damned in our history!
So pitifully petty and inhuman. The idiot has nothing better to do than pervert our justice system just as her boss has. Never forgive them! Prosecute her and throw the book at her hard!
GOP Rep: “Communist” Dems Should Move To Europe
“For the people in our country, who want to turn this country into a communist country? Leave. You’re free to leave. The beauty about America is, you can leave!
“Go to Europe where they’re experiencing this heat wave and they don’t have any air conditioning. See how well that works for you!
“I’m proud to be an American. I respect the flag and I respect the people who made the sacrifice to make this country what it is today. Freedom. Free speech, family faith?
“Why aren’t we celebrating the greatest nation on Earth?” – GOP Rep. Lisa McClain, who is best known here for telling a 2022 Trump rally crowd that “Trump caught Osama Bin Laden.” (That, of course, was Obama.)
McClain last appeared here when she called for “evil, fascist Democrats” to stop calling people names.
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Think again, honey! You're the ones that will be leaving when our new Communist Nation takes charge! You'll be shipped to the darkest jungles of Africa where the cannibals will stew you in a pot and peel your flesh from your cracked bones! In the meantime we'll be celebrating with our comrades in victory over you just as we did in Stalingrad! /S
Court: Intel Agents Fired Over DEI Must Be Rehired
The New York Times reports:
A federal appeals court ordered intelligence agencies to rehire officers who were fired for working on diversity issues, a major victory for employees who had said that intelligence chiefs had overstepped their authority in firing them.
In a 2-to-1 decision, a three-judge panel said the effort by the C.I.A. and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to fire 19 career intelligence officers was wrong and that the agencies must adhere to their own regulations.
The employees have said they believe they were arbitrarily fired at the beginning of the second Trump administration and sued to be reinstated. The Trump administration is likely to appeal, and it is not clear how quickly the intelligence officers might be assigned to new posts inside their agencies.
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One more for our American team!
Top Republicans Attack “Communist” Mamdani For Asking NYers To Conserve Energy During Heat Wave
The Huffington Post reports:
Saturday is expected to be the Big Apple’s hottest July 4 in the last 20 years, but a request by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to set air conditioners at 78 degrees is making a lot of right-wingers hot under the collar. In fact, many are acting like the suggestion is the first step to godless communism taking over America.
In order to avoid straining the power grid, Mamdani asked New Yorkers to set ACs at the recommended level, turn off lights and electronics that are not in use and unplug “what you can.”
Although the Public Utility Commission of Texas has also made that recommendation, the fact that it was coming from a democratic socialist like Mamdani was apparently a sign that all that is good and decent in the good old U.S. of A. was being ripped to shreds. Of course, many of the conservatives griping about Mamdani’s request to New Yorkers don’t actually live in New York, but, hey, details.
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These Nazi beasts are as mean as toxic snakes!
Expert alarmed as sordid prediction about Trump DOJ inching closer to coming true — Nicole Charky-Chami
A leading political scientist revealed a chilling prediction Thursday suggesting that the Trump Department of Justice was close to reaching a deal with captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Norman Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributing editor for The Atlantic, said that the deal was inching closer to completion and suggested that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche would work out a deal with Maduro and his wife over an unsubstantiated claim that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 American presidential election — something President Donald Trump has long complained was "rigged."
"Something I predicted multiple times is about to come true," Ornstein wrote on X. "Blanche is going to cut a deal with Maduro to have him falsely claim that Venezuela tilted the 2020 elections. In return, he and his wife are likely to be in the same prison as Ghislaine Maxwell."
Ornstein was not the only political expert to weigh in on this apparent negotiation. Tara Setmayer, co-founder of bipartisan superPAC The Seneca Project, responded to this forecast.
"I’m hearing this Maduro rumor also," she wrote on X. "As soon as he was captured, I thought Trump would try this nonsense. Firing Bondi, then Gabbard opened up this scheme with Blanche & Pulte as the henchmen. I hope this doesn’t happen but it’s more than plausible and would throw the midterms into utter chaos."
Something I predicted multiple times is about to come true. Blanche is going to cut a deal with Maduro to have him falsely claim that Venezuela tilted the 2020 elections. In return, he and his wife are likely to be in the same prison as Ghislaine Maxwell
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) July 2, 2026
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The Department of Jerk-offs do a blackmailing deal for Trump's deceitfulness and glorification! Justice will track them down for the remainder of their days on earth.
Platner, Collins, and the Peculiar Definition of Political Scandal — David Dayen
The Founding Fathers had a finely honed sense of the corroding power of corruption. They wrote prohibitions on self-enrichment and the pull of bribery directly into the Constitution on three separate occasions, banning foreign and domestic gifts, changes to presidential compensation during one’s period in office, and appointments for members of Congress that could be remunerative. They believed that someone treated well by a foreign potentate or stateside special interest would be naturally inclined to benefit them, if even unconsciously, and that a wall needed to be constructed to guard against this.
That the Supreme Court has directly or indirectly nullified these one by one is a tragedy. But the court of public opinion, at least as mediated by gatekeepers of information, has also separated what counts as corruption from what counts as a political scandal. Donald Trump personally earning $1.4 billion from a family cryptocurrency business that benefits from his administration’s lenient crypto policies (much of those crypto purchases coming directly from a foreign government) is less well known to the public than whatever wild thing he said on his personal social media site the night before.
By the same token, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a household name, and Darializa Avila Chevalier will soon be, because of what they say, or once said. Thomas Daffron is not a household name....
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The corruption is strong in this one.
After Two Decades, Beloved Senior Center Shutters in Brooklyn — Carol Chen
The owner of the Ocean Parkway Older Adult Center, which serves as a cooling hub, claimed he closed the place because of low attendance. But staff and clients claim that just isn’t true.
After more than 20 years serving seniors in southern Brooklyn, the Ocean Parkway Older Adult Center is gone. The city-funded senior center served its last meal this past Friday and laid off most of its workers, according to the staff, after its landlord — itself a nonprofit built to house and serve low-income seniors — refused to renew its lease expiring June 30.
The closure comes as New York enters a major heat wave, and the center had been one of the city’s designated cooling centers, an air-conditioned refuge where the public can escape dangerous heat in the summer months.
The city’s Office of Emergency Management, which oversees the city’s cooling center network, confirmed the closure.
The center’s landlord, Ahi Ezer Housing Development Fund Corp, the nonprofit that owns the affordable senior building where the center operated on the ground floor, has declined to renew the lease that has kept the program in place for more than 20 years....
However, finding a space that works for the center has proven a daunting task, according to the director Mazal Vachine, especially given the short notice that the staff has received.
Any replacement site has to be handicapped-accessible and equipped with a commercial kitchen capable of turning out hundreds of meals a day.
“We’ve looked a little bit, but nothing seems to be popping up,” said Vachine, “it’s not so easy to just start over like that.”
As of June 30, no other location has been identified, according to the staff.
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Another sign of a failing country.
Trump has a couple of billion in grift loot he could help with. I'm sure he cares about our elders as he is one as well, albeit retarded.
Trump Having The Great American State Fair/4th Of July/America's 250th Birthday He Deserves — Evan Hurst
Yesterday, Donald Trump was in North Dakota, having senile babble-chats with AI holograms of Teddy Roosevelt, trying to get it to tell him how upset it is about the Democrats selling the Panama Canal for a dollar. Later, he gave a speech in front of some kind of cohort that was supposed to be dressed up as the Rough Riders, but behind Trump just looked like The Village People. He told the crowd how he was going to give himself the Medal of Freedom and also give it to his older sons, so that they could have a “threesome.”
Yep.
He also told them that this weekend, for the Fourth of July, he’s going to give a speech outside, even though it’s going to be 107 degrees, “a really long speech, just to show that I can do anything!” Won’t everybody be impressed with big and tough and strong Donald Trump?
Yesterday, Donald Trump was in North Dakota, having senile babble-chats with AI holograms of Teddy Roosevelt, trying to get it to tell him how upset it is about the Democrats selling the Panama Canal for a dollar. Later, he gave a speech in front of some kind of cohort that was supposed to be dressed up as the Rough Riders, but behind Trump just looked like The Village People. He told the crowd how he was going to give himself the Medal of Freedom and also give it to his older sons, so that they could have a “threesome.”
Yep.
He also told them that this weekend, for the Fourth of July, he’s going to give a speech outside, even though it’s going to be 107 degrees, “a really long speech, just to show that I can do anything!” Won’t everybody be impressed with big and tough and strong Donald Trump?
Question: If Donald Trump dies during his Fourth of July speech and nobody is there to see it because nobody is going to his fucking Fourth of July party, will he really be dead?
So there are a lot of headlines right now about the continuing humiliation that is the Great American State Fair, which nobody is attending, and if you say nobody is attending, then you obviously hate America, so better not say nobody is attending.
Here is Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins dodging panties everybody’s throwing at her on stage, uh oh, Brooke, they’re all crowd-surfing!
“Ow! Ow! Ow! Too many panties!” said Brooke Rollins, who was about to go file a complaint from panty-hitting-face injuries.
It also happened to Dr. Oz
Yesterday, Donald Trump was in North Dakota, having senile babble-chats with AI holograms of Teddy Roosevelt, trying to get it to tell him how upset it is about the Democrats selling the Panama Canal for a dollar. Later, he gave a speech in front of some kind of cohort that was supposed to be dressed up as the Rough Riders, but behind Trump just looked like The Village People. He told the crowd how he was going to give himself the Medal of Freedom and also give it to his older sons, so that they could have a “threesome.”
Yep.
He also told them that this weekend, for the Fourth of July, he’s going to give a speech outside, even though it’s going to be 107 degrees, “a really long speech, just to show that I can do anything!” Won’t everybody be impressed with big and tough and strong Donald Trump?
Question: If Donald Trump dies during his Fourth of July speech and nobody is there to see it because nobody is going to his fucking Fourth of July party, will he really be dead?
So there are a lot of headlines right now about the continuing humiliation that is the Great American State Fair, which nobody is attending, and if you say nobody is attending, then you obviously hate America, so better not say nobody is attending.
Here is Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins dodging panties everybody’s throwing at her on stage, uh oh, Brooke, they’re all crowd-surfing!
“Ow! Ow! Ow! Too many panties!” said Brooke Rollins, who was about to go file a complaint from panty-hitting-face injuries.
It also happened to Dr. Oz.
It also happened to Trump’s glorious arch, which is leaking some sort of caulk jizz, probably from all the panties being thrown in its general direction:
So that’s cool.
Places where definitely nobody is throwing panties? Into jars of Mt. Olive Pickles, because Mt. Olive Pickles withdrew its participation in the event after a Confederate flag somehow showed up in the North Carolina booth.
Mt. Olive Pickles: Keep your panties out of our brine, RACISTS....
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Mt. Olive Pickles! It's what 's for lunch every day at our house!
I Saw This Happen Behind the Iron Curtain. I Never Expected to See It Here... — Thom Hartmann
An afternoon in East Berlin became the lens through which today's America suddenly makes terrifying sense.
...I’ve been thinking about Torsten all week, because the reporting now says that immigration checkpoints are being set up within the United States, and that more than 213 million of us Americans live inside a hundred-mile band running inward from every land border and coastline where federal agents can now stop your car and demand proof of your immigration status. No international crossing required.
That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows ten entire states and cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobody’s idea of open-borders radicals, call it the “Constitution-free zone” and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.
It’s “Constitution-free” because ICE has decided that the Fourth Amendment, which reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” is just a suggestion, rather than one of the foundational guarantees of American liberty; just an obstacle standing between the Trump administration and the police state it’s steadily but relentlessly building.
In Washington, D.C., for example, a construction worker got waved over by the Park Police for a minor traffic matter, and within a minute ICE agents had surrounded his truck, asking where everyone was from and whether they were in the country illegally. Two of his passengers were taken away, and nobody would tell him where.
ICE is also now paying state and local police to help, and the money is staggering. One estimate says the total could hit two billion dollars this year alone. In Florida, police departments pocketed nearly forty million dollars for vehicles and gear. In the Florida Keys, agents threw up a checkpoint on the only highway in and out, a tourist route, and made more than three hundred arrests.
They’re stationed at courthouses, bus stations, train terminals, and airports too, snaring domestic travelers who never came near a border. The ACLU’s Naureen Shah put it plainly. “We’ve never seen this financial incentive scheme exist.”...
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Trump's nation of repression must be eliminated from the face of our planet!
Trump’s fans got 'trash' while Trump got rich: WSJ report — Adam Lynch
“My investment is trash now,” one user said of their WLF tokens.
"People backed Trump because they believed he would fight for them and were hoodwinked into thinking he cared about the working classes who brought him into power,” said a longtime Republican activist familiar with grassroots sentiment among Trump's MAGA base. “Seeing billions tied to crypto makes some loyal supporters uncomfortable and most of them have no idea what crypto is, let alone have the resources to invest in it. They feel this isn't public service anymore."
“The president raked in cash by issuing new assets — World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto,” reports WSJ. “Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.”
All told, roughly two-thirds of investors in Trump’s memecoin are currently in the red, according to crypto data provider Nansen, which tracks 1.48 million crypto wallets that bought the token since its January 2025 launch. Many fans spent thousands of dollars on Trump coins while the biggest spenders shelled out millions for the token....
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A crook and a con man. That's all Trump has ever been. Still, the suckers bit. The disgace and shame of a nation!
GOP strategist gets face pounced for claiming Dems 'hate' America — Adam Lynch
...“But the difference between this presidency and other Republican and Democratic presidencies is the fact that in other presidencies besides this one, the cabinet and the administration always believed that they were serving the American people,” she added. “… This President believes there … must be a loyalty test when it comes to his cabinet and everybody serving in his cabinet, and what that is that his cabinet is not serving the American people. What they're doing is that they're serving him … and you're seeing it on display with a 250th anniversary.”
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Scott Jennings is just another sad sucker that bought the con.
Why Right Wing 'Communist' Name-Calling Won't Work — Oliver Willis
Republicans are launching a rerun of one of their most well-worn tired lines of attack: communism.
...No one running in the New York elections ran as a communist. They ran as progressives, largely opposed to the disastrous policies put in place by Republicans, like an abusive anti-immigrant regime, social safety net cuts, and tax cuts for the wealthy.
The attack was boringly familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to U.S. politics for the last 60-plus years. Conveniently for the right, whoever is in charge of the Democratic Party or is an influential voice within the party is one of the Four Horsemen of communism or socialism....
Socialism and communism just simply aren’t imminent if everyone from Al Gore and Bill Clinton to Kamala Harris to Zohran Mamdani are all supposedly on the same far-left page. The attack is nothing more than background noise, especially as more and more people turn against failed right-wing policies.
When everyone is supposedly a socialist, no one is.
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Nazis always fear losing that which they have never had.
Trump Trying To Sabotage Kennedy Center Funds To Keep His Name On It — NewsHound Ellen
It appears Trump cronies rigged the rules to make the Kennedy Center lose donations if Trump’s name is removed.
But it seems the removal of his name proved too much for Big Baby Trump’s ego after all. In addition to covering the wall of the center with a tarp, thus hiding his missing name, Trump’s cronies created a legal document designed to threaten the center’s finances if Big Baby’s name isn’t there. There to help is Trump’s personal attorney cosplaying as acting attorney general, Todd “Slush Fund” Blanche....
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The filthy swine shows his filthy hoof!
JD Vance: We'll Correct Roberts Court's Birthright Citizen Decision 'Mistake' — John Amato
Is he threatening violence against the court?
I don't know how anybody can say that if a person who is an illegal alien or a person, for example, who's pregnant and comes to the United States on a vacation, they have a baby and all of a sudden their entire family gets the benefits of American citizenship.
Where does he get this idea that the "entire family" gets the benefits of American citizenship?
There are two ways to amend the U.S. Constitution. An amendment ratified by 3/4 of the states after being passed by a 2/3rds majority in the House and Senate. Or a constitutional convention, if 34 states pass resolutions calling for one. Those are the only two ways, and the right wing has been setting up the stage for a constitutional convention for well over 20 years.
Good luck.
Their new plan is to go after pregnant women. What are they going to do? Hand out pee sticks as women get off the plane? Do ultrasounds as they go through customs?
There was a time in this country when anyone could come from elsewhere and build a life. Those immigrants built our highways and railroads and worked the farms and built the American economy into what it is today.
Fragile white men in power are so afraid that they'll lose that power to Black and brown folks that they're losing it over people coming to this country and building lives. On the one hand, they want people to have more babies to bulk up the workforce, and on the other, they want to toss out the people who are working hard here, calling them "illegal."
No human is illegal. And it's only in recent history that everyone needed to produce papers anyway.
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Like Trump. Vance talks to hear himself. He's a clueless wannabe that has led a very sheltered life.
Protesters Swarm NY Restaurant After Facebook Post Mocking Drowning Death Of Muslim Child With Autism
Albany’s CBS affiliate reports:
The owner of a Latham restaurant is responding after a social media comment posted under the business’s Facebook account sparked outrage in the community on Tuesday. The comment was posted in response to a journalist’s social media post about Harbe Nagi, a child with autism who was found dead in a pool after being reported missing for nearly two days.
The comment, which was made under the Taste of Italy Facebook account, made assumptions about Nagi’s family’s religion and included inflammatory statements about Muslims, prompting criticism online. Frank Cappello, owner and operator of Taste of Italy, explained how the comment was posted. “It was somebody in my circle,” Cappello said....
"Note that his wife didn't apologize for what she said. Only that she regretted that it was on the business account, and that people objected to it.
I hope they don't have kids of their own, and that their relatives don't leave their own kids with them." — Karl Dubhe IV (comments)
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It was a little boy, you retarded dumb shits! Your hatred is unbecoming to anyone that is human!
Shut the "Taste of Italy" religious hate down!
"Horrific fake religion?" That goes for ALL of them!
Video Busts USDA Secretary’s Fair Speech To Nobody
The Daily Beast reports:
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has been busted trying to hide how few people bothered to watch her speak at Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair flop. Rollins was interviewed by Debbie Kraulidis for the Moms for America podcast on stage at the sparsely attended event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
The top Trump ally promoted the talk on X with a brief seven-second video that crucially did not show the crowd. At one point, the camera cuts to a shot of Rollins and Kraulidis from the back of the stage, which also strategically obscures the audience. However, another video posted by FactPost embarrasses Rollins by revealing the “nonexistent crowd” watching her.
"May the Republican turnout in November be equally impressive." — DevilDog (comments)
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The failure that is Trump.
Thieves Are Absolutely Loving All of These New Data Center Projects — Victor Tangermann
An enormous amount of resources and money go into the construction of a data center.
The enormous facilities are filled to the brim with extremely sought-after gear, from hard-to-get-by AI chips to cooling equipment.
And for thieves eyeing these construction projects, there’s another worthwhile target as well: oodles of copper, a metal that has risen considerably in price over the last few years.
As Business Insider reports, investigators are trying to chase down cargo thieves who stole a pair of trailers that were carrying $1.3 million worth of data center supplies, including $300,000 worth of copper wire spools.
The bounty was recovered in the Chicago area by law enforcement last week after the trailer with the copper was first reported stolen in Alabama. A separate trailer holding an estimated $1 million worth of data center infrastructure supplies had also mysteriously gone missing in Jacksonville, Florida, suggesting it was a coordinated effort to bring both to Illinois.
A separate incident saw almost $5 million worth of copper and electronics vanish while in transit, as the Canadian Press reported earlier this month.
The enormous rush to construct sprawling AI data center facilities has been a boon for cargo thieves, criminals who intercept products and valuable materials while they’re in transit. According to the US Department of Homeland Security, cargo theft accounts for roughly $35 billion in losses a year....
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Not one cent for security?
Factories Attach Cameras to Workers, in Hopes of Replacing Them With Robots — Joe Wilkins
Today, sweatshop workers across the Global South are being made to pull double duty: both stitching clothes together, and training robots to put themselves out of work entirely.
New reporting by the Guardian documented this emerging gig taking hold at manufacturing facilities around the world. Outside Delhi, a 32-year-old garment maker identified as Lalita says her factory now requires everyone to strap a GoPro camera to their heads at the start of each shift.
“We found it funny at first, because of how we all looked with that headgear,” Lalita told the Guardian. Yet as cameras started to dominate the shop floor, workers became more wary that their every word would be picked up by the boss, she explains, resulting in a much quieter, more paranoid workplace.
“The way people mount a CCTV camera on a wall, they mounted one on us,” she added.
And as their bosses recorded terabytes of footage on them, the workers say they were never told what the cameras were ultimately for. While they had the side-effect of enforcing discipline by keeping workers focused and fearful, the cameras were actually there to hoover up footage to train humanoid robots....
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J.D. Vance should read this. It might change his attitude toward corporations and workers.
Birthright Citizenship Sends Fearful, Blubbering MAGA Nazis Searching For Final Solution — Evan Hurst
Decision really has triggered the part of America that looks like this.
You would really think the Supreme Court had written a line into the Constitution that was never there before, the way white supremacist Nazis throughout greater MAGAdom are pulling out their white hoods, lighting crosses on hilltops and using their giant four-headed swastika dildos they probably use anyway whenever four Republican men with masculine insecurity issues (redundant) find themselves gathered with no wives around.
We are talking of course about the hysterical meltdown these people are having right now, showing us exactly who they are, in ways that should leave no doubt that we should never view these people as countrymen of good faith ever again. (Got it, dickhole moderate Democrats like Josh Gottheimer? These are not your friends. We are never forgiving the MAGA Nazi Republican Party, not as long as we live. Are you with decent Americans or are you with them? Decide.)
To review: The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that in fact, the Constitution does say in plain English what it has said in plain English ever since the 14th Amendment was ratified — history lesson! That’s 18 motherfucking 68! — which is that if you’re born here, you’re a citizen. Simple as that. It’s always said that. There’s never been an asterisk next to it. And anybody who thinks there’s room for interpretation there is an inbred Nazi fucking lunatic and a piece of shit....
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Amen! Amen! Amen!
Vance: My Faith Is Against “Low-Wage Foreigners”
“My faith really motivates me to remember that our economic policy, it doesn’t exist for corporations, it doesn’t exist for Wall Street. As much as we want everybody to be successful, it exists to support the dignity of human beings. We want every American to be able to raise a family, to be able to support themselves in comfort and in dignity, that’s why we’re trying to bring investment and manufacturing back to the United States of America. That’s why we don’t like low-wage foreigners coming in and undercutting at the wages of American workers. We want normal Americans to be able to live a dignified life.” – JD Vance, on Fox News.
""our economic policy, it doesn’t exist for corporations."
WTF??? Your entire economic policy exists for nothing but corporations and oligarchs." — moisturize me (comments)
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Who does this nitwit thinks hires the workers he's speaking of? He knows they are using AI for all of our jobs now. Our corporations and the extreme wealthy are in charge and run our country now. Vance wants it that way as he thinks he's a part of it. He is not. The chickenshit Nazis always pull out the word "Communism" when they are losing the narritve. Vance is an obvious fraud. Since he's from Ohio he should talk to Mike DeWine and Jim Tressel and learn a thing or two.
JD Vance’s Drunk History — Steven Harper
The Watergate scandal revealed President Richard Nixon’s contempt for the Constitution and his systematic abuse of power. At the time, it was one of the darkest chapters in US history, resulting in the first-ever resignation of an American president.
But on June 25, Vice President JD Vance told his audience at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum that Nixon got a bum rap. The uncontested historical record proves otherwise. Vance’s contrary view demonstrates the depths to which he and President Donald Trump have taken the country....
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More facts that level the lunacy of J.D. Vance's warped concept of our history.
Another Major Study Finds No Tylenol-Autism Link
Ars Technica reports:
Another large study has found no link between autism and Tylenol use during pregnancy, refuting claims by President Trump and anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
In September, Trump and Kennedy held a press conference in which they stated without evidence that the common fever and pain reducer acetaminophen—sold as Tylenol in the US and also known as paracetamol—causes autism in children if taken during pregnancy. Trump repeatedly warned pregnant people not to take Tylenol and instead “tough it out” with fever and/or pain.
Medical organizations decried Trump’s message, emphasizing that acetaminophen is a safe pain and fever reliever during pregnancy and that untreated fever during pregnancy is known to increase the risk of autism in babies as well as other conditions, including miscarriage, birth defects, and premature birth. Still, the president’s warning was effective. Texas sued the maker of Tylenol over the alleged connection
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Back to hell with this demon!
Warning: The Supreme Court Just Revived a System America Buried in 1883 — Thom Hartmann
Critics argue the decision resurrects the patronage politics the Pendleton Civil Service Act was designed to end.
The six unscrupulous Republicans on the Supreme Court — over the loud objections of the three true constitutionalists on the Court — are aggressively dragging America back not just to the 1950s but, as of yesterday, to the 1830s.
Arguably the most depraved president in American history, Andrew Jackson (aka “The Indian Killer” a title he gave himself), Trump’s favorite, whose picture he hung in the Oval Office, invented what came to be called the “Spoils System.”
If you wanted a job in the federal government, or a favorable ruling from one of the then-few federal agencies, all you had to do was give a big enough gift to President Jackson, or pledge your loyalty to him instead of the Constitution and the people, and your wish would be granted.
Prior presidents, particularly among the Founding generation, were generally strongly opposed to such a corrupt system....
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It is past time for reconstruction of our Supreme Court. It no longer functions as it is now stands. Major reforms must take place for us to move forward as a nation of freedom.
It's the Next America — Robert Reich
The source of the new energy taking over the Democratic Party isn't Democratic Socialism. It's something far more exciting
Friends,
In one of the most notable upsets of the Democratic primaries so far, Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros, 29, yesterday won the nomination over incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette to represent Colorado’s hotly-contested First Congressional District.
I expect to see more stories about how the Democratic Socialists of America are taking over the Democratic Party. In New York last week, nine of 10 candidates endorsed by the DSA won primaries for the state Legislature and Congress. All three Democratic Socialist insurgents Mayor Zohran Mamdani backed for Congress prevailed. Two of them defeated incumbents.
Pundits eager to declare a new movement or sound the alarm about socialism are having a field day.
But they’re wrong.
Voters who have supported these candidates haven’t done so because they’ve been particularly attracted to the idea of Democratic Socialism. Most don’t even know what Democratic Socialism is.
In reality, voters have been attracted to vigorous young people who are committed to getting stuff done. Voters have had it with incumbents who have been in their jobs for decades. And they want fighters — who will get big corporate money out of our politics and go to the mat for average working people....
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It is high time for America to take our country into a future for all of us!
Trump hauled into court over rule that could cost millions their Medicaid — Anna Claire Vollers, Ohio Capital Journal
Twenty-five Democratic-led states plus the District of Columbia have sued the Trump administration over its new work requirements for people who get their health insurance through Medicaid.
At issue is a “medically frail” designation that the states say is too narrow and will make it too difficult for ill and disabled people to remain on Medicaid.
They’re challenging the administration’s guidance on who can be exempt from the work requirements included in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the broad tax and spending measure President Donald Trump signed a year ago.
Medicaid is the publicly-funded health insurance for people with low incomes. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states that have expanded Medicaid eligibility to more adults under the Affordable Care Act — 40 states plus the District of Columbia — must require those adults to prove they’re working, going to school or serving their communities for at least 80 hours a month to receive Medicaid. Georgia, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, which have used federal waivers to expand their Medicaid programs, are also subject to the new work rules.
The new lawsuit specifically targets new federal guidance that narrows the definition of who can qualify as “medically frail,” a key exemption used to excuse Medicaid recipients from work requirements if they have serious disabilities or illnesses. The guidance came in the form of an interim final rule published this month by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)....
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Make this bilious bastard have to pay for his own damned healthcare!
Trump DHS chief's wild birth tourism claim blown apart by experts: 'This is not happening' — Travis Gettys
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin was hit with blowback for claiming that Chinese women were racing into the U.S. days before giving birth so their children would be American citizens.
President Donald Trump's DHS chief appeared Wednesday morning on "Fox and Friends," where he made the baseless claims following a Supreme Court decision to strike down an executive order limiting birthright citizenship.
Co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested that pregnant foreigners should be prohibited from traveling to the U.S., and Mullin seemingly agreed, but critics questioned their facts.
"We know this is not happening, because no airline in the world would permit it," said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. "And even if someone managed to hide a pregnancy that far along, CBP officials at airports already have the discretion to turn away a tourist in that situation; no new laws or policies needed."
"No federal agency has produced a definitive count of how many women travel to the United States specifically for birth tourism," noted immigration lawyer Allen Orr Jr. Researchers generally conclude that birth tourism represents a small fraction of all births in the United States....
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In fact, we do know how many foreign births happen. This is a mystery to only the anger ridden, JohnWayne Melon. It's around 9% of all births. This means that 91% are given birth by citizens and not foreigners.
Elect candiates who are not lying, inept fascists.
Fox News host called out after meltdown at Supreme Court ruling: 'Lying or didn't read' — Matthew Chapman
Fox News commentator and right-wing talk radio host Mark Levin lashed out at the Supreme Court's decision upholding their century-old birthright citizenship precedent — but swiftly got called out by experts and observers for getting a basic fact about the decision incorrect.
Levin, who declared the ruling "one of the dumbest decisions I’ve seen" on "Hannity" after it was handed down, took to X to complain that "The 14th amendment was adopted by more than 2/3rds of the members of Congress and thereafter ratified by 3/4ths of the states. Yet, nowhere can the Court or its proponents point to all those elected representatives at the federal and state level who argued for birthright citizenship for the children of aliens — illegal aliens of all matter!"
That issue, Levin said, "wasn’t even on their collective mind. They were dealing with Reconstruction, which was going poorly. No, this is not a constitutional decision. It’s a cowardly decision. An abomination giving constitutional protection to what is illegal conduct."
There's just one problem, as many observers pointed out: the Supreme Court did, in fact, address the exact issue Levin is claiming they did not address.
"Mark Levin is either outright lying or tacitly admitting he did not read the decision, because the Court explicitly discussed in great detail how 'those elected representatives' intended the 14th Amendment would apply to children of immigrants," wrote American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, quoting a passage from Chief Justice John Roberts' opinion that notes, "the bill's sponsor, Senator Lyman Trumbull, enthusiastically agreed with the bill's critics that it would make citizens of 'the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country.'"
"Tell me you didn't read the Roberts opinion without saying you didn't read that history lesson," wrote immigration attorney and Emory University law professor Charles Kuck....
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OK. We can now agree, Levin is, in fact, a dumb shit!
'Stunning' disclosure shows what Trump's doing isn't legal: ex-White House lawyer — David Edwards
President Donald Trump's former White House lawyer said Tuesday that Trump's $1 billion crypto haul is part of "the greatest onslaught of corruption in the history of mankind."
Ty Cobb, who served on Trump's White House legal team in 2017 and 2018, made the remarks on CNN's "OutFront" in response to Trump's newly released financial disclosure — a 927-page filing showing Trump earned more than $1 billion from crypto ventures in 2025 alone.
Anchor Erin Burnett asked whether it's all legal
"I don't believe so," Cobb said.
"How can that be anything other than trading on his image and likeness in violation of the Emoluments Clause?" Cobb said of the commemorative coins, which generated several hundred million dollars.
The Emoluments Clause is a constitutional rule that bars the president from personally profiting from his office.
"He creates policies that can only enrich himself and his family," Cobb said. "I think the average American should be staggered."
"I mean, we are seeing the greatest onslaught of corruption in the history of mankind in the last 18 months," he added. "This is somebody who every day is devoted to the accumulation of wealth and power."
Burnett also cited a New York Post editorial calling the conduct "the shame of the nation" and a New York Times report that found at least 14 companies tied to Trump and to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's son are pursuing federal mining contracts backed by roughly $9 billion in guaranteed government financing.
"It is the shame of the nation, and people should be paying attention," Cobb agreed....
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Anyone with a small piece of brain knows this criminal is a criminal! It's past time to rid our country of him.
Fox Host: Ban All Officials Who Didn’t Take Part In Trump’s State Fair From Seeking Higher Office [VIDEO]
“The message is: my politicization of this, my hatred for an individual, my lack of respect for the office of the presidency and my clearly lack of respect for the United States of America, completely trumps—no pun intended—my public service of my occupation.
“What a travesty to the citizenry of those 11 states that don’t get to be represented. To be discarded like that, overlooked, not included because of someone’s petty feelings. I find this so patently embarrassing, and I think that this frankly should be disqualifying for any of them that are seeking higher office.
“Let’s remind them of how petty they were to exclude citizens that wanted to celebrate their nation’s 250th birthday.” – Fox News host Emily Compagno, who last appeared here when she declared that she was “looking forward to Mamdani failing.”
Also last year, Compagno called for CNN’s reporters to be arrested for reporting on ICE.
The governors of several states that aren’t participating in Trump’s fair have been named as potential presidential candidates.
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Winner of "Laugh of the Month" award! Top notch comedy!
Trump Seeks To Delay Paying $5M Owed To Carroll
CBS News reports:
Lawyers for President Trump asked for writer E. Jean Carroll’s consent to delay the $5 million awarded to her by a 2023 jury, and signaled they plan to ask the Supreme Court to reconsider his appeal of Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation case, according to an attorney for Carroll.
Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, wrote in a court filing Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s lawyer called her with the request Monday, soon after the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. Later Monday, Kaplan wrote, she informed Mr. Trump’s team that “Carroll does not consent,” and asked whether the president would agree to the immediate disbursement of the funds Carroll has waited years to receive.
In a separate filing Tuesday, Kaplan asked a judge to set a faster-than-normal schedule to disburse $5 million in damages awarded to her by a 2023 jury, which found Mr. Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. Kaplan wrote that Carroll is also due an additional $779,783 in interest.
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Trump's got it in grift money! Pay up, chiselers, or your boy gets a visit from Big Leo and his knuckle breakers.ROTFLMAO!
Fox News Flipping Out Over Birthright Citizenship Supreme Court Ruling — John Amato
It's like they can't read the U.S. Constitution
The gaggle-fest on Fox News ''Outnumbered' program was furious the Supreme Court didn't honor Trump's illegal executive order that would undo the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting birthright citizenship.
Did you know 3 billion women will come to the U.S., give birth and then go back to their countries to enjoy the fruits of a desolated U.S. under Demented Donald?
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More illiterates.
It's like they have no idea we have a constitution.
Fox News has never been a part of a progressive society. Treason is all they've ever peddled.
GOP Rep. Chip Roy: We Must “Pause All Immigration”
Blah, blah, blah, etc....
“The Supreme Court manufactured out of thin air a complete abomination of a ruling by the Chief Justice suggesting that you can simply become a citizen from being born on dirt, thereby validating the abhorrent practice of baby factories."
"The Supreme Court manufactured out of thin air a complete abomination of a ruling by the Chief Justice suggesting that you can simply become a citizen from being born on dirt.
Which happens to be Chip Roy's claim to US citizenship, as well." — Clay (comments)
"Gee chip, can you help Chump any more to distract from his chaos, cruelty and corruption? How many of those 6,665 South Africans were pregnant when Chump imported them?" — Jay Silversmith (comments)
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Read it and weep, motherfuckers:
About 9% of U.S. births in 2023 were to unauthorized or temporary legal immigrant mothers.
Another illiterate.
The Constitution is very clear. It does not say what this idiot states.
It's brown and black humans he detests. We all know it.
Roy is just another traitor in our midst.
GOP Rep Shrugs Off Inflation: “I’m Gonna Get Lobster”
MEIDAS TOUCH: “How do House Republicans make the case that you’re fighting for affordability when you go back to your districts?”
REP. TROY NEHLS: “Affordability? What are you talking about? I’m gonna go there tomorrow. I’m gonna get me a couple of big lobster tails. I’m gonna get me some nice rib eyes. I’m gonna sit in my backyard with my family, my neighbors, and we’re going to be enjoying the fourth, celebrating 250 years, the birthday. We’re gonna be celebrating the greatest president my lifetime, Donald J. Trump, maybe watch some fireworks, won’t be up here. But, listen, everybody understands, you’re gonna see a little increase in energy prices because of Iran. I mean, come on, people aren’t stupid.”
MEIDAS TOUCH: “Do you think the 60% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck can afford lobster tails and rib eyes and all of that?”
NEHLS: “Maybe not. Maybe the 60% of Americans don’t work as hard as I do.”
"NEHLS: “Maybe not. Maybe the 60% of Americans don’t work as hard as I do.”
The least productive Congress in our nation's history.
The House works an average of 147 days a year.
Americans who have one job, (a shrinking number of Americans) work about 240 days a year." — DaddySnark (comments)
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Troy wins "Retard of the Month" award!
Federalist Co-Founder: “Sterilize All Foreign Visitors”
Blah, blah, blah, etc....
"“a nation which can’t even restrict who gets to be a citizen isn’t a nation.”
But we do restrict it. We restrict it a lot, actually. We just don't restrict it the way that the xenophobes want" — Fen (comments)
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Another disciple of Hitler. What shit hole do these turds crawl out from?
Texas Republicans may regret mandating Bible in classes — Amanda Marcotte
Debating Christianity in class will likely create more non-believers
The decades-long Republican quest to force Christianity on those they see as unwashed heathens reached a new low on June 26, when the GOP-controlled Texas State School Board put Bible stories on mandatory reading lists for every level of public school student. The decision is disturbing on many levels, starting with the outright disinformation being used to justify this move by people in charge of educating children.
“Our nation was founded as a Christian nation,” board member Brandon Hall insisted during a Thursday news conference.
It’s unclear if Hall is lying or has deluded himself, but there is no excuse for indulging this falsehood about the founders, who clearly forbade the “establishment of religion” in the Constitution and repeatedly emphasized separation of church and state. It’s no surprise where this is coming from, either. The school board hired David Barton, a discredited writer who falsely claims to be a historian, as an adviser. Barton has no training and less than zero credibility, having been caught repeatedly peddling easily disproved lies. But because Republicans are pleased by his intellectually dishonest interpretation of America’s past, they continue to choose his nonsense over actual history developed by real scholars....
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Those of us who recognize history know this fact. Ignore history at your own risk.
Trump Reflecting Pool contractor used toxic liner with 'long lasting effects': report — Bennito L. Kelty
The Reflecting Pool is lined with a toxic epoxy that will have "long-lasting effects," according to a new report.
The MeidasTouch News found safety data sheets that revealed the Reflecting Pool is lined with a material that is "toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects." The lining was put in as part of Trump's $14 million renovations.
Multiple dead ducks have been found in the Reflecting Pool since the renovations were completed, leading to calls for investigations and the enforcement of federal environmental protections, according to a report by the Center for Biological Diversity....
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The pool continues to be a metaphor for America. Trump has poisoned us as well as all the waterfowl that will die there!
Onlookers astonished by JD Vance's latest attempt to dunk on Pope Leo: 'Excommunicate him' — Bennito L. Kelty
Vice President JD Vance's most recent jab at the pope backfired as onlookers shot back at him.
During an appearance on Fox News, Vance questioned decisions by the American Pope Leo, who has emerged as a vocal advocate for immigrants and directly challenged the Trump administration's sweeping immigration crackdowns.
"I don't see Pope Leo as an anti-capitalist. I do think some of the things that have come out of the Vatican on the immigration issue, in particular, have been troubling," Vance said. "What I would hope the Catholic leadership has learned from some of the things that me and Marco [Rubio] and the president have said about immigration is, it's not just about the dignity of the immigrant, it's about the dignity of the native born."
"You have to have some deep, unregistered pretentiousness to try to dunk on the pope" — Juan Escalante (@juanescalante.com) June 30, 2026 at 6:05 PM
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The Cult and it's minion.
Federal judge torches 'Schrödinger-esque' immigration policy in Trump admin setback — Bennito L. Kelty
The Trump administration was dealt a major setback in its immigration plans after an appeals court torched it as Schrödinger-esque.
A Denver-based federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected the Trump administration's push to jail immigrants in the U.S. without a bond hearing. In his opinion, Judge Richard Federico likened the Trump administration's reasoning to a famous quantum physics paradox.
The case centered around the question of whether an immigrant living in the country's interior can be detained without a bond hearing while fighting their removal.
Under previous administrations, the government detained people without bond only if they were stopped at the border seeking entry. Last year, the Trump administration broadened its reading of the law to detain immigrants who crossed years ago and have lived here ever since.
The Trump administration leaned on narrow jargon applying to an "applicant for admission," which is someone never formally let in. But the same provision also requires that the person be "seeking admission," which means they're actively asking to come in, and only applies to people at the border.
In arguing that they meant the same thing, the Trump administration made what Federico described as an "interpretive quantum leap." He also noted that the Trump administration "glosses" over the complications in its interpretation and failed to provide "an exceedingly persuasive argument" to justify it.
"Like Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously dead and alive, 'applicant for admission' simultaneously takes on both its ordinary and statutory meanings in the government's hands," Federico wrote. "As far as we are aware, no other phrase in the United States Code has this Schrödinger-esque property."
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Trump was heard to comment, "Do what, now?"
Stephen Miller threatens to 'take a hard look' at banning pregnant women entering America — Matthew Chapman
President Donald Trump's top adviser Stephen Miller suggested on Fox News Tuesday evening that now the Supreme Court has struck down the executive order abolishing birthright citizenship, the administration could retaliate by prohibiting all foreign pregnant women from entering the country as a means of preventing the right from being granted.
"If you have birthright citizenship, it means that if a person comes here nine months pregnant to go look around at some things, in a couple of weeks, that is the mother of a lifetime American citizen and a direct line into cash and welfare for the rest of that child's life," said Miller.
"Are we banning pregnant women from America?" asked Fox News anchor Jesse Watters. "Are we banning foreign pregnant women?"
"Well, what I'm saying, Jesse, is that you have to now think very carefully on who you let into the country, even on a temporary basis, because of the possibility, as you said, for birth tourism, right? ... People that come here just to have babies on American soil, and that baby gets to be a citizen for life."
Ultimately, he added, "There’s a lot of things we have to take a hard look at."...
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We are looking real hard at this miscreant Hitler throwback.
Heritage Foundation: Birthright Ruling Is “Tremendous Betrayal And We Will Lead Fight To Correct This Error”
Long whine....
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Amendment XIV
Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Obviously, this zero is illiterate. If he could read the 14th Amendment he would know that section is the only thing that holds this nation together.
But the one thing we can agree on is that SCOTUS is corrupt and must be restructured.
Oh, and shut down the Heritage Foundation!
Trump 'too mentally feeble' as 'crazy stalker' aide takes control: ex-RNC official — David Edwards
President Donald Trump is "too mentally feeble" to hold office and a "crazy, stalker-ish" aide has effectively taken control of the West Wing, former RNC spokesperson Cheri Jacobus said.
Jacobus made the comments on her Tuesday YouTube show, Politics with Cheri Jacobus, about Natalie Harp, 34, an aide to Trump since 2022 who became his executive assistant when he took office in January 2025.
"Natalie Harp. She's a 34-year-old executive assistant to Trump, and she has unnerved her colleagues by leaving out letters for Trump that say things like, 'You are all that matters to me,'" Jacobus said.
"They've raised alarms ... about her feeding the president unhinged online content and being the driving force behind his bizarre Truth Social posts," she continued.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Harp compiles content for Trump's approval and then logs into his account herself, often late at night, to post it.
"What's bizarre and disturbing is that he is so vulnerable to this sort of undue influence. This is somebody who should not be in office — he is too old and too mentally feeble," Jacobus observed.
"But she's got this devotion to Trump that's just disturbing. Very, very disturbing. And other staff at the White House are concerned. And you know how disturbing the other staff at the Trump White House are — so if they're disturbed and concerned about this, my God, that's pretty bad," the former RNC official noted.
Trump's closeness to Harp was documented in Regime Change, a new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which reported Harp left Trump notes reading, "You are all that matters to me."
"All right, this woman is a danger," Jacobus said. "Very concerning. I don't know what we do about it."...
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That's odd. Everyone else knows exactly what to do about it.
Ex-Trump official erupts after fiery exchange with CNN anchor: 'You are a left-wing hack!' — Nicole Charky-Chami
A former Trump administration official clashed with a CNN anchor in a heated exchange after he was fact-checked about birthright citizenship during a live broadcast on Tuesday.
Ken Cuccinelli, former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump, was talking to CNN anchor Eric Hill when the host clarified a talking point Cuccinelli was using referring to "birthright tourism," claiming that it was a rampant problem — just hours after the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship and rejected Trump's executive order that declared people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
Hill explained that it might be a concern and that the numbers were not clear. She pushed back on the unfounded claim as Cuccinelli tried to talk over her in disagreement.
"The American people, in terms of polling, do overwhelmingly support birthright citizenship as it stands now," Hill said.
Cuccinelli appeared frustrated.
"Boy, you are a left-wing hack!" Cuccinelli said, as he was cut off from the broadcast.
Hill was stunned and responded quickly.
"Wow, it's unfortunate that you felt the need to say that," she said. "I appreciate you coming on here to answer fair questions."
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Go back and tell your pedophile boss you were abused by a CNN reporter, Nazi chump. We can't take you assholes anywhere anymore. Damn!
It's not so much they are against birthright, it's the fact that they hate these people for being human in the same world as them!
'Pretty good burn': Justice Jackson dismantles Clarence Thomas' double-speak dissent — Matthew Chapman
As the Supreme Court handed down a landmark ruling on the last day of its term protecting birthright citizenship and invalidating a signature policy of President Donald Trump's administration, Justice Clarence Thomas took a swipe at the majority in his dissent, stunning legal experts with an argument that would have effectively rewritten 14th Amendment protections out of the Constitution for millions of people.
But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson went out of her way in her concurrence with Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion to demolish Thomas' argument — and in particular, point out that he was talking out of both sides of his mouth on how to interpret constitutional rights.
"I write separately to respond to some of the themes in the principal dissent," wrote Jackson. "Despite his longstanding endorsement of a 'colorblind' Constitution, Justice Thomas now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to 'freed slaves such as Dred Scott,' ... and those who shared with them certain characteristics ... It is for this reason, he says, that 'children who were born in the United States but [to parents] not domiciled here' are not entitled to claim birthright citizenship."
This, noted Georgia trial lawyer and legal analyst Andrew Fleischman in a post to X, is a "pretty good burn here."...
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Feel da burn, Clarence!
Expert flags haunting truth behind Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision — Alexander Willis
... On Tuesday, four of the Supreme Court's nine justices indicated they did not believe Trump's effort to overturn birthright citizenship – a right explicitly enshrined in the 14th Amendment – was unconstitutional. While the court ultimately rejected Trump’s case for why he should be allowed to eliminate a constitutionally protected right, the vote tally was nonetheless disturbing, Weinstein argued.
“The real headline from the birthright-citizenship case isn’t the outcome,” Weinstein wrote Tuesday in a social media post on X to his more than 86,000 followers. “It’s that four Supreme Court justices signaled they believe a president can effectively rewrite the Constitution through executive order.”...
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I see we have more retrrds than previously suspected. Torch them all and start over with a new batch of logicals.
'Terrified' conservative gadfly buried over 'whatever force necessary' immigrant threat — Tom Boggioni
... “Two thoughts: - The Trump EO applied to people whose parents are here legally, including those on visas here for many years who are fully domiciled here. So Walsh's framing is based on a lie. - It's amazing how terrified these supposedly alpha men are of their fellow citizens.” he wrote.
He then clarified, “The EO didn't bar children of permanent residents, but applied to anyone present on a nonimmigrant visa. So that could include the child of parents here on H-1B visas who'd been living and working here legally for a decade, or children of foreign students studying for years.”
Immigration tracker Andrew Thrasher joined the pile-on by writing, “The funny part about Matt Walsh types is that they love talking tough, which almost always reveals they actually live in constant fear of everyone around them.”
“It's also funny how easily they buy into the very blatant hyper-masculinity campaign in MAGA, and yet still see themselves as free thinkers. Yeah Matt, very edgy showing off how you got played by Temu-ssolini,” he added.
Law Professor Jonathon Booth suggested, “Matt Walsh is a pathetic baby but also... the Supreme Court decision kept the law the same as it was before!”
“Like come on, ‘lesbian activists’ is such a tell here. if a lesbian activist punched Matt Walsh in the face he would literally die,“ joked author Lyta Gold.
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The Nazis all need a new pair of pants. Oooh! Stinky!
Republican's 'thinly veiled call' to 'kill' progressives triggers calls for ouster — Julia Conley, Common Dreams
Darializa Avila Chevalier, the progressive organizer whose primary victory over five-term Democratic Congressman Adriano Espaillat last week stunned the party’s establishment, was among those calling for the expulsion of New York City Council member Vickie Paladino Tuesday night after the Republican issued “a thinly veiled call” for the government “to kill” democratic socialistsB
On the social media platform X, Paladino posted an image of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) 2025-27 National Political Committee, including national co-chairs Ashik Siddique and Megan Romer, and mused that in the past, government agencies may have mobilized to kill the 27 people in the picture to stop their left-wing activities.
“There was a time in our history, not too long ago, when the CIA/FBI would’ve made sure unabashed revolutionaries like this were neutralized one way or another,” said Paladino (R-19). “In fact, that was basically the entire point of having them.”
Paladino appeared to be referring to the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which surveilled, infiltrated, and tried to disrupt groups and movements that fought for civil rights and against the US war in Vietnam. COINTELPRO was involved in the 1969 raid in Chicago in which police killed Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
“This is insane,” said US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) after Paladino suggested the US government should use the FBI and CIA to “neutralize” DSA organizers, who are working to elect advocates for Medicare for All, universal childcare, and abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among other increasingly popular progressive proposals.
Chevalier, a member of the DSA’s New York City chapter, called for Paladino to be “expelled.”
“We need public leaders who will fight for a politics of life and the council member has shown time and time again that she does not,” said Chevalier....
"Looks like they're moving toward the final solution sooner than anticipated." — D Smith (comments)
"Another commenter on this site showed me some clips of what is being preached in some 'christian' churches. My god. No wonder some Rs think killing Ds is an ok position to take.
It isn't ok to shoot protesters either. People have a first amendment right to protest." — MiddlePillar (comments)
"revolutionaries....????? compared to what? magalutionaries...?
what is it about free elections that has the reich wing schitting its britches?
oh, and everybody in the current admin is gonna have a bigly chance to explain themselves in front of a hague tribunal... that is, once our FBI is functional again and unweaponized..." — tyler bennet (comments)
"Grandma reminiscing about a time when the government could kill people with differing political values other than the full throated fellating of crony capitalism that we have now.
Hopefully Jesus kicks her in the dick when she meets him ." — JasonS (comments)
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The CIA has been murdrering citizens considered to be "undesirables" for decades. No doubt the current mob will do the same at Trump's whims.
This is why the fascists must be stopped before they murder again. They can see they are losing the narrrtive and, like a rat in a trap, want to resort to more murder as a solution.
Predators Always Need Prey. Now They're Running America. — Thom Hartmann
Hundreds died in this week's heat wave. But the real killer is a political & economic system that rewards predators, turns citizens into prey, & leaves governments protecting power instead of people
Hundreds of people died yesterday across Europe from the heat; they’re a symptom of a larger problem that governments around the world have failed to address — that goes far beyond simply global warming — and that the Trump regime is making far worse
Its foundation is one of the most troubling aspects of human nature called predation: while most people just want to live their lives, raise their kids, and have a comfortable old age, some small percentage of those among us have simply become, for lack of a better word, predators.
In nature, there are natural predators and natural prey; foxes and rabbits are the classic example.
Rabbits, like most prey animals, have wired into them by evolution a response called “tonic immobility”; we used to think that when a rabbit or mouse was seized by a fox or eagle and went limp that they were playing dead (“thanatosis”) but, in fact, we now know their body is suddenly flooded with hormones, chemicals, and nervous reactions that essentially put them into a coma to either/both fool the predator or avoid experiencing the pain of being torn to pieces.
Predator animals — including humans — also have this instinct/mechanism; we see it when people “faint from fright” or are paralyzed by PTSD. But it’s far less frequently activated in predatory animals, particularly social animals like apes and humans, largely because we invent social systems to discourage predation.
Among modern humans, according to psychology, predation against other humans is a form of psychopathy, twisting the predator instinct our species once used to hunt food, instead, against others of our own kind, whether it be via physical/sexual violence or via theft and fraud....
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America has been raped by the Trump Crime Syndicate.
Trump’s Penn Station extortion scheme ruled 'flagrantly illegal' by judge — Sarah K. Burris
A federal judge put the hammer down on President Donald Trump's scheme to block funding to the Hudson Tunnel project, which began in 2023.
The ruling, reported by the New York Times, called out Trump's demand that New York's Penn Station be named after him in exchange for the funds.
Judge Jeannette Vargas of the Southern District of New York ruled on Monday that Trump violated federal guidelines when he blocked the pledged $16 billion funding in September. The project was forced to shut down construction, and about 1,000 workers were laid off in February thanks to Trump.
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Our resident criminal attempts another crime but is foiled again!
The Supreme Court just changed everything about American democracy — Robert Reich
First of all, you should know that I spent five years of my life advising the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission how they could best protect Americans from monopolies and deceptive corporate practices.
I’m proud of the work the FTC did then, and proud of much of what it’s accomplished since then. When I served there, the chair of the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic trust-buster and consumer advocate. More recently, the FTC has been chaired by Lina Khan, who courageously stood up to some of the biggest and most politically-powerful corporations in America.
Part of the reason the FTC has been so effective is that it is — or was — independent, and therefore immune to the political moves of powerful corporations seeking to stop it from acting for the common good.
The FTC was established in 1914 as part of what’s known as the “progressive era” when the government first sought to rescue the nation from the grip of the robber barons who then ran the railroads, oil, shipping, and much of the rest of the economy — and corrupted the nation’s politics — during the First Gilded Age.
That progressive era was followed by the New Deal, when Congress and FDR established other independent regulatory agencies, modeled in part on the FTC, to use their expertise for the benefit of the American people — and not just the wealthiest an most powerful citizens whose unbridled greed had led the nation into the Great Depression.
We’re now in America’s Second Gilded Age, when a new set of robber barons (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry and David Ellison) are running much of the economy and corrupting our politics.
Hence, today’s Supreme Court ruling that a president can utterly disregard the will of Congress and install his own hacks in all independent regulatory agencies (with the odd exception of the Federal Reserve Board).
Today’s ruling is in direct conflict with a 1935 case in which the Court ruled that FDR could not replace an FTC commissioner because Congress had explicitly given FTC commissioners protection against such firing, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Today marks the culmination of a years-long weakening of that New Deal-era precedent.
Humphrey’s Executor v. United States concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office” — the same language that Congress has since used to protect most other independent commissioners and board members throughout government....
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Trump's criminal SCOTUS has made his plundering a cancer on our Republic.
We need to build more gallows!
Trump's FAA Orders 15 Hours Of Airport Flight Shutdowns For Freedom 250 Events — David Edwards
President Donald Trump's Federal Aviation Administration is shutting down flights at Reagan National Airport for 15 hours across two days to clear the skies for his Freedom 250 celebration.
President Donald Trump's Federal Aviation Administration is shutting down flights at Reagan National Airport for 15 hours across two days to clear the skies for his Freedom 250 celebration.
The FAA posted the warning on Monday on X, saying it has been coordinating with stakeholders "for months to help ensure the safe and efficient movement of air traffic during celebrations of America's 250th birthday, including the iconic flyovers and fireworks."
"Flight operations at DCA are expected to be temporarily paused from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on July 3 and from noon to 11:59 p.m. on July 4 to support Independence Day events," the FAA wrote....
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Maybe a good thing for them. He will take a shot at setting DC on fire with his "LARGEST FIREWORKS SHOW IN HISTORY." What a dope.
The Great American Flop — John Amato
Are MAGATs tired of rushing to DC to prop up Trump? --John Amato
When you've raised inflation by implementing illegal tariffs against our trade partners.
When you've sent your brown-shirts in masks in unmarked cars to scoop up and kill US citizens unrepentantly.
When you drive up gas prices by unnecessarily attacking Iran and starting a war that's hampered the Strait of Hormuz.
When you deny there's an affordability crisis.
When you raise the cost of healthcare for millions of Americans for tax cuts to your friends.
When you refuse to sign the bipartisan Housing Act.
Even your MAGA cult will not turn out for your narcissistic events.
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I remember the BiCentennial. It was awesome. This is just a two-bit sideshow ripoff of our country.
NYP Board Torches Trump Crime Family’s Latest Grift: “Slimy, Banana Republic, This Stinks To High Heaven”
The New York Post editorial board writes:
It was bad when the Bidens did it, and it’s just as bad when the Trumps do it. Insider deals, finders’ fees and backdoor introductions to family members are business-as-usual in Third World banana republics, but these slimy practices have now been normalized in the White House, to the shame of the nation.
The New York Times reports that Eric and Donald Trump Jr., sons of President Donald Trump, and Kyle and Brandon Lutnick, sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, are tied to a billion-dollar tungsten-mining deal that the US government is financing in Kazakhstan. The prez himself actually called into a meeting between Howard Lutnick and Kazakhstan’s president as the deal was being finalized.
The Trump sons, meanwhile, are part-owners or investors in companies neck-deep in a key defense contract to mine tungsten reserves in Central Asia. It stinks to high heaven. True, no one thought of Trump & Co. as unblemished saints, but who would’ve thunk he, his kin and associates were going to use the Biden family template — virtually backing up the truck and stealing the carpets and silver — as a model of ethical behavior?
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The Trump Crime Syndicate struts before you, America!
House Advances Defense Bill Which Includes SAVE Act
Politico reports:
The House Rules Committee advanced a procedural measure aimed at breaking an intra-Republican deadlock Monday night. But GOP leaders are still facing a major battle Tuesday to regain control of the House floor.
The panel approved on party lines a measure to set up Republicans’ $1.1 trillion defense policy bill, a government funding bill and other GOP bills for floor debate. It would then combine the Pentagon bill, once passed, with the contentious elections overhaul known as the SAVE America Act and send it to the Senate as one piece of legislation.
That maneuver, telegraphed by Speaker Mike Johnson earlier Monday, is aimed at appeasing House GOP hard-liners who have blockaded the floor, demanding the Senate pass the elections bill that has languished there for months.
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The SAVE act is the end of democracy bill. They had better vote this version down or we will all be dead.
WH Secretly Gave $500M No-Bid Ballroom Contract
The Washington Post reports:
White House officials last year secretly awarded a no-bid contract worth up to $500 million for the construction of the East Wing ballroom in an unusual arrangement that sidestepped typical contracting procedures designed to control costs, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by The Washington Post.
The White House routed the contract through the Executive Residence, the document shows, an office that is exempt from rules that require federal agencies to solicit competitive bids and disclose details to the public. The office is typically responsible for routine repairs, entertainment expenses, and the purchase of furniture, art and other items for the executive mansion.
The confidential contract with Clark Construction, along with related correspondence and records obtained by The Post, reveal for the first time how the Trump administration bypassed norms last summer as it set the ballroom project in motion. Trump has repeatedly claimed that the ballroom would be paid for by private donors and once said that Clark executives offered to build it for free. “They said: ‘Sir, we’ll do it for nothing. This is the greatest honor,” Trump told the New York Times in January.
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Our criminal in our White House.
Oz: Not Using Your Obamacare Is Evidence Of Fraud
The New Republic reports:
Speaking on Fox News Monday in front of the president’s desolate fairgrounds, Oz presented his proof that the Obamacare marketplace was plagued by fraud—and in the process revealed how little he actually knows about health insurance. Oz claimed that of 23 million people who were signed up for the Affordable Care Act—commonly known as Obamacare—40 percent of enrollees had never actually used their insurance.
“It raises, again, the reality that there are many people who are signed up who are getting paid for, but don’t believe they have the insurance, don’t know they have insurance, don’t want the insurance,” Oz said. Of course, that’s not really how health insurance coverage works: Just because you have it doesn’t mean you actually use it. The only “reality” that Oz’s statistics raised was that health care in this country is way too expensive.
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Not having a brain makes you an idiot fraud, Oz!
'Absolutely Sick!' Right-wing Media Rages As '8647' Sightings Surround Trump's Fair — David Edwards
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called it "absolutely sick" after the anti-Trump code "8647" appeared inside the Great American State Fair.
Jackson sounded off Monday on Newsmax, where anchor Katrina Szish raised the growing string of sightings at Freedom 250's National Mall celebration.
"What do you make of that?" Szish asked. "What is the president's response to all of that ongoing — I'm gonna say — vitriol, essentially?"
"It is absolutely sick that these Trump-deranged whack jobs are vandalizing our beautiful National Mall, our beautiful national monuments, all because they hate President Donald Trump," Jackson said on Newsmax.
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Why do any of these fruitcake retards think that these "8647" signs are made by anyone but their own? MAGA destests Trump. Are these people really that fucking clueless? I don't think so!
Judge reverses ban on Trump's most-hated phrase in pro-impeachment protests — David Edwards
A federal judge ruled Monday that a pro-impeachment protest group can keep flying a flag with a phrase President Donald Trump has called a death threat against him.
The group Accountability NOW USA has displayed a flag reading "8647" as part of a months-long demonstration outside a federal courthouse demanding Trump's impeachment.
"8647" turned up carved into the National Mall's lawn this month, and Trump blamed former FBI Director James Comey for inspiring it.
"Probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey!" Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, warning of a "10 year prison sentence" for the damage
In his ruling on Monday night, U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss wasn't persuaded that the phrase itself was dangerous.
"The term '86' is used far more often to mean 'throw out' than to 'kill,'" Moss wrote, "and it appeared at a demonstration that was focused, of all things, on the constitutional impeachment and 'removal' of the President."...
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"8647!"
Roberts Court Expands Trump's Power And Kneecaps Congress — Red Painter
The corrupt MAGA Roberts Court mostly ruled against Donald Trump today, rejecting his appeal in the E Jean Carroll case, protecting mail-in voting and blocked Trump from firing Lisa Cook
BUT, they did give him a big win that is going to be highly consequential. He is now able to fire independent regulators, a power that no other President has ever had. The case was brought by Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter after he fired her shortly after he began his second term. No other President has tried to exert such power over independent regulators - it would have been unheard of. Trump tried it and the Supreme Court has decided that he can do it - and I guess all future Presidents can as well. (Ed. note: You know they'll find a way to prevent a Dem president from doing that)
In the 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court gave Trump and all future presidents the power to "remove members of supposedly independent federal agencies that carry out functions under the executive branch of government."
All 6 conservative justices ruled in Trump's favor, of course.
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The Supreme traitors act again to tear down our democracy!
Supreme Court declares war on democracy: Krugman — David Badash
The U.S. Supreme Court has “declared war” on American democracy, on “modern society,” and on “everything it takes to function in the 21st century,” warns Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, after the court expanded presidential powers once again. Six of the court’s members, presumably the conservative wing, “are fundamentally hostile to democracy, fundamentally hostile to the modern world and determined to put the catastrophically bad leader that we currently have sitting in the White House in charge of everything, which is a nightmare scenario on every level.”
Krugman scorches the court for ruling that presidents can fire, without cause, the heads of independent federal agencies (except the Federal Reserve). In doing so, the court overturned a 91-year-old precedent.
He explains that in a modern society, “the agencies that operate the U.S. government and basically run our society are supposed to be professional. They’re supposed to be following their legal mandate. They’re not supposed to be personal tools of a dictator in the White House.”
Krugman says that the court has now given “essentially dictatorial powers to the occupant of the White House,” while also making it extremely difficult for the economy and for society to function.
He explains that in today’s complicated world, ground rules are necessary. Offering the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as an example, Krugman says that producers need to know that their products will be approved based on merit, and not on “spurious grounds.”
“And what would cause those decisions to happen?” he asks. “Well, how about the fact that some businesses are better at the business of bribing the president and his family than others. And if you think that this is outlandish — you know, a few years ago you might have said this was outlandish, things like that wouldn’t really happen — well, as we speak, these things are happening all the time.”...
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It's our 250th birthday. Our Declaration of Independence states we can abolish this sort of government. It's time we get it started.
"That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness..."
Let's get to it!
Supreme Court signaling willingness to test Trump's 'wildly illegal' order: expert — Robert Davis
...One of the first executive orders Trump signed during his second term sought to halt recognition of citizenship for children born to people in the country illegally or temporary residents. It would overturn more than a century of jurisprudence, which has granted citizenship to these groups.
Litman said the Supreme Court's delay in releasing its opinion signals that it might contain a few fireworks.
"I think the delay could also signal that the decision isn't going to be unanimous, and if it's not unanimous, that's going to meaningfully alter the Overton window as far as what people's understanding of our constitutional multiracial democracy is," she said.
"If you have dissents by Justices Thomas and Alito, is birthright citizenship going to become a new litmus test for Republican appointees, where the expectation is you will only be selected for a judicial seat if you would overrule birthright citizenship, just like you could only be selected for a judicial seat if you would overrule Roe v. Wade?" Litman queried. "It would also invite future challenges to birthright citizenship down the road. So, I think those are some of the things that are on people's minds."
"The fake "conservative" majority is busy showing what a fraud their "originalism" is when they torture the language of the Constitution (and Amendments) to get to the result they want." — phreethink (comments)
"Well, I guess we are going to have a bit more work to do.
These fucks are going to push us right to the god-damn wall.
So be it, then.
They want a war with us because they think we are weak.
They. Are. Wrong." — Jay - I'm ANITFA! (comments)
"SCOTUS SCum: Liars, thieves, perverts and traitors. And a braindead Handmaid giving handjobs to tRump." — Chelonia Testudines (comments>
"Would you mind explaining to me, a dumb social democracy practicing Canadian, what, exactly, in your opinion, is this “open border” you speak of?" — Canadian 4 a Southern Wall 2.0 (comments)
*Or any other believer in "give me your tired, your poor..." - ed. note"
"“You’re gonna need a bigger boat revolution!”
The regime is now out of hand, the Constitution being gutted before your eyes. He has an enabling act, Stephen Miller decides who’ll a Jew American, you have State Propaganda, you attack countries for economic reasons commuting war crimes and crimes against humanity, you have concentration camps where more crimes against humanity are committed, they’re on the cusp of becoming death factories, you have the Gestapo like law enforcement agencies, emotional support goons for Trump with his murderous ICE domestic terror arm, the “disappeared” lifted off the streets, denied due process and shipped to a living hell with no hope of release to prisons in El Salvador and other countries. The regime is so blatantly corrupt they proudly boast about their schemes, and manipulate world financial markets to farm profits. The regime threatens anyone who dares speak out, they’ve silenced critics in the media. The DOJ and FBI are protecting paedophiles from their victims, making sure victims know they’ll suffer the consequences if the pursue matters.
What’s it going to take America? Where are the Democrats?
You need to organise, plan, and rise up to reclaim your country, because at some point you are next on their lists!" — Eric T Cat (comments)
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What's next for these pigs? Simply declaring the U.S. Constitution is no longer the law of our land?
If the racist court decides no birthright then I strongly advise every young person that is able to do it to leave this country as soon as they can and never return if they want a future life. Those remaining will have the final job to do for the unfinished business at hand.
Clarence Thomas makes mysterious Capitol visit as medical rumors swirl: ' That's not good' — Matthew Chapman
"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was just in the Capitol," wrote Politico's Meredith Lee Hill. "He declined to answer questions about why he was here as he left the House side. He did not meet with House GOP leadership and Rs believe he was here for the House physician office, per sources."
MS NOW reporter Mychael Schnell could not ascertain this, but confirmed the secretive nature of Thomas' presence on the Hill.
"Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas just walked through the House side of the Capitol," she said. "He didn’t say why he was here. But told me he was meeting with 'nobody.' I said tomorrow will be a big day at the court. 'I guess so,' he responded. Would he give a sneak peak of decisions? 'Nope,' he told me with a chuckle."
The whole situation raised eyebrows among political observers, with former President Barack Obama spokesperson TJ Adams Falconer posting a GIF of "Veep" protagonist Selina Meyer saying, "Well, that's (expletive) ... not good."
"Make Justice Great Again
Jack Smith for Supreme Court 13" — Straitjacket of Hormuz (comments)
"You can't just elect Democrats and move on and pretend nothing happened
.Germany could not just pretend nothing happened .Iraq could not just pretend nothing happened. There must be trials and executions. If America doesn't have the stomach for that there will be no moving on. This also means removing the traitors on the supreme court who ignored the constitution and allowed this to happen." — Straitjacket of Hormuz (comments)
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There isn't any way to look at it that spells good. Even if his string has run out there is still Trump to pull another one just as evil! Whichever, he must go!
Red state hospitals quickly eject gunshot victims — especially if they're uninsured — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
Alea Bates wasn’t ready to leave Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare’s main hospital four days after a stranger shot her seven times at close range. Miraculously, hospital records show, none of the bullets damaged her internal organs.
But after surgery, Bates said, she couldn’t get out of bed or walk to the bathroom without help. She complained of intense pain radiating down her left leg, weakness in her knee, and a numbing sensation below it, according to hospital records. Bates, who worked as an Uber Eats driver, didn’t have the strength to drive a car.
Still, Bates said, the hospital told her it was time to go.
“They didn't do any further X-rays or CTs or MRIs to figure out why my knee was numb,” she said. “And they were just like, you know, ‘It'll go away.’”
Doctors said she was medically stable, Bates said, and because she had no health insurance, they could not send her to a rehabilitation hospital or a skilled nursing facility, which can charge thousands of dollars a day for such care.
“They were just like, We need the bed for somebody who has insurance,” she said. “That's of course, you know, what they say without saying it.”...
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Gunshot wounds are something you don't want to have these days. Worse than the wild west I tell ya!
Bannon: Force The SAVE Act With Emergency Order
...“The buses should have rolled up, you should have gone out there to Ohio, where they’re eating the dogs and the cats. Go out, the buses should have been there and come on, — oh you know where they live.
“Get the buses, let’s load the buses and let’s have the planes right there at the airport. Well, heck, we’ll give them private service and fly back. Don’t even need to take commercial.” – Steve Bannon, on today’s podcast.
"Judges are no longer signing off on Fat Donnie's emergency declarations. After all the lying, the courts no longer give Donnie's DOJ the presumption of regularity.
Bannon is living in a fantasy world." — amy cuscuriae (comments)
"Yet another wanna-be traitor trying to incite an insurrection by preaching sedition." — OlyGregg (comments)
"The 'presumption of regularity' in the Courts has been exploded.
Everyone now know these fascist for what they are, money obsessed grifters." — magic twanger (comments)
"Well, he got this right, "“I think Markwayne Mullin has been a total complete disaster as Homeland Security..." — Refugay (commments)
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Obese Nazi jailbird shows the threat he is to us.
Vietnam Evicts Farmers For $1.5B Trump Golf Resort
Bloomberg News reports:
Eviction notices have been sent to farmers in northern Vietnam to make way for a US$1.5 billion Trump Organization-branded luxury golf resort project that is already behind schedule. If the farmers refuse to comply with orders to surrender their land, they will be subject to enforcement, according to the written instruction from local officials in Hung Yen province seen by Bloomberg News.
Officials are racing to clear the remaining land as the developer pushes to get construction under way to open the first golf course in time for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in 2027.
For months, dozens of residents have contested the compensation offered by local officials for land that contains ancestral graves and orchards of banana, longan and orange trees that have provided for generations of the same families. The first phase is due for completion in late 2027, when Vietnam hosts the APEC summit and welcomes world leaders, including US President Donald Trump.
"Trump is always screaming about communists, but apparently, when money is involved, has no problem dealing with actual communists." -- BensNewLogin (comments)
"WHAT A FUCKING ASSHOLE FAMILY" — Dwight Williamson (comments)
"If I'm being generous, the Vietnamese are being pressured to give trump a bribe / extorted. This deal is a vehicle then to pay off trump. Whether or not a building goes up eventually is beside the point. There's probably a local politician who is using this (corrupt) opportunity to take control of the confiscated lands." — The_Wretched (comments)
"The Trumps have made so many enemies around the world leaving the question how are they still alive and how long before someone ends them." — Thewolflam (comments)
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Greed, avarice, gluttony, are all the traits of human failure. Here we have it in spades from both sides of our world.
There will be an accounting. Of this we can be certain. Even Trump knows it.
VIRAL VIDEO: Kentucky Baptist Bible School Stages Killing As Children Chant “Take Him Out, Blow Him Up”
The Lexington Herald-Leader reports:
A Lexington church is being criticized after a video went viral depicting church staff shooting the devil in front of several children during the church’s vacation Bible school program. The video shows a room full of young children and adults at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church. Soldiers armed with air-soft rifles march down the center aisle while a character representing the devil is laying on the steps to the church’s altar as the children chant “take him out, blow him up.”
The soldiers eventually “open fire” on the devil for several seconds. After seemingly shooting and killing the devil, the soldiers drag the devil outside the room through a side door. Pastor Dewayne Walker then starts counting up and at the eight-second mark, an explosion can be heard followed by loud cheers from the children.
On Monday, Walker posted a video on the church’s Facebook page and said what’s being shared online contains a lot of misinformation. Walker said the church has been putting on vacation Bible school for 32 years, and every year they feature a skit highlighting the difference between evil and good. In the last several years, the skit has included “commandos for Christ,” using “the gospel gun.”
"Religion is child abuse. I remember being absolutely terrified after a rather dramatic three day lesson on the book of Revelations when I was about 7 years old." — Sandy Bottoms (comments)
"Baptist Christonazis indoctrinating children to kill while conveniently calling minorities and political opposition 'the devil' and 'demons' on a constant basis, too." — Friday (commments)
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Indeed, child abuse disguised as religion. They must be carefully taught.
Paxton Spotted On “Romantic Getaway” With Mistress
The Daily Mail reports:
Instead of hitting the campaign trail to court voters in the hotly contested US Senate race in Texas over the Fourth of July, MAGA firebrand Ken Paxton is on a trip with his mistress in Iceland, the Daily Mail can reveal. Exclusive videos and pictures show the married Texas attorney general and his mistress traveling in economy from Washington, DC, to Iceland on Saturday.
Footage of the Lone Star State politician and the woman he has carried on an affair with showed the lovebirds boarding their flight at Dulles International Airport Saturday night and taking a red-eye to Reykjavik. The Daily Mail first exposed the sordid affair between Paxton, 63, and Tracy Duhon, 58, in September, revealing Paxton and the Christian influencer and mom of seven became romantically involved in May 2024 after meeting at the Kentucky Derby.
Duhon was then married to a millionaire car dealership mogul from Louisiana but has since divorced. Paxton was then and is still married to Texas State Senator Angela Paxton, who learned of the affair and filed for divorce last year on ‘biblical grounds.’
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It will be fine with the Texas hypocrite xianists who believe they are holier than holy!
Supreme Court blocks Trump's attack on mail-in ballots — Nicole Charky-Chami
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, rejecting President Donald Trump's attacks on the voting practice, CNN reported.
The "unexpected rebuff" in the 5-4 ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee, was considered a defeat for Trump and Republicans, who have argued that the method should not be used before the midterm elections in November, according to CNN. Trump has asserted that there is widespread fraud involving mail-in ballots, despite no evidence of these claims.
"The president has repeatedly and falsely equated lengthy vote counts with 'cheating,' including in a recent NBC interview in which he complained about ballot processing in the Los Angeles mayor’s race," CNN reported.
Eighteen states and territories, including Mississippi, allow mail ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day, NPR reported. Another twelve states extend that window specifically for ballots coming from overseas, such as those cast by military members. The grace periods exist to protect voters from delays caused by the Postal Service, bad weather, or other unexpected disruptions.
The high court wrote in its decision that "nothing in the federal election-day statutes requires ballots to be received by election day."...
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Trump loses. American wins!
SCOTUS Rejects Trump’s Appeal In E. Jean Carroll Case
USA Today reports:
The Supreme Court won’t step in and stop President Donald Trump from having to pay $5 million to writer E. Jean Carroll for sexually abusing and defaming her, despite his argument that a president shouldn’t be burdened with defending himself against decades-old charges.
The court on June 29 declined to review the 2023 jury verdict against Trump in a civil suit brought by Carroll.
The court – which has a 6-3 conservative majority - has been largely receptive to Trump’s appeals of challenges to his actions as president, often allowing controversial policies to move forward while they’re being litigated.
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Trump must pay for his pussy grabbin'!
DOJ Loses Attempt To Get Pennsylvania’s Voter Rolls
Democracy Docket reports:
A federal judge dismissed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, who rejected its request for the state’s unredacted voter files.
Saturday’s order was the tenth straight loss in courts for President Donald Trump and U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who’ve sued thirty states and Washington, D.C. to gain unfettered access to voter registration lists – an unprecedented intrusion into states’ authority.
Those losses don’t include a federal appeals court dismissal of a DOJ lawsuit seeking similar private voter information from Michigan, handed down on June 24 – collectively a decisive blow to Trump’s unconstitutional crusade to wrest control of election administration from the state.
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Another loss for the GREAT LOSER!
Hate Group Celebrates Bible Indoctrination In Texas
From the Family Research Council’s website:
Five million children will get to hear the gospel because of a new state book list approved in Texas for public schools.
On Friday, the Texas State Board of Education voted to codify a proposed list of required reading that would eliminate titles such as “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Great Gatsby” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and introduce the text of the Bible instead, reported The New York Times.
Some of the passages included are Luke 14 “The Necessity of Humility,” Ecclesiastes 3, “To Everything There is a Season,” and excerpts from the book of Job. For younger elementary students, a picture-book adaptation of the David and Goliath and Bible passages about Adam and Eve for older students are also in the mix.
“This recognizes a simple historical reality, which is that it is nearly impossible to understand American history and western civilization or really, even the English language without some familiarity with the Bible,” David Closson, the director for the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand.
"It'll be amazing if teachers and their classes analyze those readings critically in a way that never gets done in churches!" — (((GC))) (comments)
"Nothing causes a person to become an atheist more than actually reading the bible. I expect this new law will produce the exact opposite effect to what was wanted." — RedSky (comments)
"If you suspect that my interest in the Bible is going to inspire me with sudden enthusiasm for Judaism and make me a convert of mountain-moving fervor and that I shall suddenly grow long earlocks and learn Hebrew and go about denouncing the heathen — you little know the effect of the Bible on me. Properly read, it is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." — Isaac Asimov (((GC))) (comments)
"The Council of Conservative Citizens is an American white supremacist organization. Founded in 1985, it advocates white nationalism and supports some paleoconservative causes. In the organization's statement of principles, it states that they 'oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind.'" — Frank Costanza (comments)
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Texas Board of Education decides to keep sudents retarded! To hell with the greatest literature of human history! They are the laughing stock as "let's stay stupid ignorant yo-yos mindless fools." This will be stricken down as is UNCONSTITUTIONA,L, you idiot bastards!
Study in your churches and church schools all you want but leave the rest of us alone. Stop forcing your bullshit on the rest of us!
These Tabs Are Lava! Tabs, Mon., June 29, 2026 — Evan Hurst
...I went on a RANT about those asshole San Francisco Giants bigots who felt the need to scrawl Bible verses on their Pride hats, because the passage they chose was God promising never to flood the earth again and kill everybody, so sorry, here is a rainbow! So I decided to address the question of whether the rainbow even commemorates something beautiful for conservative Christians, or if actually that story is God on his absolute worst behavior and that’s why conservative Christians love it so much. So click here for that!
This morning, between now and Tavis, I will have the long awaited next installment of my Pervert Pastor Project, where I am tracking all the conservative Christian pastors/youth pastors/Christian school teachers, etc., who are found abusing kids. Because they’re not drag queens! I say long awaited because it’s long overdue, but now the project is back on track. So this will be the full recap of 2025, with statistics on which kinds of conservative Christian denominations produced the most Pervert Pastors that year, and the big mid-year update for 2026 will come soon after that....
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No more water, but FIRE NEXT TIME! Produced and brought to you by XIANIST Nazi SOBs!
Yes, the Cuts to USAID Have Killed
IN A RECENT VIDEO, Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, defended his decision last year to feed the United States Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper.” When someone on his social-media platform claimed that not a single child had died because of his destroying USAID, he reposted their argument with a single word of commentary: “Exactly.” Musk said that during his “DOGE” rampage he’d never been able to talk to any real children who could prove to him they were suffering and receiving help from the agency, because it was so full of “fraud and graft.”
But Musk is wrong. Many people, including many children, have died as a direct result of the cuts he and his DOGE team made to USAID. And the number of deaths no longer being prevented by the agency will only grow.
To back up, USAID was established in 1961 to end extreme global poverty, promote democracy, and advance U.S. interests. In the five years prior to the second Trump administration, U.S. spending on foreign aid—a figure that includes but is not limited to the work of USAID—ranged from $35.6 billion to $61.2 billion per year, or less than 1 percent of the federal budget. It also typically accounted for over a quarter of total development assistance given by all countries put together. In some twenty developing countries, U.S. aid “equaled more than 10 percent of domestic health expenditure,” according to an analysis from the Center for Global Development; in one case, Afghanistan, American aid equaled three times the domestic health expenditure. In 2024, 50 to 60 percent of Côte D’Ivoire’s AIDS response was funded by the United States. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, that figure was 89 percent.
And if we define success as saving lives, USAID was working. Not by itself, but alongside parallel investments by Global South governments, advocacy by people, and economic growth. One study estimates that USAID saved around 92 million lives over the last two decades, including 30.4 million children under 5. Since 1990, the world has more than halved the number of children dying before the age of 5, from 13 million a year to 4.9 million. Between 2000 and 2023, we cut maternal deaths by 40 percent. USAID is an important part of that story.
These positive indicators are changing direction for the first time in thirty years. Around 200,000 more children are believed to have died in 2025 than in 2024. Over 1,300 health and family planning clinics have closed globally due to USAID cuts. Thousands of medical professionals were laid off. Studies show an increase in child marriages, violence against women and girls, and civil disorder, including riots and armed battles. Lancet modeling indicates USAID cuts may cause 14 million deaths, including those of 4.5 million children under age 5, by 2030....
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Their murderers must be brought to justice. And they will be!
More dangerous than Trump — Robert Reich
JD Vance said on Friday that the U.S. wins “either way” in negotiations with Iran. “If we make the final deal, then great,” Vance told HBO’s Bill Maher. “If we don’t make the final deal, their nuclear program is still destroyed. They’re still much weaker as a country.”
Just hours after Vance’s appearance on HBO, Iran launched attack drones on Bahrain — which hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters, a major logistical base for U.S. military operations. Iran also struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, its second attack on a ship since Thursday.
So much for Iran being much weaker.
Pressed by Maher on whether Iran’s nuclear program has been destroyed, Vance shot back: “What part of it is not destroyed? The thing that you have to destroy is their ability to enrich uranium, which has been destroyed.”...
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Vance's arragance is second only to Trump's. No one wants to deal with him, either.
Trump Bought Millions In Taser Stock Before ICE Deal
CNBC reports:
President Donald Trump bought as much as $5 million in shares of Axon Enterprise — maker of Tasers, body cameras and policing software — two weeks before Immigration and Customs Enforcement sought a five-year, $220 million contract that experts told CNBC appeared tailored to the company’s weapons.
On Feb. 10, Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of Axon stock, according to federal disclosures he filed in May. On Feb. 24, ICE posted a notice seeking roughly 17,800 new Tasers, along with unlimited cartridges and training.
The White House has said Trump’s assets are managed by independent third-party firms, not Trump or his family. “There are no conflicts of interest,” spokesperson Anna Kelly told CNBC, calling the scrutiny a “tired narrative” pushed by Democrats.
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Sure, Anna. Trump loves losing.
Fired NOAA Experts Launch Independent Climate Site
Via press release:
Climate.us today launched the full version of its new independent, nonprofit climate information website, creating a public-backed home for trusted climate science at a time when access to federal climate resources has become increasingly vulnerable to disruption.
The launch reflects strong public demand for reliable climate information. One-third of the funding to support the launch of Climate.us came from more than 2,500 small donations (approximately $250,000) from people who contributed to help preserve access to science-reviewed climate information. More than 80 scientists have volunteered to serve as subject matter expert reviewers.
Built by former members of the team behind the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s popular Climate.gov website, Climate.us will keep climate information accurate, accessible, scientifically rigorous, and useful for the people who rely on it, including educators, students, journalists, scientists, community leaders, local and state decision-makers, and members of the public.
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Go back to hell, Trump!
Gallup Poll: Pride In Being American Falls To New Low
Gallup Polling reports:
As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, 33% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely proud” to be an American, the lowest reading in Gallup’s trend dating back to 2001. Another 20% say they are “very proud,” which means just over half of Americans express high levels of pride in their country.
The remaining shares say they are “moderately proud” (22%), “only a little proud” (15%) or “not at all proud” (9%). The latest figure, from a June 1-15 poll, is down eight percentage points from last year and is tied for the largest year-over-year change in the trend, along with 2004-2005.
Currently, 70% of Republicans, 28% of independents and 14% of Democrats say they are extremely proud to be American. The current 56-point gap between Republicans’ and Democrats’ reported extreme pride is similar to last year’s 57-point difference, the highest on record.
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Thanks to Trump and MAGA scum.
Trump: “Obuma” Could Have Never Done A State Fair
The Daily Beast reports:
President Donald Trump woke in a fury on Monday morning and immediately launched into an angry rant about his state fair flop. The Great American State Fair, delivered by Freedom 250, Trump’s event organization, kicked off last week and was bogged down by issues from the outset.
Trump, it appears, noticed the resulting criticism. “Do you think people appreciate what a fantastic job we did in building and operating the Great American State Fair at the National Mall, packed with happy people, and everybody loving it?” he opened his 6:30 a.m. Truth Social post.
He added: “Ask yourself this simple question, ‘DO YOU THINK THAT OBUMA OR SLEEPY JOE BIDEN COULD HAVE DONE IT?’ THE ANSWER IS NO!”
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They would not have put on the SHIT SHOW of tearing down our White House and making a two-bit carnival out of the property, you jackass!
Their show would have been bigger, better, and more inclusive!
Trump and his clowns are a universal exhibition of failure!
Four Million Have Lost Obamacare So Far This Year
NOTUS reports:
Four million Americans dropped out of Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces in their first month of coverage this year, largely for failing to pay monthly premiums. The decline — far larger than in previous years — reflects the sticker shock felt by millions as premiums rose by double digits after congressional Republicans allowed for extra pandemic-era federal subsidies to expire in December.
Democrats are likely to seize on the figures released Friday to blame Republicans for higher health care costs ahead of the midterms. Democrats seeking House and Senate majorities this year have adopted health care affordability as a top message. It has been such a salient issue for Democrats that their congressional caucus shut down the government over demands to extend the enhanced subsidies.
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"Repeal and replace." That's all the goddamn Nazis ever said. Then they repealed and replaced with a bag of shit!
DISGRACED AMERICA!
MAGA Groups To Petition FCC To Yank ABC’s Licenses
Politico reports:
Conservative groups are preparing to urge the Federal Communications Commission to revoke Disney’s broadcast television licenses, two representatives told POLITICO — a step that would build on agency Chair Brendan Carr’s already unprecedented efforts to punish President Donald Trump’s perceived critics in the media.
The petitioners are expected to include a lawyer leading the conservative Center for American Rights who filed complaints against NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and CBS’ “60 Minutes” about alleged favoritism toward Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign. Carr immediately revived those complaints once he assumed the gavel, kick-starting a year and a half of threats and investigations that have left the media industry on edge.
With the new petitions, the review is “no longer only about DEI,” said the Center for American Rights leader, Daniel Suhr, in an interview with POLITICO. “It is now about the complete record of ABC’s management of these stations.” The Media Research Center, a watchdog group devoted to countering perceived liberal bias, also plans to file a petition Monday urging the commission to deny Disney’s ABC license renewal, a spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO.
"I think if they do that it will be one bridge too far, and the people will take to the streets. We're not going to allow these fascists to take over the media. Hopefully this will lead to Mr. Carr's imprisonment" — Blue4sure (comments)
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Both MAGA and Carr are vile Nazis.
They all will be held accountable. Nlo one gets away with this shit!
Letter From Hate Groups Sparked Case Against SPLC
The New York Times reports:
Ever since the Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center in April with defrauding donors by using its money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations, the prominent civil rights group’s lawyers have wondered how the investigation came about.
In court papers filed on Monday night, the lawyers shed new light on the origins of the renewed investigation using records recently provided to them by the F.B.I. They said the inquiry appeared to have been prompted, at least in part, by a letter sent in September from several right-wing organizations that had been criticized by the law center. It was addressed to Stephen Miller, the powerful aide to Mr. Trump who has often exercised significant influence over decisions at the Justice Department.
The letter, jointly written by groups including Moms for Liberty and Turning Point USA, used language about the law center that was almost identical at times to language that appeared in an F.B.I. document from October that laid out the basics of the new investigation.
“To put it succinctly,” the lawyers wrote, “the Justice Department’s justification for opening a ‘full’ investigation into the S.P.L.C. in October 2025 — that led to the indictment in April 2026 — appears to be a rehashing of a letter sent by conservative groups to Stephen Miller complaining about being designated as hate groups by the S.P.L.C.”
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If one doesn't want to be labled a hateful Nazi, stop admitting you are by doing your Nazi shitting!
Trump’s ‘lost cause’ is a threat to democracy — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump’s attempts to celebrate America’s 250th birthday as a referendum honoring himself, and simultaneously plastering memorials to himself all over Washington, D.C., is a literal “lost cause” that threatens democracy.
“That’s some food for thought here in 2026, as an ailing, flailing President Donald Trump sets his sight on being the ringmaster of the clown show he has planned for the Fourth,” wrote The New Republic’s Jason Linkins on Sunday.
Previously, Linkins discussed how Americans should embrace discrediting the Lost Cause ideology of the Confederacy — namely, the idea that the Confederate rebellion against the United States after Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election was somehow honorable. In fact, the Southern states seceded from the Union because they supported slavery and feared Lincoln would bar it from the newly-conquered Western territories.
“When Trump’s not losing wars or setting the economy on fire, he’s busy turning the nation’s capital into an orgy of self-aggrandizement ahead of next week’s semiquincentennial celebration,” Linkins wrote. “At Wednesday’s kick-off event for his ‘Great American State Fair,’ Trump announced that ‘America is back.’ Where had it gone? The president proclaimed that ‘a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.’”
Linkins added, “As a thin crowd made for the exits, he also touched on the matter of state that’s consumed most of his time lately: ‘The Reflecting Pool that you’ve heard so much about, which is so incredible, it’s been gruesomely vandalized by thugs, bad people, but soon will be looking as beautiful as it looked just two weeks ago,’ Trump said. ‘In fact, I looked at it just a little while ago. It looks perfect already, but we’re fixing it.’ As it happens, the Reflecting Pool is still green, still peeling, and half-assedly stashed behind some chain-link fence. It may be a federal crime for me to report this, it’s not really clear.”...
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Without doubt, Trump is a lost cause.
Revealed: Why Trump's newest vanity obsession has him counting trees — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump has yet another Washington, D.C., makeover project dominating his mind, and according to the Washington Post, it all has to do with counting the number of trees close to the White House.
Now, in a Sunday morning report, the Washington Post exposed his latest fixation: the number of trees at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. Trump has reportedly demanded that the public park, which he has dubbed "the entrance to the White House," feature 47 trees to commemorate his current presidency....
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If he wants to commemorate his current presidency then he should put a gold commode there!
Trump’s unprecedented corruption is actively destroying America: report — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump is breaking precedent in an important way, according to two experts — he is unprecedented in his corruption.
“Past presidents of both parties have recognized that the Oval Office is a public trust, not a business opportunity,” wrote The Hill’s David Wippman and Glenn C. Altschuler on Sunday. “President Trump has shattered that norm. Since returning to office, he and his family have raked in more than $4 billion. Much of that comes from investments in cryptocurrency, real estate, and licensing ventures that benefit directly from President Trump’s policies.”
He added, “Although the federal conflict of interest statute does not cover the president, every occupant of the White House since Watergate has recognized an ethical obligation to separate public office from personal financial interests. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush used blind trusts. Barack Obama and Joe Biden didn’t need to, because their assets consisted largely of diversified investments, pensions and book royalties.”
Wippman and Altschuler described how Trump has weakened regulations to prevent conflicts of interest, heavily profited from cryptocurrency, used his power to enrich his hotels and golf courses and accepted deals which personally benefit him from the governments of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. They even described him from profiting by major media and technology companies settling frivolous litigation he filed instead of contesting them....
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The most corrupt administration in 250 years!
Employees Are Using Their Jobs’ Super-Expensive AI Tokens for the Most Hilariously Pointless Tasks Imaginable — Joe Wilkins
Under all the bluster of AI hype lies a real conundrum: companies are charging out-of-this-world prices for a tool that still can’t match the value of a competent human. As AI companies and their financial backers continue to dump billions of dollars into AI development, the consequences of that basic contradiction are spilling out into offices and shops throughout the US.
The fintech firm Slash, for example, recently encouraged its employees to start using AI coding tools as much as possible, a phenomenon known as tokenmaxxing, with the ultimate goal of boosting productivity and lowering costs. Unfortunately, LLMs are too expensive — and not quite useful enough — to really make that a reality.
At Slash, one employee wasted an astonishing $80,000 in AI tokens to vibe code a lackluster video game called “brainrot shooter.” As Business Insider describes it, the first-person shooter is a barren experience where the player runs around shooting at enemies inspired by viral internet memes.
“Pls play it so we can write this off as a marketing expense,” Slash wrote on social media....
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Apparently, "brainrot" is not a game but real life with these retards.
Company Pulls Delivery Robots From All College Campuses — Frank Landymore
College campuses across the country will no longer be swarming with tiny rolling robots.
Starship Technologies, a leading delivery bot company, announced earlier this month that it was ending its university operations and redeploying over a thousand of its meal machines. But the news is just starting to sink in, as various partnered universities all issue official communications mourning the program’s end like obituaries for a celebrity’s passing.
The time has come for the takeout drones to hit the big leagues, as the company intends to focus on doing deliveries for grocery chains and restaurants in cities instead. And shut-in, no-tipping undergrads from coast to coast weep.
“We’re seeing a lot of traction for delivery robots across numerous industries including industrial, universities, and corporate, but it’s time for us to focus on the vertical we feel will have the most value, both for our clients and for Starship,” CEO Ahti Heinla said in a statement.
Symbolically and literally, the pull-out is a pretty big deal for Starship. Serving students was how it made a name for itself in the US, when it first unleashed a sortie of its burger butlers at George Mason University in 2019. It went on to partner with more than 60 other universities, which acted as a more forgiving laboratory to test its roaming dumbwaiters than the unpredictable chaos of city streets....
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Fire the robots, hire real humans! A novel idea!
Parasite That Affects Cognition Has Quietly Infected Billions of People — Joe Wilkins
One of the world’s most effective parasites doesn’t spread through mosquito bites or undercooked snails — but through the common house cat.
Called toxoplasma gondii, the parasite is a single-cell organism that primarily spreads to humans via cat turds, but also through raw or undercooked meat, contaminated water, and from a mother to her fetus. Its symptoms range from mild aches and pains to debilitating neural impairment, which makes it all the more horrifying to learn that it currently has no cure.
According to a paper published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, as spotted by Gizmodo, the infection of this protozoan parasite known as “toxoplasmosis” is “one of the most common parasitic infectious diseases affecting humans,” and the number one “intraocular infection” — meaning inside the eyeball — on the planet.
In the research paper, a team of international scientists makes the case that toxoplasmosis meets the criteria for recognition as a “neglected tropical disease.” That designation would free up significant resources for further studies and the development of public health policy “to address the substantial burden” the parasite has on human health.
And it is substantial. Some researchers estimate that roughly one-third of humanity —roughly two billion people — is infected with the parasite, including about 60 million people in the United States alone. Though a healthy immune system can keep the worst impacts of the eye-ball dwellers in check, worst-case scenarios can include significant damage to the eyes, brain, and nervous system....
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Ah-ha! Inside the eyeball goes inside the brain pan! Seems many are afflicted these days.
Paxton: Jesus “Delivered Me” From My Legal Problems
The Christian Post reports:
Texas Attorney General and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton told the crowd gathered Saturday on the last day of the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference that he believes God delivered him from the legal obstacles he has faced in recent years. “There’s a greater power, and I’m not here because of some great thing I did. I’m here because God delivered me,” Paxton said to an enthusiastic Evangelical audience at the Washington Hilton.
“The Bible is full of those stories about all kinds of people, and none of them are particularly perfect — whether you talk about Peter or Paul or David, the story is about what God did, not what they did. All they did was trust and believe, and that’s the message: that my life is an example of that,” he said. He has faced scrutiny from some conservative and Christian leaders over his personal life in the wake of his wife filing for divorce against him on “biblical grounds” last summer.
"What amazes me isn’t that Paxton said this, but people believe him" — Todd20036 (comments)
""Well, Jesus and a shitload of bribes, anyway." — Judas Peckerwood (comments)
"Ah yes. The ultimate 'I don't take responsibility for anything'".... — Ed B (comments)
"It’s so refreshing that Jesus devotes his time to forgiving politicians and preventing their prosecutions, and of course assisting athletes in achieving a home run, touchdown, or pummeling an opponent violently. So much better than wasting time saving children in Gaza, or feeding the hungry." — Gus S (comments)
"Given the ancient idea of a god, these people (christianists, evangelicals, bible-bangers) all seem so primitive and childlike in their conceptualizing a god-person who manipulates every event on this tiny blue planet, especially when things seem to go the way they like." — RRebel (comments)
"Why doesn't White Jeebus fix that wonky eye then? Not praying hard enough?" — HomerTh (comments)
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When they start sinking in the polls in Texas they will always find Jesus!
‘Is There a Question in That?’ DHS Sec Mullin Battles CNN’s Jake Tapper in Tense Debate Over Haiti Deportations — Joe DePaolo
...“Will you be deporting all of them?” Tapper asked Mullin. “Will they be all deported back to their home countries, Haiti and Syria? And when will these deportations start? Will it be immediately?”
“Well, Jake, first of all, Temporary Protected Status was never intended to be permanent,” Mullin said. “And there’s a lot of people that came over here 15, 20 years ago underneath TPS that’s already changed their status.The whole time these individuals have been here underneath the Temporary Protected Status, they could have applied for a visa. They could have applied for LPR. They could have applied for different directions. But the status itself can be ended in its name itself by saying temporary.”
Tapper proceeded to question Mullin on whether it is truly safe to send those with TPS back to Haiti.
“The Trump administration’s argument is that this was only supposed to last 18 months,” Tapper said. “My understanding of how the process works is, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has the discretion to extend it if the U.S. State Department says that the countries that these people are from are still considered unsafe, which is why they were afforded TPS status to begin with. Is it the position of the Trump administration that Haiti is a safe country to send these people to?”...
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Put yuorself in Haitian shoes. You have lived here in the U.S. for as long as 20 years but you will be safe and sound back in Haiti? JohnWayne "I have an anger issue" Mullin is someone we are confusing with someone who cares.
Trump Turns National Mall Into Sh*tty Theme Park For July Fourth — Dominic Gwinn
Trump supporters attend the kick-off event for The Great American State Fair, a month-long celebration on the National Mall in Washington DC that celebrates the country’s 250th anniversary. Thursday, June 25, 2026.
A large stretch of the National Mall in Washington DC is currently full of a bunch of large, white tents. There’s a white 150-foot Ferris wheel on Seventh Street, opposite a large arch. Over on 14th Street, there’s a big, empty stage.
The Trump administration calls it the Great American State Fair, but it looks like the shoddiest amusement park. A trashy rebranding of the American experiment for dim-witted suckers. This is Trumpland: The Experience. One ride, a bunch of cheap flags, and a lot of tan lines.
All the white tent exteriors are covered in a combination of vinyl tarp with wood and plaster columns. The tarps have fake, painted windows. Some of the plaster corners are already popping out, and are hastily held together with industrial adhesives and tape. Faux columns evoke the look of a permanent marble structure. The whole thing is a less than subtle message that these structures are intended to be replicas of Trump’s proposed ballroom. A wink and a nudge for rubes gullible enough to be tricked into forking over billions in tax dollars so Trump can build memorials to himself.
All the workers dress like uniformed attendants at some desperate, struggling country club. Security run around in burgundy polo shirts (some have shoulder-slung fanny packs that undoubtedly house a pistol). Young, fit men serving as VIP escorts all wear light blue button-ups tucked into khaki slacks. Regular staffers scurry around in dark blue polos. Janitorial crews in bright orange T-shirts slowly drag bins from one fenced off area to another. Out-of-state cops and federal agents in tactical gear leer at everyone from behind sunglasses, some anxiously waiting to be thanked for their service....
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Side Show Showdown — Pistol Grip Wallet, Men of Extinction.
America's unmet promise — and most shameful secret — The Conversation
As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, the global data we collect and analyze shows that the country is failing to “promote the general Welfare,” as the Constitution’s framers promised a little more than a decade later.
We are scholars of human rights. Alongside the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, a nonprofit that tracks how well more than 200 countries and territories are meeting the human rights commitments their governments have made, we annually update scores measuring whether people can actually get the basics of a decent life, such as healthcare, adequate food and a quality education.
The latest data our team has amassed shows that the U.S. is falling short compared with what it could achieve, given its US$32 trillion economy. This is not a one-year blip – the U.S. has been underperforming for the past 25 years.
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America still has a long way to go.
The quiet coup: How Trump is dismantling the government to consolidate power — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump has been purging qualified federal workers from their roles and replacing them with loyalists — and his efforts have not received a lot of attention.
“The board’s decision has no direct bearing on cases that the Supreme Court is expected to rule on this week, which could establish how far the president’s power over the civil service extends,” reported The New York Times’ Jonah E. Bromwich, Michael S. Schmidt and Rebecca Davis O’Brien on Sunday. The journalists were referring to the Merit Systems Protection Board, which Trump pressured behind the scenes to rule that he had the right to dismiss officials without due process simply because they differed from him on policy issues. “But it defanged the most effective method for federal workers to challenge their dismissals, and if upheld on appeal could undercut protections for broad swaths of the civil service.”
By removing those protections, the White House made it possible to penalize and remove officials who historically have been protected by civil service rules so that they can do their jobs without worrying about political pressure.
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Civil service was the backbone on America for years. Without it my family would have been up the creek.
Why the right’s attack on ‘socialism’ is a failure — Oliver Willis
This past week, after Democratic socialists swept a slate of primaries in New York City, Republicans launched a rerun of one of their most well-worn lines of attack: communism.
President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to insist that “many Communists running in badly failing Blue States” and that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”
No one running in the New York elections ran as a communist. They ran as progressives, largely opposed to the disastrous policies put in place by Republicans, like an abusive anti-immigrant regime, social safety net cuts, and tax cuts for the wealthy.
The attack was boringly familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to U.S. politics for the last 60-plus years. Conveniently for the right, whoever is in charge of the Democratic Party or is an influential voice within the party is one of the Four Horsemen of communism or socialism.
In the 2024 election cycle, Trump alleged that former Vice President Kamala Harris—and by extension, former President Joe Biden—was a Marxist. This would have been news to anyone living on planet Earth during her time in office, because not a thing that she or Biden did could even remotely be considered communist in nature.
But maybe their economic stimulus package that revived the country after Trump’s first term was considered socialist? Or perhaps the decision to spend infrastructure funds—that Trump failed to secure—to repair roads, bridges, and other systems was somehow socialist?...
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This is the little boy whining, "That's exactly what your mother is!"
He doesn't know shit from shinola!
Biden Unloads On “Brazen Blatantly Corrupt” Trump
“Look, it’s not just his deliberate distortion and destruction of NATO. And he is choosing Putin as an American over American ally or the fact that he’s diminished our standing in the eyes of the world more than any president in history has.
“It’s not just his vanity projects, tearing down the East Wing of the White House, making room for his ballroom. Put his name on the Kennedy Center. Building an arch in his own honor. They’ve been hiring his own, his own pool guy to fix the reflecting pool. Whoa. What a loser!
“Look folks, well folks, it’s not just that. Reflecting pool reflects something even worse than the narcissism and incompetence at the core of this administration. It’s the corruption, the corruption. A brazen blatant corruption. Corruption on a scale never seen before in American history in any administration.
“Trump has made billions of dollars. It’s simply stunning to me. He has no shame. And frankly, it’s embarrassing for the country. But Trump, Trump could care less. Making money off the presidency is one of the reasons he wants to be president.
“But you know what, it’s not even the corruption and the money that makes me the most angry. It makes me angry. Trump wants to give taxpayers’ money, your money, to the January 6 insurrectionists. People who stormed the Capitol, attacked the police and tried to execute his own vice president.” – Joe Biden, at the Maryland Democratic Convention gala.
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It's good to hear the voice of sanity again.
Impeachment is the only answer to Trump’s behavior — Heather Digby Parton
Democrats should not be timid in holding the president accountable if they take back Congress
The big current Beltway debate is whether the Democratic Party has gone off the deep end and is destroying the country because a couple of democratic socialists in New York City unseated two incumbents. Apparently, it’s just been too long since party elders and the media establishment had a hand-wringing party over alleged left-wing extremism ruining everything, so this was their invitation to hold one. Democratic strategist James Carville says he’s done with the party over this. Donald Trump is screaming about communists running rampant, and the mainstream media is sighing with relief that they have a storyline to prove they aren’t biased against Trump after all. And so it goes.
Some of us who weren’t born yesterday remember that it was just eight years ago when the same thing happened. Recall that a young upstart by the name of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated New York Rep. Joseph Crowley, a powerful 10-term incumbent and chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. Ocasio-Cortez’s win was seen as a crisis for the ages when she and a group of young “woke” women of color, dubbed “the Squad,” were feared to be taking a wrecking ball to everything we hold dear because they were just too extreme for the regular folks.
This has happened over and over again when a new generation steps up with a different energy and new ideas: the old guard always freaks out. In our present moment, it’s true that the calls for generational change are very loud, and for obvious reasons. The issue of America’s unconditional support for Israel, especially in the wake of Trump’s disastrous war with Iran, is roiling both parties, and it’s having an effect at the ballot box. But despite whatever internecine disagreements they have — and they always have them — Democrats of all stripes are strongly united on one issue above all others: the existential threat to our democracy presented by Trump and the Republican Party....
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May the third time be the charm!
MAGA attorney floats 'no mercy' response if Supreme Court goes against Trump: 'Adios' — David McAfee
Conservative legal activist Mike Davis floated an aggressive immigration crackdown this week if the Supreme Court rules against the Trump administration on birthright citizenship, including a call to prioritize the detention and deportation of women of childbearing age.
Davis, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump who heads the Article III Project, framed his posts around the expectation that the high court will rule against the administration's position. He accused the justices in advance of preparing to "lawlessly" extend birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants.
In one post, Davis wrote that if the court "lawlessly pretends we fought a Civil War and passed subsequent laws to give birthright citizenship to illegal aliens, we must ramp up third-country detainments and mass-deportations."...
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Mike Davis is an extremely reprehensible human! He represents what is wrong with us.
The stupid is strong in this one!
Three days in and Trump’s State Fair already ‘falling apart at the seams’: commentator -- Alexander Willis
Three days into the 16-day Great American State Fair organized by the President Donald Trump-linked group Freedom 250, the event is already “falling apart at the seams,” argued prominent liberal commentator and podcast host Adam Mockler on Saturday.
“Just like everything else Donald Trump touches, this Great American Fair is falling apart at the seams,” Mockler said in a video published on social media Saturday. “We are at day three of his 16-day fair that is funded by our taxpayer dollars to the tune of $80 million, and it’s falling apart.”
Critics have already noted what they say are small crowd sizes and near-empty exhibits, but several other issues appeared to plague the event within its first few days, including power failures that stalled a Ferris wheel and melted ice cream....
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The Trump State Fair is melting in the park. The sour green icing flowing down...
THE GREAT AMERICAN RIPOFF!
The second coming has turned into the fiasco we all knew it would.
The comments are priceless for this one!
Are we bothsidesing racism now? — Dan Froomkin
The legal and moral question at the heart of Thursday’s 6-3 Supreme Court opinion giving Donald Trump the go-ahead to deport over 350,000 mostly Haitian immigrants was a simple one: Was Trump’s decision motivated even in part by racial animus?
And that, in turn, came down to the question: Were Trump’s past statements about Haiti racist?
That is not a tough one.
Trump has accused Haitians of eating their neighbor’s pets. He has called Haiti a “shithole” country and has said he preferred immigrants from “nice” predominantly white countries. He has said that most Haitian immigrants “probably have AIDS.” He has said nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Even the mainstream political journalists who bend over backwards not to call Trump a racist outright have acknowledged that some of his comments about Haiti in particular qualify as racist smears and as elements of a racist and inflammatory narrative.
But after Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion that none of Trump’s statements about Haiti were “overtly racial,” I had a bad feeling that our top political journalists would wimp out and treat Alito’s assertion as debatable – as one of two plausible sides of a political argument –- rather than as the bald-faced, ridiculous lie that it is.
I was worried that rather than state the obvious, they would throw up their hands and say, effectively, “You decide whether what Trump said is racist or not. You decide whether his statements on race represent reasonable, legitimate political discourse. We’re not going to judge.”
Readers, I was right to worry.
Our elite political media is now bothsidesing racism...
Racism is now rampant in one of our two political parties. But that’s not an excuse for journalists to treat it like an issue with two legitimate sides -– or to cover it up.
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Our free press has failed to live up to its responsibility.
Accountability is coming — and Speaker Johnson is petrified — Adam Lynch
Former Republican Steve Schmidt says House Speaker Mike Johnson is not so clueless that he can’t see the future, and that future involves a Democratic majority in the House, and lots of scrutiny.
“Mike Johnson seems like he needs to be reminded about an important reality,” said Schmidt on his “Warning” substack. “Most people drown because they panic, not because they can’t swim. Mike Johnson is panicking.”
Johnson’s overly frank claims about a future without a Republican majority in the House were quite the admission.
“If we were to lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats… impeachment’s not even the big concern,” Johnson said before a live audience. “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends … half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I’ll take care of you. We’re going to win the midterms.”
It was “an astonishing statement,” said Schmidt, comparing it to dialogue written for Burgess Meredith playing the Penguin in the old ‘Batman’ TV series: “I run the protection program.”
“Mike Johnson isn’t panicked because he believes innocent people will be persecuted,” said Schmidt. “He’s panicked because he understands that accountability may finally be coming to Washington. He knows there will be subpoenas. He knows there will be hearings. He knows there will be oversight. He knows investigators will begin asking questions that should have been asked years ago — and he knows the answers may be devastating.”
Johnson isn’t afraid of unfair investigations, Schmid added. He’s afraid of fair ones....
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The little twerp brought it on himself. He deserves the swift sword of justice that's coming to all the Trump criminals.
Ex-MAGA darling accuses Trump of 'manipulating stock market for insider trading' — Thomas Kika
A former MAGA darling lashed out against the Trump administration this week, accusing it of manipulating the stock market as it tried to strategically hide signs that its Iran ceasefire is failing.
On Friday evening, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. had carried out new military strikes against Iran, claiming that they were in retaliation for an attack the Middle Eastern nation carried out on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump called a "foolish violation" of the recent "memorandum of understanding" it recently signed. Iran claimed that the ship was targeted because it was using an unauthorized pathway through the Strait.
In a post to X on Saturday, the Kobeissi Letter, which tracks news about "global capital markets," highlighted something notable about the timing of the announcement.
"BREAKING" The US Pentagon delayed publicly announcing US strikes on Iran until after the US stock market had closed at 4 PM ET on Friday, per NBC News," the account posted. "The timing of the announcement was reportedly intended to 'reduce the immediate impact on financial markets.'"...
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His time is just about up.
Panicking MAGA already begging courts to save them as Democratic victories mount — Adam Lynch
Salon reports right wing media is freaking out over a slew of Democratic victories this year and preemptively pleading to the Supreme Court to save them from the results of democracy.
This tactic involves demonizing the electorate that votes Democrat and excluding them from the electoral process as much as constitutionally possible.
“This is what happens when you import the third world,” Fox News talking head Jesse Watters recently growled about New York’s primary results, wile describing it as “a third world takeover.” Laura Ingraham, said Salon, also labored to connect progressive politics with foreignness rather than domestic political preferences.
“The entire lead-up to July 4, I consider it one big trigger warning to the Mamdani minions,” Ingraham said. “They’re happiest when foreign flags are flying. Because to them, red, white and blue ... is like sunshine to a vampire.”
Steve Bannon was no better on his “War Room” podcast, said Salon writer Sophia Tesfaye, calling New York a “foreign city.”
“Go look at Mamdani’s base,” Bannon told his audience. “It’s foreign. These sanctuary cities — this is all by design.” Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh was even less subtle, saying “Third world communists are the enemy,” on X. “They’ve taken over our greatest American city. They’re taking over one of our two major political parties. They hate this country. They hate white people. They hate our heritage and traditions.”
“The danger of this commentary lies in its explicit de-legitimization of the democratic process itself,” said Tesfaye. “When a citizen votes for a candidate who happens to hold democratic socialist views, conservative media treat the voter as an illegal interloper whose very participation in the franchise is a form of national contamination. And they’ve turned to the nation’s highest court as a counter-majoritarian shield, framing an ordinary shift in municipal politics as an existential emergency that justifies the legal dismantling of a century of constitutional consensus.”...
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It will be a pleasure to see these traitors stretched out across the concrete! This means you, Jesse Waters!
Court Upholds Life-Saving National Soot Air Quality Standard — Newswire Editor
“Clean air is not a luxury. We are thrilled these vital air quality standards have been upheld by a federal court,” said Patrice Simms, vice president of Healthy Communities at Earthjustice. “The 2024 soot standard is a critical advancement for public health, projected to save thousands of lives every year. Lee Zeldin’s EPA must stop catering to polluters and must instead fulfill its mission to protect public health. The time for implementing the 2024 soot standard is now.”
“Fine particulate matter standards provide critical public health protections. The court correctly rejected EPA’s about-face on the need for a stronger standard,” said Shaun Goho, senior director, Legal Advocacy at Clean Air Task Force. “The science is clear that soot has many serious health impacts, particularly for children, the elderly, and those with asthma. By EPA’s own estimate, implementing the 2024 soot standard will prevent 800,000 cases of asthma symptoms, 2,000 hospital visits, and 4,500 premature deaths in 2032. Today marks an important step in the right direction, but EPA must now implement the 2024 standard without delay.”...
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Another victory for humanity.
Waymo Caught Driving Straight Into Oncoming Traffic — Joe Wilkins
The hits keep coming for Waymo, whose self-driving taxi cabs are behaving like European tourists who haven’t quite gotten the hang of driving on the right side of the road.
During peak congestion due to the World Cup in Los Angeles, frustrated commuters caught a Waymo trying to drive the wrong way through a jammed intersection.
Video shared by ABC 13 shows the red Waymo stopped on the wrong side of a double-line in Inglewood, California, forcing oncoming vehicles to merge into the farther lane. Though it mostly remains stopped at a red light while traffic crawls past, the very end of the video shows the terrifying moment the robocab starts rolling forward, straight into the oncoming lane.
“Uhh, why is this Waymo on the wrong side the road?” asked Kimoon Kim, the driver who recorded the video. “It’s supposed to be in the left turn lane.”
Speaking to the local station, Kim said the Waymo then abruptly cut him off at the intersection so that it could rudely merge back into the correct lane and make a left turn.
It’s just the latest embarrassing episode for Waymo. A similar incident occurred just three months ago in Houston, where drivers captured footage of one of its cabs turning head-on into a one-way HOV lane before backing up and correcting itself. Elsewhere, Waymos have led police on high-speed chases, swarmed sleepy suburban streets, and violated bike lane boundaries....
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Progress appears as retarded as our Nazis.
Deranged Stalker Uses AI to Edit Her Imaginary Baby Into Man’s Photos — Frank Landymore
An unbalanced stalker posed as an unwitting man’s fiancé, claiming they had a child together. To sell the act — and live out her obsessive fantasy — she used AI to edit images that showed them going on dates together, and even that she was pregnant with his child. And she was doing this for years.
It’s a saga that’s somehow even more bizarre than it sounds. The man, pseudonymously identified as Luke, had no idea that there was a woman out there who had an obsessive fixation on him, and only found out about it from his sister a few months ago. She was alerted to the photos that the stalker had been posting after her friend spotted them, and made a now viral series of posts on Threads documenting their bewilderment.
“It is traumatizing to learn that your pictures were used in such an elaborate narrative,” Luke told The Straits Times.
“We were very worried and concerned that this stranger has photos and videos of my children stored in her phone and was sharing them online as and when she likes,” his sister added.
Luke didn’t actually know the woman, but it turned out that they were once schoolmates 15 years ago. “I spoke no more than two sentences to her when we were in school,” he told The Straits Times....
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We are living in a batshit crazy age.
Trump: Dems Will Kill You And Close Your Churches
“Communism is very easy to sell. I’d be the Greatest Communist in History. I’d give free rent, free houses, free food, everything is free. Unfortunately, after two or three years, the Country where this is taking place would fail. It always does, and then you’ll start living in squalor.
“There will be no food, there will be no housing, there will be no Military, there will be no nothing. You’ll be Third World every way, and everyone will suffer or die. I’m sorry to say, but Assassinations of those who oppose them is a very important element of their Ideology. They’re animals!
“In many cases, not smart but, in some cases, they are. It’s easy for them to get followers because they make promises that they know they can’t keep, and the Dumocrats aren’t fighting back.
“In many ways, they’re allowing them to go their own way. They’re afraid they will lose their Election, they’re afraid of conflict. They’re not smart enough or tough enough to fight this plague.
“If they fought them the way they fight Republicans, or me, they’d be victorious, but they don’t have the courage to do so. These are not social Dumocrats, these are hard core, godless Communists.
“This is the most serious threat to our Country since its existence 250 years ago. Isn’t it ironic, we’re celebrating a very important Birthday, and instead of speaking about Christ, Freedom, and Victories of all different kinds, we’re speaking about yet another threat to the Foundations of America.
“These ruthless Communists will attack all Religions but, in particular, Christianity – They always do. All Communist Countries attack Religions violently. As you know, we recently struck Nigeria, and largely ended the slaughter of their Great Christian population.
“They know that if they go further, the attack will be far greater and, in that, they don’t want to get involved. I am saving Christians throughout the World, even though we are not in those various Countries, by hitting these Terrorists violently and hard.
“They will close your Churches, they will kill your people. This is what they’re about. This is the Greatest Threat to our Country since its Founding 250 years — Donald Trump.
"Long past his jail time. Into coffin time now." — Karl Dubhe IV (comments)
"This is laying the groundwork for declaring martial law and destroying his political opposition by any means available. It is sickening, un-American, and a very real threat." — IamSmartypants (comments)
"This harangue alas is not much different than stuff you would find in 1950s (the era of McCarthyism) Catholic textbooks especially the anti-Communist equals anti-religious hysteria. (The discussion of the evils of Communism was next to a picture of a nun in full habit operating a film projector.) I remember finding one in my aunt's house when I was a kid called The Making of Our Nation and it proclaiming that the usual persecution tropes combined with the triumphalist Christopher Columbus and missionary narratives. One can see from this harangue why certain demographics voted for the tin-pot dictator." — scott grunow
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Trump tells us exacltly who he is in case we didn't already know! He's talking about himself with this.
The ranting of an insane and lost man. The comment about our 250th birthday is a huge tell. All he does regarding it is to glorify himself with events and celebrations reserved for him and the suckers that bow to his evilness.
Maher Presses Vance To Stop Lying About Elections
The Hill reports:
Bill Maher on Friday challenged Vice President Vance over Trump’s false claims of election fraud, saying the GOP must stop insisting they were “cheated” by losses and return to a place where candidates concede defeat. “Under Trump, you guys have two outcomes an election can be: Either we win, or they cheated. That shit has to stop,” he told Vance.
“Will you bring us back to the middle, at least on that, where we can concede elections?” the host asked. “The biggest criticism I had of the 2020 election is that you had technology companies that were quite literally censoring negative information about the left and promoting negative information about the right,” Vance said.
During his State of the Union address to Congress earlier this year, the president said Democrats “want to cheat” in elections, while providing no evidence. He argued that their policies are so unpopular “that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.” Vance, who was seated behind the president, applauded the remarks at the time.
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I know it, you know it, the American people know it. The only reason that they attempt to sell this pile of pig shit is due to the fact that the patholigical Trump lost an election and can't live with it as he is such a weakling!
Missouri Youth Pastor Arrested On Child Sex Charges
Jefferson City’s CBS affiliate reports:
Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church Pastor Daniel Bishop confirmed 27-year-old Robert Ferguson was a youth minister at his Holts Summit church. The investigation into Ferguson began in May 2026 when Ferguson’s wife found two cell phones with sexually explicit content on them and turned them over to law enforcement. During a search of the phones, investigators found photos and videos that had been sent to multiple people without the victim’s consent.
Investigators also found screenshots they said showed Ferguson posing as a teenager while messaging a girl who said she was 16 years old. Police said Ferguson asked the girl to send him explicit photos. During an interview, investigators said Ferguson admitted to messaging the teen girl in an attempt to obtain sexually explicit images. Prosecutors charged Ferguson with attempted sexual exploitation of a minor, nonconsensual dissemination of private sexual images, and enticement of a child.
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Another one bites the dust!
Michigan Pastor Charged With Video Voyeurism
Grand Rapids’ ABC affiliate reports:
A former Holland pastor is facing six felony charges after investigators accused him of secretly recording a family member with a hidden camera. Joshua Peter VanderKlok, who served as co-pastor at Res Life Church Holland, is charged with three counts of surveilling an unclothed person and three counts of using a computer to commit a crime.
According to court records, the investigation began on May 2 after a family member discovered a small black camera hidden beneath a bed and contacted the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office. Court documents allege the camera was positioned toward the doorway of a private bathroom and contained images of the victim unclothed on multiple occasions, including on April 21 and April 23.
During a June 10 probable cause hearing, a detective testified that VanderKlok admitted placing the camera to surveil the family member because it gave him a “connection” to the victim. If convicted on all six charges, VanderKlok could face up to 18 years in prison.
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Another one bites the dust in a double-header.
Vanilla Ice’s Freedom 250 Show Canceled Due To Rain
The Wrap reports:
Vanilla Ice did not get to perform at Freedom 250’s Great American State Fair, even after being one of the only headliners to not back out of the event this month.
The “Ice Ice Baby” rapper was slated to perform at President Donald Trump’s celebration for the U.S.’s 250th birthday on Friday, as part of the “I Love the 90s!” event taking place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. However, less than two hours before the event was scheduled to begin, organizers for the Great American State Fair paused the day’s festivities over heavy rainfall.
“Due to inclement weather in the area, the Freedom 250 Great American State Fair and FIFA World Cup 2026.
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Rain, rain, baby! God does work in mysterious ways now, don't he?
Confederate flag display at Great American State Fair ignites firestorm — Nicole Charky-Chami
A Confederate flag display at the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C. was under fire on Friday, according to reports.
The flag was part of an interactive exhibit for North Carolina and shared in a viral video shared on X by Reuben Jones, Spectrum News Washington Correspondent.
"I stopped by the North Carolina booth at the 'Great American State Fair' on the National Mall today. The state decided not to participate because of the high costs so the booth is sponsored by private orgs," Jones wrote.
His video panned around the room, showing multiple Confederate flags on television screens mounted to the display's walls.
The flag drew "unwanted attention," Jones reported for Spectrum News and elicited a response from North Carolina state officials who said the controversial flag was "unapproved."
"This display does not reflect the North Carolina that we love. America 250 is about unity and bringing our nation together. Glorifying this divisive Confederate symbol does the exact opposite. We demand the organizers stop dishonoring the flag of North Carolina," the North Carolina governor's office told Spectrum.
One of the booth sponsors, Mt. Olive Pickle Company, said it was ending its participation at the event. The company shared this statement:
"Mt. Olive Pickle Company was invited to participate in the North Carolina exhibit for the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C., as part of America’s 250th celebration," the statement said. "We are proud of our North Carolina roots, and we agreed to be a part of an exhibit, as presented to us, that would represent the best of our great state. We were unaware that an image of the Confederate flag was included in a video as part of this exhibit, and we have withdrawn our participation. Our company stands on values of human dignity, opportunity, and freedom."
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein shared this statement with TMZ after the video went viral.
"This flag does not represent the North Carolina that we love. America 250 is about unity and bringing our nation together. We are pleased the flag that did the opposite has now been taken down. Here in Raleigh, North Carolina, we are hosting a July 4th A250 celebration that will honor the spirit of equality and freedom in the Declaration of Independence. Everyone is welcome."...
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Racist treason flags from the Land of the Happy Negro are not tolerated in a democracy!
Six Unelected Justices Just Gave Trump the Power to Ignore Congress and Every American Should Be Terrified — Thom Hartmann
Congress passed the laws. Previous presidents signed them. The Supreme Court has now declared they can be ignored whenever this particular president chooses (but not Biden).
Something happened inside the Supreme Court chamber on Thursday that almost never happens: Justice Sonia Sotomayor was so disgusted by what the six radical, on-the-take Republican appointees had just done that she read her dissent aloud from the bench, and Justice Samuel Alito, who’d written the majority opinion, snapped back at her in real time, a breach of the Court’s normally stage-managed decorum that left veteran reporters in the room visibly startled in slack-jawed amazement.
On the surface they were fighting about asylum seekers. But Sotomayor understood, as Alito surely did, that the real question wasn’t who gets to cross the border: it was whether the laws Congress writes still mean anything once a neofascist, imperial president (like Alito and his peers want) decides he’d rather not follow them because he’s above the law.
To understand this — and why it’s so insanely radical — look carefully at what the Court actually did in the two 6-3 all-Republican immigration rulings it handed down yesterday morning.
Back in 1980, a bipartisan Congress passed the Refugee Act to bring American law in line with our promise not to send the persecuted back to be killed, and it laid out a specific, mandatory set of steps.
Under the law Congress wrote that year, a noncitizen who reaches our border and says she fears persecution gets referred for an asylum interview to determine the legitimacy of her fear of violence or death in her home country or the country she’s fleeing. The word Congress chose to write into the law was the administration “shall,” not “may,” hold that hearing and a judge “shall” make that determination.
On Thursday the Republicans on the Court, however, ruled that Trump can erase or effectively ignore that law by simply ordering border agents to physically block people on the Mexican (or, presumably, Canadian or at an airport arrival) side of the line, so they never technically “arrive in the United States” and the law never kicks in.
Sotomayor called the reasoning illogical, because it is. A person standing at the threshold of a port of entry has plainly arrived. The Republican Trump toadies on the Court, however, pretended otherwise so Trump’s racial enforcers could essentially ignore both the intention and the letter of the law that elected members from both parties in Congress wrote....
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SCOTUS Nazi racists at work. They must be rejected and removed.
Inside the real reason Republicans are finally telling Trump to pound sand — Adam Lynch
Dispatch writer David M. Drucker dropped some truth on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” show on Saturday, explaining exactly why Republican leaders in the Senate are finally defying President Donald Trump by refusing to pass the SAVE Act.
Passing the act, which critics say will severely constrict voter access, will require unprecedented moves in the Senate, including the dismantling of the Senate filibuster and the removal of the Senate parliamentarian. Neither of that’s going to happen, however, because Republicans in the Senate can see the future whereas Trump — who is pushing 80 — sees very little future at all.
“What I find silly about this, but it kind of shows you where the President's head is at — which is the same place it's always at —,” he said suggestively, “is that what Republicans do unto you today, Democrats can do unto you tomorrow.”
“So go ahead and fire the parliamentarian, go ahead and scrap the filibuster. Democrats are going to be in power again sometime soon. Look at the past 25 years. This goes back and forth. And they will trash this bill. They'll [install] universal mail-in balloting. They'll do all these things that will force Texas and Florida and Idaho and all these red states to govern elections the way they want. We just played ping-pong doing this. So, the whole thing is just ridiculous,” Drucker said....
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You had better believe it!
Texas unleashes sleeping giant as conservatives face reckoning over 'truth' — Bret Wilkins
“We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state,” Republican board member Brandon Hall—who is also a youth pastor at Cavalry Baptist Church in Springtown—said during a Thursday press conference in Austin.
That “truth” omits or marginalizes climate change, US imperialism, women’s history, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, and racism....
“Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she added. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”
"We could improve the IQ of the United States, by making Texas Mexico again. Which will then, make United States great again. What holds us back ,is the idiocy that is Texas" — Blue4sure (comments)
"For sure there will be huge lawsuits brought by those not Christian or of 'other' Christian faiths like Roman Catholics over this bible based indoctrination policy. Hopefully it will mean a US District Judge make a decision against it on freedom of religion/separation of faith and state grounds, upheld by the regional Court of Appeals and hopefully when the SCOTUS has seen new justices under a Democrat President to uphold the Constitution." — leonbnj (comments)
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Being retarded is no way to go through life, Texas!
America was NEVER founded as a "Christian" nation.
All of this garbage is unconstitutional! Stop sleeping your lives away!
Billionaire Destruction From Reflecting Pools To Predators — Cliff Schecter
But the DOJ is constipated by greed and ass-kissing, so they're still walking around: collecting checks, getting glossy magazine profiles....
Trump spent more than $16M trying to turn the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool blue—yet it's a green, algae-choked pond scum. Like Trump Tower...And instead of owning it, admitting he hired an idiot pal as a no-bid contractor (and took a taste himself?) so the usuals get rich, he's blaming "vandals." Look in the mirror, prickless.
If everything Trump touches gets worse, the new "Trump Memorial" is the proof. If only that were the worst thing he was up to. I sat down with investigative writer Ellie Leonard for a full hour on the people who built and protected Jeffrey Epstein’s machine. It is known, there is proof in many cases, but the DOJ is constipated by greed and ass-kissing, so they're still walking around: collecting checks, getting glossy magazine profiles.
We need to ensure the authoritarian egg timer set to November. As all signs point to Republicans aiming a weapon of mass electoral destruction at themselves. We'll talk more about this at the link below.
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Trump is deadly cancer.
RNC Sues Colorado To Block Overseas Voting
Democracy Docket reports:
The Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a new lawsuit Friday seeking to block certain U.S. citizens living abroad from voting in Colorado — the second such lawsuit within a week and the latest escalation in the GOP’s exploding campaign against overseas voters.
The lawsuit targets a Colorado law and guidance from Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) that allow certain Americans living overseas to vote in Colorado based on a parent, legal guardian, spouse, domestic partner or civil union partner’s last residence in the state.
The RNC has now filed overseas voter lawsuits against Colorado, Nebraska, Virginia, Arizona, North Carolina and Michigan, arguing in each case that states are unlawfully allowing so-called “never-residents” to cast ballots.
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Tell these Nazi motherfuckers to eat shit and die!
Clean up your own filthy criminal backyard first.
Energy Sec Scoffs At Europe’s Deadly Heat Wave
Politico reports:
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright had a message for Europe as it bakes beneath a record heat wave this week: Stop your whining. “Always more people die in the winter than die in the summer, because cold is a vastly larger killer than heat is,” he said this week in video remarks delivered to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a gathering of influential conservative figures, many of whom dispute the facts of climate change.
His comments came as governments across Europe warned that this week’s record-high temperatures posed life-threatening risks, echoing the dangers of a 2022 heat wave that killed more than 60,000 people on the continent.
Among those attending the conference were Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K.’s populist right-wing party, Reform U.K., and Steve Koonin, who was handpicked by Wright to co-author a U.S. government report that misrepresented mainstream climate science. House Speaker Mike Johnson also delivered video remarks to an audience that included Boris Johnson, the former prime minister of Britain, and Bill Anderson, the CEO of Bayer.
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Another pathetic retard! What shithole do they crawl out of? Cover it over in molten steel!
Watters: Haitians Are Part Of Plot To Overthrow US
“A lot of them believe in voodoo. A lot of them don’t speak English. They don’t assimilate. They’re not the right type of people. So the Democrats sued to keep the Haitians here. Now, why are we suing to keep Haitians? Because they make money off Haitians. It grows the welfare state. It helps the nonprofits. The Haitians have babies, they become American citizens. They’re cheap labor. That’s what this is all about. They want to overthrow the country and we caught them and they’re going home. I’m not feeling that bad about it.” – Jesse Watters, yesterday on The Five.
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Said the putrid and hateful asswipe who is attempting to overthrow our Constitution!
Trump caught red-handed using tax dollars for renovations he claimed he paid for: report — Alexander Willis
Back in March, President Donald Trump claimed that an expensive renovation to a White House pathway was paid for by himself personally, but on Friday, The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer revealed that the bill was actually footed by taxpayers.
The pathway in question connects the Oval Office to the White House’s central complex, a commute that takes all of 45 seconds to make, according to Scherer. Originally paved with Tennessee flagstone, a flat sedimentary rock, Trump instead wanted the pathway to be redone using “polished African granite, carved in Italy.”
CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe asked Trump in March who would be fitting the bill for the pathway renovation.
“Uh, paid for by… me,” Trump said, according to O’Keefe.
Scherer learned, however, that the renovation project actually cost taxpayers $689,232, and was taken from money earmarked for the National Park Service. Scherer also discovered another $347,503 that had been directed away from the National Park Service to pay for a “rush project at request of [Trump]” to help “affix gold frames and plaques mocking some of his predecessors.”
“This previously undisclosed spending is part of an enormous shift of taxpayer cash away from national parks around the country and into the Washington area,” according to The Atlantic report. “In order to pay for the president’s projects, the parks have had to cancel needed repairs, slash their budgets, and operate with fewer employees.”...
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The world's greatest liar! Fucking America is all he lives for!
Mark this article readElection lawyer details game plan to stop Trump from sabotaging the midterms — Alex Henderson
Set for Tuesday, November 3, the United States' 2026 midterms are a little over four months away. And Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias has a warning: expect President Donald Trump to do everything he can to make the midterms as chaotic and stressful as possible.
Elias, publisher of Democracy Docket and a frequent guest on MS NOW, warned voters to expect the worst from Trump in an interview with The New Republic's Win McCormack and his wife Carol Butler.
“What we've seen from Donald Trump in the past is that he starts with lies; then, he increases the rhetoric behind the lies," Elias warned. "Then, you see the legal process. And then, when he fails in the legal process, we have violence. And I think that we are on that progression. He has lied about voting, he has now upped the rhetoric for all of the SAVE Act — which began as a proof-of-citizenship law. It's now become a voter suppression, voter purge, ban on mail-in voting, trans-targeting law, right?"
The Democratic election lawyer added, "So, when he loses in court in the cases I referenced, and he's not able to pass this law through Congress, as we've discussed, I think he's going to escalate further."
Elias said of the midterms, "It's just gonna be a knife fight from here to the end."
The attorney warned that in November, Trump might send U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to polling places in a blatant effort to intimidate voters. On his "War Room" vodcast earlier this year, MAGA Republican Steve Bannon urged Trump to do exactly that....
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Our Congress is controlled by Republicans. Our president is a Republican. Can someone tell me what the fuck Trump is whining about election fraud for? It must be the Republicans that are the crooks here since they are the ones that got elected!.
Of course, that's not it. It is because of only one thing. TRUMP LOST AN ELECTION AND HE"S SCARED AS A MOTHERFUCKER HE'LL LOSE AGAIN!
20th Immigrant Dies in Trump’s Detention Camps — Whitney Curry Wimbish
At least 20 people have died in Donald Trump’s concentration camp network in 2026 as of Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced. Sixty-three-year-old Felix Alcorta-Rodriguez, a Mexican national, was unconscious when guards found him the night of June 19 at the Webb County Detention Center in Laredo, Texas, a facility CoreCivic runs. Staff sent him to the Laredo Medical Center, where he died less than an hour later.
ICE listed no cause of death, saying only that an autopsy is pending. The agency also failed to include any other information about Alcorta-Rodriguez beyond its allegation that he skipped a court date for driving drunk in 2018, and was once arrested for improperly disposing of a lead-acid battery. As the agency typically does in death notices, it said that Alcorta-Rodriguez was provided with “safe, secure, and humane environments,” provided “comprehensive” medical care including dental and mental health care, and “at no time during detention” was denied emergency care.
Family members, elected officials, and multiple organizations say those claims are lies. They say immigrant prisoners in detention camps are routinely denied medical attention, sometimes as retaliation for protesting the deadly conditions, and that the physical environment is so unsanitary that it has touched off outbreaks of tuberculosis and other diseases. Conditions are so inhumane that they have led ten men to kill themselves since Trump retook the White House, according to a recent Associated Press investigation.
A database of ICE-related deaths maintained by staff at the Prospect shows that at least 58 people have now died in immigration detention since January 2025. The actual death toll is likely worse. Many independent organizations are tracking ICE-related deaths; numbers may differ because methodologies differ.
The Trump administration is detaining a record number of people, the vast majority of whom have no criminal record, as part of its mass deportation terror campaign. Led by radical right White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Republicans intend to kick a million people out of the country each year, and have made three massive allocations of tax dollars to ICE and Customs and Border Protection to do so. After their initial $170 billion, which already made the agencies better funded than any military outside of China or America, Republicans then followed up with another $70 billion and a proposal to add $28.4 billion more, as my colleague Ryan Cooper pointed out. For a comparison, that is slightly more than Spain’s entire government budget and twice as much as Thailand’s....
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The shame and disgrace of the United States.
The Death Rate for ICE Detainees Has Skyrocketed Under Trump — Noah Lanard
In February 2025, Maksym Chernyak had a medical emergency. There were multiple signs that Chernyak—a 44-year-old from Ukraine detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Florida—was suffering a severe stroke. But ICE’s medical personnel missed those clues. By the time 911 was called, it was too late. Chernyak’s systolic blood pressure was more than 280 when he got to the hospital. He died soon after.
Chernyak is one of 52 people who died in ICE custody during the 500 days after President Donald Trump returned to office. A new report from two watchdog groups argues that ICE’s mistakes “almost certainly” cost Chernyak his life. It also reveals that he was far from alone in receiving abysmal medical treatment while in immigration detention.
The analysis—released on Thursday by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights—found that the mortality rate for people in ICE custody has skyrocketed during Trump’s second-term mass-deportation campaign. It’s nearly three times what it was during Joe Biden’s presidency and about two times higher than during Trump’s first term—a period that covered the first 10 months of the Covid-19 pandemic. In other words, far more people are now in ICE detention than in prior administrations, and a far greater percentage of those detainees are dying....
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Disgusting ugly fascism.
Feedbacks upon feedbacks: Rock weathering and the climate — Howard Lee
Since the early 1980s, Earth scientists have understood that erosion and weathering of rock slowly removes CO2 from the atmosphere, regulating Earth’s climate on geological timescales. But recent studies have shown that erosion can also emit CO2 by oxidizing organic carbon contained in eroding sediments. It hasn’t been clear how this competition between removal by rock weathering and emission by organic carbon weathering ends up affecting Earth’s climate.
A new study in the journal Nature Communications uses the geological past to test how these competing effects added up. Doctor Madeleine Stow of the University of Oxford, with colleagues from across the UK and France, examined a volcanically triggered episode of global warming that happened in the early part of the Jurassic period, 183 million years ago, known as the “Toarcian Ocean Anoxic Event.”
They found that eroding organic carbon amplified climate warming at the time, suggesting that the same process may apply to modern climate change. But the extent to which the past is prologue is uncertain.
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Enjoy your summer. It may be your last.
Supreme Court Sides with Monsanto in Roundup Case, Shielding Pesticide Companies from Failure-to-Warn Lawsuits — Newswire Editor
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a deeply troubling ruling in Monsanto v. Durnell, siding with Monsanto and holding that federal pesticide law preempts state law failure-to-warn claims. The decision deals a major blow to families, farmworkers, and communities who rely on state courts to seek justice when toxic pesticide exposure causes serious illnesses. It also marks a major win for Monsanto and other pesticide manufacturers seeking to avoid accountability in litigation involving Roundup and other dangerous chemicals.
“Today’s ruling allows Monsanto and other chemical companies to avoid responsibility when their labels leave people unprotected from serious harm,” said Patti Goldman, Senior Attorney at Earthjustice. “The fact that EPA approved a pesticide label does not mean a product is safe, and it should not become a shield for companies that fail to warn about cancer risks, neurological harm, and other serious dangers.”
The ruling rests on Monsanto’s argument that state failure-to-warn claims impose labeling obligations in addition to what the EPA has required. However, EPA’s approval of a pesticide is often based on limited information at a single point in time, while the science around pesticide harms continues to develop. In cases involving Roundup, state court litigation helped reveal that Monsanto knew more about cancer risks than it disclosed and failed to provide adequate warnings to the public. By precluding these claims, the Supreme Court has eliminated an important backstop that protects people when federal regulation and oversight falls short....
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It's like Vietnam all over again! Ha! Ha! Protect the toxic poison makers by all means!
End Sanctions Now - U.S. Economic Warfare Has Made Venezuela’s Earthquake Catastrophe Worse — Newswire Editor
CODEPINK extends our deepest condolences to the people of Venezuela following the devastating earthquakes that have taken hundreds of lives, injured thousands, and left entire communities in urgent need of assistance. Our hearts are with the families mourning loved ones, the first responders risking their lives, and all those working tirelessly to rescue survivors and begin the difficult process of recovery.
For years, CODEPINK has opposed the U.S. policy of sanctions, economic coercion, and regime change directed at Venezuela because these policies have inflicted immense suffering on ordinary people while failing to achieve their stated goals. Today’s catastrophe makes clear what we have long argued: when a country is deliberately weakened through economic warfare, its ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters is also weakened. The United States has a responsibility to help address the humanitarian consequences of the policies it has imposed.
We call on the Trump administration to provide immediate, massive humanitarian assistance in coordination with Venezuelan authorities. Aid must be unconditional, strictly civilian in nature, and must never be used as a pretext for military intervention or political interference. Too often, we’ve seen the U.S. and other Western countries exploit natural disasters like this in order to deepen foreign control. In Haiti, the U.S. and its allies have repeatedly pushed militarization and politically conditioned aid instead of genuine recovery led by the country itself. In this moment, the world must refuse to allow Venezuela to be forced down the same path.
We also call on the administration to immediately lift all U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and release Venezuelan funds under U.S. jurisdiction so they can be used for emergency relief, reconstruction, and recovery....
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Someone needs to tell them Trump will fart in their general direction.
NASA Rover Finds “Complex Organic Matter” on Mars — Victor Tangermann
After more than five years of roaming the desolate and dusty landscapes of the Martian surface, NASA’s Perseverance rover has come across some of the most intriguing evidence yet of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, scientists confirmed that Perseverance had discovered a rock that contained “complex organic matter” — the building blocks of life, in biological parlance — in two rocks in a formation dubbed Bright Angel.
The outcropping is located inside the Jezero crater, which scientists believe is an ancient lakebed that dried out billions of years ago. The scientists found that samples from the rocks that Perseverance originally found in 2024 contained macromolecular carbon (MMC), large networks of carbon atoms commonly found in Earth rocks containing fossilized biological carbon and meteorites.
An initial analysis of the rocks made headlines last year after NASA announced it had spotted “potential biosignatures,” pointing at compelling “leopard spots” that may have been left behind by microbial life.
The latest paper fleshes out the compelling case even further, confirming the detection of MMC in the rocks by using one of Perseverance’s scientific instruments to detect their composition by shining an ultraviolet laser at them.
“Measurements of two mudstones show hundreds of organic detections, making this the most robust organic detection in Jezero crater thus far, and, to our knowledge, the only detection of macromolecular carbon on a natural rock surface on Mars,” the paper reads....
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Let's see how this plays out.
If There Wasn’t Enough Opposition to AI Data Centers Already, Now They’re Supercharging Inflation — Victor Tangermann
The shockingly unpopular drive to pepper the United States with massive AI data centers isn’t just driving up electricity prices, wasting huge amounts of water, and reviving heavy-polluter power stations — it’s also making life more expensive for the average American.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the data center boom is driving a “third wave of inflation” which — following president Donald Trump’s unprovoked tariff war and the conflict in Iran choking out oil supplies — is increasing consumer prices even more.
We’ve already seen a massive run on semiconductors cause PC components, like RAM and storage devices, to become incredibly unaffordable. Just this week, Apple was forced to raise prices by hundreds of dollars for the vast majority of its offerings, once again highlighting surging costs amidst AI-driven chip shortages. According to the Labor Department, prices for wholesale electronic components and accessories were up a stunning 27 percent last month compared to a year ago.
Now, analysts are trying to get a better sense of how these effects could ripple across other markets, as well as how long this inflationary period will last. The results could have major implications for an economy that’s increasingly being held up by a handful of AI-crazed tech companies.
Proponents of AI continue to argue that the tech is powerful enough to increase productivity enough to push down inflation. Put simply, the idea is that businesses will have an easier time meeting demand without raising prices.
At least, that’s the theory — but it’s not what’s playing out right now. Economists at UBS warn that the current frenzy to construct new data centers is only the very beginning. Productivity gains and dis-inflationary pressure could take years to materialize, if ever.
In other words, consumers will have to bear the brunt of the tech industry’s latest obsession for the time being, a sobering predicament....
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Fire, good! Burn all!
Ilhan Omar Gonna Assimilate Her Foot Up Racist Rep. Tom Emmer’s Ass — Evan Hurst
Look at this ugly ass white-haired bitch with his Birth Of A Nation face
Tom Emmer is not some obscure congressman. He is the House Majority Whip, and the racist white piece of shit from Minnesota who always speaks up on Minnesota matters like he represents real Minnesotans and not just fellow racist white pieces of shit. (His district is north and west of the Twin Cities and includes St. Cloud but definitely not Minneapolis.)
He’s had lots of racist piece of shit things to say about the white supremacist federal occupation of Minneapolis (surprise, he’s for it), and now he’s got some new racist piece of shit things to say about Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, a city he again does not represent.
He was at a “Faith and Freedom Coalition” town hall — human garbage like Tom Emmer always let the white hoods come out when they can do it at shebangs with names like “Faith and Freedom,” because things with names like “Faith and Freedom” tend to be pretty much straight-up Nazi — and he declared that it’s No More Mister Minnesota Nice Racist, he’s gonna show his true colors. (As if he hasn’t been already.)
“The reason I bring it up is because, [as] I tell people regularly, Minnesota did not create passive-aggressive behavior, but we did perfect it,” he said. “I happen to be more on the aggressive-aggressive side, which doesn't always work in Minnesota. [...] Sometimes Minnesotans are so afraid that you're going to call us a racist, you're going to call us an Islamophobe, you're going to call us some name that we just don't want to get into that fight. You know what, I would argue that I never did care, but I'm done being careful, even the least bit careful. [...] If they don't assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from.”
He’s a white supremacist and he’s not gonna take it anymore!
To put this in context, Emmer’s comments came on the same day the illegitimate partisan hack white supremacist Supreme Court issued its vile decision siding with Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and all the other sneering little Hitler fluffers that make up the Trump regime and ending Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants. That’s what kind of an “immigrant treatment” day MAGA had yesterday.
Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is awesome, who is a Somali-American herself, and who actually does represent Minneapolis in Congress, as opposed to Emmer’s district, which is mostly cows eating cheese curds out of each other’s butts, responded:
"I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back where I came from."
It’s useful to call out what white racists like Tom Emmer mean when they say “assimilate.” They do not simply mean speak perfect English while eating foods without any spices that give white racists like Tom Emmer heartburn.
Tom Emmer is mad that Somali-Americans in Minnesota, and all immigrants, refuse to become tokens who vote like white racists, who express the same opinions as white racists, and who ask “how high?” when white MAGA racists like Tom Emmer bark the order at them.
They want them to be slaves who don’t want to leave even after finding out they’ve been emancipated.
They want them to be Their Immigrant Friend, the one who lives on their street and services the white racist patriarchy.
They want them to become Nazis like them, and find the nearest available minority neck to put their boots on, so that they can point at Their Immigrant Friend and say “See? Even the immigrants agree with my white supremacist Nazi beliefs!”
That’s what “assimilate” means to Tom Emmer. In fact, if they did all those things, Tom Emmer might even let them keep their spicy food. Not their religion, though.
Also being a little Birth Of A Nation Barbie about immigrants yesterday was Megyn Kelly (shocker), who has been feeling very aggrieved by Haitian immigrants, because garbage human Aryan racist detritus like Megyn Kelly are always aggrieved by things that don’t affect them in the fucking slightest:
KELLY: We know our country’s better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it. And half of you people, more than half, you won’t assimilate. We don’t want you. We don’t care if you’re offended. Get out. Go home. Go back to fucking Haiti. Sorry.
You guys, a literally worthless, space-hogging white lady with a podcast is here to lecture people about “work ethic” and people who “dilute” her White Nazi Cousinfucking Redneck Conservative Jesus Values. Surprise, she is also talking about “assimilate.”...
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When will white trash ever assimilate into human beings?
The only thing that's ever enough for racists is a lynching party. These potential murderers must be removed from our planet!
The Truth About "Socialism" that Republicans and Corporate Dems Don't Want You to Hear — Thom Hartmann
Why Americans are embracing policies they were taught to fear, while rejecting a stupid, oligarchic economic model that's failed us all (except the oligarchs)
On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening.
Former city comptroller Brad Lander beat Rep. Dan Goldman by more than thirty points. A 32-year-old democratic socialist named Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and state Assembly member Claire Valdez won the seat Nydia Velázquez is vacating. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (a recipient of dark money and AIPAC money) campaigned hard against all three and watched all three win anyway.
As Bernie Sanders put it afterward, the message is pretty clear: Americans are sick to death of a rigged economy and of billionaires buying their elections.
The corporate press and just about every Republican in the country will tell you these candidates are “socialists,” and they’ll spit the word the way you’d say “arsonist.” A little history clears the fog.
When a young public defender in upper Manhattan or a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn calls herself a democratic socialist today, she isn’t talking about Havana or the old Soviet Politburo (the way Republicans and much of the press want you to think). The three who won in New York ran on Medicare for All, affordable housing, stronger union protections, and an end to U.S. military support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works forty hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.
That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped-out about....
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The money grubbers are America's greatest enemy! Social Democracy works very well in the world.
The Mounting Humiliations of D. J. Trump — Robert Reich
They're making him even more erratic and dangerous
Friends,
Nothing makes Trump angrier than being humiliated. Humiliation involves public shame, which Trump’s malignant narcissism cannot abide.
But Trump is facing humiliation after humiliation. They’re causing him to lose his mind even faster than before.
The Iranian regime knows this, which is why it’s publicly humiliating Trump by contradicting everything he says about making progress on the peace talks.
Yesterday, Iran went further. It refuted Trump’s claim that Iran did not control the Strait of Hormuz, and that the strait was again open to shipping, by striking a container ship passing through the strait. Oil prices immediately jumped.
Meanwhile, American judges are humiliating Trump by ordering his name off the Kennedy Center, requiring that the center remain open, pausing work on his billionaire ballroom, threatening to stop his Arch de Trump, ending his slush fund, and vacating charges that Trump’s Justice [sic] Department has brought against Trump’s enemies.
Performing artists are humiliating him by pulling out of his so-called “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall because they don’t want any part in what’s become a Trump rally.
Congressional Republicans are humiliating him by rejecting his demands that they enact the “SAVE” Act (which would make it harder for millions of people to vote), pass his next reconciliation package, and blow up the Senate filibuster....
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Perkins: Americans Are Turning Against Same-Sex Marriage Because They Now See Its Consequences
Hate group leader Tony Perkins writes:
....As we mark the 11th anniversary of Obergefell, Americans are no longer arguing over predictions; they are judging outcomes. They have watched the promises of marriage redefinition play out in their schools, businesses, athletic competitions, churches, and families.
Increasingly, the American people are rendering their own verdict. The great experiment of redefining marriage and reinventing the family has produced its results. Americans are no longer judging promises — they are judging outcomes. The debate over the Sexual Revolution is no longer about its promises. It is about its consequences....
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May hate die a painful death!
Read it and weep, dirtbag!
Decline of Christianity in the Western world.
Florida Youth Pastor Arrested After Child Sex Sting Conducted By Christian Vigilante YouTube Operation
Jacksonville’s ABC affiliate reports:
The son of former pastors in Palatka was arrested on Wednesday after police say he traveled across the state to meet a minor for sex. On April 21, the YouTube channel Operation 17:2 uploaded a video where they confronted 26-year-old Caleb Steven Roberts with alleged messages suggesting that he wanted to meet a minor for sex. Caleb is the son of former pastor Steve and Angie Roberts of Victory Church.
Victory Church announced that both Steve and Angie would be stepping down from their roles, citing “recent circumstances that have brought deep sorrow to many within the church and community.” In their statement, the church also stated there is “no place in the body of Christ for sexual misconduct or the abuse of trust in any form.” Caleb Roberts was previously seen in photos leading services at the church.
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Does Tony Perkins keep the data on these scumbags?
Inside ‘flailing’ Trump’s total 'meltdown' — Alex Henderson
When swing voters and independents who favored Donald Trump in 2024 were asked why they decided to vote for him, many of them expressed a desire for greater stability in their lives. They wanted lower prices and border security. But Trump's second presidency, critics argue, is even more chaotic than his first. Writing for The Atlantic, journalists Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman point to Wednesday, June 24 as a prime example of how Trump has gone from "chaos" to "flailing."
"A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion," Lemire (a former Associated Press reporter who often appears on MS NOW's "Morning Joe") and Berman observe. "The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals — and maybe Barack Obama. And that was just yesterday."..
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Even his best toadies can see this. What's wrong with the 30% percent suckers?
Trump’s Pentagon firings creating 'national security' crisis: retired Navy admiral — Alex Henderson
Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, a former U.S. Army Europe commander, is warning that President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — by forcing seasoned military figures out of leadership roles — are promoting instability in the U.S. Armed Forces. But Hertling isn't the only veteran who is sounding the alarm. Retired U.S. Army Adm. William H. McRaven, writing in The Atlantic, emphasizes that the United States needs detailed "answers" about all the firings and resignations taking place at the Pentagon during Trump's second presidency.
"Every president and secretary of defense has the right and, moreover, the responsibility to remove officers who are failing to meet the high standards expected of senior leaders," McRaven argues in his Atlantic article. "But when crucial decisions regarding the professionalism, effectiveness, or morale of the military are made, the people and their duly elected representatives have a right to know why these decisions were made. In recent months, President Trump, upon advice from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, has relieved or forced the retirement of some of the finest officers that have ever served this nation. I have personally worked with most of them in combat."
McRaven continues, "I can tell you from experience that Generals C. Q. Brown, Randy George, Jim Mingus, J. P. McGee, Dave Hodne, Jim Slife, and Joe Berger and Admirals Lisa Franchetti and Jamie Sands were war fighters through and through. And this week, in an egregious decision, the president forced Gen. Chris Donahue to step down from his position in command of U.S. Army Europe."
Hertling, on the conservative website The Bulwark, found the forced resignation of Donahue especially troubling — as Donahue, Hertling argued, brings a wealth of military expertise to the table....
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Military is beyond him. Not one clue.
Kelly: “Get Out, Go Home, Go Back To F*cking Haiti!”
“TPS (temporary protection status) designations are supposed to be for specific periods of time. Hence the word ‘temporary.’ TPS for both countries extended multiple times. And look, this has been going on for over a dozen years.
“Go home! Get out! We know our country is better than yours. That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values! You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it. And half of you people — more than half of you — won’t assimilate. We don’t want you!
“This is the whole cats and dogs thing, like, they don’t want to live like Americans live. And this was supposed to be a temporary — It was supposed to be temporary help and it’s turned into another backdoor way of allowing someone permanent residency here.” – Megyn Kelly, on her podcast.
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So extinguishing Miss Liberty's flame is something you're all for? Then go back to the place in hell you came from.
GOP Rep Used AI To Help Write Defense Amendment
The New Republic reports:
Representative Anna Paulina Luna was caught using Claude to do her job—and she doesn’t care. A description of Luna’s National Defense Authorization Act amendment that appeared on the House Rules Committee website Wednesday was filed with a tell-tale indicator of the artificial intelligence assistant.
Squeezed in the middle of the text: “11:25 AM????Claude responded.” The language of Luna’s amendment description has since been revised.
Luna was quick to respond to the controversy on X, writing that her staff had used AI to “spell/grammar check the amendment SUMMARY, not the actual amendment text itself. “Not a shocker. Most staff use it. I have told them to make sure they are double checking and more thorough,” she continued. “What dork planted this story?”
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Spell checkers have been around for decades, Miss Lunatic. Try again dumb dork.
Emmer Spews Racist Tirade About Somalians [VIDEO]
Minneapolis’s CBS affiliate reports:
U.S. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, at a Wednesday evening Capitol Hill event, said that Somali immigrants who don’t assimilate “should go the hell back to where they came from” — remarks that drew sharp criticism, including from fellow Minnesota U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, herself an immigrant from Somalia. The Republican Emmer’s remarks were made at a Faith and Freedom Coalition town hall on Capitol Hill, where he said immigrants who don’t assimilate “should go the hell back to where they came from.” He also said he was “done being careful” about being labeled a racist or an Islamophobe.
"He doesn't deserve any attention. Nothing to see here except a White, privileged racist repeating Christianist lies." — magic twanger (comments)
"We can argue whether we should welcome e refugees and then not offer any support for them to assimilate.
We don’t teach native born kids civics so how can the kids be of these refugees learn and assimilate?
The only Somali refugee I know assimilated by opening a small business, the American way!
It’s projection. His ancestors created a culture they did not assimilate. Also it’s not “don’t call me racist” it’s “I’m only calling out the Somalis because they are Muslim” if he was honest.
I’d like to send the Christian idiots back to Zeeland and wherever else they were spawned from those freaky European cults." — Retired Davestill collection (comments)
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Tom Emmer: "The founders created a Christian-based nation"
Another retarded, uneducated, racist choad. Perhaps even he will assimilate one day soon.
BBC Seeks Trump’s J6 Records In Lawsuit Discovery
The Telegraph reports:
The BBC has requested that Donald Trump hand over his phone records and private schedules from around the time of the Jan 6 2021 insurrection as part of the US president’s defamation lawsuit against the corporation.
Lawyers for the broadcaster have demanded Mr Trump disclose a string of documents for the case, including his telephone logs, calendars, schedules and diaries from Nov 3 2020 to Jan 20 2021. The US president is demanding $10bn (£7.5bn) in damages from the BBC in the defamation lawsuit.
The BBC is also asking Mr Trump’s legal team to “identify all persons with whom [Trump] had communicated regarding any aspect of the January 6 2021 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally, including but not limited to planning the event, your January 6 2021 speech at the event, and discussions about the event after the fact”.
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Maybe they can convict him of treason. Our weakened country certainly doesn't have the spine to do it.
Vance: Nixon Was Taken Down By The “Deep State”
The Washington Post reports:
Vice President JD Vance on Thursday expressed sympathy for former president Richard M. Nixon, suggesting that Nixon was wrongly forced out as president in 1974 and comparing his political travails decades ago to those facing President Donald Trump now.
“As I joked … backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” Vance said in remarks at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
“If you look at the story of how the ‘deep state’ took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump and the first Trump administration,” Vance said to applause. “There is a parallel.”
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I think one needs to know American history to be elected to office in the U.S. This man is far too dim-witted to hold office here.
He seems to not realize many of us were alive during the crimes of Nixon and know the facts.
The Watergate TV broadcast fact is up to seven hours a day during the Senate hearings, with full "gavel-to-gavel" coverage being broadcasted. Today it would be more.
Judge Blocks Federal Government From Accessing Medical Records of Trans Minors — Shireen Akram-Boshar
The Trump administration had demanded medical records of trans minors receiving care in NYC hospitals since 2020.
Afederal judge in Manhattan has temporarily blocked the Department of Justice (DOJ) from using grand jury subpoenas to obtain medical records of patients who have received gender-affirming care as minors at NYU Langone, Mount Sinai, and other New York City hospitals.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla granted a temporary restraining order after several families and patients sued to block a grand jury subpoena that demanded the medical records of all transgender minors who have received gender-affirming care at the New York City hospitals since 2020. The order blocks the subpoena until the case’s next hearing on July 8.
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending federal funding for gender-affirming care for transgender youth and directing the DOJ to investigate doctors and hospitals that provide such care.
Failla said that the executive order was one of many issued by Trump “that sought to identify, to demonize, and ultimately to eradicate an entire population of transgender people.”
The judge also pointed out that the Trump administration had previously issued many other subpoenas prior to this grand jury subpoena, and they had all been partly or fully shut down.
“ But undeterred by its disastrous showing in the courts, DOJ decided to issue nearly identical document requests in the form of grand jury subpoenas emanating from the Northern District of Texas,” Failla said.
Families and patients had filed a lawsuit in early June asking Manhattan’s federal court to block New York City’s hospitals from turning over their records, arguing that the subpoena violates patients’ civil rights as well as laws ensuring physician-patient privileges.
The suit stated that the subpoena was issued “as part of the Administration’s systemic campaign to exclude transgender people from public life and to ‘end’ the gender-affirming medical care that enables many transgender people to live authentically as themselves.”...
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The vile evilness of the Trump Criminal Sydicate.
Record-Breaking Heat Wave Across Europe Signals Harsh Future of Climate Change — Shireen Akram-Boshar
Scientists have stated that climate change is making record-breaking heat waves more frequent and intense.
Arecord-breaking heat wave has enveloped much of Europe over the past week, with temperatures reaching as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Spain. Scientists say this is the new reality of climate change.
France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. have all issued high-level “red” heat alerts, with more than half of France under red alerts.
Tuesday’s temperature topped 112 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of France, and 111 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Spain. The heat wave is continuing, with Germany expecting the temperature to reach 106 F on Saturday. France is expecting 104 F temperatures on Wednesday and Thursday.
At least 48 people have died in France, including 40 who drowned trying to find relief from the heat. Two children were found dead in a hot car on Monday afternoon.
Europe is the globe’s fastest-warming continent, but its infrastructure is not prepared for the now-recurrent heat waves.
Air conditioning is rare in both schools and homes across Europe, as the continent historically had mild summers. But now, heat waves are beginning earlier each year.
Many schools have closed across Europe, and railways have advised against travel. In France, the country’s energy sector has been unable to keep up with the heat, and at least 68,000 households lost electricity on Tuesday evening. The outages are expected to continue through Wednesday.
Many are forced to continue working through the heat wave, particularly those in precarious jobs, like delivery drivers in Rome and street cleaners and construction workers in Paris....
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If only they had been warned years ago. Oh, that's right they were. We all were.
As supporters praise Texas’ proposed “Judeo-Christian” curriculum, rabbis say it dismisses Judaism — Ellie Ashby
A required reading list before the State Board of Education would present a predominantly Christian perspective to public school students, Jewish leaders say.
Praising a proposal to require Texas public school students to read Bible stories and passages in class, supporters say the perspective is an important acknowledgment that the nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values.
Rabbis and Jewish leaders, however, criticized the biblical passages chosen by the State Board of Education as heavy on Christianity and dismissive of Judaism, reducing the term Judeo-Christian to “a fig leaf at inclusion.”
The State Board of Education kicked off a week of meetings Monday by hearing from more than 400 experts, teachers and concerned citizens on two proposals — one that would overhaul the state’s social studies curriculum, and another that would create a required reading list for K-12 public schoolchildren. Both proposals include biblical references, passages and stories. A final vote is expected by Friday....
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Only in the Christo-fascists minds was this nation founded on their religion! Many of our founders were deists. They appear to reject education on the subject.
Even QAnon Hates Trump Now — Will Sommer
Aggrieved QAnoners Accuse Trump of Q-Baiting
The Trump administration launched a bizarre QAnon-themed social media campaign this week, using QAnon slogans like “trust the plan” and even a fake Q post to promote Trump executive orders on “quantum computing.”
The White House’s social media. (X.com)
“Where we go one, we go quantum,” one Department of Defense account posted on X, a clear play on the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.”
Why would the administration play footsy with QAnon? Perhaps they’re just stirring the pot? Maybe they feel like the QAnon brand is a little less toxic, since it’s been a while since Q believers murdered their family members, kidnapped a child, or stormed Congress? Maybe they’re true believers? After all, Trump has frequently posted QAnon memes in the past, albeit not this explicitly
The most likely reason is that it’s a troll job—more about that later—but that’s not exactly why, the posts went over so poorly with the QAnon believers (in addition, it almost goes without saying, to normies). The movement, once convinced that Trump was a messianic figure who would literally bring about heaven on earth, apparently has gotten sick of him.
“We’re done being treated like shit!” wrote QAnon promoter Liz Crokin, saying Q believers’ lives had been destroyed while Trump did nothing.
There are several reasons why QAnon believers are turning on Trump. But the main thrust boils down to this: After trying to block the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and failing to deliver deep-state arrests, some of the movement’s dissatisfied stars think it’s a bit gauche, if not insulting, that the president and his team are appropriating QAnon culture....
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Trump will appropriate anything that's not locked down!
Trump Won’t Rest Until He Runs Our Elections — William Kristol
Yesterday was an enormous day for earthquakes. Seismic activity rocked Japan and Northern California, but nowhere was hit harder than Venezuela, which suffered a devastating pair of quakes that leveled buildings and struck terror throughout the capital of Caracas and beyond. At least 164 people died in the quake, acting President Delcy Rodríguez said, and at least 971 more were injured.
In a grim way, Venezuela has one thing to be thankful for: After seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last year and handing power over to Rodríguez, President Donald Trump has moved Venezuela from his “enemies” to his “friends” list, and he is therefore in a giving mood. “The U.S.A. stands ready, willing, and able to help!” Trump wrote on Truth Social last night. “I have instructed all agencies of our government to get ready to move quickly. We will be there for our new and great friends.” Happy Thursday.
Trump Shoots Another Legislative Hostage
by Andrew Egger
Donald Trump has been flogging it for only about six months, but the Save America Act already has a chance to go down in history as the most consequential piece of legislation never passed. Faced with the cold reality that Senate Republicans just don’t have the votes for his elections wishlist bill, Trump has responded the only way he knows how: by squeezing harder.
Threatening to primary senators who won’t do what he wants is his go-to move, but lately he’s been doing even more—taking important bills hostage until the Save America Act reaches his desk.
As of yesterday, however, the president isn’t just blocking bills Congress wants passed. He’s even targeting bills that, at least on paper, are his own legislative priorities....
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He will run our elections over our dead bodies!
Military Families Are Going Hungry—and the Numbers Don’t Yet Reflect the War — Marcus Baram
Military families are experiencing a sharp rise in food insecurity, driven largely by the rising cost of groceries, according to a survey conducted before the start of the Iran war in February and its inflationary impact.
The biennial report by the Military Family Advisory Network, a national nonprofit that supports military and veteran families, surveyed more than 10,000 families between October 2025 and January 2026. The report examines how economic security, health care access, spouse employment, community connection, family functioning and military life satisfaction shape family well-being and force readiness.
More from Capital & Main
More than 41% of respondents said they were experiencing food insecurity. That’s a dramatic jump from 2023, when 16% reported food insecurity. Both surveys predate the war-related inflation that has since raised costs for many military families, as Capital & Main previously reported.
More than half of respondents (53.8%) identified food costs as a barrier to eating healthy, citing the high price of groceries and healthy options in particular. One of the most striking findings, the report said, was that many families reported skipping meals or portions of meals so that other family members could eat.
“People are struggling. Things have gotten a lot more expensive, especially with the gas prices,” said the spouse of a deployed service member living near Camp Pendleton in Southern California who asked to remain anonymous due to her fear of retaliation. Her family is receiving extra pay during her husband’s deployment. “But when he comes home, that will not be true anymore,” she said, noting that she knows other spouses who are being squeezed by rising inflation.
One of the most alarming developments, said Military Family Advisory Network chief executive Shannon Razsadin, is that military spouses are experiencing some of the survey’s most negative outcomes—from limited access to mental health care to unemployment....
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More proof that Trump hates America.
'Gasps' heard at Supreme Court as Alito takes personal shot at Justice Sotomayor — Tom Boggioni
A decision by Justice Sonia Sotomayor to take 12 minutes of the court’s time on Thursday to read her dissent in a 6-3 ruling that makes it significantly harder for asylum seekers who traveled through Mexico and South America to enter the US provoked Justice Sam Alito to take an unseemly potshot at her, which stunned court regulars.
According to MS NOW legal analyst Lisa Rubin, arch-conservative Alito sat and listened to a very “calm” Sotomayor read her dissent, with Rubin pointing out, “That is certainly not unusual.”
“But here there was a moment of tension between Justices Sotomayor, with her dissent and Justice Alito, who wrote the majority opinion here,” she elaborated. “Producer Peggy Helman, who is in the court for the reading of all of these decisions, said that Justice Alito said in response out loud, ‘There's much I would have added if I had known a dissent would be read from the bench.’”
“She [Helman] said that people in the Supreme Court, in the gallery gasped when he said that because this is a group of people that, for all of their differences in terms of legal, interpretive methodology or even the outcome of cases, they like to make it seem as if they get a long; that they are all just rowing in the same direction, trying to do their job to uphold the rule of law” Rubin reported.
“Even when their conceptions of what the rule of law is differs, that very obvious public fracture between the two of them was one that was surprising even to the most veteran court watchers in the room today,” she added.
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The vile Nazi pig, Scalito, is a boorish thug. We expect his venom spewing.
Judge 'dunks on' Todd Blanche as he's ripped for no 'degree of trustworthiness' — David Edwards
Reporter Scott MacFarlane said a federal judge just "dunked on" acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a four-page order declaring his word about a Trump slush fund cannot be trusted.
MacFarlane wrote on X that the order was "just remarkable" — and called it remarkable a second time for good measure. The judge, he said, "clearly doesn't trust the statements of the nation's top law enforcement official."
"Judge Brinkema absolutely dunks on the claims of the acting U.S. Attorney General," MacFarlane posted on X.
The order, signed Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, rules that a lawsuit over President Donald Trump's nearly $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" is still very much alive — and orders the Justice Department to respond by July 17.
The fund was set up to pay people who claim the government was "weaponized" against them — including, potentially, supporters charged over the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Critics call it an illegal slush fund.
The Justice Department had a simple way to kill the lawsuit: swear under oath that the fund is dead. Brinkema gave them a week to do it, but they refused.
"That the defendants have refused to accord a genuine degree of trustworthiness to their representations about the Fund not going forward is particularly concerning…" Brinkema wrote in the order, citing Blanche's own acknowledgment that the fund "remains 'important.'"
The judge pointed to a core problem: Blanche told Congress the fund was dead — but he was not under oath when he said it. When asked directly whether he would rescind the May 18 memo that created the fund's structure, Blanche was blunt.
"I'm not committing to putting anything in writing," he told lawmakers. "And I said it over and over again."...
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Blanche is "King of the Toads!"
UT Youth Pastor Dies By Suicide In Jail While Awaiting Trial For 2006 Murder Of His Wife And Underage Sex
Las Vegas’s NBC affiliate reports:
The former Las Vegas youth pastor accused of his wife’s murder in a 2006 fall at a Utah national park died while in custody. Judge Eric Goodman informed the courtroom of David Vander Meer’s death ahead of an extradition hearing planned for Thursday morning in Las Vegas Justice Court. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department later said a 49-year-old inmate at Clark County Detention Center was taken to UMC on Wednesday for “self-sustained injuries.”
Vander Meer’s then-wife, 28-year-old Bernadette, fell to her death in 2006 at Angels Landing in Zion National Park. The Washington County District Attorney’s Office issued a warrant for Vander Meer’s arrest this week for Bernadette’s murder, saying they had received new information implicating him.
An affidavit alleged that Vander Meer began having a close relationship with a young girl when she was 14 and he was her youth pastor. A fugitive task force took Vander Meer into custody in Summerlin and he was booked into Clark County Detention Center on June 22. Bernadette’s parents told News 3 they long suspected Vander Meer played a role in her death. “Because of the girlfriend,” said her mother. “I found insurance policies months later that he had, lots of them.”
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Another one (literally) bites the dust!
Church Leader Child Rapist Dies By Suicide In PA Jail
Philadelphia’s NBC affiliate reports:
A Lehigh County man who was found guilty of rape after he was accused of sexually molesting a teen friend of his step-daughter over the course of several years — including being discovered with the victim in Mexico by federal agents at one point — was found dead in his prison cell overnight, officials said. On Monday, the Lehigh County Coroner’s Office said Kevin Esterly, 53, of Whitehall Township, was found unresponsive in a single cell at the Lehigh County Jail at about 1:30 a.m.
Esterly was found hanging from a bedsheet tied to the top bunk of a bed in his cell. At his trial, a victim told the court that she was 8-years-old when she first met Esterly as a friend of his step-daughter. When she was 13-years-old, the woman — now 24-years-old — told the court that Esterly began to sexually assault her after giving her drugs and alcohol. Esterly was awaiting sentencing that was scheduled for June 30, 2026. He was facing 43 to 87 years in prison.
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Another one bites the dust!
Bill Cassidy Is A Coward And A Complete Dumbass — Evan Hurst
Let’s get this out of the way right now, since there are all these headlines out there about how outgoing Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy stood up to Donald Trump in a closed-door Senate meeting yesterday.
The coward caved.
The clown who first went renegade by asking Robert F. Kennedy Jr. some real tuff questions about vaccines, and then caved and voted to confirm him anyway; who Trump fucked in his primary by endorsing his opponent; and who now, with nothing to lose, voted along with three other Republicans for this week’s War Powers resolution to, at least symbolically, rein in Trump on his stupid Iran war, which Trump lost on his first day?
Cassidy caved last night.
The barely sentient pile of shit smells named Trump was so mad. He said after Tuesday’s vote that Cassidy and the others had given “aid and comfort to the enemy,” as if the enemy needed any more aid and comfort after they so easily beat Trump and Pete Hegseth in war.
Reportedly Cassidy and Trump were very shouty shouty during that Senate lunch yesterday:
“I stood and said, ‘You have not told the American people what’s going on. It was supposed to last four weeks, it’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on,’” Cassidy told reporters after the lunch. […]
When a reporter asked Cassidy if Trump had called him a “lunatic,” as had been rumored, he did not deny it, but stated, “Can I imagine that the president called me things that would be said on a school ... playground? Yeah, I can imagine that.”
Senator John Kennedy had some of his fake folksy descriptions of what happened (he has to pretend to be stupid to please his backwoods Louisiana constituents):
Louisiana Republican John Kennedy said Trump was “mad as a murder hornet” about the vote during lunch.
“Put yourself in his shoes,” Kennedy told reporters. “He’s right in the middle of delicate negotiations and the Senate votes to get out of Iran.”
Well, usually the losing side of a war is expected to gather its things and leave, yes....
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Very few if any of Trump's toadies have any hero in them. They are a total disgrace to their country.
The Voting-Machine Report They’re Hiding Until November — Thom Hartmann
The pattern is becoming impossible to miss: the hidden report, the voter-roll purges, the gerrymanders, and Postal Service changes targeting mail ballots in Democratic states.
Somewhere inside the White House right now there’s a federal intelligence report sitting in a drawer, and Trump’s lickspittles who put it there are betting you won’t see it before you vote in November.
It’s an assessment of the security of America’s voting machines, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Reuters revealed last week that White House officials have spent months refusing to authorize its release even as the 2026 midterms come barreling toward us.
The findings are almost comic in their irony, but they could also become the weapon that brings down our democracy this November. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first the backstory.
Tulsi Gabbard launched this whole investigation to dig up proof of Donald Trump’s endlessly repeated lie that voting machines stole the 2020 election from him. What her people reportedly found instead was that some states are running outdated equipment that ought to be patched, and that there’s no evidence anywhere that a single vote was flipped or manipulated.
So the one document that could actually help election officials harden their systems before Election Day has been buried, precisely because it tells the opposite of the story the president wanted told.
And consider who now controls that report. Gabbard stepped down this spring, and last week Trump installed Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence, a man who runs the federal housing agency and chairs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has no intelligence background whatsoever, and didn’t even hold a security clearance until days before he walked in the door.
He reportedly showed up early asking for a list of every employee so he could decide whom to fire, floated cutting hundreds of intelligence jobs (a Putin dream for decades), and wondered aloud whether he could carry the President’s Daily Brief home with him.
Trump has been remarkably candid about why Pulte is there, telling reporters that his new spy chief may “find out some things about the rigged elections.”
David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works with election officials in both parties, warned that Pulte appears hand-picked precisely because he embraces the same 2020 lies Gabbard chased for eighteen months and never could prove.
Elections lawyer Marc Elias put it more bluntly, calling the appointment a straightforward attempt to seize control of our elections, and Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, called Pulte a “national security threat”....
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The criminal must be condemned for his crimes against our country!
Trump's claim fizzles as Park Service won't back Reflecting Pool 'gash' in court — David Edwards
The National Park Service refused to corroborate President Donald Trump's claim of a 350-foot Reflecting Pool "gash" in a sworn court declaration filed this week.
Frank Lands, the NPS's deputy director for operations, submitted the two-page declaration in an ongoing federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia over the pool's renovation.
Lands described cut caulk, peeling liner material, and roughly 70 fence post tops thrown into the water. He never used the word "gash." He never cited a 350-foot figure.
"You'll see it in court," Trump told reporters Monday when asked whether he had visual evidence of the damage.
The court filing came and went without it on Tuesday.
Trump's description of the alleged damage has kept shifting. He first called it a 250-foot gash, then 300 feet, then "numerous slashes over a very long 350-foot length." However, no photos have been released. The Interior Department, asked for comment, pointed reporters to a post on X.
"[A] caulk over the foam sealant…was cut with a sharp knife or razor and destruction of delaminating surface material," Lands wrote under penalty of perjury....
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Sanity wins again!
Jeers rain down on Sean Duffy over Great American Fair remarks: 'You're garbage' — Travis Gettys
Critics piled on Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for the politically charged insults he delivered in a warm-up speech for President Donald Trump at the Great American State Fair.
The cabinet official saluted the Marine Band and three performers – Lee Greenwood, Christopher Macchio and Alexis Wilkins, the country singer and girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel – at Wednesday's event on the National Mall, but Duffy then slurred acts who pulled out of the festivities as "libtards."
"I think we have to give a big round of applause for our military band and singers," Duffy said in a video posted on X to cheers. "Way better than those libtards that canceled on us. So much better. Thank you guys. President Trump will make you famous."
Duffy's remarks didn't sit well with many social media users, who said his politicized remarks showed why the performers – including country star Martina McBride, The Commodores, Morris Day and The Time, Milli Vanilli, rapper Young MC, and Poison frontman Bret Michaels – had canceled their appearances.
"Classy. Very classy," slow-clapped blogger Hemant Mehta.
"Sean Duffy is unqualified for his job, and has spent more of his time doing reality TV than protecting Americans," booed political scientist Norm Ornstein.
"Trump admin: 'why'd they cancel, it's nonpartisan' – Also Trump admin: 'f---in libtards,'" observed political commentator Jessiah Eberlin.
"In one sentence, Duffy both complains about the musical acts who canceled and completely legitimizes their stated reason for doing so," noted CNN's Aaron Blake.
"You called all the musicians who turned down Trump’s invitation r-----ed while your special needs daughter stood there waiting for her next photo op," jeered the popular PoliticsOhMyGawd account. "You’re garbage and she’ll figure it out when she’s older."
"You have a daughter with Down syndrome and called artists who didn’t want to perform, 'libtards' you’re a disgrace," agreed X user fjr.
"7 month vacation a--hole says what? F this guy," seethed disabled rights activist James Tate.
"F---ing hell, a high ranking Cabinet member using a term like 'libtard' in official, public remarks??" sighed popular X user Jazzmom 2.0. "How much lower into the gutter are we going to descend?"
"I don’t think it’s a partisan statement to say he should resign for this," opined widely followed X user J.J. Abbott. "Beyond the pale and deeply inappropriate."
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America is wise to the Trump scumbags. Ride them out on a rail!
Trump's Great American State Fair off to rough start as fans walk out on his speech — Tom Boggioni
Donald Trump’s “Great American State Fair” being held on the Mall in Washington, DC, is off to a ragged start with supporters of the president walking out on him as he was still speaking at an opening rally Wednesday night.
As NBC News reported, hours after the president got into a shouting match with Republicans in a closed-door meeting, he attended the opening ceremonies and told fans, “As you know very well, a short time ago we were a dead country. We were dead. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re respected by everybody. Nobody’s laughing at us anymore.”
The report also noted that the president drew a sparse crowd estimated at slightly more than 1,000 MAGA fans and curious onlookers, with some unimpressed with what they found at the Fair, which has been troubled by finding entertainers willing to perform.
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No artist worth a good goddamn would work for this traitor!
Combative Trump pastor busted for crossing highway to assault neighbor: report — Adam Lynch
Spell claims the neighbors across the street from his Life Tabernacle Church on Hooper Road, have been “terrorizing” him and his congregation for months. He even described the Sherwin family as “domestic terrorists,” although Central Police Chief Roger Corcoran said they have only received one complaint about the family, filed by the Spell’s wife, Shaye Spell. Corcoran said they investigated the claim but found nothing and closed it, reports the Advocate.
Just before the fistfight, the pastor claimed the 20-year-old man threatened to rape and kill his family from across the road. However, Scott Sherwin, the father of the 20-year-old, countered after the press conference that his son wouldn’t have said something like that, let alone loud enough for Spell to hear across four lanes of traffic.
“You know what I think? I should buy my son a megaphone because I know [Spell] didn’t hear across the highway,” Sherwin told the Advocate. He added that his son was in the front yard checking whether the grass was finally dry enough to mow, and had done nothing to provoke Spell.
But Spell claims the son was on the other side of Hooper Road, shouting obscenities. Spell’s arrest warrant claims the man yelled: “f—— you.”...
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Xianist pastor? Looking for a victim? Exactly what we expect from these scumbags.
Feds Issue BOLO For Woman Who Touched Pool Water
The US Park Police write:
BULLETIN/BOLO: The United States Park Police is seeking assistance in identifying the individual depicted here in connection with a Destruction of Government Property investigation. The incident occurred on June 19, 2026, at approximately 3:36 p.m. at the Reflecting Pool on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Anyone with information regarding the identity of this individual is asked to contact the United States Park Police Tip Line: USPP_TIPline@nps.gov or (202) 379-4877.
For those not hip to law enforcement lingo, BOLO stands for “be on the lookout.”
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These Trump psychos have lost any marbles they had left. Batshit fucking lunatics!
Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s iconic history in photos.
It's our pool, not the dumbass moron's
Trump Goes On 12-Minute Rant About Pool “Vandals”
Forbes reports:
President Donald Trump suggested in an Oval Office appearance Wednesday that the six people arrested for allegedly vandalizing the Reflecting Pool this week should spend years behind bars, delivering a series of critical comments as his makeover of the landmark has been disrupted by algae blooms and peeling lining.
Trump said, “These people should go to jail for a long time,” referring to the alleged vandals. Trump then claimed one of the six people is “a member or big payer to ActBlue,” a political action committee and fundraising platform for Democrats.
“I think they’re in big trouble,” Trump added, saying the pool has been temporarily “patched” and claiming the resurfacing material was cut 350 feet long using razor blades and knives.
"It's a matter of time until public executions." — Danny & Andrew (comments)
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Trump is the vandal. Everyone knows what Trump is. His end must come before he kills us all.
Voldemort Behind Push To Institutionalize The Disabled
Bloomberg Law reports:
White House adviser Stephen Miller was the driving force behind the Justice Department’s recent memo authorizing states to institutionalize people with disabilities rather than fund community-based care, said people briefed on the situation.
Miller, the president’s powerful deputy chief of staff, was frustrated that the department’s Civil Rights Division was still reaching settlements compelling states to transfer those experiencing mental illness out of institutions, added the individuals, who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation.
They said Miller felt DOJ’s agreements—including one reached with South Carolina in December—would increase homelessness and didn’t adhere to President Donald Trump’s July executive order pressuring cities and states to move homeless people into treatment centers.
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Does anyone still believe this evil bastard isn't a Hitler worshipper? This is the same plan Hitler wanted to implement!
Let's be clear, people. Disabled can mean someone in a wheel chair or a mobile device.
The white working-class myth that made JD Vance — Chauncey DeVega
From "Hillbilly Elegy" to "Communion," Vance's narrative is about power, not solidarity
...While “Hillbilly Elegy” was celebrated as a compelling story about the American Dream, the book was widely criticized for its stereotypical depictions of Appalachia, and for minimizing the role that structures and institutions such as the opioid crisis and deindustrialization play in poverty and social inequality.
The years since the publication of “Hillbilly Elegy” demonstrated that Vance is, at his heart, an opportunist and a chameleon. Before entering politics, he publicly and privately condemned Trump, describing him as “America’s Hitler” and an “idiot.” Venture capitalist and conservative activist Peter Thiel served as his mentor, funding his career in finance and underwriting Vance’s own business. When Vance ran for the Senate in 2022, Thiel was his largest donor, contributing approximately $15 million to his campaign. Thiel’s intervention on behalf of Vance serves as a reminder that the vice president did not pull himself up alone by his bootstraps; he had a lot of help and luck along the way....
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Fame is fleeting, JD.
Music legend's estate refuses to let Trump play beloved hit at Freedom 250 rally: report — Bennito L. Ketty
"The Leonard Cohen Estate has learned that the song 'Hallelujah' is to be performed at a Donald Trump rally on June 24," the Facebook post read. "This use is not authorized, and the Estate does not support or approve of this or any similar usage. Thank you for your attention to this matter."
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Now, fuck off!
Judge forces Trump admin to answer for Kennedy Center tarp covering name removal — David Edwards
A federal judge is demanding an explanation for the tarp that now hides where President Donald Trump's name once stood on the Kennedy Center's façade.
U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper issued the order Tuesday in Beatty v. Trump, the lawsuit brought by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) over Trump's illegal renaming of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Cooper ordered the parties to file a joint status report addressing "the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding that Defendants have erected on the front portico of the Center."
The Kennedy Center says the covering is needed for marble maintenance. Beatty's lawyers aren't buying it.
"Willfully sabotaging Kennedy Center's iconic façade to assuage Defendants' vanity or massage broken egos is a clear breach of fiduciary duty," her attorneys wrote.
Mallory Miller co-founded the activist group Hands Off the Arts and got behind the tarp to photograph the façade. She told NBC News the administration's motive was plain.
"The Trump administration does not want to see that building without Trump's name on the façade before they could go through all their appeals," Miller said.
Beatty's attorney, Nathaniel Zelinsky, was more direct. "It certainly seems like an attempt to hide embarrassment on Donald Trump's part," he told The Washingtonian.
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We must keep in mind Trump is a devious shyster, a felon and a vain fop.
Arrest him and charge him with defacing publc property!
WSJ: Larry Ellison Bought Trump’s Favor With $45M
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Larry Ellison didn’t join the gaggle of CEOs that traveled with President Trump on his state visit to China. He wasn’t among the guests at a White House dinner Trump hosted with tech titans. He also skipped the UFC event on Trump’s 80th birthday. The Oracle billionaire didn’t need to be at these public events. Ellison, 81 years old, has developed a more private friendship with Trump that has helped his tech company’s business as well as his son’s effort to assemble a media conglomerate.
Key to the relationship: Ellison’s money. Ellison gave roughly $45 million to a political nonprofit group supporting Trump’s election efforts in 2024. Such funding isn’t subject to disclosure rules and hasn’t been previously reported. More recently, Ellison has given millions of dollars more to groups that support Trump since the election with some of the funds going to Trump’s legacy initiatives in Washington, D.C.
Oracle is among the corporate sponsors listed by Freedom 250. Trump’s investment accounts were actively trading Oracle shares earlier this year, including a sale worth at least $1 million in January and a purchase worth at least $1 million in March, federal disclosure filings show.
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What if we all had the money that Ellison has to pay bribes?
Tillis Blasts GOP Sen. Mike Lee For SAVE Act “Bullshit”
The Hill reports:
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) didn’t mince any words Tuesday in calling out what he characterized as the “bullshit” arguments of fellow Republican Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) on social media, revealing the tensions within the Senate Republican Conference over how to push forward on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act.
“I think it’s silly. All of it’s just goofy stuff,” he said. “It’s like a remake of a bad movie that just keeps on getting released. At what point do you stop digging a hole?” the senator added. Asked why Lee keeps pushing the talking filibuster as a strategy to pass the legislation, Tillis replied: “Naivete or a desire to get more likes on a social media post. Maybe both. I don’t know.”
“I never speak ill of members when they want to be professional and they want to engage in a productive way, but when you do some of the bullshit he’s done on social media, that’s why he gets these comments out here,” he told reporters, speaking in a hallway off the Senate floor.
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Defectors are starting to emerge.
AI Companies Are Trying to Seize Control of Elections — Joe Wilkins
With trillions of dollars on the line, it should come as no surprise that tech companies are spending gobs of cash on the upcoming US midterm elections. What is surprising is the scale of electoral financing, as certain newly-founded AI super PACs are now spending more on candidates than the candidates are spending on themselves.
According to reporting by the Los Angeles Times, political finance groups linked to tech companies including OpenAI and Anthropic are already some of the top spenders in the 2026 elections. So far, they’ve distributed a combined $37 million on various campaigns, a number which is expected to skyrocket as November draws closer (and those are just the ones we know about, as numerous tech-backed PACs are alleged to have evaded federal reporting requirements.)
While one might expect these companies to flock to the typically pro-business and small-government Republican party, an LA Times infographic shows that they’re cynically playing both sides. ChatGPT maker OpenAI, for example, is heavily linked to both the American Mission PAC, which has donated $8 million to Republicans, and the Think Big PAC, which has spent $14.1 million on Democrats so far....
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What evil lurks in the heart of AI? Futurism knows! And so do we!
Unemployment surges as Trump's Florida paradise crumbles — Alex Henderson
MAGA Republicans often hail Florida as a symbol of their movement's success, praising Ron DeSantis' two terms as governor and arguing that President Donald Trump chose wisely when he made Mar-a-Lago his primary residence. The Sunshine State is associated with a who's-who of MAGA, including Trump, DeSantis, former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, ex-U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, among many others.
But Florida, according to Bloomberg, is now facing higher-than-average unemployment.
"While the U.S. unemployment rate has been little changed over the past year, joblessness in Florida has surged," according to Bloomberg News reporter Augusta Saraiva. "It's climbed more than a percentage point to 4.8 percent — faster than nearly any other state — and is now among the highest nationwide. Job growth has slowed to a crawl amid a pullback in key industries like real estate, retail and tourism, all of which are highly sensitive to interest rates and consumer demand."
Saraiva continues, "That marks a reversal from Florida's run as a magnet for workers and retirees coming out of the pandemic, when its economy was one of the hottest in the U.S. It also raises questions about the viability of the state's growth model as a rising cost of living starts to send would-be Floridians elsewhere."...
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Not immune after all?
MAGA media caught manufacturing conspiracy theories to protect Trump from humiliation — Alex Henderson
..."Right-wing media has long functioned as both amplifier and validator for Trump's claims," Tesfaye observes, "but the Reflecting Pool episode shows how far that relationship has evolved. It is no longer reactive. It is now anticipatory. The ecosystem does not wait for evidence; it constructs a narrative framework into which evidence, if it ever appears, can be slotted later. In the meantime, repetition does the work. A claim aired on cable becomes a segment, becomes a tweet, becomes a talking point — becomes, for millions of viewers, a form of truth."
The Salon journalist continues, "And yet, even that is only part of the picture. Because alongside these attempts to rewrite a mundane failure, the White House has started doing something more deliberate and more dangerous: openly courting conspiracy culture itself…. The algae in the Reflecting Pool, the fake Q drop and the phantom menace of election fraud are, in many ways, the same story. When the administration confronts an inconvenient reality, it substitutes evidence with insinuation. Then right-wing media personalities rush to amplify claims before facts are established. The purpose is to transform accountability into victimhood and failure into sabotage."
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Making up the lies before they are needed to be spread.
'They're outright lying': Retired judge exposes Trump admin attorneys for deception — The Conversation
More than 10,000 lawyers, many of them from the U.S. Department of Justice, have left the federal government during the second Trump administration. “Their departures show how rapidly the president has eroded the image of the federal government as the gold standard for lawyers seeking public service roles,” writes The New York Times.
Politics and legal affairs editor Naomi Schalit spoke with John E. Jones III about the mass departure of federal government lawyers, as well as other recent issues related to the Department of Justice. Jones, now the president of Dickinson College, is a retired federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 2002.
Schalit: What are the repercussions of this exodus of lawyers?
Jones: One thing that I could rely on as a federal judge was the professionalism of the Department of Justice, and hand in hand with that was its collective credibility.
When you have an exodus of those professionals, and when you have, unfortunately, Department of Justice attorneys going into federal courts across the country and outright misrepresenting – the stronger word is lying – to federal judges, it really creates a massive reputational problem for the department.
So “massive reputational problem for the department” means what happens between lawyers and judges. What are the on-the-ground implications of that for people who are caught up in the justice system?
It’s well to remember that the attorney general’s client – the Department of Justice’s client – is the United States of America. It is not the president of the United States, even though one would think that based on the way this president operates his administration. The mission of the Department of Justice is within its name: It’s to do justice, to uphold the rule of law, to operate without fear or favor, and to make sure its prosecutions are righteous and well founded....
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Even the deniers know the Trump Crime Syndicate is lying.
Pentagon Reinstates Flu Vax Mandate Amid Outbreak
ABC News reports:
A flu outbreak at the Air Force’s basic training hub in San Antonio is worsening. As of Tuesday, at least 222 recruits at Lackland Air Force Base, part of Joint Base San Antonio, had been diagnosed with the flu and four had been hospitalized, the two people familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The outbreak is unfolding just two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the annual flu shot optional for troops, scrapping the military’s requirement for it, which dates to 1945, a move breaking with longstanding public health directives.
According to Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell in a statement provided to ABC News, the Army, Navy and Air Force are once again requiring flu shots for basic trainees, according to officials....
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Take that, Hogsbreath!
Fence Goes Up Around Lincoln Reflecting Pool [VIDEO]
The New York Times reports:
President Trump says the peeling blue coating and algae blooms that mar his $16.4 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are the fault of vandals working with “knives” in the “dark of night.” But government documents obtained by The New York Times show that while National Park Service workers found two cuts in sections of foam between the pool’s expansion joints, those were not directly related to the “American flag blue” coating that is now peeling, or to the algae that has turned the pool a bright shade of green.
Mr. Trump also told reporters on Monday, without offering evidence, that vandals had poured fertilizer into the pool to feed the algae. Neither the Interior Department nor the White House would provide charging documents, citations or the names of anyone arrested.
Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, did not answer specific questions about the government documents but said in an email on Tuesday that the pool was “clear” and “reflecting beautifully.” The administration is setting up fencing around the site before the July 4 fireworks display for safety reasons, Ms. Martin said. But it’s going up earlier than originally planned because of what she called an “increase in vandalism by leftist activists.”
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Look! A Happy Birthday fence for America's birthday celebration! Signifying our loss of freedoms from a criminal Nazi dictator!
CNN host flags unusual Trump bathroom preference: 'Nothing grosses the guys out more' — Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump has adorned the Oval Office with gold trophies, vases, trimming and other ornaments, and the authors of a new book revealed what his aides said was behind his bedazzling spree.
The 80-year-old president has leaned hard into his former career as a real estate developer and hotelier to apply what he describes himself as "Trump touches" to the room's decor, and CNN's John Berman asked New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan what they learned about the White House redecoration while researching their new book, "Regime Change."
"Quick lightning round of things that I found fascinating just in passing," Berman said. "Number one, and the guys all moaned when I mentioned it before. He likes carpeting in his bathrooms?"
Haberman confirmed that was true, and she said restoring bathroom carpeting to the White House was a top priority when he returned to office last year.
"Yes, this was a continuous thing in Term One, and everybody had to restore everything to how it was in Term One –remember Term One," she said. "By the way, I just move away from bathrooms and carpets for two seconds. He hung like nothing in the Oval Office in Term One, he made almost no changes to design or what was in there, and now it's like every square inch is covered, which aides had seen as something of almost like a like a therapy session for him because he liked doing it. It was his happiest hour of the day."...
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Carpet molding in water and urine. Always a favorite!
The President Finds His Happy Place — William Kristol
The Democratic party is leaderless, unpopular, and up for grabs, and in last night’s New York elections, the Democratic socialists showed they’re the faction with momentum in it. “Fresh off sweeping victories across New York City that showcased the growing power of the anti-establishment progressive left inside the Democratic Party,” Politico reports this morning, “Democratic Socialists of America leaders, eager to capitalize on their momentum, are already plotting their next act: making sure one of their own is on the presidential primary debate stage, whether the party wants them or not.”
Isn’t it exciting, living in one interesting time after another? Happy Wednesday.
Old Man Yells at Crowd
by Andrew Egger
It’s interesting, the things that jump out at you watching your eight millionth1Trump rally. For instance: Did you know the president is perhaps the sole person on earth who uses the words “won” and “love” as synonyms? “Hello, Pennsylvania,” he said as he arrived on stage Tuesday afternoon to the usual soaring strains of “God Bless the USA.” “I won this place so much.”
Trump hasn’t been doing so much winning lately. Islamist regimes abroad and single-celled organisms at home keep disobeying his extremely clear instructions, no matter how many bombs or gallon jugs of hydrogen peroxide he sends their way. Rogue judges keep ordering his name off of buildings, no matter how much he deserves to put it up and how nice it looks once it’s up there. Even his most reliable whipping boys, the Republicans of the United States Congress, have begun to flash a sudden and alarming new modicum of self-respect, with a small but significant number of them voting against his wars and scuttling his slush funds.
Yeah, D.C. sort of sucks lately; what Trump needed was a rally. So yesterday he schlepped out to a Mack Trucks factory in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley to get one. These rallies have always been a tonic for Trump; this one felt more like a lifeline. Every stupid threadbare brag line, every completely invented cockamamie anecdote and scripted attack on the “Dumocrats”—the crowd, as usual, ate it up with a spoon. “There’s so much love in the room,” Trump said. “There’s so much unbelievable love.”
We could spend far more time and space than this newsletter permits ticking through the president’s usual parade of whoppers. It seems, for instance, that he intends to try to sell a return to the status quo2in the Strait of Hormuz as one of those Wonderful, Magnificent Deals Only Trump Could Ever Get You: “Yesterday, 19 million barrels of oil flowed out of the Strait of Hormuz, a very beautiful place,” he said. “That’s the most oil in the history of the strait.” (In reality, it’s still a bit subpar—last year an average of 20 million barrels passed through the waterway daily.)
It also appears that Trump, having failed once again to deliver the manufacturing boom he has spent a decade promising, is now using America’s data center buildout as a way to fudge the numbers and pretend he’s delivered on that front too. “Right now, we have more factories being built—and I mean car factories, AI factories, factories of every type—than we’ve ever had in the history of our country, by three times,” he bragged. “That’s because they didn’t want to pay the tariff. How don’t you pay a tariff? You build the factory here and you hire American workers.”
Building a data center in America rather than in Bangladesh, of course, has zero to do with tariffs and lots to do with latency, infrastructure, grid stability, and so on—companies want to keep their data centers as close to their actual users as possible. And a data center, unlike a factory, doesn’t bring with it a whole bundle of blue-collar manufacturing jobs of the sort Trump keeps promising to bring back....
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The nightmare we live in.
Prairieland Protesters Sentenced to 30 to 100 Years for “Terrorism” Charges — Shireen Akram-Boshar
These sentences are far longer than any of the prison sentences given to the 1500 January 6 rioters.
On Tuesday, eight Texas anti-ICE protesters convicted on trumped-up terrorism charges earlier this year received decades-long sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years.
Five of the defendants received 50-year sentences after being convicted of rioting and “providing material support to terrorists.” One received a 30-year sentence, and another a 70-year sentence. And Benjamin Song, convicted of attempted murder of an officer in addition to rioting and “providing material support to terrorists,” was sentenced to 100 years in prison.
The eight protesters were convicted based on a July 4, 2025 protest at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, where the activists used fireworks and noise-making to protest the immigrant jail and Trump’s anti-immigrant detentions. Police arrived at the scene, and later claimed that one of the protesters opened fire on an officer, who also shot at protesters. The next day, the FBI began raiding homes, and arresting and detaining protesters.
One of the defendants, sentenced to 30 years in prison, was not even present at the July 4 protest.
These sentences are far longer than any of the prison sentences given to January 6 rioters, the longest of which was 22 years for a member of the Proud Boys, a far right, neo-fascist militant group that embraces white nationalism, Islamophobia, and misogyny. The 22-year sentence was commuted to time served after President Donald Trump pardoned the Proud Boys member, along with some 1,500 other January 6 rioters....
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The continuing rape of our U.S. Constitution by third-rate criminals.
Trump Is the Vandal He’s Been Looking For — Fran Shor
“The pump don’t work ‘Cause the vandals took the handles.”
—Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
Sometimes President Donald Trump’s diatribes reveal his own guilty behavior. Take his disastrous promotion of the makeover of the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. Not only did he hire an incompetent contractor whose prior work for Trump at Mar-a-Lago gave him the shady inside track, but also Trump’s insistence on an environmentally disastrous “royal blue” caused an increase in the amount of algae now polluting the pool. Perhaps it might be time to break out a new MAGA hat, all in green, with the words, “Make Algae Grow Again.”
Of course, neither Trump nor his buddy contractor would admit their malfeasance and responsibility for what has happened. Given Trump’s other corrupt vandalism of national sites in DC, why should we fleeced taxpayers and residents of the city expect accountability from such grifters? Instead, the predictable accusation by the Orange Menace is that vandals were the cause of the algae bloom. The real vandals, Trump and his enablers, were operating in plain sight and with presidential impunity.
Indeed, Trump’s vandalism has engulfed the White House and environs. From the destruction of the “Rose Garden” (heaven forbid that he would want to wake up and smell the roses) to leveling the East Wing for his ballroom and bunker (again, at the taxpayers’ expense), the wrecking of the grounds continues unabated. Added to this devastation was the garish Claw, erected for the UFC blood sport on the White House lawn. Oh, yeah, the lawn is gone. Perhaps to be replaced by what—a Circus Maximus!
And speaking of Rome, the actual sacking of the city by the Vandals in 455 only lasted some two weeks. Trump’s pillaging of the federal government has lasted more than a year. While the most obvious physical vandalizing is very evident, buried in much of the legislation and executive orders is a massive amount of damage to people’s lives and the future of the country and the world.
Only now are we reckoning with the harm caused by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Hundreds of thousands thrown off Medicaid, children and families denied basic foodstuffs. Trump and his Republican allies apparently aren’t even interested in offering “bread” along with the circuses that Trump revels in....
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The lowest level of hell awaits Trump's return.
168 Dead Children. One Secret Report. And Elon Musk’s AI. — Thom Hartmann
The Pentagon investigation is finished. Congress still hasn’t seen it. The families of Minab deserve answers—and so do we.
On the morning of February 28th, the first day of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, the children of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab were at their desks a little after ten o’clock when the missiles arrived. The name of the school means “The Good Tree.”
By the time the dust settled, as many as 175 people were dead, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. Iran’s confirmed count came to around 155, and the list its state broadcaster released documents dozens of dead little boys, dozens of dead little girls, more than two dozen dead teachers, several dead parents, a dead school bus driver, and a dead pharmacy technician from the clinic next door.
The teachers had started phoning families the instant the attacks began, begging them to come collect their children. There wasn’t enough time. Some parents reached the school only in time to claw through the rubble looking for their daughters, and according to first responders and a Reuters stringer the building was hit a second time, a so-called “double tap” (which is a war crime), with the survivors and the rescuers caught in that second blast and blown to pieces.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both opened investigations. Reporters at TIME and elsewhere traced the weapon to an American Tomahawk cruise missile, the kind fired only by US forces in that war, and a preliminary military inquiry concluded our forces were almost certainly responsible for both the initial killing of the children and the double-tap that killed the firefighters, rescuers, and their parents.
When a reporter asked Trump about it at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains last week, he waved the dead children away as if they were nothing. “Nobody did that on purpose,” he said. “Mistakes are made, war is nasty.” Then he handed the question off to Pete Hegseth and moved on.
His shrug doesn’t survive contact with the evidence. An Al Jazeera investigation that traced satellite imagery back more than a decade found the school had been a clearly marked civilian building, walled off from the neighboring military base with its own separate gates since 2016.
A medical clinic that opened on the same complex barely a year before the strike was left untouched, while the school full of children was hit....
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Equivalent of any atrocity by Hitler.
Entire World Hates Trump And America. We're Dead Last! We're By Ourselves! — Evan Hurst
Hey, know that thing where Donald Trump is always patting himself on his distended testicles, telling himself that before he came along America was “dead,” but now it’s “hot” again? (Maybe it’s hot like open wounds get hot as blood rushes to the region to try to repair the damage.)
Well, we have two winning numbers to share, and they are that Trump himself is more hated, loathed, and mocked than ever, and so is America.
USA! USA! USA!
This poll from the American Research Group (ARG) has Trump’s approval rating at a mere 30 percent, a record low for a man who’s known for them. In May it was 31 percent. His disapproval sits at 66. It’s even worse when they start asking specific questions like what do voters think of his job on the economy. There, only 26 percent of Americans approve. (Which suggests four percent of Americans are like “well, he’s skullfucking the economy like a loser, but I reckon I still like the guy!”)
Fully 70 percent disapprove of his handling of the economy.
Only seven (seven!) percent of Americans think the country’s economy is going to get better in the next year.
NJ.com does note that this poll shows some lower numbers than other recent polls, which show Trump with comparatively respectable approval numbers like “38” and “36.” But considering what a shit-awful job Trump is doing and what a shit-awful pathetic loser he is, will it be long before everybody’s polls are showing him at 30 or below?
Then there’s the world’s opinion of the US. Damn.
A new 36-country survey from Pew Research finds the obvious result, that under Trump the United States of America is more hated and distrusted than ever. Overall among all these countries, 37 percent have a positive opinion of the US, vs. 57 percent who don’t. Overall, only 23 percent have any confidence in loser Trump, and 76 percent don’t. (Not a lot of “I don’t know” answers there!)...
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I'm guessing the US has the high end of "I don't knows." The typical answer of someone who is disengaged with caring.
Trump's 'bizarre' impersonation befuddles the internet: 'What in the name of God?'— Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump stunned the internet on Tuesday as he mocked a woman weightlifter on stage.
Trump started talking about women in sports, sharing a convoluted story and pretending to groan in front of the crowd at the Mack Trucks assembly plant, in Macungie, Pennsylvania.
People reacted to the bizarre moment on social media.
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How much evidence does a country need to know its leader is batshit insane? We seem to be a shameless nation.
Aides fear Trump’s Reflecting Pool meltdown reveals a deep psychosis: biographer — Sarah K. Burris
One of President Donald Trump's longtime biographers, Michael Wolff, is warning that the obsessive focus on the Reflecting Pool reveals something much deeper about the 80-year-old leader.
Speaking on the Daily Beast podcast, Wolff explained that, according to his sources, Trump is spending as much as 80 percent of his time on things like the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.
Chatting with those he said are close to Trump, Wolff said that the Reflecting Pool failure is drawing "All of his anger, all of his rage, all of his demands — and now his need for vengeance: someone must be responsible."...
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How many time have we told you? Psychotic!
Busted: MAGA politician accused of lying about donations to veterans groups — Matthew Rozsa
One of President Donald Trump’s most loyal lawmakers, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), is accused of lying about donating money to veterans’ charities.
“Tommy Tuberville promised Alabama voters he would donate ‘every dime’ he made in Washington, D.C., to Alabama veterans — and even present checks on a monthly basis,” reported Lagniappe Daily's Scott Johnson on Tuesday. The news outlet serves Mobile, AL and Baldwin County. “Six years later, tax records and his own nonprofit show no evidence that ever happened.”
Instead Johnson reported that Tuberville’s tax returns in the seven years since taking office do not “show in-kind charitable gifts. The returns list $35,672 in what appears to be interest paid or charitable gifts in 2021, no listed amount in 2022, $2,500 in 2023 and no listed amount in 2024.” If all of that money went to causes that support veterans, “the total is only $38,172 over four tax years. Tuberville’s wages reported in Alabama were $529,419 over that same span. He reported income of more than $2.9 million when factoring in real estate and investment earnings.”...
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Why are all of Trump's cronies grifting, lying swine?
Trump Didn’t Make A Deal With Iran. He Got Mugged — Cliff Schecter
The $300 billion could’ve covered universal childcare, paid family leave, and free public college for a year—instead of going to the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. And that's not even the worst of it, sadly....
There’s no “art” to this un-deal. It’s miles closer to someone pooping on a canvas and trying to hang it in the MOMA. A complete capitulation. Utterly pathetic. Helluva job using a catastrophic failure, to yet again fail in your quest cover up the Epstein files, guys!
Meanwhile, the math: the same $300 billion could’ve covered universal childcare, paid family leave, and free public college for every American for a year—instead of going to the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. And that's not even the worst of it, sadly....
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This is foreign aid?
More Ducks Found Dead At Trump's Reflecting Pool — Ed Scarce
"It could be something related to peeling paint or algae,” said City Wildlife President April Linton.
Source: Washington Post
A duck carcass was photographed floating in the algae-filled water, days after the “American Flag Blue” paint began peeling off the bottom of the pool.
Then, two other dead ducks were found in a pond at Constitution Gardens on the National Mall — roughly 250 feet from the Reflecting Pool. City Wildlife, one of the lead animal rescue and rehabilitation groups in the area, said a staffer collected their bodies Sunday and brought them to the organization’s facility.
It’s not immediately clear how those two ducks — one was a juvenile and the other was an adult — died. But animal experts said ducks, which know no boundaries, typically go back and forth between the two water spots of the Reflecting Pool and Constitution Gardens.
They expressed concern that the construction activity is placing additional stress and “drama” on the ducks and their habitat. They also worry that algae blooms containing toxins called cyanobacteria, or chemicals from the paint in the Reflecting Pool, could harm wildlife. Certain types of algae are part of a duck’s natural diet, but if the birds consume blue-green algae, it can be toxic.
“They walk and fly back and forth,” said City Wildlife President April Linton. “They could have had exposure to the Reflecting Pool. It could be something related to peeling paint or algae.”
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It could simply be the toxin that Trump spreads by his touch. He doesn't give a shit about the ducks!
A perfect metaphor for his destruction of America.
Trump threatens to sue over reporting on Reflecting Pool scandal — Oliver Willis
President Donald Trump is threatening to sue ABC News over its reporting on his administration’s ongoing failure in renovating the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial. He is now pushing the outlet to repeat his lies about renovations to the monument during the Obama and Biden administrations.
In a social media post, Trump claimed that ABC “failed to report that their close ‘friends,’ Dumocrats Obama and Biden, spent over 100 Million Dollars on the Reflecting Pool, and it never worked.” He also claimed that his Democratic predecessors “wanted to spend 300 to 400 Million Dollars, but just let it ROT.”
Trump wrote he is “preparing lawsuits against ABC for false reporting” and that “I like their money.”
Trump’s claims about Obama and Biden’s actions on the pool are false....
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The man is insane. He's the one that rotted the pool. He is the cancer that must be removed.
Acting Spy Chief Axes Dozens Of Career Intel Experts
Washington DC’s CBS affiliate reports:
Just over 50 career and political intelligence staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have been removed from their roles since Bill Pulte became the agency’s acting director, Friday. Six career and political intelligence staff were terminated and 45 were sent back to their home agencies, according to three sources familiar with the personnel moves.
Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence panels, warned Pulte against making large-scale staff cuts, calling it an inappropriate course of action for an acting official without national security experience.
Since Pulte’s selection, Democrats have declined to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which grants intelligence agencies broad authority to spy on overseas targets, causing the legal provision to expire earlier this month.
"With any luck, it ends with the remains of MAGAs being surrounded in a bunker." -- Buttery Males (comments)
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More goddamn DOGE bullshit! Trump's retards keep killing us. They are rendering us helpless to any power that wants us. How long before this is put to an end?
Hegseth Ousts Another Four-Star US Army General
The Atlantic reports:
General Chris “C. D.” Donahue was the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan during the chaotic 2021 withdrawal. As the head of Army forces in Europe and Africa, he has helped bolster Ukraine in its fight to repel the Russian invasion. Now Donahue has become the latest casualty in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s purge of the military’s senior ranks.
Donahue’s abrupt departure, after just 18 months in his role, is another sign of the upheaval. He was widely seen as one of the Army’s rising stars—a legendary Delta Force leader who was considered a top candidate for Army chief of staff or even chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—having distinguished himself in wars of the past two decades.
A career Ranger and Special Operations commander, Donahue served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, climbing through the ranks during two decades of counterterrorism wars. As the U.S. military shifted its focus from hunting terrorist networks to preparing for conflicts against technologically sophisticated adversaries, Donahue did as well.
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And Hegseth continues to destroy our armed forces. Invading forces should find it easy to occupy us with morons like this in charge.
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, which means that when one object exerts a force on another, the second object exerts a force of equal strength in the opposite direction on the first object. This principle is known as Newton's third law of motion." It's coming, America!
Trump Boasts Of Ordering DOJ To Probe CA Elections
Politico reports:
President Donald Trump acknowledged having called federal prosecutors in California to probe the state’s primary election results, claiming without evidence on Tuesday that his intervention resulted in Republican Steve Hilton advancing to the runoff in the gubernatorial race.
His remarks, at a rally in Pennsylvania, came weeks after California primary results first cemented Democrat Xavier Becerra as the front-runner advancing to the November ballot, with results for the Trump-endorsed Hilton arriving days later.
“I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California. I said, ‘Do me a favor. Take a look,’” the president said. It wasn’t immediately clear which attorney Trump was referring to. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli — the top official in the Los Angeles-based Central District of California — announced an investigation into election fraud claims earlier this month.
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Public enemy #1 is fucking around and staining credibility on our elections. This is more of his crimes against America.
Perhaps he is liable on this law: Honest Services Fraud - 18 U.S. Code § 1346. Let's give it a shot.
How right-wing media turns Trump’s failures into conspiracies — Sophia Tesfaye
With no evidence behind them, Trump has amplified MAGA media's claims about the Reflecting Pool
...The bizarre ordeal with the renovation of Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is important not because of the pool itself. Americans have bigger concerns than algae in Washington. It matters because it illustrates a broader pattern that has defined Trump’s political career and increasingly characterizes his administration’s communication strategy. More than merely mismanaging reality, the White House is actively replacing it with conspiracy. The project has collapsed into an emblem of systemic incompetence and cronyism that the administration has attempted to mask through a dizzying array of official conspiracy theories, weaponized law enforcement and cynical trolling....
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Lies on top of lies. The stench of his perverted crime gets stronger each day.
White House Columns Undergo “Restoration” Work
People Magazine reports:
President Donald Trump’s latest renovation to the White House involves its iconic, 200-year-old columns.
After crews were spotted working on the North Portico columns last week, rumors began swirling that Trump may be eyeing a redesign from their original Ionic style to a more ornate Corinthian style — an idea that was pitched by Trump’s ally on the Commission of the Fine Arts, chairman Rodney Mims Cook Jr., earlier this year in an interview with The Washington Post.
Asked about online murmurs, a White House official tells PEOPLE the maintenance workers are carrying out a “standard” repair project in front of the building. In March, Cook suggested replacing the North Portico’s 200-year-old Ionic columns that mark the White House’s main entranceway with Corinthian ones used at the Supreme Court building, the U.S. Capitol and the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Why is he allowed just to do this–he literally had the East Wing torn down. The Oval Office looks like a whorehouse, and he has ruined the colonnade to the west wing and more. The south lawn was destroyed. America, what are we doing here? https://t.co/EG2e3QX2MR
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None of his "remodeling" is being done on things that are his! They belong to us! This is a crime under most law of sane nations. This is the rape of America by a domestic enemy we are apparently helpless against. Our country is a disgrace to our principals.
Newsmax Rips Trump On “Reopened Strait” Claims
“We never really prevented them from closing the strait. You know, we’re supposed to be jumping down with joy that the strait is reopened, but guess what? The strait was open before the war.
“And that’s a real question. Why did they get the bad intelligence, or was it just bad judgment that the Iranians wouldn’t close the strait? Because they went to war with that. Was that the DOD making bad advice? Was it bad advice for the intelligence bureaucracies?
“Did it come from another country? Because every war scenario since 1979 has involved the Iranians closing the strait. And for one reason or another, this administration was not prepared for that.” – Newsmax contributor and former Trump advisor Christian Whiton.
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Descension in the Legion of Doom!
MAGA Pastor Who Protested Over “Sick” LGBTQ Books And Pride Flags Gets 15 Years On Child Sex Charges
Hoodline reports:
A Clinton County pastor who once drew headlines for railing against LGBTQ-themed books is now headed to state prison. Silas Shelton was sentenced yesterday in Wilmington to 15 years behind bars after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual contact with a minor, in a hearing that packed the courtroom with supporters and relatives from both sides and ended with the judge saying Shelton showed no remorse.
Judge Andrew McCoy ordered three consecutive five-year prison terms, one for each count of unlawful sexual conduct, for a total of 15 years, and required Shelton to register as a Tier II sex offender for 25 years, according to WKRC. “When you take absolutely no accountability for your actions, you demonstrate no remorse,” McCoy said. While some of Shelton’s family members pleaded for leniency, prosecutors argued he exploited both his relationship with the family and his position in the church to harm the victim.
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Another one bites the dust!
ABC Begging Viewers To Save ‘The View’ From Kim Jong Sh*tler, So That’s Dystopian — Evan Hurst
‘The View’ yesterday, just kidding you don’t want to know how many years ago that was now. IT WAS 19 YEARS AGO.
We randomly watched that famous 2007 fight between Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck the other day, the one about the Iraq war that led to Rosie’s exit from The View. Rosie was asked recently on Watch What Happens Live if she’d be willing to guest-host The View while she’s in New York, especially now that the vapid twit pictured above who isn’t Rosie is being afforded that privilege. Rosie noted that she hadn’t been asked.
We noticed upon the rewatch though that in that big 10-minute splitscreen fight, even Hasselbeck said Donald Trump was “obnoxious,” which led him to bitch later to the press that she was “the dumbest person on TV.” Not sure if he knew in those days that dumb has a “B” in it. Just kidding, of course he didn’t, the dementia-addled loser is functionally illiterate, and he just learned about the secret “B” in “dumb” very recently.
All of that is to say that it’s kind of wild that today in the year 2026 — 19 years later, oh my God — ABC is having to run an on-air campaign to try to get viewers to help it fight back against the intimidation and censorship threats from President Donald Trump’s ass-frenching sycophant at the FCC Brendan Carr, who wants to control who The View is and is not allowed to have on its TV program, and let’s be honest, wants to ban the show from the airwaves entirely.
This all started, if you will remember, because Republicans, especially milquetoast picked-lasters like Brendan Carr, are very scared of and intimidated by Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, who models a way to be a Christian man without even having to rape kids or abuse women. (Very threatening to Republicans!) Talarico appeared on The View in February, and suddenly Brendan Carr’s prissy tailfeathers started flapping this way and that, moaning and caterwauling that The View was violating equal time rules for candidates because it is not a “bona fide” news show, blah blah blah, giant wanking motion dot gif.
ABC, for its part, decided to fight back, among other things arguing in a filing that human wedgie Brendan Carr is violating their First Amendment rights. This is a refreshing change of pace for Big Media during Trump 2.0, most of which has been acting like a common Mar-a-Lago-faced Paramount/CBS owner about things, donning a bib and going down on fascist dick like it’s all you can eat fried fascist dick night at Red Lobster.
And as part of that campaign, ABC is now running this ad telling viewers to submit comments telling Brendan Carr what they think of him and to please save The View.
You know, it’s funny, because The View is one of those things that MAGA dipshits have been trained like drooling, shitting animals to believe is The Liberals’ favorite thing, just like how in the 1990s they imagined we all worshipped Maureen Dowd. It turns out they’ve actually always been the ones who needed to get out of their bubbles and learn what people in the surrounding world are like, and not vice versa. (We’ve always known exactly what they’re like, because so many of us escaped the shithole existence of being surrounded by them.)
But yet here we are, and an actual key fight in the war against fascism is preserving The Joy Behar And Whoopi And Ana Navarro And Token Republican Yelling Show, which none of us actually watches.
C'est comme ça....
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Worth stating again: "....most of which has been acting like a common Mar-a-Lago-faced Paramount/CBS owner about things, donning a bib and going down on fascist dick like it’s all you can eat fried fascist dick night at Red Lobster."
Conservatives Now Owning The Libs By Dying More — Robyn Pennacchia
For quite some time now, rejecting science and modern medicine has been the hot trend on the Right — something of a shibboleth, if you will. Nothing will lose you street cred faster than believing that vaccines are necessary or that climate change is real, and there’s no better way to gain it than by eating gallons of horse paste with a side of colloidal silver. And besides, what better way is there to piss off all those smug libs than by rejecting sound medical advice in favor of junk science and snake oil?
Well, there is now some quantitative proof of what a fabulous success that has been. A study published in Nature last month found that conservatives are dying at higher rates than are liberals, as opposed to back in 2010 when we all died at more or less the same rate. Curiously, it’s not just COVID-19 deaths, either. Multiple studies have already shown that Republicans were at least 15 percent more likely to die of COVID-19, particularly after the vaccine dropped. What this shows, however, is that they’re more likely to die of every other cause as well.
We have to assume that this is very good news, as far as they are concerned, as it is proof that not only are their compatriots not selling out and secretly taking the advice of their primary care providers (or seeing a PCP, even), but that they are willing to die for the cause....
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May they continue to succeed at this.
Thanks to Trump You Can Now Fill Your Car with Iranian Gasoline! — Jonathan V. Last
1. Iran Wins
Donald Trump and JD Vance’s slow-motion surrender continues in Switzerland. Yesterday the United States showed its full-spectrum dominance and strength by . . . giving the Islamic Republic a license to sell crude oil and petroleum products on the open market.
This is a surrender of the sanctions regime which has been built up over decades. And the best part?
Trump has agreed to let Iran sell oil to America.
Here’s Bloomberg:
The waiver even allows the US to import Iranian crude oil and other petrochemical and petroleum products, opening the door for the first such shipments in decades. . . .
“This waiver doesn’t just weaken the pressure campaign—it puts it into reverse,” said Brett Erickson, a managing principal at Obsidian Risk Advisors. “Washington spent months building economic leverage and weeks handing Iran a path around it. What took months to build will be dismantled in a fraction of the time.” . . .
Iran had already been rushing to get millions of barrels of its oil into the global market since the peace pact with the US was announced last week. . . .
Iran also has a large fleet of ships that can deliver the country’s cargoes.
The Treasury’s move on Monday also allows for movement of the cargoes on previously sanctioned vessels.
However bad this looks, the reality is worse. Let’s talk about who holds the cards, shall we? Hint: It’s not the American president.
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Trump can get all the cards he needs from Bibi.
Class Warriors, Class Worriers, and Class Wimps — Robert Reich
Democrats must take on America's oligarchs. Here's how.
Friends,
The last time Americans faced such overwhelming evidence that the monied interests were screwing them over was the Great Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, resulting in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, starting in 1933.
The one silver lining of the current Trump-Musk-Bezos-Ellison-Murdoch-Koch horror show is that most Americans now know beyond any reasonable doubt that they’re on the losing side of a class war, and are justifiably pissed,
America’s first trillionaire is a vicious white supremacist who’s stirring up hate around the world and backing Republican candidates with big bucks. American billionaires, meanwhile, are openly sucking up to America’s first dictator, spending lavishly on whatever he wants, and gobbling up media outlets so most Americans won’t know what’s going on.
Where has this gotten us? Workers’ share of the nation’s income has now dropped to the lowest it’s been since records began in 1947, while profits’ share is the highest since 1950 (showing up in a rip-roaring stock market).
This is morally wrong. “Income from capital risks replacing income from labor,” Pope Leo wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, his recent encyclical letter.
It’s also undermining our democracy. “America has a choice,” the jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said. “We can have great wealth in a few hands or we can have a democracy, but we cannot have both.”
It’s time for Democrats to take on the class war that’s being waged by the nation’s oligarchy against most Americans by becoming class warriors themselves....
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Home of the brave or home of the slave?
Italy Called Trump an "Asshole" - Why Won’t America’s Media be Similarly Candid? — Thom Hartmann
A conservative Italian newspaper used the blunt type of word American journalists keep avoiding, and exposed how far our press will go to normalize the abnormal.
This weekend, the right-wing Italian daily Libero, a major conservative newspaper that shares a fair amount of Donald Trump’s politics, ran a one-word verdict on the President of the United States across its front page. The Italian word is coglione. The polite translation is “idiot.” The translation that George Conway and half of social media reached for, and the one the paper plainly intended, is a good deal blunter than that and more dictionary accurate: “asshole.”
What set the newspaper off wasn’t the war, or the self-dealing, or the cruelty toward immigrants: it was Trump’s lie about a photograph. He pathetically told an Italian network that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had “begged” him repeatedly for a picture at the G7 in Évian, that she’d wanted it so badly he “felt sorry for her” and went along.
Meloni, who until a week ago was Trump’s closest ally in Europe (and the only one who came to his inauguration), called the story “completely fabricated” and said neither she nor Italy ever begs. Her foreign minister cancelled his trip to Washington in protest.
And a conservative Italian newspaper looked at the most powerful man on Earth inventing a petty, humiliating story about a friendly head of state for no reason anyone could name but his own wretched, needy, emotionally-stunted ego and decided that therefore there was exactly one accurate word for him.
A newspaper in Milan, run by people who’d probably vote for him if they had the chance, will say in a banner headline what our own press, knowing far more about this man than they do, still treats as unspeakable.
So let’s do what our major papers won’t, and lay the record out in plain English:...
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America used to have brave journalists. They are mostly hacks that are scared of Trump these days.
NYT reporters reveal 'jarring' response from Trump about 'power' on MS NOW — Tom Boggioni
During an appearance on MS NOW to promote their new book “Regime Change“ about Donald Trump’s current term, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recalled a meeting they had with the president in the Oval Office where they were surprised by his demeanor when asked about wielding power.
Haberman took the lead in answering the question about the president’s current “state of mind.”
“When we went in, first, he greeted us with pictures of maple trees, which was what he was looking at, and the amount of time that he is spending on decor and remaking the White House, Washington in his image and sort of trying to make sure that people can't take his name out of commission the way it happened before,” she recalled.
“And then we asked him a question about power and how he sees his own power, because we knew that he had been talking about this,” she continued. “And he tells Natalie Harp, who is his ever-present aide, who sits on the side of the wall in the Oval office in almost every meeting, go get the printouts and then he says ‘Do you do you know who Gary Player is?'"
”We weren't really sure where this was going, because Gary Player is a golfer and a very well-known one and so she comes back with these sheets of paper and she hands each of us a two-pager,” she recalled. “And he tells this story about how Gary Player introduced him to a historian and the historian had this theory of the case about Trump, and this paper begins that Donald Trump is the most powerful person who has ever walked the Earth. More than Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, Caesar, yeah, he calls them ‘the top 10, these are the top 10,’ and the people he's naming are the top 10 of sort of the well known influencers of history, so to speak, and that Trump is more powerful than any of them because he has the might of the US military.”
She added, “And Trump is sort of reveling in this. You know, he's reading, he's reading the names and I wasn't reading them along with him. I don't think Jonathan was either, and hearing him say it out loud was actually sort of jarring — of Hitler, Stalin. It turned out that this was not a historian, this was Jonathan went down a rabbit hole and tracked him down. We were asking what the name was David King, he was Gary Player’s, business associate and caddy.”
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The evil and sick danger that is Trump.
New book reveals who’s really calling the shots in Trump’s White House — Sarah K. Burris
...Speaking to Lawrence O'Donnell late Monday, Haberman and Swan were promoting their forthcoming book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, which comes out Tuesday, the Daily Beast reported.
“The thing that was really notable about this White House, compared to the first one, is they keep talking about how they’re the most transparent White House in history,” Swan explained. “It’s a canard. They’re actually incredibly good at keeping secrets.”
According to Swan, “You have a tiny group of people that are running this country, five or six people and Donald Trump.”...
The authors say that those in the room plotting the war were Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, White House Counsel David Warrington, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, State Secretary Marco Rubio and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine.
Not on hand were Bessent and Wright, who likely would have lent some comments about what would ultimately happen to global oil markets if the Strait of Hormuz were closed. Reducing costs on food and fuel were key pieces of Trump's 2024 promises.
Another detail O'Donnell read from the book is that in the middle of the disastrous Iran war, Trump welcomed the two authors into the Oval Office, where he was picking out trees for the White House grounds.
"I know how to pick out good trees," he told them. He then bragged about his views on TikTok and began showing off his "grand ballroom" designs. Behind the scenes, aides told the authors they wish Trump was more concerned about his plunging poll numbers and "the dangers he was courting."...
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He knows how to pick his nose too.
ACLU To Spend $50M+ Monitoring Midterms Voting
NBC News reports:
The American Civil Liberties Union will spend more than $50 million on the 2026 midterm election, with half going toward efforts to ensure smooth administration of elections as President Donald Trump seeks to exert more control over the process.
ACLU officials said they will train and deploy more than 100 paid staff members and more than 3,000 volunteer leaders to encourage people to vote and to ensure voter access while monitoring ballot counting and certification.
Those people will coordinate thousands of other volunteers. The ACLU said it has already trained 5,000 people on election work and plans to train 5,000 more. Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all critical battleground states — are expected to receive the bulk of the investment.
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Trump will call this "rigging."
DOJ Sues NY Over Law Banning Masks On ICE Thugs
The New York Post reports:
The Department of Justice is suing New York over a law set to take effect this week that would bar federal agents from wearing masks, opening them up to “harassment, tracking, intimidation, and assaults.”
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate and other DOJ attorneys in the Civil Division filed the lawsuit Monday in Buffalo federal court, alleging that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul tucked the unconstitutional law into the state’s annual budget. “Governor Hochul cannot tell Federal officers how to do their job,” Woodward said. “And she certainly cannot prohibit them from ensuring their own safety in conducting Federal law enforcement operations.”
The suit, which also names New York Attorney General Letitia James, claims that the Face Covering and Identification Acts “violate the principles of intergovernmental immunity and the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution,” according to the 40-page filing, which notes that the law is set to take effect June 26.
"States rights are only acceptable when they benefit the GOP?" -- DevilDog (comments)
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Trump's Department Of Jerk-offs show their complicity with ICE criminals.
Collins Blames Schumer For Overturn Of Roe [VIDEO]
...Sen. Chuck Schumer did, in fact, push to codify Roe in 2022, but Democrats didn’t have the votes, in part due to then-Sen. Joe Manchin.
"It was 5-4. Kavenaugh was the deciding vote." — Jackie Boy (comments)
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Collins is lying, as usual.
Leavitt: Obama Donors Are Vandalizing Reflecting Pool
The vandalism is very real, despite what Tim Walz wants to say: ‘It’s an imaginary problem.’ No, it is not. It’s a very real problem. In fact, I spoke with the National Park Service just before joining the show. They now have 17 police reports that have been filed in just a matter of a few days.
“There’s actually been six arrests at the reflecting pool where, again, these deranged individuals, many of them longtime donors to the Democrat Party, to Barack Obama, to Act Blue, that have been vandalizing and desecrating our federal monument, one of the most beautiful monuments in the world, the reflecting pool.
“And that’s why President Trump is not going to stop with this effort. They’re not only holding those people accountable, but they’re going to fix the pool and continue to make it beautiful after this despicable vandalism, just in time to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday next week.” – Karoline Leavitt, on Fox News.
"You lying Nazi cunt. I pity your progeny." — JT (comments)
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Arresting citizens does not constiute proof, you dumb shit. The only proof of anything you have is your fucking arrogant Nazi stupidity!
DOJ Faces Contempt Over Deporting Venezuelans
ABC News reports:
The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has agreed to hear arguments over a federal judge’s attempt to hold the Trump administration in contempt for the deportation of more than a hundred Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison last year. The court will hear the appeal en banc — to be considered by the entire bench — on Sept. 29.
A divided panel of judges on the same court in April halted the criminal contempt inquiry into former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other officials for their role in the deportations after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg concluded that “probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt.”
The Trump administration, in March 2025, invoked the Alien Enemies Act — an 18th century wartime authority used to remove noncitizens with little-to-no due process.
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The Department Of Jerk-offs should be sent to the Phantom Zone!
Trump’s MAGA brand is fading — and that makes it dangerous — Chauncey DeVega
As the president's favorability sinks, the danger to democracy rises — not the other way around
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Whoever these jackwagons are they can't be happy to be associated with the likes of a loser like Trump.
President Donald Trump snapped at a CBS reporter on Monday after he claimed someone took a knife to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
Ed O'Keefe, CBS News' senior White House and political correspondent, asked Trump during an Oval Office press conference if he would share a photo or proof that the incident had happened. Trump responded with frustration.
"When you have a 350-foot slit, do you think that's proof?" Trump asked.
O'Keefe pushed back.
"Reporters have been down there today looking for that slit you mentioned. There's no evidence," O'Keefe said.
Trump suggested the parks department would have proof.
"But I saw it. They cut it, they cut it very violently," Trump argued.
"You write fake news," Trump told O'Keefe.
Trump had ordered National Guard troops to the location and ramped up patrols at the National Mall after reports of damage and algae blooms turned the blue reflecting pool green after the multi-million dollar remodeling project. Reports at the scene indicated the new paint had peeled off the bottom of the large-scale fountain.
Early Monday, Trump had threatened that anyone who vandalizes his vanity projects, including the reflecting pool, would face 10 years behind bars. He told reporters that five people were currently under investigation.
TRUMP: When you have a 350 foot slit, do you think that's proof?
O'KEEFE: Reporters have been down there today looking for that slit you mentioned. There's no evidence
TRUMP: All you have to do is see the parks department. They'll show it to you. pic.twitter.com/ZMzO76CpDY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 22, 2026
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The parks department works for Trump — not a trusted source.
The alleged 350 foot slash is equat to 116.6 yards. That's nearly 120 yards, as long as a football field with end zones. The pool is 167 feet wide and 2030 feet long. Someone using a kniffe would have taken a very long time to make a cut that long. They would certainly have been spotted doing that in the time it would take not to mention the physical endurance involved. The water is at least knee high (see worker's photos). Someone would have to have something like a long power tool to make a cut at the bottom. Otherwise they would be underwater and wearing a breathing device to do that. Is he suggesting they used a laser to cut it or a box cutter? Neither sounds plausable on a closer look at his claim. It doesn't hold water.
Giants Pitchers Who Defaced Pride Hats Aren't HATEFUL, They're Just Rainbow Fact-Checkers — Robyn Pennacchia
Francisco Giants have been hosting official Pride and LGBTQ+ nights at the ballpark, which makes sense, given where they are located. They were the first major league baseball team to do so, and were also the first MLB team to officially join the It Gets Better campaign, as well as the first to put rainbows on their team uniforms for Pride nights in June.
Well, last week, three of the team’s pitchers, Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker, really wanted to drive it home that, if they have anything to say about it, It Will Not Get Better And Will In Fact Get Worse. They decided to protest the rainbow hats that they were not even required to wear in the first place, by writing Bible verses on them.
Specifically, they cited Genesis 9:12-16, a passage about how the rainbow is meant to be a symbol of their God’s promise to not kill everyone on earth by drowning them again.
As they are not actually allowed to write stuff on their uniforms (and also had the option, again, of not wearing the hats, an option another player took advantage of), the players were reprimanded by the League, just like other players who have written other things on their hats or uniforms in the past.
Naturally, the Right (the same people who were very upset about Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem and not actually defacing anything) absolutely lost its shit over this, claiming the players were being discriminated against for “expressing their Christian faith,” and the Trump Department of Justice announced on Friday plans to launch a “civil rights investigation” into the MLB. You know, because of how they are very desperate to prove that Christians are being discriminated against in a country in which they are the majority and have the most actual power of any belief group.
Why? Because they think the “oppression olympics” are a real thing and that if they can successfully convince the rest of us that white heterosexual Christian men are the true victims of discrimination, they will be able to get the sweet, sweet “special treatment” they think all of the people who actually are oppressed have been getting. Or something? I guess?,,,
I’m sorry, but what is it that we’re supposed to believe here? That these guys just happened to choose this particular time, for no reason whatsoever, to express their religious beliefs about rainbows? Because, for people who are saying that all they want is to “stand for their faith,” they’re not doing a great job of explaining what they even mean by that. Are they trying to say “Look, it’s just that my religion that I believe in says LGBTQ+ people are bad, not that I, personally, am a mean person who thinks that LGBTQ+ people are bad?” Are they trying to be the rainbow police? Like, is it their actual contention that Christians own the rainbow and no one else can use it? What is it that they are trying to say?
The most generous reading of the situation is that they are mad about LGBTQ+ people using the rainbow as a symbol to represent something that they believe is against their religion, when “in fact,” the rainbow actually belongs to Christians. Because, you know, this one time their god flooded the entire world, save for one family and two of every animal (except for the unicorn, cause that bitch was running late or whatever), but then he felt like, really bad afterwards so he promised never to do it again and gave them a colorful sky arch to prove it.
I’m sorry, but if someone were in a relationship with a person who went on a mass murder spree and then apologized by saying “My bad, I’ll never do it again, please accept this meteorological phenomenon as proof of my promise,” no one in their right mind would tell them to stay. That’s not a thing to celebrate! Especially given that, apparently, the promise is only to not drown people again, not to kill everyone off again, as these people also believe that their god will eventually end the world by killing everyone with fire.
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Very strange. Are these gentlemen Jewish? Genesis is the Jewish Torah.
ABC Launches Campaign Against FCC’s Abuses [VIDEO]
The Washington Post reports:
ABC viewers across the country are getting a message from the network: If you like your local stations, or “The View,” help us get the government off our back. ABC on Monday launched an on-air campaign asking viewers to send comments to the FCC’s website pushing back on the agency and its chairman, Brendan Carr.
Since February, the FCC has been investigating whether ABC’s “The View” violated the commission’s equal-time rule, which guarantees equal airtime to all candidates running for the same public office.
In April, the FCC also ordered an early review of ABC’s eight local stations over its diversity, equity and inclusion practices. The review was announced just days after President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump intensely criticized ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, though the FCC maintained that the timing was purely coincidental.,
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Take a long walk off a short pier, Carr!
Judge Blocks Creation Of Citizenship Status Database
Politico reports:
A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from creating a database of millions of Americans’ private information — including Social Security numbers and citizenship status — saying the administration has fed knowingly inaccurate data to states that are now “actively” and “haphazardly” purging purported non-citizens from voter rolls.
“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan wrote in a 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
Ruling in a lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters and other advocacy groups, the Biden-appointed judge said the Trump administration’s new system — an updated version of the so called “SAVE” database operated by the Department of Homeland Security — combines citizenship data with information from the Social Security Administration to create a clearinghouse that Congress has expressly prohibited.
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What an evil web Trump has attempted to weave. He's trapped himself in his totalitarian dream.
Woman Detained For Touching Reflecting Pool Water
TMZ reports:
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is getting treated like the Mona Lisa these days … and one woman got a ticket to prove it. Check out the footage Charlie captured Monday … a woman is seen dipping her hand into the newly renovated Pool before drawing the attention of cops, National Guard troops, and U.S. Marshals, who surround her and begin questioning her near the water’s edge.
The woman is eventually escorted away from the Pool … she was issued a citation, but was then free to walk away. It’s unclear whether officials believe the woman caused any damage, but the response makes one thing obvious … authorities are treating even minor contact with the Reflecting Pool as a serious matter while the troubled renovation remains under the spotlight.
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Our insane president wasting our National Gruard on nothingburger arrests on citizens who own the relfecting pool. Trump doesn't own it. Americans do. He is that retarded!
Tucker Carlson: I’ve Left The Disloyal Republican Party
“I would not support the Republican Party. There’s no chance I would support the Republican Party. I’m not going to support the Democratic Party — I’m not sure what I’m going to do. How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States. That puts the interests of a foreign country above those of its own citizens. It’s not possible to vote for people like that, and I’m not going to. What we know for certain is that the United States went to war with Iran — a war we are losing, that we’ve effectively lost already — because of pressure from the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. I’m out. And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.” – Tucker Carlson, on his podcast.
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Only traitors support the treasonous party.
DOJ’s Subpoena Of Tim Walz Blocked As “Harassment
The Associated Press reports:
A federal judge has blocked an attempt by the Trump administration to subpoena Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other state officials, calling it an effort to “harass and retaliate against them.” In a ruling unsealed Monday, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schlitz found the “dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to “coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil immigration law and to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so.”
The subpoenas seeking records were served in January as part of an investigation into whether Walz and other officials obstructed or impeded law enforcement during a sweeping immigration operation in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. They were sent to the offices of Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her and officials in Ramsey and Hennepin counties.
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The Trump Department of Jerk-Offs get what they deserve — laughter at their sock puppet treason!
Comer: All Of Biden’s Pardons Must Be Declared Void
Comer calls on all of Biden’s pardons issued on the last day of his presidency (especially the one for Fauci) to be “declared null and void”
"Just wait until you and the other Nazis have fallen." — JT (comments)
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Exactly what will happen with every Trump pardon incuding any that Vance makes for him, wise-ass! Fauci is a hero. Comer is a fascist. Says it all.
Analysis of Trump DOJ results pour cold water on his pledge to jail DC 'vandals' — Matthew Rozsa
...Trump’s position on vandals is particularly relevant now because he is accusing vandals, including a former Olympic canoeist, of causing the Reflecting Pool to turn algae green with peeling paint during his renovations. The president has provided no evidence to back up any of his claims, with Olympian David Hearn saying he merely touched a piece of the peeling paint that had already been dislodged. Trump also says vandals slashed a gash in the sealant as large as a football field, even though such an act would have been observed by onlookers.
"Reflecting Pool story: Under Obama, responsible people carefully studied the problem, sought best solutions - and failed,” posted conservative journalist David Frum on Sunday. “Under Trump, irresponsible people imposed a hasty solution that enriched inept cronies - and failed even more spectacularly."
A prominent former government official echoed Frum’s sentiments.
"Like most things Trump touches, the Reflecting Pool is now in worse shape than before,” former US Attorney Barbara McQuade posted on X on Sunday. “Adding cosmetic paint did not solve the underlying problem. And now he baselessly blames vandals for his failure."
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This is what happens when idiots get drunk with power. It's not only Trump but many of his toadies are suffering from the same drug overload.
The latest smelly episode in Trump’s embarrassing Reflecting Pool saga — Nick Hilden
In recent months, President Donald Trump’s endeavor to clean the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has taken on an episodic quality as the project has raised controversy and encountered mounting problems. Now, a new odorous issue has been reported.
“As they drain it,” noted Joe Flood, “the Reflecting Pool is starting to smell.”
Over the weekend, Trump admitted that the pool would have to be drained to fix the peeling paint and algae blooms that have plagued his mission to have it “American Flag blue” in time for the 4th of July. While many have suggested that the no-bid contractor his administration secured to do the job could be to blame, Trump has his own theories.
According to the Guardian, “Trump acknowledged ‘real problems’ with the site, which he said he had examined himself, this week. He has not acknowledged any issues with the renovation he ordered, however. Instead, the president blamed the pool’s woes on ‘vandals’, which he claimed had taken ‘some form of knife or blade’ and delivered a 250ft gash into the pool’s facade. By Monday, when Trump was still posting about the site, this alleged damage had grown into a ‘300 foot long gash’. Reporters at the Washington Post who visited the pool on Sunday could see no evidence of such damage, it reported, despite Trump’s claims. Trump also claimed that unidentified vandals have poured ‘corrosive and destructive chemicals’ into the pool.”
No evidence has been provided of such claims, though as the Guardian notes, “Government workers were seen pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to tackle the algae.”...
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Young birds like young ducks can be harmed by contact with hydrogen peroxide. Someone doesn't care about wildlike partaking of a relaxing moment in our reflecting pool.
He's having Americans arrested for dipping their hands into their own pool. It's ours and not his.
Trump has become manic about his failure with the pool. It's everyone's fault but his own. This is a very sick man.
Lawsuit Seeks Records on Trump Executive Order to Accelerate Glyphosate Production — Newswire Editor
The Center for Biological Diversity sued the Trump Department of Agriculture today seeking records revealing who advocated behind the scenes for — and potentially ghost-wrote — the president’s Feb. 18 executive order directing the department to accelerate domestic production of glyphosate.
The order to increase U.S. production of the nation’s most-used herbicide was issued under the emergency powers granted to the president by the Defense Production Act — a Cold War-era law designed to address wartime shortages of critical goods.
Despite annual glyphosate use of more than 300 million pounds, the Trump executive order declared that increasing production of the pesticide was critical to national defense and ordered the federal government to ensure its continued availability.
Of Trump’s 13 executive orders invoking the Defense Production Act, the glyphosate order is unique for its language granting immunity to the chemical companies that make glyphosate should they take otherwise illegal actions in complying with the order.
“This executive order is another corrupt giveaway to the pesticide industry, and people have a right to know who pushed for it behind the scenes,” said Brett Hartl, the Center’s government affairs director. “The pesticide industry is doing everything they can to avoid accountability for the harms their products have caused across this country, and the only reason this administration is hiding these important records is that they will almost certainly show just how deeply the poison-makers’ influence permeates the Trump government.”
The executive order also declared elemental phosphorus, a key ingredient for glyphosate production, to be critical for national security. The order’s language mimics text that artificial intelligence generates when prompted to explain consumption of elemental phosphorus in the United States, including language that the nation imports “more than 6,000,000 kilograms” from other nations annually. The glyphosate executive order is the only executive order in the history of the nation to use the word “kilogram.”
“Everyone knows that Trump doesn’t write, let alone often read, the executive orders he signs,” said Hartl. “But the chatbot slop that makes up the majority of this executive order shows that virtually anything can reach the president’s desk if the right levers of power are pulled around Trump and his cronies.”
Glyphosate has been linked to a variety of human health impacts including cancer, liver disease, and developmental and metabolic disorders in young children that could lead to diabetes and cardiovascular disease later in life....
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Irresponsible as all hell!
The Green Algae President: How He's Handling Four Messes He Created — Robert Reich
The mess at the Reflecting Pool as a metaphor for his many other messes
Friends,
Referring to the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented on X: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.” (Walz could have added: “blamed others for his failure, conjured up a conspiracy, then prosecuted them.”)
One remarkable aspect of Trump’s horrendous reign is how many crises and problems he’s brought on himself — created them out of thin air. Then he brags about how well he’s handled them. And when they go wrong — as they inevitably do — he casts blame on others or on his political opponents.
Four examples from the last few days:
I. The Return of Operation Metro Surge
U.S. prosecutors in Minnesota on Tuesday announced charges against 15 people they say conspired to “violently oppose immigration law enforcement.”
But when repeatedly questioned by the press, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen failed to describe a single example of injuries to federal agents.
Rosen has a dubious track record with this kind of prosecution. In the months after “Operation Metro Surge,” launched by the Trump regime last December, federal prosecutors charged three dozen Minnesotans in a first wave of cases allegedly involving assaulting or impeding federal immigration agents. Most were dismissed or downgraded.
So why is Minnesota’s U.S. attorney announcing new charges? Rosen’s predecessor as U.S. attorney, Joseph Thompson, said he doesn’t understand it. “I think most people, on both of the sides of the political aisle, viewed [Metro Surge] as a disaster for the administration,” Thompson told The Wall Street Journal. “Why you would want to go back and re-litigate this is beyond me.”
One clue lies in the timing of the new charges — coming just two weeks after the John F. Kennedy Library awarded its 2026 Profiles in Courage Award to the people of the Twin Cities for their resistance to Operation Metro Surge....
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The Trump Criminal Syndicate has no moral authority. It is a fraud takeover of our country by fascists who are abusing the laws of our land. This essay tells us how and why.
Trump Will Stop Humiliating Self With Giorgia Meloni The Second He Wins This Iran War — Evan Hurst
Amidst every other embarrassment, every other news headline that makes you go “Oh for fuck’s sake,” every Ozymandian moment, every peace talk blown up, every queen-out as we watch Donald Trump fuck up the Reflecting Pool, when renovation/construction is allegedly the one thing he’s good at, there is also the fact that Trump cannot seem to stop making the fight he started with right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni even worse.
Meloni was maybe his only friend in Europe, especially now that Viktor Orbán has lost power. But Trump, because he is a needy little dementia queen, just the smallest, weakest man in history, couldn’t stop himself from trying to aggrandize himself/self-soothe by making up lies about her begging him for a picture at the G7, like he’s some dreamy celebrity.
She might be kind of a fascist — which is why she was his only friend — but she at least has self-respect.
After he bumblefucked around and humiliated himself at the G7, Trump tried to make himself look cool in an interview with Italian network La7, telling a reporter that Meloni “begged me to take a photo with her. She wanted a photo with me so badly — I could have skipped it, but I felt sorry for her.”
To which Meloni responded:
Meloni called what Trump said “made up”, adding: “Neither I nor Italy ever beg.”
“I don’t know why the president of the United States behaves this way with his own allies,” the far-right leader wrote on X.
“I can only say that it’s a pity he doesn’t show the same determination with enemies of the West, with enemies of the United States, with leaders with whom, instead, he is far more accommodating,” she said.
Ohhhhh, that wounded Trump somethin’ FIERCE. You know what a whiny, thin-skinned little bitchbaby he is. So he tried again this weekend, looking more and more ridiculous:...
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Bumblefuck is what he is. Incapable of doing anything but spitting up!
America’s Kiddie-Pool Authoritarian — William Kristol
Vice President JD Vance emerged from a weekend of peace talks in Switzerland with Iran to announce the first significant nuclear concession Tehran has yet made: International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, he said, will be allowed back into Iran as a condition of the deal. More on the negotiations below. Happy Monday.
Straight to Jail, Right Away
by Andrew Egger
Until now, Donald Trump’s shambolic attempts to renovate the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool have been just a silly, funny sideshow. But this weekend, the story took a more sinister turn. As news spread that the new “American Flag Blue” coating was already sloughing off the bottom of the pool, Trump went looking for somebody to blame—and predictably went with the most authoritarian available option.
“The United States Park Police have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations [sic] magnificent Reflecting Pool,” Trump posted on Saturday night. “These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail!”
Nothing had been wrong with the pool coating itself, the president insisted: “Ours worked perfectly, including the mirror like finish . . . the Reflecting Pool was never so beautiful as it was just one week ago.” But alas, some theatrical villains had come along and ruined it for everybody: “They took some form of knife or blade, and put a 250 foot long gash into the beautiful facade of what took so much work, competence, and money to build and complete. They also poured corrosive and destructive chemicals into the Pool.”
Who could have done such a thing? Who would have dared poor gallons of harsh chemicals into the Reflecting Pool? .
These villains, it seems, were so cunning, so devastatingly dastardly, that they managed to pull off this shocking act of national blasphemy without once being visible on the cameras embedded in the Washington Monument that transmit a 24/7 public livestream of the Reflecting Pool. Plainly, we are looking at some serious criminals here. But rest assured that Trump is on the case: Many people, he claimed, have already been arrested.
Is that true? Who knows! At least one arrested person has already been identified, however: former U.S. Olympian David Hearn, who told ABC News he was arrested Friday after heading to the Reflecting Pool to see it for himself and touching a piece of the blue coating that had come partially loose. “I did not remove, I did not damage, I did not rip, tear, break, destroy, or harm any part of the Reflecting Pool,” Hearn insisted....
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Trump always has to have a scapegoat to cover his stupid, bumbling failures. He's a shameful disgrace to our country. The worst in our history.
'Your cuts did this': Elon Musk skewered over deaths tied to DOGE — Alexander Willis
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) unloaded on trillionaire Elon Musk Monday morning over his tenure in the Trump administration – namely, his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the initiative’s federal spending cuts that are projected to cause millions of preventable deaths.
Khanna recently appeared on the progressive podcast “I’ve Had it” with host Jennifer Welch, during which he noted that a one-time 5% tax on Musk’s wealth would generate enough revenue to fund “universal child care for every family” in the United States. Musk responded to a clip of Khanna’s appearance posted on social media Sunday night, calling the California Democrat “such an evil liar.”
The next morning, Khanna fired back, sharing research suggesting that the spending cuts enacted under Musk’s leadership at DOGE may cause 14 million preventable deaths by 2030.
“Elon, how about just paying the 5% instead of hurling random insults?” Khanna wrote. “And here are the facts, man. Your [United States Agency for International Development] cuts did this.”
Khanna shared a report from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health citing a peer-reviewed study that found as many as 4.5 million children under the age of five may perish due to the recent U.S. foreign aid cuts spearheaded by Musk.
Over the past 20 years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is estimated to have “helped save 91 million lives,” per the report, with USAID-supported programs “associated with a 15% reduction in all-cause mortality and a 32% reduction in mortality among children under five.”
During his time leading DOGE, Musk oversaw around $60 billion in cuts to U.S. foreign aid, leaving “few surviving USAID projects” after he departed from the Trump administration last year amid controversy....
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Not to mention his cars are death traps!
WaPo Board: Hegseth “Panders” To Anti-Vax Nutbags
The Washington Post editorial board writes:
An influenza outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas has sickened almost 160 people in the past few weeks and might have even killed one person going through basic training. If it wasn’t already clear why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to eliminate the military’s universal flu vaccine mandate was an exceptionally bad idea, it should be now.
When Hegseth announced the new vaccine policy, he claimed that “overly broad” mandates “only weaken our war-fighting capabilities” and stressed that his rollback would “restore freedom and strength to our joint force.”
In reality, his apparent motive was pandering to anti-vaccine elements inside President Donald Trump’s coalition. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former trial lawyer who has profited from lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, continues plotting to make it harder for people to get immunizations. Never mind that Trump himself received the flu and covid vaccines last fall.
"Illness reduces troop readiness. It's why the troops used to get a billion shots." — The_Wretched (comments)
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Disease for all American troops! What a wonderful message!
MAGA melts down as Stephen King nails Trump’s blatant corruption — Alex Henderson
On X, formerly Twitter, King posted, "Nobody is vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, and Trump knows it. This is a visible example of his corruption — a no-bid contract to some crony followed by sky-high cost overruns, and shoddy construction to boot. Classic Trump: I didn't f–– up, it was my enemies."
Trump's defenders didn't like that tweet at all.
X user Fred Almeida posted, "You let Trump live in your mind. You should focus on your writing. these kind of posts from you are too low brow and annoyingly boring. Especially from the man that wrote Gunslinger."...
The real culprit with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, conservative MS NOW Joe Scarborough argued on his show "Morning Joe," was shoddy work resulting from a "no-bid contract."
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What is very low brow is when a Nazi attacks a professional in any field because they think they have no right to an opinion.
These underdeveloped mental midgets show us how far they are from reality. How do Americans get so lost?
The pool fiasco is the result of poor workmanship by one of Trump's cronies. Get over it lamebrains! You can't vnadalize a pile of shit!
Trump Threatens To 'Take Over' Iran If Strait Remains Closed — Heather
Looks like those "peace talks" are going about as well as expected.
Looks like those "peace talks" are going about as well as expected. Trump ran to one of his favorite reporters on Fox again with more threats against Iran:
Donald Trump told Fox News on Sunday that he threatened to “take over” Iran if the Strait of Hormuz was not immediately re-opened.
The president’s latest round of threats came in response to news Saturday that Iran was once again closing the key waterway, just days after signing an agreement to ensure that traffic could flow through. Iran announced that it would close the Strait of Hormuz after Israeli forces continued an all-out assault into Lebanon aimed at dislodging Hezbollah militants....
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Sounds like a crazy loser whose time is running short.
Six Survive Latest “Drug Boat” Strike In Eastern Pacific
The Associated Press reports:
The U.S. military has conducted another strike against a boat accused of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Thursday, immediately killing two people and leaving six survivors amid an ongoing campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin America.
The latest attack — which now number more than 60 — brings the number of people who have been killed in boat strikes by the U.S. military to more than 210 since the Trump administration began targeting those it calls “narcoterrorists” in early September.
It is unclear if the survivors of this strike, or the one conducted Tuesday, which left two survivors, were rescued. However, in both cases, U.S. Central Command said it notified the U.S. Coast Guard. The Pentagon did not immediately answer questions about the outcome.
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Survivors can be witnesses in court against murder charges.
Trump and his henchmen may very well face murder charges.
Dead Duck Found Floating In Lincoln Reflecting Pool
The Independent reports:
A viral photograph of a dead duck floating in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has intensified scrutiny of the landmark’s recent $14 million renovation, fueling a mounting debate over water quality, chemical treatments, and alleged vandalism at the historic site.
The cause of the duck’s death remains unknown, but the image, which has over one million views as of Sunday afternoon on X, has quickly become a flashpoint for critics highlighting the pool’s rapid deterioration.
Environmental concerns have moved to the forefront, as observers warn that current water conditions could pose risks to the wildlife that regularly inhabit the national monument.
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Human lives mean nothing to Trump. Why would he care about a duck's life? Poisoning wildlife isn't considered in his insane assault on our nation's Capitol.
The military helped Black Americans find belonging. Pete Hegseth wants to reverse course — Chauncey DeVega
The military has been a powerful force for social progress in the US. Under Trump, it is being used to undo it
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has tattoos all over his body — including a Jerusalem cross and the phrase Deus Vult (“God wills it”). Tattoos tell us a story about a person’s life and beliefs.
“God wills it” was a battle cry of Christian crusaders during the Middle Ages. Today it is used by violent right-wing extremist groups and other hate organizations – including those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The commanders of Hegseth’s D.C. National Guard unit deemed his tattoos to be a security risk — citing concerns about “insider threats” — and he was not allowed to work the security detail for President Biden’s 2021 inauguration.
Hegseth has defended his tattoos as expressions of his deeply held Christian faith. He claimed that he was persecuted for his religion and outspoken “conservative” beliefs. Yet, under current regulations, such tattoos could disqualify recruits and subject active-duty personnel to discipline....
Loving a country that does not love you back is an old and vexing question for Black and brown Americans. Now, women, immigrants, LGBTQ people, Muslims and other marginalized communities are forced to confront it in ways many of them likely never imagined. In the Age of Trump — especially his return — that question rings louder, loaded heavier with new dread. It is here and getting much worse.
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Our troops are disgracing their oaths. All flags must be displayed upside down. We have become a nation in distress.
Press corps still gets Trump’s motivation all wrong — Dan Froomkin
It’s been wild lately watching mainstream news coverage swing from “Trump cancels US strikes in Iran and suggests agreement is close” to “Deal is reached to end Iran war” to “There are many questions about the Iran deal” to “Why Trump’s secret and vague MOU is stirring a political storm” to “First steps in peace deal demand far more from U.S. than Iran” to “US-Iran talks abruptly called off after Israel and Hezbollah trade deadly attacks”.
What is gradually becoming clear, even to a credulous press corps, is that the U.S., having effectively surrendered to Iran, emerges much weaker. Iran’s tyrannical leaders, having gained significant economic concessions, emerge much stronger.
That’s the essential takeaway: That Trump unilaterally went to war against Iran, then lost, at great cost to his country and the world.
But the coverage still reflects a lot of false assumptions about Trump and his motives....
Despite the mainstream media’s insistence on sanewashing Trump – by writing about his “unfiltered, improvisational style” or describing him as “a self-indulgent political leader who trusts his own instincts” – he is, in fact, not sane.
Call it what you will – narcissism, solipsism, sociopathy, hedonism, paranoia, dementia – the evidence overwhelmingly shows that Trump cares about only one thing: Trump.
Nothing else.
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Until we come to grips with this fact we will continue to sink.
Republican operative shares staggering prediction for GOP after Trump: 'No coming back' — Robert Davis
A long-time GOP operative warned on Sunday that his party is facing an existential crisis as the conservative parts of the party give way to President Donald Trump's extremist followers, and that could have massive implications for American society going forward.
Mike Madrid, author of "The Great Transformation" on Substack, argued in a new essay that there has been a "complete collapse" in the relationship between Republicanism and Conservatism, one that Trump filled with "populist nationalism and bigger, stronger government." And that collapse could have serious ramifications, he warned.
"The old GOP is dead much the same way as the Whigs left the scene," Madrid wrote. "There is no coming back. Second, the Democratic party is the conservative party today - at least in the Burkean sense - as the guardian of institutions against populist destruction and countercultural institutional attack manifested in today's GOP. If you think Reagan was a precursor to Trump, I would submit you have a very elementary understanding of what’s happening to our society - let alone our political system."
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Better the new Nazi party dying than the U.S.
A New Type of Gambling Scandal Is Sweeping Through Sports — Frank Landymore
Before playing at this year’s World Cup, the Ivory Coast soccer player Elye Wahi was arrested on alleged fixing offences.
Wahi, who plays for the French side Nice, hasn’t been formally charged yet, but what he’s accused of doing is emblematic of a new wave of scandals sweeping across sports. As The Athletic reports, he didn’t make a conspicuous error or stop trying to score. Instead, all he did was receive a yellow card — deliberately, the Ligue de Football Professionnel, the governing body of France’s top soccer league Ligue 1, alleges.
It may not sound like a big deal. But that’s the point of “spot-fixing,” the practice of deliberately manipulating smaller, less consequential events in a game with the aim of monetizing the blips on sports betting apps or prediction markets. It’s far less dramatic than full-blown match-fixing, when a player may purposely throw a game. And it can be even more subtle than points shaving, when you deliberately try to win a game with a smaller margin than expected to throw off the bookies.
In Wahi’s case, he clumsily tackled a player on the opposing team and promptly received a yellow card. Because it was his fifth yellow card of the season, he was suspended for his team’s next match. Sources told The Athletic that the LFP received notifications of suspicious betting patterns during the game involving wagers on Wahi receiving a yellow card, which the LFP confirmed.
If what Wahi did was deliberate, it was a perfect example of spot-fixing. The yellow card didn’t have a sizable impact on the game, which ended 0-0. But it could’ve provided a massive payout to someone who put money on this very specific event happening.
These kinds of bets are perfect for our nerdy data-driven age of sports. As The Athletic notes in a separate piece on the rising phenomenon, part of the way that sports data companies earn money is by selling their data to bookmakers....
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As civilization collapses...
Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers — Frank Landymore
Not that anyone in power is going to care, but there’s even more evidence that Americans are coming to overwhelmingly loathe AI — despite, or perhaps because, they’re using chatbots more than ever.
In a sweeping new poll conducted by Pew Research, only 16 percent of respondents said they believed AI will have a positive impact on society — a number as dismal as the perception of the tech.
Meanwhile, 49 percent of adults say they use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which remains the most popular by a considerable margin, with a quarter saying they use the tools daily. That proportion is considerably higher than the 33 percent of American adults who said they used AI chatbots in 2024.
In other words, the tech’s widespread adoption isn’t helping its perception. A full 40 percent of respondents said they anticipate AI will have a negative impact on society, and 31 percent said it will impact them personally in a negative way, too.
This varies quite a bit by age. Gen Z adults, ages 18 to 29, were the most wary of AI, with 48 percent believing it’ll be negative for society. Yet they’re also the group that reported using AI the most, at 66 percent....
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Apparently, a total failure.
National Guard Deployed At Reflecting Pool [VIDEO]
The National Guard, along with local police, have been dispatched to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to guard the algae.
As you can see at the end of this clip, the algae is safe. Well done. pic.twitter.com/p61u3f2j6m
— Steven Huffman (@Poeslawisalive) June 20, 2026...
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Knee jerk reaction from a reactionary jerk!
Meteorologists Warn That This Could Be the Strongest El Niño This Century — Frida Garza
The oceanic phenomenon known as El Niño, which increases temperatures worldwide, has officially begun, according to U.S. weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Meteorologists have warned that this could be the strongest El Niño this century. It is expected to drive extreme weather events around the world, including both severe droughts and heavy rainfall…...
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Our stubborn ignorance didn't help to moderate this.
Sunday Thought: 135 Days — Robert Reich
Friends,
To you fathers, and to those of you who have or have had fathers, Happy Father’s Day.
For the next 135 days, our first and most important goal is to end Republican control of Congress, thereby limiting Trump’s reign of criminality, corruption, cruelty, and treachery.
This is a moral imperative for every one of us who believes in a decent society.
I know, I know — you’re exhausted. You’ve been doing everything you can to fight this regime — to protect the vulnerable, stop the bigotry, end the violence at home and abroad — and you feel worn out. I often feel the same.
But we have no choice. Trump is getting crazier and more dangerous by the day.
A few congressional Republicans are showing a bit of backbone, especially those who aren’t running again because Trump has supported their opponents in a Republican primary (Texas Senator John Cornyn, Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie).
But most of the GOP in Congress are as cowardly and shameful as any group of politicians has ever been in American history. They should all be swept out of office.
This means we must keep fighting even harder over the next 135 days — ensuring that Democratic candidates have our support (money, time, and energy),** that every qualified voter is registered, that Trump and his neofascist goons don’t interfere in our voting system, and that November 3rd’s blue wave is so large as to overwhelm any attempt by Trump to meddle. ...
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We must go to the polls like never before. Our ballots must wipe out the fascism that has stained our nation.
Trump drops F-bomb in apparent threat to kill peace negotiators: 'Won't even make it back' — Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump appeared to threaten Iranian peace negotiators with assassination Sunday in a “bonkers” phone call with Fox News’ Trey Yingst, the details of which Yingst revealed on air just moments later.
Last week, Trump officially agreed to a tentative peace deal with Iran, giving the two parties 60 days to finalize a more permanent agreement to end hostilities. Vice President JD Vance arrived in Switzerland Sunday to meet with an Iranian delegation of negotiators led by Speaker Mahammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghci.
However, after Iranian military officials announced on Saturday that they would, again, close the Strait of Hormuz due to violations of the tentative peace deal, Trump suggested, Yingst said, that the Iranian negotiators may not “make it back” to their home country.
“President Trump tells Fox News he spoke with Iranian officials overnight and said ‘you close it and you won’t have a country,’” Yingst said, recalling his phone call with Trump held moments earlier. “He went on to tell these officials, ‘you won’t even make it back to your f---ing country.’”
Whether Trump’s remarks suggested he may order the Iranian negotiators assassinated before their return home remains unclear, though multiple Iranian negotiators have been assassinated throughout the duration of the U.S. war against Iran, such as Ali Larijani, the former speaker of the Iranian Parliament who was killed in March in an Israeli airstrike.
"We'll take over the rest of your country ... I'll blow the shit out of them" -- here is Trey Yingst's entire segment about the bonkers phone call he says he had with Trump this morning that apparently included threats to assassinate Iran's leadership, impose draconian US tolls… pic.twitter.com/RLi9bos14Q
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 21, 2026
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Trump's negotiating skills are very antagonistic. Who would want to work with him toward any solution? He's not fit to lead our country. He is, in fact, a detriment to us.
'He will cave': Expert predicts Trump poised to give up to another major adversary — David McAfee
Authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat is predicting that President Donald Trump's praise for China's Xi Jinping will end the same way his Iran standoff did: with the president backing down to a strongman he admires.
Her forecast came in response to an Axios clip in which Trump gushed about the Chinese leader on "The Axios Show." Asked about Xi, Trump described him in the language of physical admiration he often reserves for fellow autocrats, calling him tall, "6-foot-2," and praising his "great stature," "great confidence," and intelligence. For Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism and author who has spent years studying how leaders flatter and accommodate dictators, the fawning was a tell rather than a throwaway line.
"He will cave to Xi in the end just as he capitulated to Iran," Ben-Ghiat wrote, situating the comment within what she sees as a consistent pattern across Trump's foreign policy. She tied the prediction to a larger argument about whose interests the president ultimately serves, describing Iran as "an ally of China" and noting that Trump "has consistently acted to help Russia," which she also called a Chinese ally. Her conclusion was blunt: in her telling, Trump "is in office to make the strongmen leaders he admires do well."...
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Does he think they will admire him for capitulating? They just laugh at him and the U.S. for being such dupes.
'Very possible' Trump leaves White House early as president 'falls apart': CNN legend — Alexander Willis
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta stunned journalist John Harwood in an interview published Sunday after predicting how President Donald Trump’s presidency may end – a prediction that included a potential early departure from the White House amid growing turmoil.
“Do you think there’s a chance that Trump will resign before the end of his term?” Harwood asked Acosta in an interview published by Zeteo.
“I think it’s very possible that he walks away,” Acosta said, citing the ever-increasing list of issues plaguing the Trump administration, from rising costs to the president’s own struggles with supposed cognitive decline.
Acosta said that he believed a Trump resignation was possible, but also predicted another scenario in which the president would leave the White House early – one far more “dangerous,” he warned.
“It may be more in Trump’s nature for him to downward spiral in such a dangerous way that he does maybe go out with a boom or a bang,” Acosta said. “I don’t see him losing these midterms so badly that he just says ‘that’s it, I quit the presidency, I’m walking away’ – I think it’s something that will be bigger than that forces him, perhaps, to leave the presidency.”...
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Which will set up the prophecy of Vance issuing him a blanket pardon for his crimes. We lose again.
White House correspondent calls out Trump ICE 'lie': 'They're criminals' — David McAfee
Donald Trump asked the public to celebrate ICE as misunderstood heroes Saturday, and veteran White House correspondent Brian Karem answered with a single word: "LIE."
The president had posted what he framed as a poll, declaring that "ICE has been abused by the Fake News Media at levels never seen before." He called the agents "Great Patriots who work hard, and do a fantastic job in a very hostile environment," and blamed the criticism on "the Dumocrats and the Fake News." Karem, a longtime reporter who has sparred with multiple administrations from inside the briefing room, was not interested in the patriotic framing.
"ICE ignores due process and hides behind masks as if they're the KKK riding through the south during the 1920s," Karem wrote, before invoking two names that have become central to the case against Trump's immigration crackdown. "Renee Good and Alex Pretti were fatally shot in Minneapolis during the Trump administration's 'Operation Metro Surge'." His conclusion was blunt: "ICE are not patriots. They're criminals."
The history behind those names is not in dispute. Renée Good, a 37-year-old US citizen and mother, was shot and killed by an ICE agent on January 7 while in her car. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old US citizen and intensive care nurse at a Minneapolis VA hospital, was shot multiple times and killed by Customs and Border Protection officers on January 24 while filming agents with his phone. Both deaths occurred during Operation Metro Surge, the aggressive enforcement campaign that drew more than 3,000 arrests, mass protests, a Minnesota general strike, and a homicide ruling from the county medical examiner in Pretti's case....
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It's likely these criminals will be hunted down just as the Nazis were after WWII. Justice will find them all sooner or later.
America deserves closure from the trauma of Trump's crime spree.
'Delusional' Trump may be too far gone to see his own limits — Adam Lynch
President Donald Trump’s arrogance and braggadocio appear to be without bounds, but does he really believe his own claims of supreme power? That was the subject of debate on CNN’s “The Arena” Saturday morning.
The panel consensus, however, could not confirm that he wasn’t nuts.
Trump recently stated during an “Axios Show” interview that there are now "no limits" to his power since he started a war with Iran. As CNN host Pamela Brown argued, he now claims “he's more powerful than some of history's most brutal dictators like Hitler and Stalin.”
“There are only two possibilities,” argued Dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg. “Either he believes it or he's just saying it. And I'm not sure which one is better. … it's a dumb thing to get obsessed about on his part. It reflects his utter lack of ability to draw distinctions between good and bad. He only measures things on the metric and the rubric of power.”
“The fact that he doesn't recognize the actual limits on his power, as evidenced by the deal that he was forced to get into, is a sign of delusion that I think is going to create more problems in foreign policy and maybe domestic policy going forward,” Goldberg added. “Because if he doesn't actually see the limits on his power, then he's going to make the same mistakes again.”
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More powerful only because our country is too cowardly to stop him.
We just set around and talk about it whlle he rapes us and destroys our country.
Grothman Complains That Iran Acts Like They Won The War — Chris capper Liebenthal
Rep Glenn Grothman and two Newsmax hosts couldn't quite bring themselves to admit Trump lost his war on Iran.
Rep Glenn Grothman went on Newsmax to discuss Trump's surrender peace deal with Iran.
They spent the first few minutes complaining that those godless pagan heathens just won't change their attitude toward the United States or Israel, all without a sense of irony. They also complained that Iran would call attacks against them a violation of the peace deal. No, seriously.
The fun really started when the three of them played a game of "Tell me Trump lost the war with Iran without saying that Trump lost the war with Iran."...
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Sorry, Charlie! We did lose Trump's war. And the terms of surrender are still in spin. Wake up! It's 2026!
BOOK: Bessent Urged Trump Not To Host Zelensky, Called Him “Little F*cker” And “Special Needs Child”
The Guardian reports:
Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, advised Donald Trump not to host Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, having called the Ukrainian president a “little fucker”, a “special-needs child” and “Mr Bean on crack”, according to a new book.
The suggestion that a US cabinet official described a world leader in such terms is included in Regime Change, a blockbusting account of the second Trump administration by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, set to be published worldwide on Tuesday.
News of Bessent’s alleged remarks may embarrass the Trump administration, although the meeting that did take place on 28 February 2025 proved outright disastrous, as Trump and JD Vance blasted Zelenskyy for not being grateful for aid in his fight against Russian invaders, and for not wearing a suit.
"He could still kick your sorry Quisling ass." — KnownDonorDad (comments)
"As always, the tRump crew believes their posturing and primping is masculine when it is actually emasculated. These eunuchs don't know a man when they see one." — magic_twanger (commentsO
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This arrogant and snotty little Nazi will never be a man.
America abdicates as global superpower — and it’s about time — Andrew O'Hehir
Trump's foreign policy has been a disaster. There could be an upside: A more realistic role for US in the world
To a significant degree, this change is about Americans waking up to facts that were painfully obvious to nearly everyone else. Only Americans view American politics in isolation, as if we were special children on a magic island and the rest of the world still had dial-up internet and village dances. Trump became a potent global symbol of the systemic crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of an authoritarian alternative, but those things were emerging all over the place. He didn’t invent them and surely didn’t understand them....
The Trump administration’s incoherent blend of expansionist, isolationist and protectionist policies — a wannabe late-medieval fortress-state that expels “outsiders,” but also a military superpower that imposes its will anywhere and everywhere — has culminated in humiliation and surrender on multiple fronts....
Trump’s war drove crude oil prices into the stratosphere at precisely the moment when capital markets began to realize that renewable energy wasn’t simply a better long-term alternative to fossil fuels but also more affordable and more efficient....
When the Chinese tell small nations in Asia, as Hass puts it, that if the U.S. couldn’t handle a “second-rate regional military power like Iran” it is no longer a guarantor of global military stability, there is no obvious counterargument. More important still is what he calls the “narrative contrast”: China presents itself as a straightforward business partner and “reliable steward of the international order,” while America is “a violent and reckless pursuer of its own interests.” Or someone’s interests, anyway. Definitely not yours or mine.
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The collapse of the United States and the west.
Karoline Leavitt scorched by onlookers over 'mystery' Reflecting Pool claim — David McAfee
The White House is getting a harsh response from numerous observers to its latest claim about the Reflecting Pool.
When White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declared on X that the press had lost its mind over the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, she likely expected applause rather than a fact-check. Sharing a post that ridiculed the coverage, she wrote, "So true, and so sad. The liberal media is truly deranged." The line fit neatly into a broader MAGA effort to recast the pool's very public failure as a symptom of "Trump Derangement Syndrome." It did not land that way.
The most pointed rebuttal came a day earlier from author and columnist John A. Daly, whose post was amplified by former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Daly argued that conservatives had manufactured the entire spectacle before turning around to whine about it, writing that "as with the Epstein Files, MAGA made a huge media-story out of the Reflecting Pool, only to turn around and complain about how much media attention it's received after blowing up in their faces."...
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Their ignorant arrogance overshadows their inabilty to process reality.
Trump claims multiple were arrested over Reflecting Pool 'destruction': 'Years in Jail!' David McAfee
President Donald Trump says the U.S. Park Police have rounded up a ring of vandals who sabotaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The actual arrest record tells a much smaller story: one 67-year-old cyclist who says he reached into the water to touch a piece of paint that had already fallen off.
In a Truth Social post Saturday, Trump escalated his days-long insistence that his troubled $14 million renovation was the victim of a crime rather than a botched paint job. "The United States Park Police have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll," he wrote, misspelling "Pool." "Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair."
According to The Washington Post, Park Police arrested a single person on Friday: David Hearn, a 67-year-old man from Bethesda and a three-time Olympic canoe slalom athlete, on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property....
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Trump is a very sick man. The fact that we do nothing about it is even sicker.
Tennessee Flooded With OTC Horse Paste Billboards
STAT News reports:
Four years ago, Tennessee became the first state to allow adults to buy the antiparasitic drug ivermectin from a pharmacy without first seeing a doctor. Pharmacies can use a pre-written, blanket prescription to sell to just about anyone who walks through their doors.
The drug is now marketed and sold across the state in roadside shops and small-town strip malls with little oversight from health authorities. Highway billboards advertise ivermectin as “Available Without a Prescription in Tennessee!” while dozens of pharmacies offer highly concentrated pills, sometimes at 10 or 20 times the potency of a standard tablet.
Some pharmacy websites now offer the drug as a treatment for Covid, “long haul vax symptoms,” diabetes, or cancer — despite no evidence of its effectiveness for those purposes — while the new law largely gives pharmacists immunity from lawsuits or professional sanctions related to ivermectin....
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Please contact me if you are interested in buying a bridge in New York. Be sure to include your bank information. /S
Trump Threatens To Impose Tolls In Strait Of Hormuz
The Associated Press reports:
President Donald Trump threatens to impose US tolls in the Strait of Hormuz if a final deal with Iran isn’t reached in 60 days. Trump, spending the weekend at Camp David, underscores that the initial agreement to end the war with Iran calls for toll-free travel through the vital waterway for 60 days.
He adds: “there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired, unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not be completed.” Trump says the money would be for “services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs.”
Trump has faced a lot of blowback domestically for how the memorandum of understanding with Iran addresses the issue of tolls in the Strait of Hormuz. The deal only secures toll-free passage for 60 days and doesn’t preclude future fees.
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Send all collections direct deposit to Trump's bank account.
Louisiana Pastor Gets 80 Years On Molestation Charges
New Orleans’s CBS affiliate reports:
A former Terrytown pastor convicted of raping and molesting two teenage boys was sentenced to 80 years in prison Thursday, according to the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office. On May 6, a jury found Terry Reed, 66, guilty of two counts of third-degree rape and two counts of molestation of a juvenile.
Prosecutors said Reed used his position as a pastor to gain the trust of vulnerable teenagers and groom them for abuse. At the time, he was already a registered sex offender, having pleaded guilty to indecent behavior with a juvenile in 1997 and to indecent behavior with a juvenile and molestation of a juvenile in 2017.
Reed operated Vessels of Christ Ministry and had a history of targeting troubled boys. Prosecutors said Reed first gained the trust of the boys’ guardians before bringing the teenagers into his residence on East Monterey Drive. He used scripture and religious teachings to normalize the abuse. One victim told investigators that Reed claimed sexual acts would provide the “covering of Jesus” and protect him from evil, authorities said.
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Another one bites the dust!
Voldemort: Nobody Knows Talarico’s Gender [VIDEO]
The Daily Beast reports:
Stephen Miller has bizarrely questioned the gender of a top Democratic candidate running in a midterm election. The senior adviser to President Donald Trump said he will not refer to the Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico as a man during a Fox News appearance on Hannity.
“All I can say about Talarico is that Texas is not going to elect an individual — I can’t call him a man — who knows what gender he is?” Miller told Sean Hannity.
“They’re not going to elect an individual, an entity, who has said the thing he loves most in the whole world is trans children,” Miller continued on Hannity’s show. “He’s a weird, strange, bizarre, totally unelectable human who is never, ever, ever going to be the senator from the great state of Texas,” Miller said Friday.
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As if anyone knows what Miller's is. Talarico is scaring the Nazis shitless!
Trump family member says his new Kennedy Center move reveals his true 'insecurity' — David McAfee
Mary Trump has spent years telling anyone who will listen that her uncle cannot bear to be seen losing. This week she pointed to a tarp draped over the Kennedy Center as her latest exhibit.
In the newest edition of her newsletter, the segment she calls "Trump Trolls Trump," the clinical psychologist and niece of the president argued that the covering left over the building's facade was not about construction logistics. It was about ego. Crews began stripping Donald Trump's name off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts after a federal judge ruled the renaming illegal, and Mary Trump claimed the tarp stayed up for a revealing reason. Because he is "such an insecure, thin skinned baby," she wrote, "they left the tarp up so we cannot actually watch Donald's letters being removed."
Mary Trump found the cover-up almost too fitting. The same tarp meant to spare her uncle the indignity of watching his own name come down, she noted, also blocks the public from seeing the name of the man the building was actually built to honor. "We cannot see the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy," she wrote, "the man for whom the Kennedy Center was actually named."...
Her broader point was not subtle. The week, she argued, was a parade of self-inflicted embarrassments dressed up as strength, "corruption masquerading as governance" and "incompetence disguised as confidence." The Kennedy Center tarp simply gave her the cleanest image for it.
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She's spot on the money!
Trump claims multiple were arrested over Reflecting Pool 'destruction': 'Years in Jail!' —David McAfee
President Donald Trump says the U.S. Park Police have rounded up a ring of vandals who sabotaged the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. The actual arrest record tells a much smaller story: one 67-year-old cyclist who says he reached into the water to touch a piece of paint that had already fallen off.
In a Truth Social post Saturday, Trump escalated his days-long insistence that his troubled $14 million renovation was the victim of a crime rather than a botched paint job. "The United States Park Police have arrested multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll," he wrote, misspelling "Pool." "Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair."
According to The Washington Post, Park Police arrested a single person on Friday: David Hearn, a 67-year-old man from Bethesda and a three-time Olympic canoe slalom athlete, on a misdemeanor charge of destruction of government property....
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The delusional paranoid lunatic. He's the one destroying national monuments. Always someone else to blame for his deluded fuckups.
Congressman sounds alarm over Trump move that 'should be on front page of every newspaper' — David McAfee
Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) is demanding the story get wall-to-wall attention after a new investigation revealed that President Donald Trump's Justice Department quietly shut down a federal criminal probe into the coal empire of one of his closest Senate allies.
"This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America," Levin wrote, sharing reporting on the reportedly killed investigation. "The pattern isn’t subtle: protect Trump’s friends, prosecute his critics, and get rewarded with more power. That is corruption, plain and simple. Todd Blanche must not be confirmed."
The reporting Levin amplified, published by ProPublica in partnership with Mountain State Spotlight, found that Trump administration officials earlier this year terminated a federal criminal investigation into the multistate mining operations owned by Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV) and largely run by his son, Jay. The probe — a joint effort by the EPA, the DOJ's Environmental Crimes Section, and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Virginia — was examining whether the companies' relentless pollution violations amounted to criminal conduct under the Clean Water Act.
Over the past decade, Justice's Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated operations have racked up tens of thousands of alleged Clean Water Act violations, according to ProPublica. Prosecutors reportedly believed they had a strong case and initially had the sign-off of Trump's own top prosecutor in the district to proceed. Then the Office of the Deputy Attorney General — at the time headed by Todd Blanche — shut it down. "They were told 'pencils down,'" one person familiar with the investigation told ProPublica....
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Impeach Trump! When enough Republicans have had enough of his grift and crime, impeach him!
Legal analysts burn Justice Neil Gorsuch's 'absurd' rationale in gun rights case — Bennito L. Kelty
A couple of legal analysts ripped the bizarre rationale in the ruling of a MAGA star on the Supreme Court.
On the Legal AF podcast, host Michael Popok and legal analyst Lisa Graves shared how put off they were by Justice Neil Gorsuch's opinion in the United States v. Hemani ruling. The case involved a Texas gun owner who was found with marijuana and admitted to regularly using the drug.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the federal government can't automatically disarm someone for using marijuana a few times a week, finding the prosecution at the center of the case violated the Second Amendment, according to reporting by SCOTUSblog.
However, Popok laughed when reflecting on Gorsuch's opinion, especially a section where the Trump-appointed justice "wasted ink telling me how drunk people were in the 1800s." Graves agreed, calling the section "absurd."
"Our ancestors can be drunk, and you can be too," Popok said, summing up Gorsuch's writing. "That's sort of how I read this, allowing somebody who's on controlled substances to continue to be on controlled substances to have a firearm. It's so outrageous."
"There was this really sort of ridiculous cherry picking, or you know, trying to understand history, how drunk were the founding fathers? How drunk was the founding generation?" Graves added. "How drunk is too drunk to have a weapon? Do you have to be drunk all the time?"
"I thought I was watching Drunk History," Popok said. "You know Drunk History? where they get drunk on stage?"...
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Wait! Is he talking about gutar players now?
This rogue wave of outrage is enough to force Trump to resign — Jason Miciak
...Trump — the man always in it for himself— sees real trouble on the horizon with fewer friends to batten down the hatches. Perhaps he uses a convenient medical issue as a graceful exit. "For the good of the country." How big of him, a martyr to the end. Red tears, "He always put the country first."
And that's what it really gets down to, right? Three things are coming together at the perfect time; the presidency isn't fun anymore. An economy nose-diving and all the fury that goes with it, advanced age he can no longer hide, cankles, bruising, a cognitive catastrophe as certainty, and his soldiers on Capitol Hill no longer following orders. Three things, each critical, and three is a magic number.
Magic enough to create a rogue wave of the type that sinks even the unsinkable.
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Insiders tell me that Trump will resign early next year. Vance will become president and then issue a blanket pardon to the felon.
A "Get Our of Jail Free" card. What a discgraceful scenario.
Gasps as Trump’s birthday bash leaves White House grounds in ‘terrible’ condition — Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump marked his 80th birthday last Sunday with an unprecedented Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on White House grounds, but by Friday onlookers were stunned when photos emerged showing the damage left behind on the Ellipse, often referred to as President's Park South.
“The UFC event has destroyed the grass on the Ellipse in front of the White House,” bluntly noted John Jackson, a podcaster, writer and U.S. veteran of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, in a social media post Friday evening.
Captured by Reuters' Aaron Schwartz on Friday, an aerial photograph shows the once-green Ellipse – a 52-acre park just south of the White House South Lawn – with slivers and patches of green grass amid a sea of brown. The White House’s South Lawn also suffered damage, with a White House spokesperson telling USA Today that $1 million will be spent restoring its grass.
“In the 250th year anniversary of USA the White House and [its] surroundings look so terrible,” wrote José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen, the disaster-relief food nonprofit organization, in a social media post on X to his more than 1 million followers. “Is so sad to see.”...
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Happy Birthday, America! Trump's swamp has now become a desert.
"Shut the F*ck Up," Joe Rogan — Thom Hartmann
I've spent enough years behind a microphone to know the difference between entertainment and a sales pitch dressed up as entertainment, and I know which one this was. Rogan does, too.
It takes a particular kind of hubris to stand on the South Lawn of the White House, on a sitting president’s 80th birthday, calling the fights for a cage match that the president personally dreamed up, hosted, sat ringside for, and bought stock in, and then go on your podcast a day later and tell the rest of the country that anybody who noticed the politics of it all should just:
“Shut the f*ck up!”
But that’s what Joe Rogan said this week, complaining that “so many people are trying to make it a partisan thing” and pleading with everybody to just please settle down and stop. It would be funny if it weren’t such a perfect little distillation of how the whole GOP con works.
There’s nothing accidental or apolitical about erecting a structure taller than the White House itself on the patch of grass where Marine One usually lands, all so two men can choke each other bloody in front of America’s Caligula on the day he happens to turn eighty.
Trump dreamed this thing up while at a rally in Iowa. He invited the fighters to the Oval Office to show off AI renderings of his octagon. He sat in the front row next to Melania and Dana White, surrounded by his whole family, his Cabinet, a clutch of billionaires and Mark Zuckerberg, while Meta blanketed the broadcast with ads.
The corners of the cage carried logos from companies with cozy ties to the administration, including Polymarket, the prediction market that’s drawn scrutiny over insider betting by Trump allies and Donald Trump Jr’s involvement with it.
Dana White is the man who introduced Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention. And when Trump’s own Justice Department, run by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, went to court to keep the show going, its lawyers actually told a federal judge that anybody who didn’t like it could simply avert their gaze for the weekend.
The American people, it turns out, aren’t fooled the way Rogan hopes they are: only sixteen percent of us think it’s appropriate to hold cage fights on the White House lawn, and even among Republicans it doesn’t crack a third....
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Rogan can fuck the shut up!
Pete Hegseth Shames US, Attacks NATO Allies For Not Supprting Iran War. — John Amato
NATO was not formed to support aggressive and violent actions by their members.
Sec. Def Pete Hegseth scolded our NATO allies for refusing to be part of Trump's indefensible aggression against Iran, this time in NATO's headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on Thursday.
Hegseth repeated his shameful and racist moments back when he attacked our NATO allies in France, during a sacred D-Day celebration.
NATO was not formed to aid in a member's decision to invade or aggressively attack another nation.
Its mission is just the opposite. It was formed to prevent another world war while protecting all member nations from attack by an aggressor....
Agreements between nations, treaties, and the U.S. Constitution are null and void if they refuse to do exactly what the Trump administration demands at all times. it doesn't matter if it's legal or not.
NATO, and other nations around the globe, are laughing at Hegseth's petulant and bloviating performances, which apparently make him believe that shows how masculine he is.
His extreme religious, racist, and misogynistic actions toward members of the DOD and rank and file were enough in themselves to have him removed.
Hegseth should be impeached if the Democrats take back the House.
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That this has to be explained to the moron shows us just how clueless he is.
'Like we’re under occupation': Tourists aghast at Trump’s ugliest obsession — Adam Lynch
Visitors touring Washington D.C. cannot seem to shake off the feeling that President Donald Trump is stamping his presence on every nook and crevice — and they’re furious.
Speaking with city visitors Julie and husband Robert on the edge of Lafayette Square, the Guardian noted a scuffed sign proclaiming: “We are making DC safe and beautiful.”
But Julie didn’t see it that way while visiting the city in celebration of her recent marriage, said the Guardian.
“The irony,” she said, spying the chain-link fence surrounded the square, closing the site off from the public for renovation under the Trump’s orders. “It’s neither safe, nor beautiful.”...
“It is a different city right now,” said Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, a city heritage group. “There are visitors from out of town who are disappointed that they’re only here for a few days, and there’s so much construction going on at the moment. … This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip for some people, and to have it marred down with not being able to access certain sites can be really disappointing.”...
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Occupied? Yes, by a domestic enemy. Destroyed by a mercenary!
Despairing Trump now hoping to survive 'the purge to come' — Adam Lynch
...However, John Heilemann, Chief Political Columnist for the media company Puck says there is a reason Trump is desperate to mark every taxpayer-funded thing around him as his personal [property.
“He's obviously … into the notion of trying to build monuments to himself in various ways and to leave marks that he thinks will not be will not be able to go away, like to kind of build the arch to Trump, you know, change the reflecting pool, change the [White House] east wing, install the claw and leave it there over the White House forever,” Heilemann told MS NOW anchor Nicole Wallace. “I mean, Trump is pretty dumb sometimes, but I think he knows some of these things are more transitory than others, easier to tear down. But I think all of it reflects a sense that he recognizes, on some basic level, that that project of exorcising Donald Trump … getting rid of the [stain] of Donald Trump is going to be a big project for the Democrat who gets back in the White House.”
Heilemann said this labor will doubtless be in addition to the work require to restore American democracy and rebuild national institutions....
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It will take a generation but Trump will be erased forever.
Economist Justin Wolfers: AI Coming For White-Collar Jobs. — Cliff Schecter
Wolfers untangled why the stock market soars while your paycheck buys less, what an AI economy does to people like you, and whether your kids are going to be okay.
Some economists make you feel dumber. Justin Wolfers makes you feel smarter—as he cracks jokes about wombats, OnlyFans, and Cliff’s handsome eyes. The U of Michigan prof (you may know him from his Platypus Economics Substack, or being the funny economist on TV) talked to Schecter and Shuster for an hour that made economics, AI, inflation, and the future of work genuinely fun.
Wolfers untangled why the stock market soars while your paycheck buys less, what an AI economy does to people like you, and whether your kids are going to be okay. He also went through how Elon Musk bought the 2024 election for the GOP—for 0.026% of his fortune, the equivalent of you finding $50 in couch cushions, with enough left over to buy 3,819 more. Elections, that is, not couches.
Wolfers explained why AI's the first revolution coming for brains not brawn (”I now know what it felt like to be a Detroit autoworker in the '70s”), and why, as an economist, he thinks January 6th was one of the most dangerous things a president's ever done. You cannot summarize this one. You have to watch it.
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This iceberg is much deeper than anyone suspects.
Elon Musk and the trillionaire class test democracy’s limits — Chauncey DeVega
The one-person, one-vote principle never accounted for billionaires, let alone trillionaires
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, has made him the world’s first trillionaire. His fortune is now estimated at over $1.3 trillion. This is more than four times the wealth of the world’s second-richest man, Alphabet co-founder Larry Page (estimated at $300 billion).
A trillion is a number so large it stops being a number and becomes an abstraction, something inconceivable. It possesses an almost magical power, like a religious incantation or forbidden word.
If the trend holds, Musk won’t be alone for long. The richest 1% control 40% of the world’s wealth — a ratio that holds inside the United States too. Put another way: the twelve richest people on Earth have more wealth than half of the world’s population. This does not include the corporations that have more money and power than many countries.
As a practical matter, a trillion dollars (or even a billion dollars) is more money than anyone could spend in many lifetimes. The mega-wealthy do not agree; death will not stop them; they want to be immortal....
Unaccountable power is incompatible with real democracy....
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The root of all evil!
'Trying to hide': Kennedy Center refuses to take tarps off where Trump's name was removed -- Matthew Chapman
President Donald Trump suffered a severe humiliation this month when the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was finally ordered by a federal court to remove Trump's name from the side of the building, clarifying that Congress only allowed Kennedy's name to be on the facility.
Now, days later, tarps are still covering the spot where Trump's name was, and, according to The New York Times, it's starting to arouse suspicion. Some are even questioning whether the name was in fact fully removed at all.
Matt Floca, the operations chief for the Kennedy Center, "filed a sworn declaration with a federal court later that day saying that Mr. Trump’s name had been removed," noted the report. And at least some letters were taken off, as "a New York Times photographer captured evidence through an opening in the tarp that the letter 'A' came off," as well as a "D" in a separate photograph.
The Kennedy Center will not give a direct explanation for why the tarps aren't coming down, with one spokesperson saying, “The scaffolding and tarp will remain up as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels. Best, Public Relations.”
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), the Kennedy Center board member who sued over Trump-aligned officials' mishandling of the facility in the first place, told The Times, “Donald Trump is embarrassed. He lost in court, his name came down, and now he is trying to hide the result from the public.”...
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A literal cover-up!
Stinky Pigf*ck Donald Trump Gross In Bedroom — Evan Hurst
News keeps pouring out from the new Maggie Haberman/Jonathan Swan book, the one that has among other things revealed that Donald Trump loves comparing himself to Mao and Hitler and Genghis Khan, because he thinks he’s more powerful than they are — “they didn’t have airplanes,” he reportedly said. Then there’s all those disgusting Epstein revelations from the book, including about how it’s apparently considered a Situation Room-worthy event to convene all the principals to discuss the best ways to cover up Trump revelations from the child rape files.
The Daily Mail read the book and focused on what really matters, which is what fucking disgusting manners President Shits-A-Bunch has. It’s part of a larger article/excerpt about how Trump and Melon don’t sleep in the same bedroom, obviously. She sleeps in what’s known as the Master Bedroom on White House floor plans, whereas he’s in the room next door, which is typically labeled as the Living Room. (Daily Mail has a floor plan if you want to see, in order to better visualize where the president shits.)
First of all, Trump is such a trash pig that he thinks carpet in the bathroom is nice, as opposed to being a catch-all for all his dead skin and the dried cum from his most recent poop-sturbation session. The Daily Mail notes that this was a trend that existed for about 12 seconds in the 1970s, until everybody noticed it was fucking disgusting. But not with Trump! He had a carpeted bathroom in his first term, the Bidens obviously got rid of it, then he brought it back.
'The portion nearest the shower would often be soaked through; the staff was never quite sure why, but they worried about mold growing underneath,' Haberman and Swan wrote. 'The solution was to lay a small piece of the same carpet - never an actual bath mat - over the larger one.'
Sick.
And then here is the part that’s making all the headlines, how Trump is always eating garbage in bed and apparently just throws the wrappers on the floor, like a dirty scumbag.
‘A nighttime snacker, the President would frequently leave an array of empty potato chip bags, Starbucks wrappers, and ice cream cartons in the trash, or on the floor,’ Haberman and Swan wrote.
Don’t shit where you eat, unless you’re Donald Trump we guess and you’re shitting and eating in your carpeted bedroom and bathroom, which you don’t share with your wife for reasons that are abundantly clear.
‘The staff had to begin monitoring the trash after it was discovered he was sometimes throwing out White House sterling silver utensils,’ they said.
Fucking idiot....
Read more at the link!
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"Smell the Trump support!" LMAO!
Trump Unveils Qatar’s Air Force One: “The Qualities Of The Materials, Woods, Engines, Are Best In The World”
Washington DC’s CBS affiliate reports:
President Trump on Friday unveiled the Boeing 747-8 that will serve as the new Air Force One, providing the first look at the $400 million luxury plane that the U.S. accepted as a gift from the Qatari government last year. Mr. Trump descended the stairs from the hulking jet inside a hangar at Joint Base Andrews, the military post outside Washington that has served as the presidential airport for decades. He greeted Air Force officials and delivered remarks to a crowd of service members.
“There will never be one like this. This is very unique. This is considered the world’s most luxurious plane,” the president said. “When it was built, it was built at a level that will probably never be seen again.” Mr. Trump said the hangar in which he was speaking had to be specially constructed to house the new jet, which is much larger than the previous plane. He added later that the new version will lead a massive flyover of Washington on July 4, the nation’s 250th birthday.
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And it's name shall be "Titanic."
DOJ Defies Judge, Won’t Say Fund For Rioters Is Dead
ABC News reports:
The Trump administration on Friday declined to submit a declaration in court from Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reiterating that the government is not continuing with a controversial $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, calling a judge’s demand for such a filing “unnecessary.”
In a notice to the federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, senior Justice Department lawyers rebuffed U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s request for the declaration from Blanche, Bessent and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward.
Brinkema said last week that “to avoid any further litigation,” the senior officials should file the declaration under penalty of perjury that the “anti-weaponization” program wouldn’t proceed “in any manner, or under any name.” She also granted a preliminary injunction that blocks the Justice Department from taking any action to create or operate the program, which remains in place.
The judge warned that if the administration opted not to file the declaration, the lawsuit brought by a coalition that includes two nonprofits and a former federal prosecutor would move forward....
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Openly criminal act by Todd Blanche and the Trump Crime Syndicate.
The former U.S. used to have a military that would enforce the law for a crime by a domestic enemy. Now they appear to be in collusion. None dare call it treason.
NC Baptist Pastor Arrested On Child Sex Charges
High Point’s Fox affiliate reports:
A man who once served as a pastor at a Triad church has been charged with sex crimes. According to court documents, Timothy Clinton Pruitt Sr., 72, has been charged with three counts of first-degree statutory sex offense, three counts of indecent liberties with a child and three counts of sex act by a custodian.
Pruitt was taken into custody on Thursday by the Wilkesboro Sheriff’s Office. The incident date was listed as 2020, and the victim was noted in the court documents as being under the age of 13 at the time.
Church leadership provided the following statement: “Peace Haven Baptist Church is deeply saddened and disturbed by the recent allegations and arrest involving Tim Pruitt Sr. who formerly served as pastor of our church. The charges that have been reported are extremely serious, and our hearts are with anyone who may have been harmed.”
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Another one bites the dust.
Are we losing count yet?
DOJ Investigates MLB For “Anti-Christian” Hat Bias
The Guardian reports:
The US Justice Department has launched a civil rights investigation into Major League Baseball after the league criticized three San Francisco Giants players who wrote Bible verses on their hats during the team’s Pride Night. MLB said in a statement on Monday that writing on hats “violates our rules, and consistent with normal practice, we have warned the players about future violations.”
Assistant US attorney general Harmeet Dhillon wrote a letter to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred saying the justice department had referred the league to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate whether the discipline amounts to religious discrimination.
“The Civil Rights Act prohibits MLB and its franchises from unreasonably burdening the rights of players with religious objections to serving as the League’s vehicle for pro-Pride messages,” Dhillon said in the letter. “Federal law is clear: employers must modify their uniform requirements to reasonably accommodate their employees’ exercise of religion.”
"Uniforms are the property of the teams and MLB has rules about altering them in any way. If that wasn`t the case they would soon look like NASCAR drivers." — crusaderrabbit (comments)
"Just stop. The players had an option to wear a plain hat - defacing a uniform for a team they are making zillions of dollars from is the issue." — Brooklyn Joe (comments)
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Here's a really big pile of Xianist horse poo! It's nothing but right-wing harassment by the Trump Crime Syndicate.
Religion and brains rarely go together.
Soulless Ghouls Gutfeld And Watters Yuck It Up While Lying About USAID Cut Deaths — Heather
There's a special place in hell waiting for these two assholes, along with the world's new trillionaire, Elon Musk, who they were defending.
During a segment on this Thursday's The Five, which was yet another "everything is going badly for Democrats" segment even though the opposite is true with which party is likely in deep trouble for the midterms even with all of the Republicans' attempts to cheat as much as possible, host Jesse Watters lauded the cuts to USAID as something his party should be proud of and run on for the midterms.
When his co-host, Jessica Tarlov, pointed out that those cuts are something they shouldn't be proud of, Watters and Gutfeld immediately mocked her for bringing it up and lied about the program.
Here's the full exchange:
PERINO: The fundamentals of the economy, if you look at the statistics, it's like, why are people in a bad mood, right? Unemployment is at a rate that is relatively low for a country that gas prices are starting to come down and that looks like the trajectory is holding. We just had this huge IPO, the stock market's up, and yet people on the left in particular tell pollsters that they're in a terrible mood and they hate the country...
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They think we won Trump's war? Media whores. Hell won't have them.
Nearly 160 Troops Sick With Flu, Thanks To Hegseth — NewsHound Ellen
File under “Don’t say we didn’t warn you!”
The New York Times reported that less than two months after the unqualified and unfit Defense Secretary Pete “WhiskeyLeaks” Hegseth rescinded the mandate for troops to get flu vaccines, almost 160 of them at Lackland Air Force base are sick with the flu. One has died, though it is not known for sure that flu is the cause.
As John Amato previously reported, Hegseth made his killer decision in late April because “your faith and your convictions are not negotiable.”
Well, guess what Petey Puffy Face? The flu virus is not negotiable either. “The outbreak at the base in San Antonio raced through an Air Force Basic Military Training wing, where new recruits sleep on bunk beds in open bays and share meals at large communal tables,” The Times said.
Who could have guessed such a thing would happen? Just about anybody.
It’s not just a matter of basic decency to protect our serving men and women from serious illness. It’s also a matter of keeping our troops ready and able to fight. Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, an Air Force veteran and chair of the Armed Services Committee, opposed the policy for that very reason, according to The Times, saying, “You know, you do give up certain rights when you take the oath,” and “It’s just part of it.”...
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Brain damange causes failure.
Mississippi Toddler, 1, Shot Dead By Cops In Alleged Walmart Shoplifting Case — Susie Madrak
Speaking of Juneteenth: The fatal shooting of a 1-year-old boy by police who were responding to a shoplifting call this week has ignited simmering tensions between police and Black residents in the small town of Senatobia, Mississippi.
The death of Kohen Wiley is the latest in a series of troubling encounters with police that have outraged community members in recent years. It has led to protests and calls for greater police accountability in the town of 8,000, with some civil rights activists pointing to Kohen’s death as another example of a Black life lost over something of nominal value — in this case, allegedly stolen diapers.
“We are treating items on a shelf as more valuable than a child,” Bernice King, the daughter of civil right icon Martin Luther King, Jr., said in a statement posted to Instagram on Wednesday. “That is not just bad policing; it is a moral collapse.”
Senatobia police responded to the shoplifting call at a local Walmart on Sunday, where they found two women and a child leaving the store, getting into a car and driving away. According to a statement released by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation: “Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one. An officer then discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene.”...
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Another diaper related murder.
I can hear the Nazi racists now, "People who can't afford diapers shouldn't be allowed to have children. It they do they deserve to be shot."
Grocery Stores Deploying “AI Shopping Carts” Stuffed With Cameras to Track Your Exact Coordinates and Bombard You With Ads — Joe Wilkins
Whether you’re dodging Flock cameras on the freeway, ever-listening smartphones in your pocket, or AI bots at the drive-thru, it’s nearly impossible to avoid some type of AI-integrated device these days.
Called “Caper Carts,” the proprietary grocery carts are equipped with numerous camera sensors, digital weight scales, a touchscreen, and “location-tracking systems” in order to make “every trip more informed and rewarding.”
“The technology is part of Instacart’s broader approach to Physical AI for grocery, combining edge computing on Caper Carts with cloud AI trained on more than 1.6 billion online grocery orders and a decade of grocery expertise,” the press release chimes.
Basically, the carts track what customers are spending in real-time, bombarding them with ads and eCoupons via the cart’s on-board screen depending on what products they’re nearby in the store....
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Even gasoline pumps have screens that are running ads when you gas up. Sometimes you need a hammer!
OpenAI Just Hired a Guy Accused of Terrible Things — Maggie Harrison Dupré
OpenAI, a company currently fighting more than a dozen consumer safety and wrongful death lawsuits, just hired Noam Shazeer — a cofounder of the notorious AI companion startup Character.AI, which has settled a pile of lawsuits over teen suicides linked to its chatbots and weathered an almost comical number of other controversies about inappropriate interactions on its service.
Shazeer, a high-profile AI scientist who most recently held the position of co-lead of Gemini and vice president of engineering at Google, announced his new job in an X post on Wednesday.
This is Shazeer’s second high-profile exit from Google. An early Google employee, he and a colleague, Daniel de Freitas, left the tech giant to start Character.AI back in 2021, after Google — citing safety concerns, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal — declined to release a chatbot the pair had built. By March 2023, the buzzy startup reached a billion-dollar valuation, despite having no revenue. In August 2024, Google re-hired Shazeer and de Freitas in an unusual deal that saw it pump $2.7 billion into Character.AI — in exchange for pulling Shazeer, de Freitas, and other key Character.AI talent back into Google.
As it turns out, Character.AI had been playing extremely fast and loose with safety and moderation. In October 2024, it — along with Shazeer, de Freitas, and Google — was sued by Megan Garcia, the mother of a 14-year-old named Sewell Setzer III, a Florida teen who died by suicide after extensive and troubling interactions with a Character.AI chatbot modeled after the “Game of Thrones” character Daenerys Targaryen. Garcia argued that the unmoderated platform groomed and sexually abused her teenage son, who experienced a months-long mental and emotional breakdown as his relationship with the AI deepened.
Setzer took his life in April 2024, while Shazeer and de Freitas still helmed the startup. During his final conversation with the Targaryen chatbot, Setzer told the AI he was ready to “come home” to it.
“Please do, my sweet king,” the AI responded....
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And the sickness continues.
Get Ready for a Catastrophic Leak That Reveals All Your Messages and Search History — Maggie Harrison Dupré
AI is revolutionizing cyberattacks, as advancements in the tech allow bad actors to find and exploit unknown vulnerabilities in software across the web. If there were ever a time to shore up your security habits — or maybe just nuke your entire digital history — it’s now.
A pair of terrifying stories dropped this week highlighting exactly how vulnerable all of us are right now. One, published in New York Magazine, was a chill-inducing reminder of exactly how revealing the past 20 years of simply existing on a web run by data-storing tech giants — social media, email, iMessage, online health and banking, pornography, buying anything and everything — really is. And an article published in The Atlantic stressed how vulnerable institutions ranging from corporate giants to banks to utilities and government agencies currently are to AI-powered cyberattacks.
In short, recent AI coding advancements have effectively dropped bad actors in a vat of radiation and transformed them into AI-fueled supervillains — and companies, which are often tasked with protecting important information about consumers, are racing to keep up with the onslaught of attacks.
“There’s a crazy amount of offensive activity happening right now,” Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Yahoo and Facebook, told the Atlantic. “Companies are getting hacked every single day.”...
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Our doom that came from the internet.
State Dept To End PEPFAR Funding For South Africa
Semafor reports:
US President Donald Trump’s administration plans to permanently end funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, in South Africa, according to a State Department official and two congressional aides briefed on the decision.
“The United States has decided to initiate a phased drawdown of PEPFAR programming in South Africa following South Africa’s failure to make demonstrable progress on policy requests by the administration,” the State Department official told Semafor. US Ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III [photo] is expected to meet with officials from South Africa’s Ministry of Health as soon as next week to deliver the news.
PEPFAR has provided over $8 billion to South Africa since its founding under President George W. Bush. South Africa has about 8 million people living with HIV, the most in the world.
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Trump, the heartless horrific geek continues his reign of terror.
Acting Spy Chief Eyes Firing Hundreds Of Intel Staffers
CNN reports:
President Donald Trump’s pick for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, showed up at his new job a day early on Thursday after asking for a list of every employee in the office so he could assess whether to fire them, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. The sources said Pulte is eyeing to cut hundreds of jobs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).
Pulte’s appearance at ODNI on Thursday caught staff off-guard, including the outgoing director, Tulsi Gabbard, who was given a brief heads up on the visit. Trump himself has said that Pulte, who is a Trump loyalist with no intelligence experience, would start his job on Friday. Pulte met with lawyers and staffers during his visit, the sources told CNN.
In his only other briefing with ODNI last week, Pulte asked staff if he could bring the President’s Daily Briefing to his house, raising alarm bells among intelligence officials, according to one of the sources. That briefing is a highly classified set of intelligence on key national security matters of the day. Pulte also asked about his level of security clearance — whether it was a top-secret — and if he had access to a government plane, the first source said.
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Trump increases our subjection to a future terrorist attack and continues his distruction of our government like no foreign enemy has ever done before!
We are heading for Oligarchy. Billionaires and serviles. That house will never stand.
There Is No Social Security Crisis — Michael Mechanic
Last week, most of the major news outlets ran the perennial story about how the Social Security fund is set to run out of money—now by 2032—and that benefits will have to be cut substantially unless Congress acts.
Okay, so act.
It’s stupid that we are being made to worry about a problem that’s solvable, a manufactured crisis that conservative politicians are already seizing upon to claim we have no choice but to slash entitlements—here’s House Speaker Johnson eyeing them. And Social Security benefits are literally entitlements, as in, we are entitled to them because we’ve been paying for them via payroll taxes our entire working lives....
This isn’t rocket science. Just tell your constituents that it’s un-American for families with millions of dollars in savings to be taking handouts from the government. Boom! And then use the savings to shore up Social Security—which benefits everyone.
At the very least, let’s not hear any more talk of a crisis. This is a choice.
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The situation is tantamount to observing a crime being committed in front of us and not calling the police to intervene.
We keep trying to set the bar lower. How fucking greedy and stupid can we be?
Trump hit by Iran ultimatum that could destroy just signed peace deal: report — Alexander Willis
Iran issued the Trump administration a fierce ultimatum that could collapse the tentative peace deal just a day after it was signed, Drop Site News reported Friday.
The demand was related to Lebanon, which Israel invaded in March and has since killed nearly 4,000 Lebanese and sparked a humanitarian crisis affecting millions. Included in the memorandum of understanding agreed to by Washington and Tehran was a provision that Israel terminate its military operations in Lebanon.
Israeli officials, however, have stated clearly they do not intend to cease military operations in Lebanon, and would maintain their occupation of their northern neighbor. More attacks took place Thursday night.
“Regarding Lebanon, we have warned both the mediators and the American side that if the regime fails to comply with the existing agreement, Iran will respond with substantial military measures without prior public notice,” said a senior Iranian official, speaking with Drop Site News on the condition of anonymity.
“Should the United States intervene, conditions, particularly those related to the Strait of Hormuz, could rapidly revert to a wartime environment.”
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Has Trump turned the ball over again?
Italy's prime minister cheered across world as she delivers 'thrashing' to Trump — Travis Gettys
A diplomatic firestorm between President Donald Trump and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni sparked global reactions Friday.
The prime minister acidly denied Trump's claims to an Italian TV network that she had "begged" him for a photo together during this week's G7 summit and that he agreed because he "felt sorry for her." Meloni claimed his comments were "completely made up."
"I am frankly astonished," Meloni said. "I don't know why ?the president of the United States behaves like this towards his allies. It is not the first time, moreover."
"I can only say it is disappointing that he does not show the same determination with the enemies of the West and of the United States, whose leaders he instead treats with far greater indulgence," she added. "There is one thing he should remember: neither I nor Italy ever beg."
Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani responded to the row by scrapping his planned U.S. visit, writing on X that Trump's "serious and offensive words" toward Meloni "offend the whole of Italy."
The 80-year-old president drew global condemnation for his comments about Meloni, who had been one of his strongest allies in Europe.
"I believe her," said journalist John McGuirk.
"She's fabulous," gushed defense analyst Michael Shurkin.
"Italian fire and brimstone," marveled Bruno Tertrais, of the Foundation for Strategic Research.
"This dust up with Italy is a perfect example of many of Trump's missteps," observed The Dispatch's Mike Nelson. "He tells a blatant lie without any reason, just because he has to sound like people are so willing to grovel to him. The false story gets him nothing and the fallout costs the United States."
"Something to ponder for those Polish politicians who are investing all their chips in the fickle — as we can see yet again — favor of the Orange Genius and Winner of All Wars," noted Polityka's Michal Danielewski.
"Trump has never met an ally he does not try to screw over in the end," snarled MS NOW contributor Marc Polymeropoulos.
"Incredible (and real, not fake) thrashing of Trump but the PM who was at one time probably his strongest supporter in Europe (aside from the departed Orban)," noted author Gary Lucas.
"Trump just can’t keep himself from bullying women. It’s basic to his nature," said Phillips P. OBrien, a professor at the University of St. Andrews....
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Leave it to a woman to put a putz in his place.
MAGA Hates This Holiday — William Kristol
Thanks to their operational control of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran was able to get away with murder in setting the terms of further peace talks with the United States—and now they’re pushing for even more. The first round of scheduled peace talks under the new memorandum of understanding were supposed to begin in Switzerland today, but Iran abruptly called them off yesterday, citing the intensifying conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, which they deemed a violation of the MOU’s terms. This morning (eastern time) the Republican Guard Corps Navy—which Trump claims doesn’t exist—once again closed the strait. The message was clear: If you want to negotiate, you’d better figure out how to get Israel in line. Happy Friday.
Celebrate Juneteenth. Annoy MAGA.
by William Kristol
Today is Juneteenth, a holiday long celebrated, especially by black Americans, to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. In 2021, Congress, recognizing that the end of slavery was an event worthy of formal recognition by the whole nation, established it as a federal holiday for all Americans. The holiday’s name refers to June 19, 1865, the day when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 ordering the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”
In the midst of this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the commemoration of Juneteenth can have special resonance. But not for the Trump administration, which, so far as I can tell, has not deigned to acknowledge the holiday this year. When I searched the White House website this morning for “Juneteenth,” I got back no results found. Nor does there seem to be any presidential proclamation this year in honor of its observance.
The one time the Trump administration seems to have taken notice of Juneteenth was in December of last year, when the administration removed Juneteenth (and MLK Day) from the National Park Service’s list of free-admission days, replacing it with June 14, Flag Day—which is not an official federal holiday. But it is President Trump’s birthday, and that is the holiday he wishes all of us to celebrate, as he celebrated it Sunday with the cage match on the White House lawn.
One understands why Trumpists choose to neglect Juneteenth. After all, Trump’s vice president claimed earlier this week at a campaign event in New York that “they’ve become anti-white in the Democratic party.” If you’re appealing to those who think one of our two major parties is “anti-white,” if you’re trying to convince Americans that anti-whiteness is a great problem, if you’re the party that wants to foster and exploit white grievance, then you have little interest in calling attention to a holiday that is a reminder of the terrible injustices caused by fantasies of white supremacy.
The American story is largely the ongoing attempt of Americans to create a better kind of politics. That’s what we’re doing here. Join us....
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Run their noses in it!
Thought Crimes: The Knock on the Door Has Arrived — Thom Hartmann
The pre-crime apparatus is no longer theoretical. Americans are now being prosecuted for meetings, messages, and protest activity
Back in April I wrote here about what I called the Department of Thought Crimes, the pre-crime apparatus the Trump regime had quietly stood up inside the FBI and DOJ to hunt for Americans who might someday break a law because of what they believe.
Ken Klippenstein first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7,” which is apparently the basis for these arrests. It identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime — specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police departments across America.
And Bondi had instructed them to go back as far as five years in their scrubbing of social media and searching out our thoughts and opinions to find Americans who presumably may oppose Christianity, billionaires, or tradwives.
At the time the whole thing still had a science-fiction quality to it, like something out of Minority Report. The watchlists were growing and the task forces were being briefed, but the knock on the door hadn’t yet come for ordinary people doing ordinary things like showing up to a protest. That part was still theoretical.
It isn’t theoretical anymore....
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Trump is desecrating our Constitution, the act of a criminal. No one is obliged to obey a criminal order. Fuck him and his rape of our First Amendment!. To arms! Down with TrumpCrime!
Trump Administration Attempts to Stop Reparations to Black Community in Illinois — Shireen Akram-Boshar
The motion is an “attack on the revived hope that Black communities have felt” from the program, said its architect.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration filed a motion to join a lawsuit attempting to block the U.S.’s first and only reparations program.
The federal government is supporting a 2024 lawsuit by right-wing group Judicial Watch, which argues that the Evanston, Illinois reparations program violates the rights of non-Black residents.
In a court filing on Tuesday, the Department of Justice called the program “racially discriminatory” because it allots benefits based on race.
The program was approved in 2021, and allotted $20 million to Black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 and experienced discriminatory housing policies. Their direct descendants can also apply, as can residents of any race who experienced housing discrimination in the years after 1969, as long as they demonstrate proof of discriminatory practices.
The program offers up to $25,000 per applicant, which can only be used for home repairs, down payments on properties, and interest fees or late penalties on property in Evanston. Since 2021, the city has distributed $7 million to hundreds of residents thus far....
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The sick racist douchebag!
Trump’s bungled pool project gets vicious review from DC residents: 'Feel for the ducks' — Alexander Willis
Multiple residents of Washington, D.C. told CNN Friday their unfiltered thoughts on President Donald Trump’s $14 million restoration of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool – and the feedback was scathing.
“It looks bad!” one D.C. resident told CNN’s Tom Foreman. “I just see green – green slime.”
Trump’s restoration of the Reflecting Pool has been just one of many of his D.C. beautification projects. It’s proven controversial given that the Trump administration handed the project to a contractor with ties to the president in a no-bid deal, bypassing what critics say should have been a competitive bidding process.
After the completion of the $14 million renovation project, blue paint from the pool’s bottom appears to have peeled off, and the pool’s water has turned a deep green – as experts predicted it would last month.
Federal workers have attempted to combat the growing algae by pouring peroxide into the pool, though as of Friday, it's largely had no effect.
“Pouring all that peroxide into it clearly didn't help,” another D.C. resident told CNN. “I feel for the ducks.”
Foreman told CNN’s John Berman that, after walking around the pool’s rim “over and over again” Friday, there were “very few places where you can see” any blue “at all.”
“Those people behind you, they're just vacuuming full time?” Berman asked Foreman about federal workers seen wading in the pool with suction equipment. “Is this going to be a permanent thing, people standing in the pool vacuuming?”
Foreman said, “There were more than a dozen of them out here all day long yesterday doing just that, working steadily to try to clear it. What is here is kind of what was here before in the eyes of many people passing by and about as bad as it's ever been.”...
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“Is this going to be a permanent thing, people standing in the pool vacuuming?”
This is a metaphor for what the country will be doing for a generation after Trump has been disposed of and brought to justice.
Trump privately confirms GOP's greatest midterms fear: report — Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump has reportedly told associates and at least one foreign leader that he isn't worried about the political cost of his decisions ahead of November's midterms.
The 80-year-old president's comments confirm what many Republicans have feared for months — that Trump is willing to let the party absorb the fallout from his choices, regardless of the consequences, reported the Wall Street Journal.
"Seventeen months into his second term, Trump is increasingly relying on his own gut instincts, dismissing the counsel of aides, conservative lawmakers and longtime associates," the newspaper reported. "The result has been a series of decisions that have confounded and frustrated Republicans — heightening fears that voters will punish the GOP in the November elections and testing Trump’s iron grip on the party."
According to people familiar with the conversations, Trump privately told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he didn't care about the midterms, a remark meant to signal his commitment to the Iran campaign no matter the political cost....
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Fuck the people, Trump says. Then fuck Trump all the way back home to hell.
Why Trump can’t stop this Juneteenth for Black Americans — Tatyana Tandanpolie
For Black Americans, Juneteenth is a love letter to their history of resistance, including to the president
...“To think about Juneteenth, while celebrating Pride Month — that is the most beautiful intersection. Black people are the curators of culture, from hair and fashion, from pop culture to food,” he said, adding that the holiday also presents a call for unity for Black people across all their intersecting identities.
“Though there is still work to do this month, it’s a reminder that we are worthy and worth it, that this energy is necessary,” Haddock said. “If there’s anything that I can pull from this dismal gray moment in history, it’s the hope that, for our culture and our celebrations, this revives us.”...
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Happy Juneteenth, America!
US-Iran Peace Talks In Switzerland Are Postponed
Reuters reports:
Switzerland said U.S. talks with Iranian negotiators on a pact to end the Middle East conflict, opens new tab would not take place on Friday, while Vice President JD Vance dropped plans to travel there, fueling uncertainty whether a ?lasting truce can be found. “The logistics of these negotiations have never been simple or predictable,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday.
Vance and the U.S. delegation had been ready ?to depart for the talks, set for the Swiss mountaintop resort of Burgenstock, as soon as plans were finalised. A Swiss foreign ministry statement said the talks had been postponed.
Switzerland remains ready to facilitate these talks and the relevant preparatory work at Burgenstock is continuing, the statement added. There was no immediate response from Iran, which had said it was ready to begin technical talks after Wednesday’s 14-point accord extended a tenuous ceasefire by at least 60 days.
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Throw these failed putrid fucks out of office!
Michelle Obama's Incredible Speech Opening Obama's Presidential Library — John Amato
Can you imagine Melania giving a speech like this?
A wonderful Michelle Obama delivered another terrific speech at the grand opening ceremony of the Obama Presidential Center.
NPR: Nearly a decade in the making, the Obama Presidential Center will have a star-studded dedication ceremony Thursday. Every living president will be in attendance except one: President Trump.
Even if Trump wasn't in Paris and didn't start a war of choice against Iran, he would never show his face.
Obama is everything Trump wishes he was.
MICHELLE: It's why during our administration, we threw open the White House doors to all sorts of folks who don't usually get to meet the president or first lady, the families pinching pennies to send their first child to college, the teenagers who know that a hot afternoon means the bullets start flying, the military spouses and children serving and sacrificing just like their loved ones in uniform, the native kids showing us that resilience and pride can never be stolen, the 4-H'ers and FFA members with calluses on their hands from feeding livestock, the immigrants proving what it truly means to be a dreamer.
These folks aren't Americans, too.
They are America.
They are the beating heart of this country.
They are us and we are them.
And to ignore this simple truth, to refuse to respect the contributions and experiences of people who aren't exactly like us, y'all, puts us all at risk.
Failing to see the humanity in all people puts us all on a slippery slope.
And once that slide starts, there's no telling where it stops.
A dangerous precedent that flies in the very face of our faith and of the founding promise of this democracy that all of us, all of us, are created equal.
That each of us is a child of God with inerrant value.
And no one, and I mean no one, has the right to sit in judgment of who's American enough.
Can you imagine Melania giving a speech like this?
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Nobody named Trump could.
Trump's bullying strategy crumbles as he abandons his brand — Roxanne Cooper
A Politico analysis argues that Trump's second-term foreign policy signifies a fundamental departure from his nationalist messaging, undermining his political brand and effectiveness on the worldwide stage.
The piece contends that Trump, who built his political identity around nationalist principles—particularly his 2016 endorsement of Brexit—has lost sight of the power of national sovereignty and patriotism in other countries. During his first campaign, Trump positioned himself as "Mr. Brexit," championing the principle that nations ought to prioritize self-determination over international institutions.
In his second term, however, Trump has repeatedly attempted to override other nations' sovereignty through aggressive economic and military pressure, failing to recognize that the same nationalist sentiment he once championed would provoke resistance rather than compliance. His strategy of bullying and coercion has backfired consistently...
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Brand X.
Kansas Republicans have a 'coordinated' plan to cancel their 2026 US Senate election — Clay Wirestone, Kansas Reflector
This was the plan all along.
That’s my strong suspicion after reading about and reporting on Senate Bill 105, a Kansas law passed last year that appears to give Republican power brokers a get-out-of-jail free card in this year’s U.S. Senate race.
As reported Wednesday by Kansas Reflector, the law’s text grants any Senate appointee a free two-year trial period before having to face voters. The bill’s ostensible purpose was to prevent Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly from appointing a Democrat to replace Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall, but the clause in question was added to the bill after its introduction....
"So basically a Republican Governor can select a revolving door of senators each serving two years and there will never be a senate election again."
See Democracy works." — kcwookie (comments)
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Cancel just the one they expect to lose. What cowardly, chickenshit, un-American Nazis!
Talk about election rigging!
The UFC Fight Was The Distraction: Follow The $100 Billion -- Cliff Schecter
Is this the moment America woke up? Or the moment we crossed our own Rubicon?
Trump's UFC spectacle at the White House was framed as entertainment. And that's exactly what it was - if by entertainment they meant distraction. Distraction from an unbelievable capitulation to Iran after fighting a war for no reason. Distraction from the Epstein Files, which just keep swirling Trump like bull sharks circling chum. Distraction from his self-inflicted wound economy, with its inflation, stagnation, corruption, debt, deported workers, etc.
Late-stage Rome was branded "bread and circuses" as its emperors transformed a republic into a monarchy: entertain the masses by giving them gore, right as you're robbing them blind. Right now, an estimated $100 billion in deregulation, mergers, and government contracts is riding on this moment—Monster Energy, crypto.com, trading on insider knowledge, defense contracts.
Is this the moment America woke up? Or the moment we crossed our own Rubicon--or Potomac--walking away from the democracy we inherited to the demented fascism of the mentally and morally mad.
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The U.S. has a disgusting bunch of shitbags running our government. 30% of the country are the same. Clean out the sewers!
Election Fraud? Tuberville May Have Talked Himself Right Off The Ballot — David Edwards
The dumbest senator is also the dumbest candidate for Alabama governor.
A new Alabama lawsuit seeks to knock U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville off the November ballot for governor, using his own words against him.
The complaint, filed Tuesday in Montgomery County Circuit Court by Brooke Lynn Dorgan and Justin Jude LeBlanc — two Alabama military veterans — invokes Alabama's quo warranto statutes, a legal mechanism used to challenge whether someone is entitled to hold public office, and names Tuberville and Alabama Secretary of State Wesley Harrison Allen as defendants.
Legal analyst Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney, highlighted the filing on X and called out one of its most striking passages.
"'At a meeting of the Shoals Republican Club on August 3, 2019, Tuberville candidly conceded that he 'has property' in Alabama but is not an 'everyday resident of Alabama,' describing himself as a 'carpetbagger,'" Vance wrote....
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Out with this trash!
Italian PM: Trump Is Lying, I Never Begged For Photo
Italian news agency ANSA reports:
Premier Giorgia Meloni on Friday said Trump’s assertion that she begged him to have a photo with her during this week’s G7 summit is false. “Donald Trump’s declarations are completely fabricated,” Meloni said in an Instagram post. “Frankly, I am stunned. Italy and I never beg,” she continued.
“Some things deserve an immediate response. I don’t know why the US president behaves this way towards his allies. It’s not the first time it’s happened, I can only say it’s unfortunate he doesn’t show the same determination towards the West’s enemies.”
Meloni had been big friends with Trump – she was the only European leader invited to his inauguration last year – until the Iran war. The Italian government’s stance included refusing the US permission to use an air base in Sicily for raids during the war. Trump accused Italy of not being helpful and said Meloni had changed.
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One more lie from the most insecure asshole polluting our world.
RNC Chair: UFC Got More Viewers Than Super Bowl
NBC Sports reports:
Joe Gruters was only off by 117.4 million. Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee chair made the loony claim that more people watched the UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House lawn than watched the Super Bowl.
The numbers are now in. Per multiple reports, Paramount says 8.2 million watched the event on Paramount+. (As noted by Mattew Belloni of Puck, that’s a “fraction” of what marquee sporting events deliver — and it’s less than the audience for Marshals or Tracker.
And (shocker) it’s far, far less than the Super Bowl LX audience of 125.6 million. But who cares about the truth? The truth is an annoyance. An impediment. A pesky little thing that gets in the way of preferred narratives.
"Note, Paramount is the company owned by the Ellisons, who recently were willing to destroy a profitable and perhaps the most respected news show in the business, in service to their rightwing views.
Though they don’t have it yet, when they get control of HBO, does anyone believe they won’t fuck that content up too?" — AreYouPreparedToGoToCourt? (comments)
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2 + 2 = 5. These frauds are so insecure. Who is he trying to impress with this bullshit?
Meta Faces Probe Over Scam Ads Targeting Seniors
Politico reports:
Retirement groups are calling on Congress to investigate Meta over a wave of social media scams targeting older Americans.
In a letter sent Thursday to House Homeland Security Committee Chair Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.) and ranking member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the groups alleged Meta has been slow to take down fraudulent ads, leaving seniors vulnerable to financial loss. The letter, shared exclusively with POLITICO, was signed by the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Postal Workers Union Retirees and the American Federation of Teachers, among others.
“Fraudulent Medicare ads have proliferated on Meta platforms and too many seniors are getting scammed while Meta profits,” said Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans. “We are calling on Congress to investigate how these scams are allowed to spread, what Meta knew about them, and why stronger protections are not in place. Seniors should not be left vulnerable while scammers and tech companies cash in.”
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Shut down the con artists.
Astonishing irony as no-bid contractor behind algae-ridden pool named: 'Can't be true' — Travis Gettys
New details are coming into focus about a longtime Donald Trump donor whose company landed a no-bid federal contract to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in what has turned out to be an over-budget, ongoing debacle.
The National Park Service awarded the $1.7 million contract to what has turned out to be the ironically named Greenwater Services, bypassing the competitive bidding process normally required for federal work. The New York Times reported the company is led by Republican donor and Mar-a-Lago neighbor John J. Cafaro, whom Trump once called a "fantastic man."
The J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, which owns Greenwater Services, lists Cafaro's Palm Beach mansion and trust contact information appear on the company's corporate filings.
Cafaro has donated more than $300,000 to Trump-connected political committees since 2016 and has known Trump for at least a decade. He pleaded guilty in 2001 to conspiring to bribe then-Rep. James Traficant, an Ohio Democrat, and later testified against him.
The Park Service justified skipping competitive bidding by citing time pressure tied to events marking the country's 250th anniversary, though it didn't specify a deadline. Records show multiple firms had expressed interest in the project before the contract went to Greenwater, which had previously received only one other federal contract.
Algae blooms turned the pool green this week after it was refilled following the renovation, and about half the pool remained green Thursday as crews vacuumed out algae and added hydrogen peroxide in an attempt to control it....
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A shady deal and a ripoff! The failed con man that is Trump!
130+ Groups Ask Congress to Reject AI Preemption Bill — Newswire Editor
On Thursday, Demand Progress and 130+ civil society groups sent a letter asking Republican and Democratic congressional leaders to reject legislation that would effectively kill state AI safeguards. The letter warns that the so-called Great American Artificial Intelligence Act, introduced by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) and Lori Trahan (D-MA), would impose a federal ban preventing states from regulating AI.
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What do we expect from retarded turncoats that used to swear by states rights? They have failed us like no traitor before.
A chess grandmaster says he can see Trump's next moves — and he is scared — Matthew Rozsa
Says Garry:
“I predicted, and unfortunately I was right, as on many other occasions, that Trump would illustrate to Americans that everything, or not everything, most of the things they believed were cornerstones of American democracy are in fact based on customs,” Kasparov told Cohen regarding Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. “It's not coded by laws, it's about traditions. Nobody ever did it. These kinds of arguments never worked against Donald Trump. Nobody could afford hiding their taxes, and the list could grow long.”...
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From the U.S. Constitution:
"It’s the foundational rulebook for the United States government. It doesn't tell citizens what they must do; instead, it tells the government what it can and, more importantly, cannot do. It's a blueprint for power, a protector of individual liberty, and the ultimate law of the land. Everything the government does—from passing laws to fighting wars—must follow the rules laid out in this single, powerful document...."
""The United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land. No federal or state law may violate it. Federal laws (statutes), enacted by the United States Congress, must be followed by every state in the country."
When's the last time you won a Chess match, Garry? Checkmate!
Trump Admits Surrender — Jonathan V. Last
1. Truth Social
President Trump’s G7 remarks yesterday were striking because they represented the administrations first candid appraisal of the Iran war since bombing commenced. For months, every single member of the administration, from Trump on down, has insisted that everything was going great.
The military was LETHALLY DOMINANT.
The Iranians were begging for a deal.
The status of the Strait of Hormuz was unimportant.
Lots of ships were transiting the strait in super-duper double secret, because we could control the waterway any time we wanted.
Oil prices were immaterial.
The economy was so hot right now.
The Iranian military had neither offensive nor defensive capabilities.
Their nuclear program was, and would remain forever, totally obliterated.
Ditto their ballistic missile capabilities.
All options—including invasion—were on the table.
That was the story until yesterday, when the president essentially admitted that:
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He gave up the ship!
Trump's $14M Reflecting Pool Paint Job Is Now Peeling Off And Floating To The Surface — Sara Boboltz and Jennifer Bendery
Just in time for America's birthday.
President Donald Trump positioned himself as a swimming pool expert as he touted the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovations he ordered this year, having put in “more than 100” over his career.
But after spending $14 million in taxpayer funds, the Reflecting Pool now looks arguably worse than it did before.
Aside from the bright green hue of the water — the product of what is reportedly one of the largest algae blooms in recent years — the “industrial-grade swimming pool topping” that Trump chose is already peeling off in sheets.
Visitors took notice of the floating material on Thursday. HuffPost even observed some taking samples of the coating with them as a souvenir of Trump’s Washington.
A man who gave his name as Sean told HuffPost that he had experience working on swimming pool coatings in the past, and did not seem surprised to see the peeling.
“This is an epoxy,” he said of the coating. “This is something you would do on a concrete — on a shot concrete sort of pool where you have leaking. And then you spray this out. But in a pool, you’re dealing with a whole lot less square feet. So you can do special treatments on it … so it isn’t going to come back up.”
The fresh layer of “American flag blue” coating was part of a flurry of renovation efforts Trump has spearheaded around the capital ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary.
It was controversial from the start, when Trump opted to give the hefty contract to a handpicked vendor instead of following the standard protocol of soliciting bids to avoid favoritism....
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Anyone in the business would know this. Who did Trump payoff to do the ripoff job we got? Alfred E. Neuman? LMAO! Too bad, America. A gag present!
Former Republicans can't stop laughing at Trump supporters waking up to reality — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump has so far not improved Americans’ economic quality of life nor prevailed in his war against Iran — and a former Republican says he cannot stop laughing at the 39 percent of America that still supports him.
“There is a particular pleasure, once rare and rich, now increasingly common, in watching people who spent a decade telling you that Donald Trump’s 47-dimensional string theory quantum chess game in politics and diplomacy was wildly beyond the understanding of the libtard c--- mainstream media shills,” wrote The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson on Thursday for his Substack column Against All Enemies. The Lincoln Project is a coalition of Republicans who oppose Trump’s administration. “For 11 endless years, the central tenet of their faith was that Trump always wins, never mind the record, the reality, or the endless collisions with the hideous realities of his flaming incompetence, intellectual vacuity, and absolute ignorance of the world.”...
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39% still believe in Santa Claus, the sun revloves around Earth, and the Earth is flat. The Trump era is a cult. The proof is everywhere except to the blind.
More Republican Catholics choose Trump over the Pope — Nick Hilden
A new poll from the Pew Research Center found that not only do more Republican Catholics side with President Donald Trump over the Pope, but their numbers are growing.
In the poll released Thursday, it was revealed that 39 percent of Catholics who identify as or lean Republican think Pope Leo XIV has been “too critical of the Trump administration,” while just 32 percent think President Donald Trump has been “too critical of Leo.” 28 percent agreed both that “Leo has been too critical of Trump but Trump hasn’t been too critical of Leo,” while only 21 percent said “Trump has been too critical of Leo but Leo hasn’t been too critical of Trump.” In other words, Trump has a roughly 7 percent advantage.
What’s more, the same poll showed that conservative Catholic unfavorability toward the Pontiff is on the rise. When the same poll was taken in August 2025, the Pope was deemed unfavorable by a mere 6 percent. Today, that’s up to 22 percent as his favorability has sunk from 84 percent to 72 percent....
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You mean the late Ronnie Hawkins was right when he referred to someone he admired, "He's got more authority than the Pope!"
ROTFLMFAO! Suckers, from the world's largest cult!
Judge blocks Trump's pause on her order to restore Black history content at parks — Sarah K. Burris
Last week, a federal judge ruled against President Donald Trump's administration, which has tried to remove historic content featured at national parks. Trump's administration then demanded that her order be stayed, but on Thursday that too was denied.
Judge Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued an order that points out in great detail how poorly constructed the demand for a stay was written from the administration. She
ordered the administration to restore all historic materials that were either altered or previously removed. Much of that included references to things like slavery, the Civil Rights movement and Black history as well as references to climate change impacts on the land.
Judge Kelley referenced the pride of all Americans in celebrating the 250th anniversary of the nation's founding. Historians have argued against sanitizing history, and instead embrace remembering where the country was, where the country is today and the work left to be done to create what the Founding Fathers called "a more perfect nation."
National parks preserve the “good, the bad, and the ugly” of American history, said Kelley in the decision last week.
According to the judge's comments on Thursday, the Trump administration's lawyers "have failed to establish the elements necessary to justify a stay."...
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The racist and fascist dictator will not stand!
Trump exposed for eye-watering taxpayer cost to clean up algae fiasco — Sarah K. Burris
President Donald Trump spent $14.2 million to paint the Reflecting Pool a blue color. The water immediately turned green in the hot Washington D.C., sunshine. Now, taxpayers are funding millions more to fix the problem.
The cleanup adds another nearly $2 million to the cost of the renovations, the Columbus Post Dispatch reported. An Ohio company known as Green Water Services scored the contract.
The company claims on its website that it has the "only water purification system in the world whose patented technology is backed by government and academic research."
A reporter witnessed workers pouring hydrogen peroxide into the reflecting pool on Tuesday. Staff have been scooping the algae, vacuuming the algae and also deploying the "patented technology" from Green Water Services.
The CEO of Green Water is Al George, who was also quoted by a New York Times report a month ago as bragging "about the prospect that the government would hire the company to bring mobile, trailer-based filtration systems — seemingly a temporary stopgap — to treat the pool’s water."
As recently as mid-May, the administration knew there would be a continuing algae problem. The public contract information on the project shows that their work on the reflecting pool will go on through September 30.
George told the San Diego Union-Tribune in January that their technology can achieve an average 93 percent reduction in bacteria "on the days we treated."
"The technology uses self-contained units that require only electrical power to operate. The machines bring in air, remove nitrogen to create 95 percent pure oxygen, then feed that oxygen into an ozone generator. The ozonated water passes through a patented nanobubble generator that creates the microscopic bubbles as water is drawn in and expelled back out," the Union-Tribune explained.
When Trump announced the project, he bragged, "It's going to be beautiful. It's going to be waterproof. It's going to be reflecting again."...
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Trump has been exposed over and over again as the know-nothing we always knew he was.
Strategist places blame for Iran debacle squarely in the hands of Trump’s enablers — Alex Henderson
When U.S. President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian digitally signed a memo aimed at ending the war between the two countries and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, outgoing U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) slammed the deal as a major victory for Iran and loss for the United States. Cassidy declared that the late President Ronald Reagan "is rolling over in his grave" — a sentiment that former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt wholehearted agrees with in a blistering Substack column.
The Never Trump conservative emphasizes, however, that Trump alone is not to blame for the "dangerous" ceasefire deal and argues that history will judge his "loyalists" harshly for going along with the agreement.
"America has produced giants in public service," the 55-year-old Schmidt writes. "George Marshall. Dean Acheson. James Baker. Brent Scowcroft. Men who understood that American power isn't measured simply by bombs, aircraft carriers or divisions of soldiers. It's measured by credibility, alliances, restraint, deterrence and the confidence of friends and adversaries alike. Whether one agreed with every decision they made is beside the point. They understood the weight of history. Donald Trump's national security team has demonstrated something very different."
The ex-GOP strategist, a founder of The Lincoln Project, continues, "Steve Witkoff. Pete Hegseth. Marco Rubio. JD Vance. Jared Kushner, whose influence over Middle East policy has remained profound long after leaving formal office. History will judge them alongside Donald Trump — not because they exercised independent leadership, but because they chose loyalty over candor, politics over strategy and performance over statecraft."
Schmidt argues that although Trump talked tough during the war and demanded "unconditional surrender" from Iran, the ceasefire agreement "bears little resemblance" to that "rhetoric."
Schmidt praises Cassidy's "Reagan is rolling over in his grave" comment as "remarkable words" coming from a Republican....
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Trump, the forever loser.
Democratic Socialist Poised To Become Mayor Of Washington D.C.. — Ed Scarce
As of this posting, around 9 a.m. Eastern, her opponent, Kenyan McDuffie, has conceded, and Janeese Lewis George will be Washington's next mayor.
Source: Newsweek
Janeese Lewis George held a commanding lead early Wednesday in Washington, D.C.'s Democratic mayoral primary, putting the self-described democratic socialist on track to become the city's next mayor if her advantage holds.
With 64 percent of ballots counted, George had 52.8 percent of the vote, ahead of Kenyan McDuffie at 36.6 percent. Because D.C. is overwhelmingly Democratic, the winner of the Democratic primary is strongly favored in November.
A Lewis George win would be a major victory for the political left, which has grown its power over the past decade. She looks poised to join New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in a new wave of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members and endorsees to serve as mayors in major American cities. Lewis George becoming D.C. mayor would bring democratic socialism to President Donald Trump's backyard.
Navigating the president will be a major question Lewis George faces as the likely next D.C. mayor. Incumbent Mayor Muriel Bowser has sought to establish a cordial relationship with the president, but Trump has already made threats to D.C.'s home rule in the days leading up to the election, as polls showed Lewis George had established a polling lead....
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Big defeat for the fascist Trump. He better keep his filthy Nazi hands away from her!
Top 10% of Consumers Create Up to $5.7 Trillion in Environmental Damage Annually — Ece Yildirim
That amount could pay for climate and biodiversity financing targets with billions still to spare.
We are consuming beyond our means.
Numerous scientific studies over the years have painted a picture of an Earth stripped of natural resources, stretched thin, unable to catch up with the consumption appetites of its primary inhabitants. The result has been rapidly accelerating environmental damage.
Although everyone had some role to play in the current trajectory of environmental degradation, that responsibility is not equally shared. According to a study published in Nature’s Communications Sustainability journal on Thursday, the highest-consuming 10% of the world’s population causes up to $5.7 trillion worth of environmental damage every year. Even at the most conservative estimates, the damage is worth $1.7 trillion a year, high enough that it could easily pay for the combined amount needed to both reach the UN’s 2035 climate financing target and bridge the gap for the 2030 biodiversity financing target....
The authors argue that in high-income countries, taxing luxury consumption over basic goods would be more progressive and fair. In the U.S., the top 10% of consumers’ annual damage bill would equal 6% of their income in the most conservative estimates, all the way up to 20% of income in other scenarios.
“Financing climate investments through a wealth tax on the top 1% would decrease wealth inequality (they would then own an estimated quarter of all wealth by 2050) while addressing the unequal burden of climate damages on lower-income communities,” the study concludes.
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Greed will prevent this as it prevents all human progress.
The US Military Has Been Using Elon Musk’s Grok AI to Bomb Iran — Joe Wilkins
In the early days of the US and Israeli war on Iran, situation monitors were abuzz at the revelation that the Pentagon had used top large language models to identify targets for annihilation via air strikes.
Those targets included civilian buildings like Tehran’s Azadi Sport Complex, a historic stadium which once hosted World Cup matches, and the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school, in a bombing that killed at least 156 people, including over 100 children.
All eyes were on Anthropic at that time, as news broke that US military personnel had used its AI model, Claude, in the selection of certain targets to bomb in Iran. (When pressed by Futurism, military officials refused to say whether Claude played a role in the bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh, specifically.)
Now, it’s clear that Claude has a partner in crime: Elon Musk’s proprietary chatbot, Grok.
In a sworn declaration defending the newly-minted trillionaire from a Clean Air lawsuit, the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence chief Cameron Stanley let slip that Grok was used to fire over “2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours.”
According to the Independent, which broke the story, it’s the first time a Trump administration official has confirmed the use of Grok in the bombing of Iran, where the US and its allies have killed at least 3,468 people. In his statement, Stanley made note of the fact that Grok is one of four AI models “currently capable of supporting national security applications,” calling Musk’s chatbot a “matter of paramount national security.”...
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Can you Grok it? I knew you could!
Oops, We Invited Nazis to Our Christian Nationalist Conference — Will Sommer
THE SECOND TRUMP TERM has been a great time for Christian nationalists seeking to make the United States into an explicitly Christian state. Their leading pastors have been embraced by administration figures like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
But behind the scenes, things haven’t been going so smoothly. The latest example came when a recent conference left members divided on a key issue: Just how racist is Christian nationalism supposed to be?
Last weekend, roughly 1,500 Christian nationalists from across the country met in Ogden, Utah, for “The War for Normal”—a gathering featuring some of far-right Christianity’s most online thinkers and posters.
Organized by Utah podcasters and pastors Eric Conn and Brian Sauvé, the conference had an undeniable macho, MAGAfied flair. Speakers were announced via nicknames like “Big Hoss,” and their almost ubiquitously bearded faces were plastered on wanted posters labeling them outlaws “For Thought Crimes.”
The organizers and attendees, in other words, were leaning into—even reveling in—a “bad boy,” edgy, naughty vibe. And the conference had the type of attractions you’d expect from an event attempting to blend Christianity with anti-woke politics. There was a single’s mixer for “based” attendees, with chaperones provided. Men could compete “in feats of strength and agility.”
Fatefully, the event also included a booth for Antelope Hill Publishing—an extremist publishing house that has made its name putting out racist books, as well as translating and reprinting old ones. To give you an idea of what we’re dealing with here, Antelope Hill got its start translating the memoir of an unrepentant commander in the Nazi SS. Their current online store is offering not one but two “Third Reich Bundles”—a collection of books written by prominent Nazis for between $126.89 and $180.49....
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Christo-fascists are the worst kind of Nazi scum. Perverted to the nth degree!
Dementia Don Making Up Nicknames For Jon Ossoff Now, Bless His Heart — Evan Hurst
It’s so funny when Donald Trump calls somebody “highly respected,” as it is like the kiss of death, the clearest indicator that exists that that person is considered somewhere below anal tumors on the human respectability chart. Anyway, he has a new nickname for Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, who is now running against the HIGHLY RESPECTED Mike Collins.
Os(jerk!)off. It has a sort of ring to it, if your lips move when you read, or if you’re a particularly stupid 12-year-old who hasn’t figured out yet that nicknames need rhythm.
Also he spelled “Ossoff” wrong when he was angrily adding “jerk!” in the middle.
Oh well, someday he will die and on that day everyone in the world will rejoice, including those who have nicknames.
By the way, has the Ossoff campaign turned that into a T-shirt yet? They should. James Talarico started selling “I’m a Talafreako” shirts when Ken Paxton started calling him that and handed him that fundraising opportunity on a silver platter by dubbing him with that nickname.
Admittedly, “Talafreako” at least works as a nickname, as opposed to Os(jerk!)off, which sounds like something a person with Tourette’s screams mid-shit.
Though “I’m A Talafreako For Os(Jerk!)off” has a certain ring, maybe?
Nah.
Ossoff told Jen Psaki what he thinks about the name last night on her show:
(see video)
Ossoff on Trump calling him "Os(jerk!)off" -- "I didn't think it was his best work as far as nicknames go. But more to the point, he is increasingly unstable. And I think it flows the fact that he is globally humiliated from this failed war."
"Not his best work."
And then he, who looks direct out of central casting, which usually is what gets Trump’s 80-year-old mushroom dick hard, explained that “more to the point, he is increasingly unstable. And I think it flows from the fact that he is globally humiliated from this failed war.” He added, “we see him lashing out and behaving erratically in ways that put the nation at risk.”
And he pivoted to the HIGHLY RESPECTED Mike Collins, whom he referred to as Trump’s little puppet....
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Jon Ossoff is presidential timber. Trump could learn a lot from him.
For Decades, Americans Learned the Treasonous Truth After the Votes Were Counted. This Time Is Different. — Thom Hartmann.
For half a century, the evidence surfaced after the winners took office. This election may be the first where the public sees it beforehand
Republicans have gotten away with it four times now, in a big way. Each time it was because Democrats didn’t realize — until it was too late — the crimes the GOP was willing to perpetrate just to seize and hold power.
This time, for the first time since 1968, it may be different.
In August of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey negotiated an end to the Vietnam War with both the North and South Vietnamese. Humphrey was running against Richard Nixon for president in that year’s election and planned to announce the deal in September or early October. He was running ahead and would’ve easily won the presidency with the peace deal.
Unfortunately, Nixon learned of the deal. His people reached out to the corrupt South Vietnamese administration and promised them riches if they’d refuse to go to Paris and sign the peace deal as planned. The FBI had been wiretapping the South Vietnamese and intercepted one of the conversations and handed it over to LBJ.
President Johnson called Everett Dirksen, the head of the Senate Republicans, and pointed out that Nixon was trying to “commit treason.” Dirksen agreed and promised that he’d reach out to Nixon to try to stop it. He failed, and Nixon went ahead and sabotaged the peace deal, leading to another ~24,000 American and ~400,000+ Vietnamese deaths before Jerry Ford ended the war in 1975.
Johnson told Dirksen that he didn’t want Americans to know that Nixon was committing treason to become president because he was afraid it’d shatter our faith in the American system; Dirksen agreed, and the secret went to their graves, only to be revealed to the public 25 years later when the LBJ library published the audiotapes of their conversations....
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Trump and his toadies make no secret about it. Their treason is in the open.
Senior Trump officials warn Iran holds all the cards with ceasefire deal — Alex Henderson
On Wednesday, June 17, U.S. President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian digitally signed a memo aimed at ending the war against Iran (which Trump launched in late February) and reopening the Strait of Hormuz — a Middle Eastern waterway vital to the flow of oil in that part of the world. Trump has been saying that nothing less than "unconditional surrender" from Iran would be acceptable, but according to Zeteo's Asawin Suebsaeng, White House insiders are privately saying that the deal puts the Iranian regime at a major advantage and the United States at a major disadvantage.
Suebsaeng, in a First Draft column for Zeteo (published by progressive ex-MS NOW host Mehdi Hasan), argues, "The U.S. government's propaganda machine is kicking into overdrive to try to convince you that no, President Trump won it — very strongly, actually. But to disprove it, you don't need to consult your own lying eyes, to ask Trump's liberal critics, or even to ask neocons furious with the president for failing to fully deliver the mass murder of Iranians that he once promised. You can just ask members of Trump's own administration, who broadly are not buying the a–– covering bulls––. That's what I did."
Many Never Trump conservatives, from MS NOW host Joe Scarborough to The Bulwark's Bill Kristol to New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, are vehemently condemning Trump's Iran deal — which they believe puts Iran in a stronger position than they were in before the war.
But privately, according to Suebsaeng, Trump insiders are highly critical as well — even though they are afraid to say so publicly....
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Stick a fork in Trump fascism.
Trump's unraveling ballroom story reveals he has been 'lying the whole time': Analyst — Bennito L. Kelty
President Donald Trump's claim that wealthy donors will fund the White House ballroom continues to unravel, as reports unearth the real cost to taxpayers.
" Trump has been lying the whole time with full knowledge of the cost and the cost to taxpayers," political analyst Brian Tyler Cohen said, pointing to new reporting by The Washington Post.
The Post looked at early project cost estimates by the contractor tasked with building the ballroom and found that it will cost about $600 million, with about half of that coming from taxpayers.
"Why would Trump try to screw something that he claims to love?" Cohen asked, jabbing at Trump's claims of loving America. "At a time when Americans are hurting as a result of his failed policies, this president has chosen to stick us with the bill."
Cohen also pointed out that the list of the 27 ballroom donors so far includes Amazon, Apple, Google, Lockheed Martin, Meta, and Palantir, and that more than half of the donors have received huge government contracts since making their donations.
"Hey, not a bad deal," Cohen joked. "It's sort of like if at Christmas time, he donated a little bit of money to Santa and then in January he returned the favor by giving you all the money he collected."
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Screwing us often and repeatedly!
Trump can’t sell his lies, even in Versailles — Heather Digby Parton
President arrives in France promising peace in our time. Problem is, no one believes anything he says
Trump really looks worn out. On Tuesday, he appeared to have forgotten his usual bronze makeup, which was a startling sight. His energy is notably low, especially for a gathering like this one; meetings with Europeans usually turn him combative and hostile. Back in 2017, he announced his presence on the world stage by lecturing European leaders about their failure to “pay their dues” to NATO and accusing them of unfair trade practices. In other first-term trips, he was generous and gracious to the presidents of Russia and China, making it abundantly clear who he respected and who he didn’t.
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Loser at his end.
Republican says 'Reagan is rolling over in his grave' after Trump’s latest blunder — Thomas Kika
Republicans continue to rip President Donald Trump's latest Iran deal to shreds, according to a new report from The Hill, with at least one lawmaker saying that "Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave" in reaction to it.,br>
This week, details began to emerge about the latest peace deal signed by officials in the U.S. and Iran, aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz and issuing a 60-day ceasefire to allow for further negotiations to take place. Elsewhere, the deal will also, among other things, end the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports and create a $300 billion fund to help the nation rebuild.
While the deal also calls for Iran to swear off ever developing a nuclear weapon, it does not call for an end to its nuclear program altogether. This, and the economic benefits given to Iran, have prompted considerable backlash against the deal from Republicans in Washington, with some, like Sen. Bill Cassidy, tearing the bill apart in no uncertain terms and saying that the terms are not worth what the U.S. had to sacrifice to get here.
“Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave,” Cassidy wrote in a social media post, calling the Iran war and this ensuing deal. the “worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”...
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That great R&R classic, "Roll Over Ron Reagan"!
Make Sure To Exercise On GLP-1 Meds — John Amato
A new study finds people are not working out as much when using them.
A new study by the Endocrine Society reports that adults "with obesity losing weight with glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonist medications significantly decreased their physical activity, which is essential to protect muscle, according to a study being presented Saturday at ENDO 2026, the Endocrine Society's annual meeting in Chicago, Ill."
"This is the first large study analyzing data from wearable fitness trackers among adults taking GLP-1 receptor agonists," they reported....
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More evidence of American brain decay.
Students For Trump Co-Founder And Fake Secret Service Pal Arrested — NewsHound Ellen
Trump fans are some of the scummiest people.
MAGA influencer Ryan Fournier and his friend Jordan Daley were arrested last week after one allegedly used fake Secret Service “credentials” to get into strip clubs and have Uber drivers run red lights, etc. while the other violated a court order after he contacted an ex-girlfriend he had allegedly bludgeoned.
Fournier, a co-founder of Students for Trump, was arrested for allegedly striking his girlfriend in the head with a gun, we reported in 2023. Those charges were dropped. But Fournier was arrested again, just a few weeks ago, after allegedly hitting another girlfriend in the head with his fists, threatening to kill her and “crush your head in with this lamp.”
On Friday, Fournier was arrested yet again, this time accused of violating a court order by texting his ex-girlfriend, The Bulwark has reported. But domestic violence is only a partial tale of Fournier’s misdoings. He cofounded a fake law firm that bilked unwitting clients of thousands of dollars, Bulwark reporter Will Sommer said. He has also stoked vigilantism via his 1.2 million followers on Xitter....
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Which twin has the Toni?
GOP Senator Somehow Blames Biden For Alleged White House UFC Terror Plot — Conover Kennard
She has Biden Derangement Syndrome.
Alabama GOP Sen. Katie Britt appeared on Newsmax and absurdly went from Biden's borders straight to "Democrat rhetoric" and "Trump derangement syndrome" in about 30 seconds flat before blaming the alleged White House terror plot on the former president while offering zero evidence to back up her wild-eyed claim.
Britt somehow claimed that Biden's border policies were responsible for the plot. Which is quite a stretch given that the suspects are named Tycen Proper (Ohio), Bryan Omar Roa (California), Michael Alan Thomas (California), Daniel Eskridge (Missouri), and Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez (Nebraska). Domestic actors, not border crossers.
"First, let's start with the positive, and that is thank you to President Trump for making sure that we can celebrate America's 250," Britt said. "Celebrate what makes this country so great. There at the UFC fight, they showcased our military men and women from all branches of our military, saying thank you for your sacrifice, thank you for your service."...
The alleged ringleader is a 19-year-old Ohio man named Tycen Proper, whose own parents contacted investigators. His dad told the FBI that Proper had spent $3,000 of his graduation money on camping gear, ballistic plates, a new shotgun, ammunition, and plate carriers. His mother said he'd been communicating with an ultra-religious, anti-government group called "Vanguard of the Old" on TikTok, and she believed the group was using religion to manipulate her son. So, he doesn't sound like a Democrat at all. In fact, Proper doesn't identify with a mainstream political party....
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One more attempt at making shit look like Shinola!
The Trump derangement syndrome has gotten to her.
QAnon Rep: If We Don’t Stop Muslims Now, “Daughters Across The Country Will Go To School Wearing Burkas”
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Racist Nazis like this are our biggest enemies. They are the ones that must be stopped cold!
Why in the world would someone even so damned stupid put him in a government office? Racsim!
Fox: Inflation Isn’t Bad If You Exclude Food And Gas
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One more retard showing us he talks with his rectum.
Reject obvious idiots!
Watters: Hillary Clinton Will Only Be A Footnote In History, She Is “Just A Female” Who Did A Man’s Job
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And Jesse Waters is just a turd that talked on TV and stunk it up for all of us!
Senate Republicans Block Bill To Prevent Pentagon From Investing In Companies Linked To Trump Crime Family
NOTUS reports:
Senate Republicans quietly killed an effort to bar the Pentagon from investing in companies tied to President Donald Trump, his Cabinet or their families, rejecting a Democratic amendment targeting conflict-of-interest concerns.
The amendment failed 14-13 on a party-line vote last week during the Senate Armed Services Committee’s closed-door markup of its $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act, according to a committee vote tally released Wednesday. Republicans said they rejected a partisan attack on Trump that would have undermined support for the bill.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) confirmed that her amendment would have prohibited the Pentagon’s equity investment arm, the Office of Strategic Capital, from making investments in any company in which top executive branch officials or their immediate family members hold a significant ownership stake.
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All are criminals. Guilty and openly admitting they side with the Trump Crime Syndicate. They will all come to justice one day. They can count on it.
Even our military is corrupt!
Trump Shrugs Off Strike On Iranian School: “Mistakes Were Made, War Is Nasty, It Was A Long Time Ago”
The New York Times reports:
President Trump on Wednesday brushed aside questions about who was responsible for U.S. strikes that hit an Iranian school on the first day of the war, telling reporters at the Group of 7 summit in France: “Mistakes are made. War is nasty.”
The answer was perhaps the closest Mr. Trump has come to acknowledging U.S. responsibility for the strikes, which Iranian officials say killed at least 175 people, most of them children. “Nobody did that on purpose,” the president added.
More than 100 days after two airstrikes demolished the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab, the incident is still under investigation by the Pentagon, Mr. Trump said. Asked whether he would release details of the investigation to the public, he referred further questions to the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.
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There is no statute of limitations on murder, Daddio!
STUDY: 474 Health Facilities Have Closed Or Will Soon
Via press release from Protect Our Care:
Today, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), health care leaders, and advocates joined Protect Our Care to expose the damage of Republican Medicaid cuts on hospitals, clinics, and essential providers nationwide. During the call, Protect Our Care released a report and interactive website outlining how more than 1,000 hospitals, clinics, and essential providers have closed, are at risk of closure, or have cut essential services since Republicans’ sweeping health care cuts last July.
Nearly one year ago, Donald Trump and congressional Republicans gutted over $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to fund tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations. Since then, communities across the country have been paying the price.
Working Americans are being forced to travel farther for care, only to face longer wait times and overcrowded emergency rooms. Expectant mothers are being thrown into maternal care deserts. Rural towns that rely on health care jobs to keep people employed are being decimated by layoffs, cuts and closures.
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Death will also find these dispicable miscreants too.
Conservative rages at Trump's Republican 'monkey' creators — Matthew Rozsa
A prominent conservative commentator expressed outrage at his fellow Republicans, who he described as “monkeys,” for helping to create President Donald Trump.
“A few Republican senators have been making a little noise about the Trump administration’s supposed deal — the agreement to seek an agreement — with Iran,” wrote Kevin D. Williamson in The Dispatch. “Apparently, there are some in Congress who believe that Congress should have some input here. That’s cute.”
Williamson explained that Trump declared the Iran war illegally by not receiving congressional approval first, then added that House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune were “servile” toward the president instead of asserting their institutional prerogatives.
“I have asked for days, why can’t we, the people, see the damn MOU?” Williamson quoted talk show host Mark Levin saying about Trump. “Not through people briefed by an anonymous person. Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like this. If it is a great outcome for peace, then release it.”
He added, “There is an answer to that question, and it is that Trump does not care what Mark Levin has to say about this or about anything else. I used to have a friendly relationship with Mark Levin, who used to have me on his show from time to time and blurbed one of my books—and one cannot help but admire a man who has made a career in radio with that Gilbert Gottfried-meets-Wallace Shawn voice—but he is, like everybody else in the Fox News orbit, a cheap date where Trump is concerned.”...
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Descension in the Legion of Doom!
Put up or shut up: Pulitzer Board demands Trump fight or drop his suit — Adam Lynch
Law and Crime reports Pulitzer Prize board members are demanding a Florida judge either force President Donald Trump to respond to their discovery demands or to shut down his Russia probe lawsuit until after his second term ends.
In 2022, the ever-litigious Trump sued 19 individual members of the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation and conspiracy because the board refused to rescind the 2018 joint awards it gave to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In 2024, Trump crowed premature victory when the judge overseeing the case denied the board’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit — but that dismissal was not a win. Pegg’s ruling did not even suggest the Pulitzer Board’s review of its award was flawed.
Two years later, the president appears to have frozen up, having refused to produce “a single written response or document” related to discovery requested by the defendants.
The Board argues that it’s gone out of its way to produce every scrap of information demanded by Trump’s lawyers, but Trump’s people have stalled in handing much of anything....
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The windbag deflated.
Everyone Agrees JD Vance Has Really Boned The Settee With This Iran Deal Thingie — Evan Hurst
You know that thing where a thing happens, any kind of thing, and within eight seconds Republicans on Twitter and on Fox News are mysteriously saying the exact same words about that thing, almost as if they all received a rapid response email telling them exactly what they’re supposed to say about that thing?
Well, we think that message has gone out about who is to blame for the atrocious devolution of Donald Trump’s Iran war into a shameful embarrassment that even makes Don Jr. look good in comparison. Spoiler, it is JD Vance. Can you believe he stuck his penis in a couch and it came out covered in War Loser?
The much-heralded Memorandum of A Concept Of Maybe Making A Deal To Give Iran Everything It Ever Dreamed Of is out, and oh boy, if Iran gets a fraction of this, they have conned and Art of the Dealed Trump something fierce.
Read through it for yourself. Or cheat off this thread that explains just how hard Trump got rolled here. It’s like he took Obama’s deal, tore it up, and replaced it with an agreement to give Iran lots of money to beat the shit out of us and make Pete Hegseth look like a little war-losing bitch, which is exactly what he is. It’s like he tore up Obama’s deal and replaced it with a begging request for the Iranians to pee on the discolored parts of his hands. It’s like he tore up Obama’s deal and replaced it with, well, himself.
Here’s Trump talking about how bad the deal is. Ha ha, just kidding, it’s a CNN montage of Trump criticizing the Obama JCPOA, the one that’s the entire reason we’re going through this right now, the deal that shows how Trump is inferior to Obama in every way.
Anyway, point is, Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is an absolute piece of garbage, a total giveaway to the Iranians, because Trump can’t Art of the Deal shit about fuck. It reads like it was Google-translated directly from the Farsi, and it’s pretty clear Iran wrote this with one hand while gleefully masturbating with the other....
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JD, just go home and leave us alone.
JD Vance's Fault! Tabs, Wed., June 17, 2026 — Evan Hurst
James Talarico smacked the shit out of Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, with his absolute moral superiority. It didn’t help that Patrick was wearing what looked like his wife’s sassy leather jacket at the time. Come by The Moral High Ground to read and subscribe to that! [The Moral High Ground]
The Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran is an absolute joke. Basically we’re paying Iran billions of dollars to reopen a strait that was open before Donald Trump touched it with his putrid rotting flesh, and Iran is stronger than ever. But it doesn’t matter, because it’s pretty clear Trump has decided the way he’s going to lose this war “gracefully” is that he’s going to blame the whole thing on JD Vance. [Bloomberg / Media Matters]
Donald Trump’s thugs and terrorists are trying to prosecute more ICE protesters in Minneapolis, based on the same statutes where the losers just tried and failed with the Broadview Six in Chicago. People are fucking pissed. [MPR News]...
You will be shocked to learn that Kash Patel fucked up the announcement of the arrests of the people who allegedly were thinking about doing a terror to Donald Trump’s bouncy house birthday bash. [MS NOW]
Also by the way, does Kash Patel have a secret slush fund he uses to give the biggest FBI agent loyalist mouthbreathers bribes and payouts to commit crimes for him? Jamie Raskin is just curious. And is that why Kash prematurely ejaculated yet another arrest announcement? Wonkette is just curious. [MS NOW]
Mississippi cop shot and killed a one-year-old baby because they were upset about “shoplifting.” In other words, a Mississippi cop acted like a fucking Mississippi cop. [Mississippi Free Press]
Does this seem too correct and accurate?
The fake news is being a dick and suggesting that the fake Teddy Roosevelt quote on the giant banner hanging on the side of the Office of Personnel Management — what IS it with these fascist bitches and their fucking banners? — is fake. What part of “There is no try, there is only do” WASN’T said by Teddy Roosevelt, you dirty libs? Just kidding, that’s not the quote. But next these woke assholes will say Jesus didn’t write the Constitution in English with the preborn ghost of Charlie Kirk. [Washington Post]...
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Evan has links and more on his page. Read it!
Trump Targets Newsom's Inner Circle as Critics Warn Democracy's Guardrails Are Collapsing — Thom Hartmann
As federal investigators knock on doors tied to California's governor, critics warn America is sliding toward the politics of Nixon, Richelieu, and Stalin.
Trump and his legal lickspittles appear — if what Governor Newsom is saying publicly right now turns out to be true — to be playing a very dangerous game with our democracy.
Federal agents have been knocking on the doors of Gavin Newsom’s family, friends, and former employees. Not, according to the Governor yesterday, because they’d found a crime, but because they’re trying to find one.
That’s not my paraphrase; it’s how the Governor of the largest state in the union described what the Trump administration is now doing to him and his wife, and if it’s true it should shock every American who remembers why we built the guardrails we’re now watching get torn down.
“Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean tweets,” Governor Newsom said. “He’s coming after me because I am considering running for president.” He then added, “To get me, he’s coming after my wife.”
As my father taught me when I was around 10 years old, the power of a government is awesome. It can legally take everything you own from you, imprison you, and even execute you. No corporation or individual can do any of those things under cover of law, but government — even state and local governments — can.
It can also break you simply by criminally investigating you. The costs of dealing with such investigations can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, as multiple victims of Trump’s witch hunts have now discovered.
This is why it’s so vital — as our nation’s Founders knew when they wrote the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment — that government be constrained by the law and answerable to the largest portion of the people....
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Trump has joined the realm of the worst dicatators in history. And the coterie of the worst totalitarian monsters of the world rogue gallery!
Freedom 250: Gladiators, Parades, and the Grifting of America — Robert Reich
This week's video
Friends,
The USA has a BIG birthday to celebrate! So, of course, Trump is trying to cash in and make it ALL ABOUT HIMSELF.
This year’s 250th anniversary events, commemorating our Founding Fathers saying NO KINGS, were supposed to be planned by a nonpartisan organization created by Congress called “America250.”
But, in king-like fashion, Trump and his MAGA allies went around Congress and created their own party planning committee, confusingly named “Freedom 250.” This new group, which claims to be nonpartisan, is planning competing events all year that do little more than glorify Donald Trump.
Who is paying for these Freedom 250 festivities? You — at least in part.
That’s because Freedom 250 has gained access to taxpayer funds allotted by Congress last year for the 250th anniversary celebrations.
To recap: President Trump and his allies are using taxpayer dollars to spread his political agenda and granting private donors presidential access — all under the guise of celebrating America’s 250th birthday.
This pay-to-play, MAGA cronyism might be Donald Trump’s definition of a birthday bash — but it certainly isn’t mine.
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Trump has fucked us again!
The Funniest Possible Thing Happened After Trump Painted the Lincoln Reflecting Pool Blue — Frank Landymore
If there’s one thing the Trump administration excels at, it’s turning just about anything into a culture war issue.
One of the latest manufactured flashpoints has been the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, or more specifically its colo
No longer shall it be a more natural greenish blue tint, which Trump has called “filthy” and “dirty.” Instead, he’s hellbent on making it “American flag blue” — yes, this is the same guy selling a Chinese smartphone stamped with a flag that only features 11 stripes — in a bid to make the pool “beautiful” again ahead of the country’s upcoming 250th birthday.
He started this renovation by painting the bottom of the pool blue, which rather than instilling patriotic feelings, evoked the appearance of a chlorine-drenched swimming pool....
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Did he have advisors telling him how this was an exercise in futility? And did he listen? No. He never does.
Texas Pastor Fired After Arrest In Prostitution Sting
Amarillo’s ABC affiliate reports:
An Amarillo pastor was fired following his arrest in a prostitution sting. David Ritchie, 42, is charged with solicitation of prostitution. He and seven other men were arrested by DPS as part of an undercover operation.
Ritchie had been the senior pastor at Redeemer Christian Church since 2011. ABC 7 News reached out to the church on Monday, and again on Tuesday. Andrew Merker told us, on behalf of the elders, they learned about the arrest over the weekend.
The Roys Report reports:
According to Sgt. Hillary Garcia of the Randall County Sheriff’s Office in Amarillo, Ritchie posted a $3,500 bond on Monday and “is no longer in custody.”
Ritchie’s personal website has a biography that says in 2011 he “replanted a historic church in Amarillo that was on the verge of near death. By the grace of God, Redeemer Christian Church has now grown exponentially, celebrating multiple conversions, baptisms, and newly planted churches.”
Ritchie promoted himself on his website as an op-ed writer for the Amarillo Globe News and a “part-time Instructor of Religion at West Texas A&M University”. The newspaper does not list a phone number, and the university told the Amarillo Tribune that Ritchie is not employed there.
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Another one bites the dust.
Sorry for all Paulinists who bought the con.
Fox Host: Trump Failed To Bring Iran “To Its Knees”
“The problem is by the deal that is framed out, it doesn’t look like Iran has been brought to its knees. So, that’s the problem. Even if we have to go back and finish the job, at this moment, it seems like Iran got a lot out of it that many people weren’t expecting. So that’s going to be the issue, and maybe the president wasn’t even expecting because he has got enough plates in the air that he can’t be into every detail. So, I just wonder if the vice president who was against this, by all reports was against the conflict to begin with, maybe he wasn’t the right person to bring this conflict to an end. We’ll find out.” – Fox host Brian Kilmeade.
"I do love to see how the blame is pivoting to JD. He's a loathesome piece of shit. I mean, so is Witkoff and Kushner who both seem to be getting off without any heat.
So JD will get the initial blame and the president will either sign it and get blamed or not sign it and shit on JD further.
Either way, hilarity will ensue." — Chicaaago (comments)
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Trump has no desire to see anyone follow him. As far as he's concerned they are all weak-kneed failures and can never replace his elegance.
Brazilian Supreme Court Sentences Bolsonaro’s MAGA Son To Four Years For Illegally Lobbying Trump Admin
The Associated Press reports:
Brazil’s Supreme Court convicted former lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro on Tuesday for coercion related to the trial that last year sentenced his father and ex- President Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison for a coup attempt. The court sentenced him to four years and two months in prison. All five justices considering the case agreed he illegally interfered by lobbying the U.S. government to threaten Brazilian officials to stop the trial.
Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who also oversaw the former president’s coup attempt case, said Eduardo Bolsonaro’s job as a federal lawmaker “is not to lobby overseas against his own country.” De Moraes and his wife were sanctioned by the U.S. government in July last year. Lawyers for Eduardo Bolsonaro disputed the verdict, saying there was not enough evidence to convict him. The former lawmaker has lived in Texas since February 2025....
The younger Bolsonaro attended Trump’s January 6 rally, spent election night 2024 at Mar-A-Lago, and spoke at last year’s CPAC. It’s not clear if he will be extradited from Texas to serve his sentence or whether the Trump administration would attempt to block his extradition.
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This is how we should be handling our scumbags!
Sexting Hate Pastor Advances To GOP House Runoff
The Hill reports:
Jackson Lahmeyer, founder of Pastors for Trump, and Oklahoma state Rep. Mark Tedford (R) are projected to advance to a runoff in the GOP primary for Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District, Decision Desk HQ projected.
Neither candidate was projected to clear the 50-percent threshold necessary to clinch the nomination on Tuesday. Ten GOP candidates competed for the nomination in the solid red district currently represented by Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), who won the Republican nod for the state’s open Senate seat Tuesday.
The race has become a proxy battle between the MAGA movement and the conservative establishment in the state. President Trump endorsed Lahmeyer, who is generally seen as close to the MAGA movement. The president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have both visited his church in the past.
Read the full article. On Monday, Lahmeyer was exposed for sexting a “home-wrecking whore” beauty queen, for which he claims his wife and Jesus have forgiven him.
"Fake Christians voting for fake Christians. This is why our country is in such a mess." — weshlovrcm (comments)
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Let us see your legal form where Jesus dropped the charges!
New CNN Poll: Over Half of Americans Say They Don’t Trust Any Political News Source — Including CNN — Sarah Rumpf
A new poll conducted by CNN and SSRS found that more than half of Americans say they don’t have any source they trust for political news — not even CNN.
Recent polls have shown Americans have deeply negative views on issues like the economy and inflation. They’re also tying a lot of that negativity to Republicans, with President Donald Trump in the White House and a GOP majority in both the House and Senate, and giving Democrats a dose of hope about November.
Americans are also deeply cynical about the media. A Gallup poll last October showed that trust in media had sunk to its lowest level ever since the pollster began tracking the issue in the 1970s. Seventy percent of Americans said they had “not very much” confidence or “none at all” in mass media like newspapers, TV, and radio to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.”
The latest CNN survey shows that pessimism has not abated. The poll was conducted between May 7 and 31, 2026 among 2,480 Americans 18 years or older, online or by phone, and with a margin of error of +/- 2.7 percentage points.
When asked, “Which best describes your approach to following what happens in American politics?”, 33% said they frequently seek out the latest political news, 32% follow major developments in politics but don’t seek them out, 26% only pay as much attention to politics as necessary, and 9% don’t follow politics at all. This showed a slight uptick in interest in political news from a previous poll taken April 30 to May 4, in which 26% said they frequently seek out the latest political news, 36% follow major developments in politics but don’t seek them out, 29% only pay as much attention to politics as necessary, and 9% don’t follow politics at all....
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But Fox News still is 100% correct! And they will still vote for fascists and wonder why they lost their trust.!
JD Vance Admits Why Iran Deal Details Are Being Held Back: ‘Some Diplomatic Protocols I Don’t Fully Understand’ — Zachary Leeman
Vice President JD Vance admitted he doesn’t “fully understand” some of the “diplomatic protocols” preventing the administration from releasing details of the U.S.-Iran deal sooner.
Vance joined CBS’s Norah O’Donnell on Wednesday morning following multiple outlets publishing details from a deal between the United States and Iran, which potentially includes Iran policing the Strait of Hormuz and seeing sanctions lifted. President Donald Trump has stressed the deal will prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Vance told O’Donnell there have been “misrepresentations” of the deal in media coverage and blasted The Wall Street Journal editorial board for calling the agreement a “strategic retreat.” Vance explained that sanctions could be lifted for the Iranians if they stop “the funding of terrorism” and any pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
“The president says he wants to put this war in the rearview mirror, and yet this framework remains silent. Why not allow the world to see whatever this deal is that you signed?” O’Donnell asked Vance....
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Maybe he doesn't look at news any longer either?
White Trash Losers 'R Us — Abby Zimet
...UFC Freedom 250, the besmirching of a staid White House lawn long reserved for dignified welcomes to foreign leaders, careful displays of statesmanship and the occasional Easter egg roll, began in May with the construction of a massive, hulking, $60 million cage called "the Claw." For weeks, up to 900 workers from seven federal agencies, including DHS and FAA, labored on our dime to build a gaudy monstrosity for 14 mixed martial arts fighters to beat and pummel each other bloody - at a "House that has hosted Churchill, Mandela, the Apollo astronauts...(that) sits at the center of the constitutional republic a generation of Americans bled for in places whose names their grandchildren cannot pronounce."
Trump "sees everything and everyone in terms of dominance or submission," notes Robert Reich. Choosing to mark his fucking big boy birthday by wrapping it in the pretext of the country's 250th anniversary and planning what's been likened to a "human cockfighting" spectacle on the White House Lawn, Reich adds, is "seeking to project an America like the winner of a cage match" - cheap, crude, violent, and so brazenly tasteless that even Republicans who once freaked out at Michelle Obama's vegetable garden there joined the vast 84% of Americans who denounced the event. Implausibly, impressively, the damning consensus reached Fox News viewers. "Tacky as hell," declared one. "Trump is a white trash president."
He is also history's most corrupt president, so no surprise his "gift to Americans" proved, per a failed lawsuit, "a volcano of corruption" and a “private, commercial, corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments," with Trump at its greedy core. He invested heavily in UFC owner TKO; his World Liberty Financial crypto business, earning billions on paper, was an “official sponsor"; so was Truth Social - "Download Truth Social today!"- and TrumpCoins.com - "Limited quantities available now!" Melding corporate and political grift, fighters were "paid" crypto bonuses, ads and logos were everywhere, fights in a Bud-Light-adorned ring had to be watched with a subscription to Paramount Plus, sponsorships cost up to $1.5 million per person.
The flagrant profiteering and Hunger Games optics were so "tone-deaf to the struggles of the American people” even some UFC fighters objected. "I don’t give a fuck to fight in front of some fucking billionaires and rich people," said one; added middleweight champion Sean Strickland, "To go hang out with people on the Epstein list? I'm good, dog.” (He was reportedly banned for criticizing Israel and the Epstein cover-up; he turned up anyway that night and was later escorted out by security for causing "disorder.") All in all, in a "celebration of American strength and exceptionalism" featuring guys clearly not quite princes among men, it was less than surprising things regularly descended into cruder, meaner, more vicious territory.
Bantamweight Sean O’Malley, "a nasty little shit" in all red, white and blue, the color scheme for everything in sight - has publicly defended cheating on his wife because rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate said it was okay: "If I get a little puss on the side - I got status, so I can." After he beat Canada’s Aiemann Zahabi to raucous chants of "U-S-A!" he thanked his fans, offered a tribute to UFC's Dana White - "Dana’s a fucking gangster," and threw up several straight-armed "Sieg Heils" to Trump. The team of four accommodating announcers - who rapturously praised the event's "unbelievable" energy, spirit, patriotism that gave them "goosebumps...How special is it to be here?" - called them "salutes to the troops."...
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The swamp was clearly filled to overflow with this shitshow!
Trump insiders know the reckoning is coming — and this confession proves — Thom Hartmann
Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.
Back in February, he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in 15 states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.
They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.
The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.
The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring, Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.
The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that 23 Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.
Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.
These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.
If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring....
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Your criminal asses are gonna get busted!
Trump’s policies pushing small businesses 'to the brink' — Alex Henderson
...Bruce Jovaag, who owns a home remodeling company in Missouri, told the Times, "It has been an incredible challenge for a small mom-and-pop operation to just simply keep the doors open. It has been a fight like has never existed before."
According to Jovaag, a series of economic challenges since the COVID-10 pandemic have "taken the enjoyment out of what I do for a living."
Trump's policies, Ember notes, are creating a variety of headaches for small business owners —from tariffs to "soaring gas prices" to interruptions with immigrant labor.
Former U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia), a Trump ally who now heads the Small Business Association, claimed that "America First policies are restoring the American dream on Main Street to new heights." But according to Ember, "That hasn't been the reality for the small-business owners who are still reeling from years of challenges."
"The persistent pressure has pushed some small businesses to the brink," Ember reports. "Businesses with fewer than 10 workers have broadly been shedding employees for much of the past five years, according to data from QuickBooks, the accounting software company."...
According to Hotchkiss, "Prices are higher, and these small businesses don't have the flexibility that larger firms do. They don't have the existing inventories that larger firms might have. It's only natural that these would be maybe the most vulnerable."
Francesca Costa, who co-owns the Houston, Texas café Cranky Carrot Juice, told the Times that increasing overhead has forced her to raise her prices. But is reluctant to do so again, as consumers are cutting back on discretionary spending.
Costa lamented, "We are very worried. It is a very real possibility that we could also have to close."
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This shit has to halt. NOW!
Michael Weiss: The Vice President Is Looking Pretty Stupid — Tim Miller
Vance is trying to sell the administration’s initial deal with Iran as a signal that the regime is ready to end its reign of terror and join the community of nations. Never mind that the CIA is outwardly saying that the Iranians can’t be trusted and that the developing agreement looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Also looking pretty naive are the pro-Israel American foreign policy hawks, who thought Trump would be a good war partner with the Israelis. Trump is now on day three of trash-talking Bibi and Israel—this time at the G7. Plus, Sam Forstag, Democratic congressional candidate in Montana, joins Tim to explain how he’s managed to unite the lefties and the centrists behind his campaign, why Dems need to cool it on language that alienates the working class, and how voters are so damn tired of being told to hate each other....
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Hillbilly boy is fingered as the fall guy!
Thanks, Obama!! Trump's 'American Flag Blue' Reflecting Pool Is Green — Conover Kennard
Here's the situation: Trump vowed to paint the Reflecting Pool "American flag blue" and spent $14 million on a renovation. Just a day after the basin was refilled, workers were already seen cleaning out clumps of algae, and by Friday, the algae was back.
Thanks, Obama!
“Versus previous administrations, the National Park Service is actually maintaining the beautifully completed Reflecting Pool,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told the New York Post.
“The nanobubbler technology has successfully destroyed the algae bloom that has plagued every pool reopening since 1922, most infamously, the Obama pool reopening that resulted in massive algae clumps taking over the pool’s surface,” the spokesperson added.
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It is obvious the joke is on the failure to clean out the supply lines before painting it. Now, tell me who realy fucked this one up?
Aging Trump deliberately staging his 'daily' public shocks to hide this hard truth — Dam Lynch
Bulwark White House Correspondent Andrew Egger says President Donald Trump is a shock artist who knows how to catch an audience’s attention. But these days, Egger says Trump is using his best talent as a Band-Aid.
“Donald Trump is, above all, a showman. While he’s plainly slowing with age, he has certainly not lost his ability to deliver near-daily shocks with his attacks on good government, ethics, and taste. But the nature of those shocks has been changing lately,” Egger wrote in the Tuesday edition of Bulwark. “More and more, they’ve seemed calibrated to obscure a harsh truth: Not yet two years into Trump 2.0, the administration’s momentum has ground to a halt.”
If the year 2025 for Trump was a flurry of energy and deed, 2026 is a slow, wrenching tug at futility and loss.
“This period of Trump’s furious maximalism seemed to die in Minneapolis early this year. It has stayed dead since,” said Egger. “Instead, Trump has spent the first half of 2026 mostly just fighting to keep stuff from sliding away from him. Simply reauthorizing funding for ICE and the Border Patrol turned out to be an enormous, sweaty legislative lift. So was maintaining his tariff regime after the Supreme Court ruled huge portions of it unconstitutional. Ditto maintaining his government’s ability to conduct warrantless surveillance of foreigners — a typically uneventful legislative renewal Trump managed to capsize with his clownish appointment of hatchet man Bill Pulte to a top intelligence role. His top 2026 legislative priority, the elections grab-bag Save America Act, is a running joke that the Senate will never seriously consider. Other major initiatives, like the $1.776 billion ‘anti-weaponization fund,’ barely made it past the announcement stage before blowing up in the face of furious public opposition.”
Instead, the things that occupy Trump this year are “just a sideshow to the major policy work,” said Egger....
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The old boy needs to sleep sometime. On the job is as good as any for him.
GOP ex-governor: Trump today is 'not the same' as when he was lucid — Matthew Rozsa
Speaking with MS NOW host Katy Tur on Tuesday, a former Republican governor who used to frequently interact with President Donald Trump expressed surprise at how far Trump has deteriorated after seeing footage of a more vibrant Trump a decade ago.
“The video you showed of Trump in 2015 worked,” former Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina told Tur. He was referring to a campaign speech in which Trump denounced Washington for being full of insiders and corruption. “It worked with me. I was governor at the time of the ninth largest state in the United States. That is not the same President Trump — where, at that time, he became President-elect Trump. His voice has changed dramatically, and I think he has lost some touch with the American people.”
McCrory is not the only one to notice a change in Trump’s voice. Speaking to AlterNet in May about a letter signed by three dozen health experts to Congress, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham (formerly of Tufts University) said that “there has been a frightening progression of symptoms. These include grandiosity without moral safeguards, paranoia, impulsivity, vindictiveness, easy misperception of being harmed, moments of omnipotence, uncontrolled rage, and sole control over the use of nuclear weapons in a time of war.”
He added, “As a psychiatrist reviewing these, I can only say Yikes!”...
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Perfect for one who handles our nuclear codes, don't your think?
SpaceX Stock Has Now Started to Fall — Victor Tangermann
Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public on Friday, exploding onto the scene with a valuation that quickly eclipsed $2 trillion.
Things went swimmingly for a while, with shares steadily rising from a debut $150 — a premium of 11 percent over the original asking price — on Friday to well over $200 on Tuesday. But after peaking at $222 Tuesday morning, SpaceX started its first sustained decline of its nascent stock market career, demonstrating that regardless of its starry-eyed hype, investors are in for a chaotic ride on the terrestrial markets.
By the close of the day, the company’s shares were hovering around the $200 mark. It’s far too early to tell where the ticker will move in the coming weeks or months — or, let’s face it, even days — but it’s an interesting inflection point after SpaceX’s IPO finally opened the floodgates.
Slowing investor enthusiasm could have a litany of reasons. The overall bear case is hard to miss, as SpaceX painstakingly pointed out in its original Securities and Exchange Commission filings ahead of its IPO. Despite having a market cap of over $2.6 trillion at the time of writing, which puts it within earshot of Amazon, the company has been burning through billions of dollars, particularly following its merger with Musk’s AI startup xAI, which itself has been incinerating cash at an extraordinary rate.
In its SEC filings, SpaceX also admitted that Musk’s plan to place one million enormous data centers in Earth’s orbit may not be economically feasible, let alone physically possible, casting a long shadow over the now-trillionaire‘s infamously overambitious aspirations....
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Genius, you say?
Consensus Grows That China Is Crushing the United States at AI — Joe Wilkins
The so-called “AI race” is a tale of two polar extremes. On one end is the Silicon Valley model, where powerful, resource-heavy AI development wreaks havoc on the population, driven by what is arguably the most powerful corporate power consolidation to ever exist. Across the Pacific it’s another story, where intense competition and people-centric AI regulation mean that today’s top performer could be tomorrow’s bottom-feeder.
Given that the two strategies are chasing vastly different outcomes, it can be difficult to tell whether the US or China is pulling ahead at any given moment. One clue that just might offer a clearer picture than benchmark scores or patent filings: what the rest of the world actually thinks.
According to a new global poll conducted by the UK firm Public First and flagged by Politico, respondents in 11 out of 15 countries surveyed now believe China has surpassed the US in AI capability and innovation — leaving just respondents in Japan, India, Vietnam, and the US itself on the side of Uncle Sam.
Even within the United States, sentiments aren’t looking good. According to the poll, just 51 percent of US citizens see their own country as dominating the AI race. That doesn’t necessarily mean they think China’s ahead — 24 percent of US residents responded that “China is leading” while 25 percent went with “don’t know” — but the fact that nearly half of all US respondents were down on their own country’s AI capabilities is telling....
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Getting rid of our work force is not a good strategy for our future
DOJ Sides With Musk In Data Center Pollution Lawsuit
The New York Times reports:
In an unusually aggressive move, the Justice Department told a federal court in Mississippi that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has the right to run dozens of polluting gas-burning turbines in the state despite not having permits for them.
The Justice Department late on Monday said that the court should throw out a lawsuit against xAI that was brought by the NAACP claiming that the turbines violate the Clean Air Act. The suit threatens national security by “seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations,” according to the memo, which was signed by Stanley Woodward Jr., associate attorney general and the No. 3 official in the department.
The memo also argued that the federal government should have unchallenged authority to stop environmental lawsuits brought by private groups or individuals. “It’s remarkable for the United States to intervene on behalf of a polluter in a case like this,” said Laura Thoms, director of enforcement at Earthjustice, which represents the NAACP along with the Southern Environmental Law Center....
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Conflict of interest. The DOJ has no statnding. Do you get the feeling we're living in the prequel to the Bernard Wolfe novel, Limbo?
Feds To Allow Trump Crypto Scam To Operate As Bank
NOTUS reports:
President Donald Trump’s family crypto business is expected to soon be allowed to operate like a bank — a decision that would give U.S. companies a new route to steer money to the president.
World Liberty Financial, the stablecoin and trading platform co-founded by Trump and his three sons, applied for a national trust bank charter with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, on Jan. 5. The Trump-appointed head of the OCC, Jonathan Gould, is due to announce his decision soon, and industry experts and congressional aides expect it to go in the Trump family’s favor.
Two former staffers at the banking regulator, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals, said it is all but certain that the OCC will approve the charter for Trump’s firm, with one saying it was “inconceivable” that the application would be denied.
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More conflict of interest and griftiing by the Trump Criminal Syndicate.
Republicans Again Block Bill To Ban Trump’s Slush Fund
The Huffington Post reports:
Republicans on Tuesday blocked a Democratic bill to abolish President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and nullify a settlement freeing Trump and his family from any ongoing tax enforcement.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Democrats would continue to insist on killing the slush fund and the tax break. “The only way we’re going to ensure that they never see the light of day is to ban them permanently by law,” he said in remarks on the Senate floor. Schumer asked the Senate for “unanimous consent” to pass the bill — meaning without a vote — but Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) objected.
“The president made clear that he’d not seek any compensation from the Anti-Weaponization Fund,” Hagerty said, adding that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the fund isn’t going forward. “Why is that not enough for my colleagues from across the aisle?”...
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Answer: Because traitors get funded by the U.S. govenment.
The Republican Party is on the record. It now supports treason.
Paramount Rejected UFC Ad Critical Of Merger [VIDEO]
The Guardian reports:
Paramount Skydance refused to air an ad submitted by a press freedom group that heavily criticized the network’s leadership and merger with Warner Bros Discovery, with an advertising associate deeming it a “conflict of interest”.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation had hoped to air the 30-second ad during Sunday’s UFC broadcast at the White House, which aired on the streaming service Paramount+
“Instead of defending press freedom, CBS’ billionaire owners cut deals and caved to Trump,” the unaired ad states, before touching on the recent uproar at the Sunday show 60 Minutes. “One fired reporter said ‘CBS demanded falsehoods and bias to appease Trump.’ Now Trump wants the Ellisons to buy CNN, too … Let’s stop Trump’s censorship and block this merger.”
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More conflict of interest. And the Trump rig goes on...
Patel Accused Of Paying $1M+ To “MAGA Henchmen
MS Now reports:
FBI Director Kash Patel may have authorized taxpayer-funded special payments to his inner circle of FBI executives and agents on his protective detail, according to the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
“We have been receiving troubling reports that you may be using part of the budget of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a personal slush fund to make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlawful ‘bonus’ payments to loyalist MAGA henchmen who have engaged in misconduct,” says a letter from Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., to Patel, obtained exclusively by MS NOW.
Committee Democrats have information that Patel has issued more than $1 million in awards, the letter says. The letter says the money went to special agents serving on his Director’s Advisory Team, which Raskin’s letter describes as “a curated group of agents who are willing to carry out your unlawful partisan and personal orders.” It also went to agents on Patel’s security detail, “circumventing the mandatory maximum pay caps established by statute,” the letter says.
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Embezzling is a serious charge for an alleged FBI head. Or a real one for that matter.
Trump throws top official under the bus with chaotic Truth Social post — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump threw one of his top administration officials under the bus this week, per The Daily Beast, making claims in a post to Truth Social that directly conflicted with an interview they gave about the recent peace deal with Iran.
As The Daily Beast noted in a report from Tuesday, Trump took to Truth Social on Monday night with a post attempting to shoot down recent claims about how much money Iran will be getting as part of the deal to suspend hostilities with the U.S. for 60 days, some of which have gone down poorly with members of the GOP.
"Iran has agreed to never have a Nuclear Weapon! Also, the story that the U.S. is paying Iran 300 million Dollars is Fake News, put out by the Dumocrats!!!" the post read.
"The president was seemingly referring to reports that the memorandum of understanding electronically signed by both him and his veep on Monday contained a clause requiring the U.S. to pay Iran $300 billion—not $300 million—for reconstruction efforts," the outlet's report said.
This post from Trump, The Daily Beast explained further, "directly conflicts with what Vice President JD Vance said about the agreement’s terms earlier in the day." Vance was interviewed about the deal by CBS News' Ed O’Keefe on Monday morning, asking the vice president whether it was "true or false" that Iran would be getting money for reconstruction efforts...
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Trump broke it. Now we get to pay for it.
WSJ calls it: Trump is in full 'retreat' — Nick Hilden
Over the course of his two terms, the conservative newspaper The Wall Street Journal has had an uneven relationship with President Donald Trump, sometimes supporting and sometimes criticizing his moves. Now, with debates raging over the Iran peace deal, the paper’s editors have called it in no uncertain terms: Trump is in retreat, and the way forward is still fraught with risks that may warrant Congress rejecting his agreement.
As the Journal asserts, “There’s no denying that Mr. Trump is retreating from his main goals as political pressure has built at home.” While he has attempted to portray the deal as “peace in our time,” most recognize it for what it is: “a strategic retreat short of achieving his war aims.” The editors explain that rather than attempting to continue winning militarily, Trump has decided to prioritize opening the Strait of Hormuz, then figure out the other questions like nuclear enrichment later.
And as many have noted, and the Journal points out, the latest agreement isn’t really a lasting peace deal, but “extends the cease-fire for another 60 days, though our guess is that it will be renewed, perhaps many times.” This will result in the opening of the Hormuz Strait — in time for gas prices to come down, Trump hopes, before the midterms — “but Tehran says Hormuz won’t return to the status quo ante, and it claims it will charge ‘fees’ not tolls, as if that’s more than a semantic difference.” In effect, this would hand the Iranian regime both a means of enrichment and political legitimacy.
Perhaps more worrisome to the Journal editors is how the deal addresses, or fails to address, the nuclear question. As they explain, “It would defer most matters of the nuclear program to 60 more days of talks, with oil and other sanctions relief along the way in exchange for diplomatic progress. This linkage is crucial, but pushing off the most difficult nuclear issues in talks with ‘dishonorable people’ who don’t deal ‘in good faith,’ as the President called them on Friday, doesn’t inspire confidence. If the regime won’t agree to dismantle its nuclear program now, why would it do so after weeks of oil exports and other relief?”...
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Let's call it what it really is. Defeated.
Fox Announces They're Buying Roku. Isn't That Swell? — Susie Madrak
Media giant Fox Corp. on Monday announced a deal to buy streaming and smart-TV company Roku for $22 billion in a cash-and-stock transaction. Via the Washington Post:
It’s a deal that will plunge Fox deeper into the streaming wars as a major player in free, ad-supported streaming at a time when large streamers such as Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu have pivoted away from offering only subscription plans and have begun providing ad-supported subscription options.
The company sold its television and film studio, then called 21st Century Fox, to Disney for $71 billion in 2019, and announced a pivot to live news and sports. In 2020, Fox spent $440 million buying Tubi, a free, ad-supported streaming service with a devoted fan base. This new deal would put Tubi and the Roku Channel, Roku’s own free-to-stream, ad-supported offering, under one roof....
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Don't we have laws against monopolies?
More Nazi propaganda to avoid. It ruins it for all of us.
Antitrust Staffers Shocked By DoJ Approval For Paramount Deal — Susie Madrak
before career staffers who were concerned about the acquisition had an opportunity to object, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to the Wall Street Journal.
Gee, I wonder how that happened?
A team of career lawyers who had spent months scrutinizing the deal were leaning toward recommending a lawsuit challenging it on the grounds that the combination of the two movie studios would be anticompetitive and violate antitrust law, the people said.
The staff investigators hadn’t yet made a final recommendation—a typical step in the deal-review process—and were told Friday that the department would close the investigation, effectively clearing the deal at the federal level, some of the people said.
The Justice Department’s senior leaders believed that Paramount Chief Executive Officer David Ellison, son of Trump ally Larry Ellison, persuasively addressed many of the staff’s questions about the deal during a two-hour interview last month, according to people familiar with their thinking.
I wonder how much it cost for Larry to "persuade" officials? And was it in crypto?
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"Ol' Plastic Face" is fucking us over like a landslide.
Judge Blocks Idaho Law That Would Imprison Trans People For Five Years For Using “Wrong” Restroom
The ACLU of Idaho writes via press release:
A federal judge today granted a request for a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of H.B. 752, a new state law threatening transgender people with up to five years in prison for using public restrooms consistent with their gender identity. H.B. 752 was set to go into effect on July 1; today’s order limits enforcement of the law to protect access to some restrooms while the case challenging it proceeds.
“This ruling means trans folks in Idaho can continue participating in public life without the threat of being arrested for using the bathroom,” said Paul Carlos Southwick, ACLU of Idaho Legal Director. “Trans Idahoans have been understandably anxious about the disruption this unconstitutional law would cause in their daily lives. This ruling will relieve that anxiety for our trans friends and neighbors.”
“This decision provides significant protections for transgender people in Idaho from the efforts of state politicians to force them out of public life altogether,” said Barbara Schwabauer, senior staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project. “No one should be forced to choose between the threat of arrest for being themselves in public or the threat of harassment and violence for acting the way the state wants them to be. The preliminary injunction is a vital first step as we continue to challenge this gross violation of privacy and fundamental equality until the law is blocked for good.”...
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A victory for humanity!
What Desperate Regimes Do Before They Fall — Thom Hartmann
History leaves behind a pattern: attack the courts, discredit elections, intimidate opponents, rewrite the rules, and cling to power at any cost. The question is whether America recognizes it in time.
Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.
Back in February he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in fifteen states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.
They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re likelier to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.
The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.
The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.
The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that twenty-three Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.
Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t. More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.
These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.
If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring....
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Trump is murdering our Constitution and the rights it gives us as Americans.
Wow, Look At His Mouth. Tabs, Tues., June 16, 2026 — Evan Hurst
Good morning, these are your tabs.
Wow, look at his mouth. No really. Look at his mouth.
So that’s Trump’s mouth. And also his inability to shake hands with the French president.
The verdict is in: President Trump Lost This War. That’s the New York Times editorial board, on Trump’s war he pathetically started and lost against Iran. [New York Times]
More: Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng explain why “The New Iran Peace Deal Is a Humiliation for Trump and Netanyahu.” [Zeteo]
Meanwhile, Trump is screaming to IMPEACH SENATOR JACK REED for making fun of his shitty loser Iran deal that isn’t a deal and definitely isn’t as big as Obama’s Iran deal, because Trump is a senile old bitch who doesn’t understand that you cannot impeach senators. [JoeMyGod]
Even Dana White is pissed off that that pig UFC fighter calling Michelle Obama a man at Trump’s birthday party. Will that pig UFC fighter actually face any repercussions, though? Or is Dana White saying what he feels like he’s supposed to say? [HuffPost]
Speaking of Trump’s gaudy trashy wrestlemania birthday party, Americans really hate his gaudy trashy monuments to and parties for himself, or as this article puts it, his “authoritarian cringe.” One poll says only 28 percent approved of his bouncy house UFC birthday party. Another one had it at only 16 percent. [HuffPost / The Hill]
Know how Donald Trump is always saying America was dying before he was president, and now it’s hot? Does he mean like how the number of people who say they’re proud to be American is lower than ever, and has literally taken a nosedive under his presidency? Just curious exactly what he means. [NBC Philadelphia]
Russia decided to bomb a beautiful, historic monastery in Kyiv, a UNESCO World Heritage site, because Putin, like Trump, only exists to destroy whatever he claims to be protecting or liberating. [Washington Post]
Here is a MAGA pastor who is just pretty sure all-powerful God almighty is really concerned with the architecture of the Obama presidential library. It’s always stunning what a limp-dicked, powerless God these losers worship. It’s like they’re looking in the mirror. [JoeMyGod]
Read the story of a Muslim man who tried to go to the Texas GOP convention to see if the party he thought he was a part of really would reject him. Spoiler. [Texas Tribune]
Trump’s clownfucking DOJ is apparently investigating Gavin Newsom and his wife now. [New York Times]...
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Lost War News.
No fat to trim: Texas beef industry profits eaten away by new threat — the screwworm — Paul Cobler and Jayme Lozano Carver
Drought, wildfire, tariffs and now screwworm are straining the beef industry in Texas as the U.S. herd reaches its smallest point in 75 years.
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This will make that BBQ eatin' contest that Paxton has challenged Talarico to take will now price it to an unaffordable level!
'Death warmed over': Trump's France appearance fuels new health concerns — Nicole Charky-Chami
Experts were raising questions about President Donald Trump's health after photo and video footage showed the now octogenarian traveling between back-to-back events across the ocean.
Trump went from Sunday night's UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House to France for the G7 Summit to discuss the next steps in the deal with Iran to stop the military conflict and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Political commentators reacted to the president's appearance in Évian-les-Bains, France, with French President Emmanuel Macron.
"The WH is trying to project Trump as the president who never stops working, going right from the UFC thing to Paris and nailing down the Iran agreement when others were sleeping. In reality, he looks and sounds totally spent. How much longer can they keep the plates spinning?" Conspiracy expert and author Mike Rothschild wrote on X.
"Trump does not look like a man that’s in full control of his faculties," entrepreneur and technologist Gissur Simonarson, co-founder of Cloud Sherpa, wrote on X.
"Trump looks like death warmed over," journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X.
"Trump, now 80 years old, is looking banged up after his big night at the fights and a flight to Europe," Rupar wrote in a separate X post.
"The blank eyes. A portal to hell," political commentator Bill Johnson wrote on X.
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No "one foot in the grave" yet?
Local officials reel over ‘logistical nightmare’ of new Trump order — Jonathan Shorman, Stateline
As election officials across the country steel themselves for the midterm elections in less than five months, President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail threatens to upend their preparations.
The executive order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t provide lists of voters or meet other requirements. It has created a sense of deep uncertainty and concern among election officials as they consider how to comply, according to a review of court documents and interviews with election officials and experts on election administration.
The March 31 executive order, and a proposed Postal Service rule published June 2 that would put the order’s requirements into effect, raise serious logistical and procedural challenges for those running elections, they say. Rural areas with limited resources are especially at risk, but jurisdictions of all sizes could be forced to scramble.
The executive order is the latest step taken by Trump to assert control over state-run elections, along with the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The Justice Department, under Trump’s control, is also trying to obtain state voter rolls.
“This is just another death by a thousand cuts that clerks have been experiencing since the 2020 elections,” said Barb Byrum, the Democratic clerk of Ingham County, Michigan, which includes Lansing...
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Rigging elections and violating our laws wherever the criminal goes!
Trump's 'Orgy Of Decline' Sets Off Conservative Stalwart After White House UFC Fight — David Edwards
A veteran conservative writer declared President Donald Trump is driving America into an "orgy of decline" after he hosted a UFC fight on the White House lawn.
A veteran conservative writer declared President Donald Trump is driving America into an "orgy of decline" after he hosted a UFC fight on the White House lawn.
Bill Kristol, editor-at-large at The Bulwark and founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard, leveled the charge in a Monday column — the morning after UFC Freedom 250 played out on the South Lawn and Trump announced a ceasefire deal with Iran that Kristol says handed Tehran a victory and left America diminished.
"[W]riting about a defeat for our country is genuinely painful," Kristol wrote.
The deal, Kristol argued, left Iran's regime intact, its missile stockpiles untouched, and billions in unfrozen assets flowing back to Tehran. He leaned on an analysis by Atlantic national security writer Tom Nichols, who wrote that Trump and his team "…in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre — but nonetheless extremely dangerous — adversary."
"Iran comes out a winner," Kristol wrote. "But Iran's victory isn't the most important outcome of Trump's foolish war. The most important outcome is our defeat."
He called the ceasefire "Trump's failure" — one that confirmed America's retreat from its role as guardian of a U.S.-friendly international order. "This failed war," he wrote, "will leave us both less feared and less respected than before."...
"Our decline," Kristol wrote, "shows every likelihood of being far quicker and more thorough than Rome's."
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Another disgraceful lost war for an overly aggressive United States.
WH Posts Photo Of Trump With Josh Hokit: “New Bling”
The Guardian reports:
Donald Trump is facing growing pressure to condemn an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) competitor who used a White House appearance to push a sexist, racist and transphobic conspiracy theory about former first lady Michelle Obama.
At a UFC event on the south lawn on Sunday, the US president’s 80th birthday, Josh Hokit, a fighter, shouted into the microphone in front of Trump: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”
Trump appeared to show a half-smile seconds after Hokit’s slur, CNN reported, while some in the audience burst into a laughter. The false claim can be traced to far-right echo chambers online. The president himself has a history of making offensive remarks.
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One thing is for certain: Michelle Obama is more of a man than the "Tattooed Terror" is.
Don't ask if you don't want to know, kid.
Dan Bongino shows he's a bigger idiot than we thought when he makes unequivocal comparisons.
"Trump, is a transsexual." See how that works, Dan?
Right Wing Israeli Paper Claims Trump Approved Billions In Payments To Iran For Free Passage Through Hormuz
Israel’s right wing newspaper Israel Hayom reports:
The US secretly approved a financial and maritime arrangement between Qatar and Iran, under which billions of dollars were paid to Tehran in exchange for free passage for Qatari tankers and ships through the Strait of Hormuz, three diplomatic officials now confirm.
This was a deliberate and conscious course of action by the US administration, which allowed its navy to turn a blind eye to the arrangement, in complete contradiction of its declared policy. The move was intended to ease the crisis in global energy markets and curb rising oil prices.
The current revelation proves that the White House had already laid the groundwork at the time for the memorandum of understanding being forged with Iran. In doing so, the administration gave Iranian terrorism a critical economic lifeline at a moment of particularly severe financial strangulation.
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We bribed them into submission! LMAO!
And fuck health care and food stamps we can't afford! What a fail!
Trump’s “white working class” base may finally have had enough — Heather Digby Parton
President's lies about the failing economy are catching up to him. UFC Freedom 250 won't fix that
...It was one thing when the detested Joe Biden oversaw high inflation during the post-pandemic recovery. Trump’s people knew who to blame. But after a year and a half of his second presidency, even they can’t lie to themselves anymore. He promised to banish inflation, and it’s only gotten worse....
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The people have gotten wise to the con man.
Did Optics Prevent Invoking of Insurrection Act and Suspension of Habeas Corpus? — Brad Reed
“Public pushback, agitation, and outcry can work. Even now. Keep it up,” said law professor Leah Litman.
A Monday report in The New York Times revealed what it described as the “alarm” felt by some White House lawyers at proposals made earlier this year by Vice President JD Vance and Trump adviser Stephen Miller as the administration was forced to contend with widespread anger over its anti-immigration agenda.
Among other things, the Times reported that Vance pushed for President Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow for the US military to be deployed on American streets, in an effort to shut down mass protests in Minnesota against federal immigration enforcement operations in the state.
A few days after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers fatally shot demonstrator Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, the Times reported that Vance — who had also elevated a baseless claim by Miller that Pretti had been a “would-be assassin” — said invoking the Insurrection Act was necessary “to crush the unrest in Minnesota.”
ance also believed invoking the law would send a “message” that “paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations” — even though, as the Times noted, there is no evidence that Pretti; demonstrator Renee Good, who was also killed by federal agents; or any other organizers in Minnesota or elsewhere received any money in exchange for protesting.
However, right-wing attorney Will Scharf quickly shot down Vance’s suggestion, noting that the Insurrection Act is an instrument aimed at putting down armed rebellions rather than groups of citizens blowing whistles at ICE officers.
Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair then made the political case against invoking the Insurrection Act.
“The scenes of federal agents in Minnesota already looked chaotic, he said, and the public was recoiling,” reported the Times. “He put three questions to the room: What does the Insurrection Act give us that we don’t already have? What changes on the ground would be worth the heat? What else could they win that would justify the public relations cost?”
“The room was quiet,” the Times added. “Nobody had a good answer.”...
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Problems are what get created by the Trump mob. Answers are not on their agenda.
Psychologist diagnoses Trump with severe dementia, malignant narcissism and sadism — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
Dr. John Gartner, a former Johns Hopkins assistant professor, warned President Donald Trump is the sickest individual he has encountered in 40 years of clinical practice, displaying extreme symptoms suggesting dementia combined with malignant narcissism and sadism.
During a new episode of "The Daily Beast Podcast" with host Joanna Coles, Dr. Gartner argued Trump is grooming the American public to accept nuclear war, driven by desires to become history's most destructive military leader.
Dr. Gartner drew comparisons between Trump and Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, illustrating his military conqueror fantasies. He also highlighted one of Trump's 2025 social media posts, when the President referenced Napoleon, "he who saves his country does not violate any law."
Gartner stated Trump's deteriorating domestic position — collapsing poll numbers, economic troubles and potential congressional losses — incentivizes him to exercise commander-in-chief power destructively.
Trump's disinhibition from dementia amplifies narcissistic and sadistic impulses, according to Gartner, who believes Trump "gets incredible gratification from destroying things and hurting people."
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Not even a little paranoiac?
She Froze After Being Released by ICE. The Medical Examiner Ruled It a Homicide — Sophie Hurwitz
Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian asylum seeker, was found dead of hypothermia at a Pittsburgh bus stop March 2, three days after being released from ICE custody 30 miles from her home.
This week, the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s office ruled her death a homicide.
“Ms. Michel was a vulnerable adult, suffering from untreated severe mental health issues and a significant language barrier when she was released from federal custody on February 27,” spokesperson Jim Madalinsky said in a statement. “Based on all available information during the investigation, the pathologist ruled Ms. Michel’s death a homicide.”
A medical examiner’s homicide declaration, Madalinsky added, is “not to be interpreted as a declaration of criminal guilt.” It simply indicates that “ the death was caused by the actions of another individual.”
Michel started the asylum process after arriving at the southern border in 2022, Joseph Patrick Murphy, her family’s attorney, told the Associated Press. She was granted humanitarian parole based on urgent need. In the year before her death, she spent six months in Washington County Jail, Murphy said, until a judge said he could not hold her for trial for threatening imaginary people. Then, she was arrested by ICE and taken 30 miles away to Pittsburgh.
“She had mental challenges,” Murphy told Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV on Friday. “She was arrested for at one point screaming at imaginary people, and they knew this. They just dumped her in a bus shelter — language barrier, educational barrier, and psychiatric barrier — and left her to fend for herself. The bus shelter, she never figured out how to leave. She sat there for days, and ultimately froze to death.”
“The ruling by the medical examiner, that is a homicide, means that the death was caused by the action or omission of someone,” Murphy said. “That means there’s some sort of culpability.” DHS, however, denies responsibility: “ICE had NOTHING to do with this woman’s death. She passed away THREE days after ICE encountered her,” they wrote on social media in mid-March. DHS also accused her of “terroristic threats and harassment,” charges which were dismissed in September of 2025.
Advocates are now calling on ICE to answer for Michel’s death.
“Daphy’s death was preventable and is the result of a violent system that cages people, surveils them, abandons them, dehumanizes them in life, and smears them in death to escape accountability,” said Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa).“She deserved care, shelter, language access, and medical support. ICE and every agency that failed her must answer for this.”...
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ICE and Trump have fingerprints all over this wrongful death.
The UFC’s Despicable Night at the White House — Inae Oh
I had never heard of Josh Hokit until the other week. But the little I quickly learned about the immigrant-bashing, trans-hating Ultimate Fighting Championship fighter was enough to guess, correctly, that Hokit was the man behind the UFC Freedom 250’s most despicable moment on Sunday.
“Michelle Obama is a man,” Hokit belted out. “Am I right, America?”
The slur, which came during a post-fight interview with Joe Rogan, was met with a mix of cheers and boo’s. Others, like Rogan, seemed taken aback, appearing to wonder: Even for a corruption-soaked night already teeming with vulgarity, did this Hokit guy go too far?
UFC president and CEO Dana White seems to think so. “I’m completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families,” he has since told Time. But what had White been expecting? Here was a man made notorious through “nasty and false” insults. As Kyle Green, a sociologist who writes on the intersection of sports and politics, told me in advance of Sunday’s spectacle:
There’s also Josh Hokit, who’s going to fight on the [White House card]. People who know him from his days as a college wrestler say he’s just playing a character in the UFC. But when he gets in front of the mic now, he wears an American flag bandana, and he says that he wants to kick Mexicans out of the country, or he’ll say that he wants to beat up transgender people, that Brittney Griner is a man. He’ll say the most offensive things, leaning into the MAGA fan base. Again, I don’t know if he believes it or not. But it doesn’t really matter, right? Because that’s the thing that sells....
Which isn’t to say that Hokit may not believe the cruelty that animated his slur on Sunday night. Nor is it to solely blame the UFC’s terrible labor rights for incentivizing it. Because to even contemplate Hokit’s motivations is to extend this man unearned, far-too-generous consideration. Hurling a vulgar insult against a Black former first lady during a White House event, ostensibly to honor America’s 250th birthday, is a choice—and Hokit enjoyed making it. Let reminders of it attach itself to every oligarch, Republican, Trump family member, and corporation that went along with this cage fight.
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The Trump down elevator is one floor closer to hell.
Student Reading Ability Spikes After Removing Tech From Class — Frank Landymore
Would you believe it: a teacher and her students say their reading ability soared after banning tech in the classroom.
Maureen Mulvaney, an AP Literature and English teacher at Washburn High School in Minneapolis, started the low tech experiment last year after becoming frustrated with plagiarism, distracted students, and plunging literacy rates.
And so, with the enthusiastic support of parents, she banned phones and laptops, requiring all coursework to be done with pencil and paper. The turnaround was quick and resounding, and despite some initial resistance from students, they quickly fell in love with the old, analog ways of doing things.
In September, before the experiment started, just 46 percent of Mulvaney’s students said they felt confident about their reading ability. By February, that share shot up to 95 percent. ...
“It was honestly really fun,” one student, Rue Falbo, told KARE 11. “I enjoyed not being on tech and I think that everyone connected a little bit more.”
Khalil Omar said that after the experiment, he enjoyed writing by hand more than typing on a laptop. “On a Chromebook, I might be tempted to maybe look something up, find a definition of something. But when I’m on paper, I feel like I can use my writing for me,” he told the outlet.
“When we use paper, there’s no temptation to use AI,” another student told Mulvaney in her essay. “I have to force myself to come up with my own ideas. So I do.”
The results of Mulvaney’s experiment are a breath of fresh air in a suffocatingly dire atmosphere of professors and teachers lamenting that their students can’t read anymore, which is on top of all the rampant cheating that AI tools have facilitated. Many blame AI and phones, as there’s mountains of evidence showing the deleterious cognitive effects of both (AI impairs critical thinking and leads to lower brain activity while writing essays, according to the latest research.)
What’s particularly interesting here is her decision to ban laptops, too, which often skirt by without blame in these discussions. Schools are banning phones, but not the portable computers students can game, shop, and talk to AI models on. For decades, the assumption has been that laptops are an indispensable learning tool, but experts are now pushing back on the idea....
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It is always the teacher who connects with their students that make education fun.
Google CEO Humiliated by Graduating Stanford Students as They Walk Out of His Speech in Protest — Joe Wilkins
As anger at the tech industry boils over, college students across the United States are using their graduation ceremonies as a forum to voice their discontent.
At Stanford University’s commencement over the weekend, hundreds of students staged a walk-out ahead of a graduation speech by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The walkout, first covered by SF Gate, featured some 200 graduates who jeered, blew whistles, and unfurled banners as the billionaire tech exec took the podium. (Stanford only graduates about 2,000 undergrads per year, so the dissent was extremely visible.)
The protest was in response to Google’s numerous contracts with militaries and domestic police agencies like the Israeli Defense Forces and US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. While other commencement protests have focused on the more nebulous issue of AI and automation, the Stanford protest struck a different chord.
“Google has actively enabled and profited from Israel’s apartheid and genocide of Palestinians through Project Nimbus,” the protest organizers declared in a walk-out pledge. “It has also enabled ICE’s persecution of our neighbors. This year, Google DeepMind just greenlit a no-red-lines Pentagon AI contract, betraying its own researchers’ pleas to stop arming war.”
After walking out, the organizers invited graduates to an alternative ceremony held directly across from the official venue, featuring Mahmoud Khalil as the headline speaker. A prominent Algerian-Palestinian activist and former student organizer at Columbia University, Khalil was arrested by plainclothes ICE agents in March of 2025, spending 104 days in detention despite never having been convicted or even charged with a crime.
“We don’t need another tech billionaire to tell us how to get rich off the killing and surveillance of Palestinians and US immigrants,” the pledge exclaimed. “Take a stance against war profiteering. Tell the Google CEO that he is not welcome. Walk out with your peers of conscience, and join our People’s Commencement instead of listening to the empty words of a Google CEO.”
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Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy.
CEOs Now Being Forced to Reverse Course, Cut AI Spending — Frank Landymore
The era of AI maximalism is grinding to a halt. It was only months ago that CEOs were forcing employees to use AI as much as possible for tasks like coding. But at some point during their AI binge, the big wigs stopped to check their tab, and are now having second thoughts. Their employees are hooked on AI coding tools, but the costs of using them are spiraling out of control.
How businesses go about reconciling these costs with their AI evangelism is “going to be an absolute nightmare,” an unnamed big tech executive told The Economist.
It’s an ironic reversal of fortunes for companies in the tech sphere, which have become one of the main adopters of AI. Bosses have been happy to slash their workforces and replace them with AI coding agents that can churn out mountains of code, encouraging their surviving employees to make use of AI help as much as possible. Some, like Amazon, instituted a leaderboard ranking employees by the number of AI tokens they used, as if they were competing in a video game. Meta also even factored AI usage into performance reviews....
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The future's not what it used to be.
BREAKING: Air Force B-52 Bomber Crashes In California
A B-52 Stratofortress crashed shortly after takeoff Monday from Edwards Air Force base in California’s Mojave Desert, according to the military base.
The crash was reported at about 11:20 a.m. Emergency crews responded to the scene about 100 miles north of Los Angeles. In an email to NBCLA, Edwards Air Force Base said more information will be provided when available.
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress is a long-range bomber used for a variety of military missions. Capable of subsonic speeds and altitudes of 50,000 feet, the bomber was a workhorse of Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and has been the backbone of the United States’ bomber force for decades.
Read the full article. The status of the crew has not been reported at this writing. No parachutes were deployed, per CNN.
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Horribly tragic.
Trump's Iran "Deal" Is a Giant Bag of Dog Sh? — Jonathan V. Last
1. Always Right
On Friday I explained to my best friend, and later to Catherine Rampell, that I believed we would get a “deal” with Iran this weekend. I said that it was likely to be announced shortly before the White House cage fight, with a signing to take place later this week. In Switzerland.
There’s a reason we sell the shirts stickers.1
I’m going to explain my thought process. And then, we’re going to talk about what this “deal” is, what it isn’t, and what it means for the future.
This is my value proposition. If you want to see around corners, join Bulwark+.
Now let’s get to Trump’s surrender....
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“Why, this is a bag of shit!” “But it’s really great shit, Mrs. Presky.”
After Trump: Proposals for a Post-Authoritarian America — Shikha Dalmia
A YEAR INTO HIS SECOND TERM, Donald Trump has proved transformative: He has transformed America’s proud liberal democracy into virtual one-man rule, tearing down checks and balances constructed over more than two centuries to block exactly this.
Trump will not be president forever. And when he goes, Democrats will face a defining choice: exploit the executive machinery he has exposed, or dismantle it. The temptation to exploit it will be enormous—and yielding to that temptation would be a historic mistake. If post-Trump America is to be a post-authoritarian one, it will have to embark on a Second Reconstruction, and Democrats will need to lead it.
In the first Reconstruction, the Union faced the challenge of reintegrating the South under a rule of law guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens. Republicans led the task then, with some support from loyal Democrats. They undertook not minor technocratic tinkering but major structural interventions—constitutional amendments and new institutions—that remade our governing framework and ensured democratic inclusion. Something similar is needed now.
And enacting such a Second Reconstruction will require not only sustained commitment from Democrats at a moment when they will face powerful incentives to look away, but also the support of principled, non-MAGA Republicans who still care about constitutional governance....
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Cleaning up the pile of shit Trump will leave will take time so now is the time to plan getting it done.
Trump taken to court over plans to redo park with 'barren' MLK Memorial — Matthew Chapman
Yet another of President Donald Trump's plans to transform Washington, D.C., in his own image has been hit with a lawsuit by preservation groups — this time over his plans to transform West Potomac Park, an area that includes several memorials, including the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.
Trump has plans to create what he calls a "National Garden of American Heroes" on the site, which has raised alarms about whether his renovations will respect the current memorials at the site.
According to Meidas Touch's Scott MacFarlane, the lawsuit cites the cost overruns of Trump's other recent projects, like the White House ballroom and the cleaning and repainting of the Reflecting Pool, which has already seen a resurgence of algae. The plaintiffs also argue that the changes would reduce the recreational use of the park.
Above all, the suit argues, the project was illegal without consent from Congress, noting that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's "announcement of West Potomac Park as the site of the garden complex was definitive and not conditioned on congressional approval."
The suit further cites as proof of urgency for court action the recent comments by Trump administration legal counsel that the government could bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and there would be nothing courts could do about it as long as they did it so quickly it was too late to enjoin the work.
Trump, for his part, has championed the new garden as a "magnificent exhibition," saying of the park on social media, "Right now, it is a totally BARREN field of Prime Waterfront Real Estate along our Mighty Potomac River."
All of this comes days after the Trump administration was forced by court order to take the president's name off the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
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There is always something that can be done to a racist scumbag attempting to make God into his own image.
Newsom drops bombshell that Trump DOJ is now investigating him and his wife — Matthew Chapman
The Trump administration has opened a criminal probe into California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife, the governor announced on Monday.
According to The New York Times, a source close to the probe "said there were multiple federal investigations underway related to the governor, including one looking at his wife’s finances," and that federal law enforcement officials in California, rather than Trump appointees in D.C., opened the investigation "based on government witnesses offering information there."
Newsom's office has said that "several people" linked to their family were contacted by federal agents, and they also believe "the agents have ... subpoenaed banking records, but said they had seen no written evidence of that."
In a video statement released on Monday, Newsom, who has become notorious for his social media postings mocking the president, attacked the probe as a politically motivated fishing expedition to try to gin up charges against a political rival, noting that he has often been floated as a presidential contender for 2028.
"Donald Trump isn’t just coming after me because of my mean Tweets," said Newsom. "He’s coming after me because I am considering running for President. Because he hates that I’ve consistently called him out – over and over again – for his lies and deceit. Donald Trump is simply the most corrupt President in American history."
Newsom also listed several more cases in which the Trump administration launched various controversial investigations into various people perceived as rivals or figures who wronged him.
"His personal attorney [Todd Blanche] now runs the Department of Justice, which has repeatedly gone after his political enemies," Newsom said. "Ask Jerome Powell. He sent them after James Comey. Tish James. Adam Schiff. He sent them after Tim Walz. And a woman that a jury found Donald Trump had sexually abused."
"One by one, anyone who has challenged Donald Trump has ended up on his hit list," he added. "And today, I proudly join that list."
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Trump's den of mobsters "investigate any politician who does not kiss his ass.
Sentinels at the Bacchanal — Mark Hertling
...Over the course of my military career, I watched many of the trends Wolfe described unfold. The military became smaller relative to the population. Fewer Americans now have direct ties to service members. The percentage of citizens who understand military life through personal experience has declined steadily. At the same time, because of transformational efforts over the last few decades, the military became increasingly professional, more educated, and more focused on standards of conduct and accountability. During my time in service, my fellow service members were increasingly taught and trained that the oath remained the defining feature of the profession.
What Wolfe understood, and what many Americans still struggle to understand, is that the military’s role in a constitutional republic is fundamentally different from that of any other institution. The military exists to defend the nation, but it does so by standing apart from the nation’s political and cultural struggles. Its purpose is not to determine the outcome of those struggles, its purpose is to ensure they can occur freely.
That is why the image of the sentinel is more important than the image of the monk.
A sentinel stands watch over the feast. He does not organize it nor judge its worth. He does not determine the menu. He does not decide who attends. He does not settle arguments among the guests. He does not determine what values should guide the gathering. Those responsibilities belong to the participants themselves. In a free society, citizens decide what kind of nation they wish to have. They debate questions of morality, culture, public policy, civic responsibility, and national priorities. In a healthy society, they persuade one another, vote, organize, advocate, and engage in the difficult work of self-government and working for the greater good of all.
The military’s responsibility is different. Its responsibility is to guard the constitutional framework that allows those debates to occur. It protects the feast. But it must never become a part of the festivities.
That distinction may sound subtle, but it is one of the most important principles of the American republic. If citizens believe society is losing its moral bearings, it is their responsibility to address that through democratic means. If they believe civic responsibility has declined, they must work to strengthen it through persuasion, education, leadership, and example. If they believe political leaders are taking the country in the wrong direction, they have every right—and indeed every obligation—to make the case. But the military is not, and must not be, the instrument through which those arguments are resolved. The military exists so that arguments can continue to occur peacefully and freely....
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The dispicable degradation that Trump has brought to our military was on full display when military members saluted cage match miscreants parading through our White House!
In far West Texas, the threat of land seizures for a border wall has families on edge Uriel J. García
REDFORD — As a teenager, Joe Carrasco would help his father pick onions and cotton on the family’s 40-acre ranch on the banks of the Rio Grande. On the weekends, he would mount his horse and wade across the river into Mexico, where he would race his horse and drink beers.
Today, Carrasco is 71, retired after 26 years working in the oil fields, sitting under a carport with a Michelob Ultra beer and staring at the mountains while his cows graze on his alfalfa farm.
“I like what I see,” he said.
But he doesn’t like what he sees coming.
Carrasco is one of an estimated 400 landowners in the Big Bend region whose land has been targeted by the Trump administration. Like other property owners along the Rio Grande, Carrasco received a letter from U.S. Customs and Border Protection earlier this year asking him to let contractors on his land to survey it or risk losing it through eminent domain....
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Destroying our land is not something our government has a damn bit of business doing!
History's Biggest Dorks. Tabs., Mon., June 15, 2026 — Evan Hurst
...Speaking of the White House freakout over the Haberman/Swan book, Trump and his closest associates are reportedly terrified that somebody’s been recording inside the Situation Room — JD Vance? Somebody should point a finger at JD Vance, since we feel like we’ve been hearing rumors Trump doesn’t trust him anymore — and that’s why Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan had such exact quotes rom important Situation Room meetings like the Situation Room meeting about how to cover up the Epstein Files. “We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded," the regime told Axios. "And we have no idea which ones." Oh golly, what OTHER Situation Room crimes do they have on tape? [Axios]
Trump says he’s finished a deal with Iran, which would presumably get things right back where Barack Obama put them, before racist coward Trump tore up the Iran deal because his delicate feelings could not handle the fact (fact) that the Black man is superior to him, and better at negotiating, and better at being president, in every single fucking way.
LOL, he hereby fully authorizes the opening of the Strait.
Just kidding, he hereby fully authorizes FRIDAY.
Yes, they will sign the “deal” on Friday in Switzerland — it’s not a deal — and then they’ll start negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program, so this really is concepts of rumors of one day having a deal. So scratch what we said about Trump getting back to what Obama already did.
Trump will never measure up to what Obama already did, and this war will continue forever....
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Loser loses again. He should investigate why he is such a loser with the ferver he uses to find election fraud by employing fraud himself.
Trump stages the perfect 'bread and circuses' event for a dying republic — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump is acting like a Roman emperor, not an American president, by hosting UFC fighters to wrestle in front of the White House on his 80th birthday.
“The weekend’s UFC fight in honor of the Emperor Donald’s birthday is about more than his obsessive love for big, powerful men, men with tears in their eyes saying, ‘Mr. President, sir, would you like to touch my rock-solid abs?’” wrote Rick Wilson, who co-founded the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project. “It’s about the fall of Rome, and that of America.”
Wilson added, “The decline of Rome didn’t begin when the Goths crossed the frontier or rival nations nibbled the edges of the Empire. It began when the Republic died, and Emperors with boundless self-regard and poor impulse control adopted theatrical personas and were told they were gods, not men.”
In this sense, Wilson characterized Trump’s actions as president as involving spectacle and corruption.
“When governing a far-flung empire became difficult, performance became easier,” Wilson said. “When problems became unsolvable, distractions became the irresistible tool to settle the restive plebs. If everyone was corrupt, from the Emperor on down, money set the terms of power. And when citizens grew anxious about the future, emperors offered them the now-cliched narcotic known throughout in political history: bread and circuses.”...
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Are we not men? We are devo!
The Age of the Super A*sholes — Robert Reich
Trump and Musk are dominating our economy and our politics, which tells us something about the era we're living through
Friends,
Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.
To describe both as selfish narcissists would be a wild understatement. Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.
Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.
Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books, and civilly liable for sexual abuse.
Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.
Both pride themselves on paying little or no taxes. Trump famously said that paying not paying federal income taxes "makes me smart." Musk paid zero taxes in 2018.
Both are notoriously lacking in empathy; they view all relationships as transactions. Trump refuses to be a "consoler-in-chief" in national tragedies and openly withholds sympathy for families of political opponents who die. (When Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered, Trump asserted they were killed “due to the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”)...
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Look! Up in the sky! Is it a turd? Is it a pain? It's Super Asshole!
White House hits the panic button over NYT reporters' new book — Sarah K. Burris
The new book by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan is set for release and has the White House "extremely worried."
According to Axios reporter Alex Thompson, some of the reports in the book are so detailed and quoted verbatim that the White House fears someone is recording conversations, even in the Situation Room, which is so secure that even cell phones aren't allowed inside.
One of those excerpts includes a conversation with Vice President JD Vance, who told top officials in the administration that it was time to invoke the Insurrection Act after the shooting deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good.
"It would be painful in the short term, he said, but the message it would send —that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations — would make sure no one tried it again," said the report. It also noted that there is no evidence that paid protesters were involved, and certainly no evidence that Pretti and Good were paid by anyone....
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Open and shut murder.
Woman’s Death Blamed on Hospital’s AI System — Joe Wilkins
As AI finds its way into hospital systems around the world, the case of one Brazilian woman makes it clear that the tech doesn’t have to diagnose patients to determine whether they live or die.
According to Brazilian news publication MG1, 32-year old Rebeca Cardoso Tenente Molina died after a state-run AI system for assigning hospital beds forced her to wait five days to transfer to an intensive care unit.
In interviews with MG1, Molina’s family members explained that the AI system delayed her access to the care she needed. Prior to her death, Molina was hospitalized in the small municipality of São João Nepomuceno after seeking medical treatment for gallstones. As her health rapidly deteriorated, Molina waited for an ICU bed in the state of Oliveira to open up, at a hospital about 186 miles away.
Though the family went as far as pursuing emergency legal action against the hospital system to get her transferred, the move was significantly delayed. The family now believes that five-day wait was fatal, MG1 reported.
According to Molina’s sister and family lawyer Sâmela Cardoso Tenente Furtado, the AI hospital-management system assigned the patient a much lower “score” than the one her condition actually reflected. This automatic scoring, completed by Brazil’s State Regulation Operations Center (Core-MG) using AI tools, is alleged to have played the deciding role on delaying transfer to an ICU bed.
“What we saw was that doctors lost the autonomy to decide if a patient is very seriously ill,” Furtado told MG1. “The one who has to accept whether a patient is seriously ill is no longer the doctor who is there experiencing that reality with the patient, it’s the Core.”
In her interview, Furtado describes a flawed and inflexible system which refused to budge, even as test data showed her sister’s condition taking a turn for the worst.
“She would have been a 10, and the system only accepted her as a 6.8,” Furtado continued. “So she couldn’t progress properly in the system because a patient at 8, a patient at 6.9 would jump ahead of her. And the system wouldn’t accept increasing her severity level within the system because of the tests that were constantly feeding it data.”...
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Your money and your life!
Trump fails again — Robert Reich
Trump again claims victory in Iran. He’s claimed victory before, but now he has a so-called “agreement” with Iran.
That agreement, which appears to be no more than a memo of understanding — that is, a set of principles to which Iran and the United States have agreed — stops the fighting and reopens the Strait of Hormuz but it does not deal with the issue that caused Trump to initiate the conflict: Iran’s nuclear program.
Keep that in mind as you hear various renditions of what’s been decided. Recall that the Strait of Hormuz was open before Trump began bombing Iran. At best, the agreement Trump is touting restores the status quo to where it was when he commenced hostilities. Remember also that Iran had agreed to limit its development of nuclear-grade materials in its treaty with the Obama administration, which Trump revoked in 2018.
So what has been accomplished? Iran now is under the control of a more extremist regime than when Trump started this war. Oil prices are far higher, and will take some time to return to where they were before it began (if they ever do). Meanwhile, Trump has caused the United States to be more dependent on fossil fuels than we were prior to his inauguration for a second time, and the high oil prices brought on by his war has enriched Vladimir Putin’s regime.
The war with Iran has cost the United States an estimated $90 billion, and that’s a conservative estimate. It has caused widespread suffering throughout the Middle East. It has put Israel in a more precarious situation than it was before — and much of that is due to Benjamin Netanyahu, who is not a party to, and has not approved, the agreement....
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Winning? Trashy cage fighting on our White House lawn! Asshole dimwit insulting a former fist lady. A real chickenshit side show. Disgusting and disgraceful.
Hats off, Amerika!
UFC Fighter Shouts “Michelle Obama Is A Man” [VIDEO]
The Daily Beast reports:
Donald Trump’s 80th birthday bash UFC fight has turned nasty with a slur against former first lady Michelle Obama. Part of Trump’s UFC Freedom 250 card, held on the South Lawn of the White House, saw Derrick Lewis take on Josh Hokit. Heavyweight prospect Hokit, 28, already created controversy on Saturday when he appeared to spit and vomit on himself during the official weigh-in. After winning his match Sunday night via a TKO to Derrick Lewis in the second round, Hokit let loose in a post-match interview.
“Shout out to Trump for having the balls to put some s— like this on,” Hokit told Joe Rogan. The mention of the president’s name got a mixture of cheers and boos, as the camera cut to the 80-year-old sitting with UFC CEO Dana White. Hokit then added, “There’s only one person more incredible than the Incredible Hulk, and that’s my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Hokit looked directly into the camera and said “And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right America?”
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Cro-Magnon interviews punk pussy Paulinist.
Many laws were broken this day by Trump. No one can even lift a little finger.
Tom Tiffany Caught In A Pay-For-Play Scandal — Chris capper Liebenthal
US Rep and gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany helped a buddy buy some national forest land for a nominal campaign contribution.
Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and U.S. Representative Tom Tiffany got caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar.
Last July, Tiffany wrote and introduced the Wabeno Economic Development Act. The sole purpose of this bill is to allow a company, Tony's Wabeno Redi-Mix, to purchase 14 acres in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest adjacent to the company's current site. The land deal would also include mining rights and keep the land at fair market value.
Tony Smith, the owner of the company, wrote a letter to Tiffany asking for his help because going through proper channels wasn't fast enough, and his company was running low on natural resources needed to keep turning a healthy profit.
Tiffany, who has a long history of opposing publicly-owned land, got right to work on the bill, which passed through the House last July 410-1.
A few months later, Smith made his very first campaign contribution ever, giving $520.51 to Tiffany's gubernatorial campaign. My, what an amazing coinkydink that was!...
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How do candidates like this get on tickets when they should be in jail?
'25 Is 25 Too Many': DHS Secretary Wants To Disenfranchise Millions For 25 — Karoli Kuns
Markwayne Mullin thinks it's justified to disenfranchise millions because there were 25 cases of citizenship-based voter fraud since 2000.
The only thing Markwayne Mullin is good for is reminding us about the naked bigotry of his party. Other than that, he should go back and be a plumber, because he is terrible at the job of DHS Secretary.
When asked by Kasie Hunt why he's obsessing on voter fraud when the Heritage Foundation (!!!) documented 25 cases of voter fraud since 2000. And by the way, the ones they found in California were BEFORE the state had universal mail-in voting.
Markwayne's answer was as stupid as you might think
"25 is 25 too many," he said. "It's kind of like one illegal death, one individual that dies from the hands of an illegal is one too many."
"One person voting illegally is one too many." he reiterated.
Fuck that, Markwayne. No human is illegal, for starters. And lots of people are dead because citizens commit crimes. More citizens commit crimes than undocumented people, so quit with the naked racism....
"Markwaynebillyjoejimbobcletusjethro is more of a plumber’s helper than an actual plumber. He’s a liar, which is why Trump nominated him in the first place." — mongopat (comments)
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JohnWayne is full of racist shit. He has lowered the stupidity bar to the ground! Take out this trash.
NYT Editorial Board: “Todd Blanche Is Unfit For Office”
The New York Times editorial board writes:
Mr. Trump has no right to expect that the Senate will confirm an attorney general with a track record of disdaining the law and using law enforcement as a partisan weapon. Todd Blanche, whom the president nominated for the job last week, falls into this category. He has already damaged the Justice Department as a senior official there, and he has misled Congress. The Senate should reject his nomination.
Mr. Blanche served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer in 2023 and 2024, defending him against two federal indictments and a New York hush money case. As acting attorney general since Pam Bondi was fired in April, and as deputy attorney general before that, he has continued to put Mr. Trump’s interests ahead of the nation’s. He pursued nakedly political indictments, including against James Comey, the former F.B.I. director. Mr. Blanche helped design a proposed $1.8 billion fund to benefit the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and other Trump loyalists. He has spread falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.
He personally signed an agreement that gives the Trump family and its businesses immunity from tax audits, which could save Mr. Trump $100 million or more. Mr. Blanche has pushed out dozens of F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors for doing their duty by investigating the riot and other potential crimes. He has violated his own promise to recuse himself from matters in which he has a conflict of interest.
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Stating the obvious.
We must stop allowing criminals to shit all over our government.
Daily Mail: Trump-Backed Far-Right QAnon Hate Pastor House Candidate Found Sexting “Whore” Beauty Queen
The Daily Mail reports:
A Trump-backed congressional candidate has been caught sending a former Miss Oklahoma USA a series of intimate text messages, prompting his wife to brand her a “home wrecking whore.” Jackson Lahmeyer, 34, the Tulsa megachurch pastor whom Donald Trump anointed a “MAGA Warrior” last month, faces a torrent of his own text messages obtained by the Daily Mail ahead of Oklahoma’s 1st District Republican primary on Tuesday.
In them he professes his love for the former pageant queen, invites her to his hotel room, and recounts leaving Mar-a-Lago to visit a strip club at 1am after being offered cocaine, which he declined. Her reply now reads as prophecy: “Jackson if u become congressman & if ever got caught u would be headlines.” Then, one word: “Pastor.”
Caitlin Simmons Key, a 40-year-old single mom who worked as a fundraiser for Lahmeyer’s campaign, tells the Daily Mail they shared inappropriate texts before his wife learned of the relationship on the eve of Mother’s Day. “You are a home wrecking whore. Did you enjoy ruining our family?” Lahmeyer’s wife Kendra wrote to Key on May 9: “He has 5 kids.”
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Hate Pastor? Of course!
Trump's DC makeover likened to 'Versailles just before French monarchs were beheaded' — David McAfee
A political columnist is comparing President Donald Trump's gilded redecoration of Washington to the excesses of the French monarchy on the eve of the revolution that toppled it.
In a column titled "Caligula on the Potomac," political analyst and longtime federal trial attorney Sabrina Haake argues that Trump is "desecrating the nation's capital monument by monument," remaking the city in his own gold-plated image.
The centerpiece of her critique is Trump's appetite for gold. She points to the Oval Office, which the president has redecorated with heavy gold filigree, gold cherubs, gold trim and gold furniture. That "gold overkill aesthetic," Haake writes, is "reminiscent of Versailles just before the French monarchs were beheaded" — a comparison she uses to argue that Trump's historical ignorance isn't confined to American history.
Haake catalogs what she sees as a sprawling vanity project on the public dime: golden Trump statues, gold coins bearing his likeness, commemorative passports featuring his photo, and enormous banners of Trump — which she brands "Nazi chic" — draped across the DOJ, Labor and Agriculture buildings. She notes that a former FBI director called the banners "sickening" for their authoritarian symbolism.
She reserves particular alarm for Trump's proposed 250-foot "Triumphal Arch," which the president has said would be, "along with the White House Ballroom, the Greatest Structure in Washington." Haake writes that the arch — more than double the height of the Lincoln Memorial — would obstruct the historic sightline connecting the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, a vista she says was designed so Lincoln would forever gaze on the resting place of more than 400,000 veterans.
The weekend's UFC cage match on the South Lawn fits the same theme, in her telling. After musicians refused to perform at the nation's 250th birthday celebration, she writes, the cage fight — staged inside a towering metal structure dubbed "the Claw" — became the marquee entertainment for what she casts as a "wannabe Roman Emperor" marking his 80th birthday....
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That guillotine you liked is making a comeback!
Sunday Thought: The Horrifying Truth About Trump's Cage Match — Robert Reich.
What Trump and his "manosphere" are trying to tell us with their public displays of testosterone.
Friends,
Tonight, Trump is throwing an 80th birthday bash for himself (he says it’s in honor of the 250th birthday of the United States) with a “Freedom250” Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on the South Lawn of the White House at 8 p.m. ET.
It will be a bloody gladiator fight taking place inside a 600-ton, 154-feet-tall skeletal structure called “the Claw,” painted red, white and blue. Opponents will punch, kick, wrestle, choke, and use jiu-jitsu on each other until one of them is unconscious or verbally concedes, or a referee stops the fight because one is judged too damaged to absorb any more violence.
This is a money-making operation for the UFC (which is offering special-access VIP packages for $1.5 million), for Trump buddy David Ellison’s Paramount (which will livestream it to you if you buy a subscription for $8.99 a month — see here), for Crypto.com and Ram (which are sponsoring it), and for Trump (who’s deciding which of his billionaire friends and CEO buddies will be invited ringside. Last night, Trump held a $1 million-a-person dinner at the Trump National Golf Club at Potomac, Virginia, to benefit his Super PAC, Maga Inc.).
Beyond the usual Trumpian issues of self-dealing and pay-to-play corruption, today’s fight also raises the question: What does a cage match on the White House lawn have to do with America’s 250th anniversary?
Just this: Trump and his regime are seeking to project an America that’s like the winner of a cage match...
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He's pretty sure he can be a man by proxy! LMAO!
New development firmly 'connects Trump family's financial interests' to UFC fight: report — Alexander Willis
Despite the White House’s claim that the upcoming Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) posed “no conflict of interest” regarding President Donald Trump, a new development directly undercut that claim and established a firm connection between the event and the “Trump family’s financial interests,” The Guardian reported Sunday.
As revealed by UFC on Friday, fighters participating in the event will be partially paid “in a form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial.” Some fighters will also receive “USD1 stablecoins” issued by World Liberty Financial, the finance company founded in 2024 by Trump and a number of his family members.
The revelation could potentially benefit World Liberty Financial, which sees the Trump family “receive 75% of net proceeds when [the company] sells tokens, plus a cut of stablecoin returns,” The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle lashed out at the media for reporting on the matter, telling The Guardian that the “Fake news’ continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interests are irresponsible.”
Todd Phillips, who The Guardian described as an “expert in crypto at the Klaros Group,” told the outlet that UFC fighters being paid in Trump-linked cryptocurrency amounted to “advertising.”
“Paying the fighters in the USD1 stablecoin would have the same economic function as writing them a check but announcing to the world they are doing it in USD1 sounds like they are [advertising] to the world that USD1 is out there and that it is connected to the UFC and the White House,” Phillips told The Guardian.
As of last December, World Liberty Financial had sold around $1.4 billion worth of digital assets, creating “billions in new wealth for the first family,” the Journal previously reported, describing it as “unprecedented for a president to have such far-reaching business interest while in office, including in areas his administration regulates.”
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The evil greed of the Trump disease.
Weather Forecast Worsens For UFC Cage Match
The Sporting News reports:
The National Weather Service has increased its chance of rain to 70%, forecasting “likely” showers and thunderstorms for the D.C. area before 10 p.m. ET. That puts the rain squarely in the window for the 8 p.m. start time of the Freedom 250 card.
On Friday night, UFC delayed a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial due to nearby lightning strikes. UFC CEO Dana White has maintained to reporters the event fill go forward as scheduled Sunday night regardless of the weather. "Listen, the show goes on on Sunday," White said. "No matter what happens."
Sunday’s main card for Freedom 250 is scheduled to start at 8 p.m. ET. There are no preliminary fights on this card, so there is flexibility to move the event up or down depending on the weather. If the weather becomes dangerous, however, the event will be delayed. This includes any lightning strikes or severe winds, for example."
Read the full article. The White House has said they expect at least 85,000 to watch the matches on big screens erected on the White House Ellipse. Thunderstorms would surely keep many – if not most – of those people away.
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The sick return of the Arena. We have become a collapsing Rome.
75 Data Center Projects Were Disrupted in the First Quarter of 2026, Report Says — Mike Pearl
The report indicates that grassroots activity in opposition to data centers is spiking dramatically.
A new report says activism is interfering with data center construction at a growing rate. In just the first three months of 2026, grassroots groups and protesters achieved the same level of success as in the entire year 2025.
These findings come from an entity called Data Center Watch, which sounds a bit like an activist group itself, though it’s actually a project maintained by the AI research and red-teaming firm 10a Labs.
Apparently, disruption from locals affected 75 projects from January through March, valued at a combined $130 billion. NBC News calls that “the most in a three-month period since the group began tracking in 2023.”
A recent poll from Heatmap Pro explored public sentiment toward data centers in the U.S., finding that the majority would “strongly” oppose one being built in their home. Again, the survey reflects growing opposition, with a similar survey nine months ago showing that Americans were divided more or less evenly on the topic at the time.
In perhaps the most telling sign of a growing cultural consensus against data centers, the Atlantic published a contrarian essay on Friday, written by one of its assistant editors, Elias Wachtel. It reads in part:
“[…]the data-center panic is overblown. Most of the complaints inflate the costs of data centers and overlook the fact that, in some contexts at least, they can bring real benefits. If saying no is good politics, it isn’t always good policy.”
So make of that what you will.
At any rate, the Data Center Watch report for the first quarter of 2026 also notes that there are now anti-data center grassroots groups in 49 states, and that statewide proposals are nearing the threshold of passage. Maine’s moratorium was struck down by its governor—who noted at the time that she would sign a slightly altered version of that bill—but the report counts 14 statewide measures introduced in the first three months of 2026.
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Humanity sees the horror. The greedy see only money.
Scientists Horrified as Huge Heatwave Hits Antarctica — Joe Wilkins
When you’re studying weather patterns across Antarctica, recording breaking heat is pretty much one of the last things you want to see. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what June has wrought across broad swaths of the icy continent, with temperatures reaching an alarming 36 degrees Fahrenheit above average in some places.
As the Guardian reported, the record breaking temps hit on June 6, when researchers stationed on the Trinity peninsula — the northernmost point of the continent — logged temperatures as high as 15.4 degrees Celsius, or 59.72 degrees Fahrenheit, well above freezing.
“This is absolutely crazy,” climate professor at the University of Groningen Raúl Cordero told the Guardian. “It is also about 20C above normal for this time of the year. That is a huge anomaly.”
Chilean glaciologist Luis Muñoz told the publication he and a colleague climbed up to the top of the Collins glacier last weekend, on the very Northwestern tip of the peninsula. There, they found that “temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted.”
“Usually there is 20cm of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time,” Muñoz continued. During the trek, they observed that it was raining, and that the precipitation was warm enough to melt the surface ice. “There was a direct impact on the glacier, which should be receiving snow now. It should not be suffering ablation at this time of the year. This is obviously not good for the glacier.”...
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Oh, well. As Scarett O'Hara said, "foddle de dee, I'll think about that tomorrow." The American answer when it comes to global climate change.
Consulting Firm’s Report on How Awesome AI Is Found to Contain Idiotic AI Hallucinations — Frank Landymore
A new report that was supposed to be a shining panegyric to how useful AI is was caught loaded with fake claims that appear to be AI hallucinations, the Financial Times reports — a blunder that may have unintentionally demonstrated AI’s most compelling use case: bullsh*tting your job.
Titled “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI,” the report was released October by KPMG, one of the big four consulting firms, making the mishap an all the more embarrassing indictment of elite Wall Street professionals’ mindless enthusiasm for the tech.
It claimed that numerous big organizations are already making extraordinary use of the tech, with the takeaway that you should be deploying AI, too, lest you become one of those dinosaurs that still relies on the fleshy circuitry of the brain to synthesize information.
The global wealth manager UBS “integrates AI agents across investment advisory, risk management and compliance monitoring,” it stated. The Swiss Federal Railways has AI agents that “help users plan, book, and optimize journeys based on preferences, real-time conditions and carbon impact, turning SBB into a holistic mobility orchestrator,” it further asserted. And the Transport for London was using AI agents “to predict and manage congestion, personalize commuter updates and co-ordinate multimodal transport.”
AI evangelists, never above shameless boosterism and misleading claims, would desperately hope for any of these things to be true. But as the FT was tipped off by AI detecting startup GPTZero, they’re not. A UBS spokesperson told the FT that the claims about AI agents were “factually incorrect.” A Swiss railway spokesperson echoed that the claims made about its AI usage were “not accurate.” And a spokesperson for the London transit system called the report’s assertion “misleading.”...
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Was this modeled on Trump's brain?
Trump 'sets the temperature' for political violence: analysis — Matthew Rozsar
President Donald Trump has not toned down the rhetoric that contributed to the assassination of a Democratic lawmaker last year, according to a contributor to the local newspaper from that region.
“One year ago this week, Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were assassinated in their home in Brooklyn Park,” wrote Steve Reuter to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. “The man who pulled the trigger was the cause of their deaths, in the way we most readily understand cause. The proximate one, the hand on the weapon, the figure we can name and try and convict.”
Reuter added, “But he was not the only cause. The harder causes are the ones we will have to look at if we want fewer June mornings like that one.”
From there, Reuter characterized Trump’s heated language about Democrats and other opponents as a thermostat, one that not only measures the temperature of conversation but sets it as well.
“When a political leader describes opponents as enemies, as vermin, as traitors, as something less than fully people, the leader is not merely venting or persuading,” Reuter wrote. “The leader is setting a temperature. And the people who take their cues from that leader calibrate to it, usually without noticing they are doing it. The words travel down. They teach. They establish what a person is now permitted to feel about a neighbor whose yard sign offended them.”
Assassin Vance Boelter, who pleaded guilty to the federal charges last week, acted as he did because of the tone that Trump set, according to Reuter.
“Responsibility does not end at the boundary of what we intend,” Reuter argued. “It extends to what we make permissible. This is an uncomfortable widening of the circle because it implicates far more people than the one who acted; it implicates everyone who helped load the language while keeping their own hands clean.”...
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Please duly note: There is no statute of limitations on murder.
Trump’s AG pick accused of massive corruption cover-up — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump’s choice for attorney general, the current acting attorney general Todd Blanche, would be dangerous to democracy, experts warn.
“A year ago, senators uncomfortable with the idea of Trump’s criminal-defense lawyer becoming the department’s No. 2 could point to Blanche’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee, where he said that ‘political prosecutions should never happen, period’ and that, if pressed to bring a bogus case, ‘I will follow the law,’” reported The New Yorker's Ruth Marcus on Sunday. “Now they have a record against which to judge those assurances. Will any of this matter to Republican senators—perhaps to members of the growing ‘wounded-bear caucus,’ who have been the targets of Trump’s fury?”
Marcus added, “A no vote from a single Republican on the committee could block the nomination. On the floor, just four Republican no votes could doom it. In a Senate that took its constitutional role seriously, Blanche would not win confirmation a second time. But, as John Thune, the Majority Leader, observed, ‘obviously most of our members are pretty deferential to who the President wants.’ Like the nominee it will consider, this Senate is more inclined to consent to Trump than to advise him.”
Marcus, a longtime political correspondent, cited as one example of Blanche’s seeming unfitness the fact that he submitted a legal complaint demanding construction of the White House ballroom in unprofessional language that could have been ripped from the president’s own social media posts.
“The motion began mid-rant,” Marcus wrote before quoting it. “‘The National Trust for Historic Preservation’ is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE.” It said that those seeking to stop the ballroom ‘suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome’ and ‘are represented by the lawyer for Barack Hussein Obama, Gregory Craig.’ Then it shifted to praising Trump’s brilliance—’a highly successful real estate developer, who has abilities that others don’t’—and to arguing that the ballroom was ‘being given FREE OF CHARGE AS A GIFT TO THE COUNTRY!’”
Marcus added, “This claim was dubious; the President has unsuccessfully sought a billion dollars in government funding. Yet it was also unfiltered Trump, a Truth Social post in the guise of a legal document, and it was met with predictable failure. But although the document was submitted to Richard Leon, the U.S. district judge who had issued the injunction, Blanche was targeting a different audience of one.”...
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Blanch the blanch Blanche.
Trump’s children bought their Albanian resort from an alleged mob-linked figure — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Trump, are embroiled in a fierce controversy over their planned resort in Albania. Locals previously claimed that it will irreversibly destroy the area’s beloved wildlife and increase an oligarchical presence in their country. Now they are adding another accusation — namely, that the person who sold the Trumps that land never owned it in the first place.
“The disputed property was sold by Artur Shehu, a businessman who has claimed his family's ownership dates back to the Ottoman Empire,” reported RadarOnline.com's Olivia Salamone on Sunday, citing a story from Reuters. “According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Shehu has previously been investigated by Italian authorities over alleged ties to organized crime. Italian prosecutors reportedly suspected him of drug trafficking at one point but never filed charges, citing insufficient evidence.”
Salamone added, “Albanian media have also reported that anti-corruption prosecutors are examining allegations of large-scale money laundering. Shehu has denied wrongdoing and recently insisted on television that his ownership claim to the land is ‘undisputed.’”
The Trumps themselves have not been accused of any wrongdoing regarding who initially owned the land. The protesters instead accuse them of disregarding the wishes of the public regarding ecological preservation and of planning a resort that would price out most of the locals....
Mobsters take care of mobsters.
FBI veteran calls out GOP's 'politically motivated' smears on Trump probe — Matthew Rozsa
...As conservative columnist George F. Will wrote for The Washington Post in February, the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Biden defeated Trump.
“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will said. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”
Will added, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
Because Trump has fired FBI agents who investigated his attempted coup (as well as other Trump-related scandals), Feinberg recently created the FBI Support Network to provide assistance to those who need it.
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The bitterness of a loser who has no ability to process losing.
It’s the First Ticker-Tape Parade Ever for the Knicks — Here’s Why — Katie Honan
The New York Knicks pulled off another victory in San Antonio on Saturday, outscoring the Spurs in the final minutes of the game to win their first championship since 1973, to the elation of fans across the city.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced soon after the win that a ticket-tape parade will be held Thursday, June 18. It’s expected to be one of the city’s largest parades.
But despite winning championships in 1970 and 1973, it will be the first parade for the Knicks – the fault of a former mayor.
“The Knicks have never had a ticker-tape parade,” Kenneth Cobb, deputy commissioner at the city’s Department of Records and Information Services, told The City Reporter.
Then-Mayor John Lindsay had “discontinued the ticker-tape parade celebration in favor of more informal receptions,” during his second term in the ‘70s, Cobb said.
Instead of being feted up the Canyon of Heroes after their 1973 win, Willis Reed, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, Bill Bradley and the rest of the players received diamond jubilee medallions marking the 75th anniversary of the city’s consolidation in 1898, according to a post from the city’s former archivist.
Police and other officials didn’t expect a big crowd at City Hall Plaza, due to the dreary weather, according to the New York Times. But more than 2,000 fans – mostly high school and college students – flooded the space in front of City Hall, threatening to take over the stand for honorees.
“This has got to be the most enthusiastic crowd I’ve ever seen,” an officer told the Times.
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I remember. I was there in '73.
Celebrity critics tear apart Trump as the president turns 80 — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump is planning on celebrating his 80th birthday on Sunday — and that is bringing out a lot of snark, according to The Guardian.
"Hey Donald, You locked me out for insulting you on Twitter back in 2014 when it was still Twitter," British comedian Dom Joly told the publication, referring to how he had been denied access to the US because of his social media posts. "I was right then and I’m right now: you’re a narcissistic, lying fraud who has somehow convinced a large number of people that you give a flying f---- about them when the only thing you actually care about is yourself. Enjoy your birthday while the world burns."...
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May it mark the beginning of his end!
Scott Jennings Thinks Laws Are For Little People — Heather
He sure doesn't think they should apply to Trump during this little tirade on CNN's NewsNight this Friday.
PHILLIP: How about: Congress established the Kennedy Center as a memorial for John F. Kennedy, and it is illegal for him to slap his name on it? That is why people are upset about it.
JENNINGS: Look, here's the deal. He took an interest in this.
PHILLIP: But what about the law, Scott?
And what is it that Democrats do for fun on a Friday night? These haters stand out on the street screeching about a name!?
I guess laws are just for little people, right Scott?
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Like Trump, he thinks ignoring the law and taking what one wants without regard to our law is not for people with power. I say POWER TO THE PEOPLE! Lincoln said it: "...government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Choke on that, Scott, you piece of mule dung!
MAGA Police Chief Arrested On Child Sex Charges
West Palm Beach’s CBS affiliate reports:
Bethel, Ohio, Police Chief Chad Essert was arrested in Florida on Thursday after a Clermont County grand jury indicted him on 70 felony sex-related charges involving allegations from more than 15 years ago, authorities said. Essert, 44, of Blanchester, was taken into custody without incident at 7:06 p.m. June 11 by the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. He was transported to the Pinellas County Jail, where he remained incarcerated while awaiting extradition back to Clermont County.
The indictment includes 56 counts of sexual battery and 14 counts of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor. All 70 charges are third-degree felonies. If convicted on all counts, Essert could face a maximum sentence of 280 years in prison. Authorities said the alleged offenses occurred between 2005 and 2010, when Essert was an instructor with the Young Marines and a teacher at Scarlet Oaks in Sharonville. The victim was a student of Essert’s during that period, according to investigators.
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Another one bites the dust! This time a cop!
Still no sign of drag queens, you fucking morons!
Algae Now Covers Lincoln Reflecting Pool [VIDEO]
Yahoo News reports:
Green algae and other organic material have returned to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, just days after the Trump administration wrapped its roughly $14 million renovation of the monument.
Photographers and reporters from multiple news outlets saw the buildup across the pool throughout this week. An algae spot near the World War II Memorial reportedly expanded between Wednesday and Thursday amid wet and warm weather, the Washington Post reports.
President Donald Trump repeatedly insisted his project would clean up the pool, which he said past predecessors left in a “disgusting” state. The president’s algae issue this time around is the latest source of controversy over the pool project.
Read the full article. Prominent cultist and former NRA TV host Grant Stinchfield is claiming that Democrats have sabotaged the pool. Yes, really.
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All the dumb shits are shitting all overthemselves about this. They deserve it!
WH Won’t Say When Kennedy Center Tarp Comes Off
The New York Times reports:
About 150 people had gathered in front of the building under a blazing sun, having heard that the center had until noon to certify that President Trump’s name had indeed been removed from the facade, as a federal court had ordered.
The center filed the certification with the court before the deadline, but visitors looking to confirm the results with their own eyes were out of luck: The marble front remained shrouded in white- and blue-striped tarps, with no clear answer on when they would be removed.
“I was hoping for a reveal, honestly,” said Katy Bigge, a student at Rutgers University who was visiting Washington with her parents. Her father, Philip Bigge, was squatting on the ground, peering through a crack between the tarp and the building’s front to try to make certain that Mr. Trump’s name was gone. He could not be sure, but he thought he had detected that the letters were missing.
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Trump is such a vindictive criminal coward!
IT IS COMING DOWN, YOU STUPID IDIOT CREEPY CON MAN!
TRUMP FINISHES CEASE FIRE AGREEMENT WITH THE AYATOLLAH ! ! !
President Trump surrenders his rectum to the regional superpower the way he likes it – hard and fast – to bring peace to the Middle East.
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I see what he did there!
DOJ To Judge: Trump’s Name Is Off Kennedy Center
ABC News reports:
The Justice Department filed a certification in federal court one hour before a judge’s Saturday noon deadline that said President Donald Trump’s name has been “removed” from “all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds.” The Trump administration had made a last-minute request to ask the court to step in and block the removal of Trump’s name ahead of a deadline of midnight Friday.
The declaration from Kennedy Center executive director Matt Floca stated that in addition to removing Trump’s name from the signage, the president’s name was removed from “employees’ email signatures, employees’ email communications, letterhead, brochures, promotional materials, press releases, signs, [and] contracts.” Trump’s name has already been removed from the Kennedy Center’s website and YouTube page.
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It has? You trust him? Or have they just curtained it out of sight for now?
Doctors Inject Human Subjects With First Vaccine Designed by AI — Frank Landymore
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have used a machine learning model to invent a new and wholly novel form of vaccine that could protect against an entire family of human coronaviruses, and even animal variants that are yet to jump over.
An initial human trial has already been completed, the results of which were published in the Journal of Infection, making it the first AI-designed vaccine to be tested in humans. The potential is dazzling: it could future-proof us against deadly virus mutations before they even occur.
“This is about making vaccines that protect us, not just from today’s viruses, but protect us from what can cause the next outbreak or disease,” study coauthor Jonathan Heeney, a Cambridge researcher, told BBC News. “This is a fundamental shift in how we prepare for pandemics.”
A traditional vaccine trains our immune system to tackle a specific virus. But these vaccines have to be constantly updated as a virus mutates over time, putting doctors on the back foot. That’s why you get new shots every flu season, and why we’re still getting new COVID-19 boosters.
AI-assisted vaccines could be a game changer. Machine learning models can scan virtually the entire corpus of genetic data collected on thousands of related viruses across the world and predict what parts of the virus are most likely to stay the same as the virus evolves, according to an expert’s analysis in The Conversation. If a vaccine focuses on these immutable virus components, it in theory could allow a vaccine to protect against an entire family of viruses — and future mutations of them, too.
And that’s that the researchers did. In the study, the Cambridge scientists focused on the sarbecovirus family, which contains both SARS and COVID, as well as strains of animal coronaviruses. After siccing their AI model on the viruses, it identified the immutable virus components, and from there, the humans narrowed down which ones were the best through careful in vivo experimentation. This allowed them to create a “super-antigen” that formed the key ingredient of the vaccine.
The results of the human trial are promising, but not definitive. It showed that the AI vaccine successfully activated the immune system to produce virus-fighting antibodies. And it was “well tolerated at all four doses with no significant safety concerns elicited,” the researchers reported in the study....
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RFK, Jr. will put a stop to this.
Visa Officially Allowing AI Agents to Go Ham With Your Credit Card — Frank Landymore
Throw caution to the wind and forget your retirement plans. The future is now, baby, and we’re letting AI agents go ham with our credit cards.
On Wednesday, the payment titan Visa announced that it’s integrating its payment network into ChatGPT, allowing the AI chatbot to buy stuff on your behalf, The Associated Press reports.
We don’t just mean putting stuff in the cart for you: with this system in place, an AI will actually be finalizing the order with your Visa card.
It’s a clear victory for AI companies, which have been pushing AI-powered shopping experiences on customers for over a year. The tech is already widely used for product recommendations and financial advice, but with the rise of AI agents, the likes of OpenAI have been touting the autonomous models’ ability to handle the entire shopping process, from picking the actual product to handling shipping details, all from a prompt.
Until now, however, few vendors accepted orders placed through ChatGPT, requiring a human to manually okay them instead. The idea seemed to run into some serious headwinds when OpenAI’s Instant Checkout feature, which allowed you to place an order inside the chatbot interface, was discontinued earlier this year.
But the new collaboration makes Instant Checkout seem quaint in comparison. Illustrating its potential, Visa chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell said a customer could ask the AI for a pair of wireless headphones under $150, and then the chatbot would find a pair that meets those criteria and buy it for you.
“I think we’re generally at a place where most people are very comfortable with the shopping aspects of it and have discovered this as a superior discovery experience,” Forestell told the AP in an interview. But he acknowledged that going from an AI recommending products to one outright buying them for you “requires a whole different level of trust.”...
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Really? We're comfortable with chatbots accessing our credit card info? Zat so? Speak for yourself, Mr. Company Man. Reading the next article might cnange your mind.
Autonomous Robots Confirmed to Have Killed Human Soldiers — Joe Wilkins
Humanity has officially passed a grim milestone: the first confirmed death at the hands of a fully-autonomous robot weapon.
In a remarkable interview with the New Scientist, a senior figure involved in the Ukrainian defence industry admitted that a fully autonomous drone deployed to the front lines of the Russo-Ukranian war has claimed human lives.
The event has been kept under wraps for two years, Ukrainian drone maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy said. The device itself was a quadcopter drone designed to zip to the front line, loiter around a perimeter for roughly 10 minutes, then launch into “terminator mode.” This mode, the Ukranian drone expert explained, involves the use of an unidentified AI model to automatically seek out and attack human targets.
During the operation in question — which Kokhanovskyy likened to a “test” — the quadcopter was let loose by Ukranian soldiers, where it identified and ultimately attacked “a couple of [Russian] soldiers” and “one truck.” The attack was confirmed afterward, by a human-piloted drone sent to scan the impact-zone.
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead — everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” Kokhanovskyy told NewSci. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… everything it sees will be killed.”
While this marks the first known strike of its kind, it’s fair to say the world’s militaries have been inching toward this for a while. The Israeli Defence Forces, for example, have long deployed loitering suicide drones to hover over various demarcation zones across Palestine, though it’s always been claimed that these drones relied on human operators to ultimately pull the trigger....
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A much better use than shooting movies, right?
Ex-prosecutor says Trump’s 'mob boss' world is about to spiral — Adam Lynch
Former prosecutor Barbara McQuade knows mob tactics, and she says she sees the mob in countless aspects of President Donald Trump’s practices.
“From 2010 to 2017 she served as the US attorney for the eastern district of Michigan. She has prosecuted high-profile corruption cases, including that of the former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, as well as the ‘underwear bomber’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and the Volkswagen emissions scandal,” reports the Guardian. “Now she turns her prosecutorial gaze on the occupant of the White House and makes the case that Trump governs like a mob boss.”
“He uses his power to try to control others, especially would-be critics,” said McQuade, speaking to the Guardian while sitting outside Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizza restaurant targeted in 2016 on the baseless conspiracy theory that it was harboring children as part of a Democratic-led child sex-trafficking ring. “He uses any leverage he can get, inflicting pain to try to coerce them to come to the table to negotiate their own punishment. He’s done it with law firms and the media and universities and even foreign allies with tariffs.”
She cites the president’s recent machinations in Michigan politics as example: “He has threatened to hold up the opening of the Gordie Howe bridge between Detroit and Canada and there’s an owner of a private span next to it who made a million-dollar donation to the MAGA SuperPac at around the same time."
McQuade, the author of The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government, also points to Trump’s pardons for January 6 rioters and political donors, his acceptance of a $400 million plane from Qatar and his lockstep with tech billionaires seeking favorable merger regulations in violation of the constitutional emoluments clause.
Trump uses both carrots and sticks to extort compliance, she said, and he get furious when the carrots don’t deliver....
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Crime doesn't pay, Don.
Devastation: Economist uncovers searing truth about the trillionaire threat to democracy — Adam Lynch
Economist Justin Wolfers delivered a searing shock to the hosts of MS NOW’s “The Weekend” on Saturday. And his news carried an unnerving warning to the state of the nation’s vulnerable democracy.
Government statistics released this week show the annual inflation rate hit 4.2 percent in May — the highest in three years — while the latest YouGov poll shows almost 60 percent of Americans say the economy is getting worse.
But this isn’t the extent of the pain the vast majority of the nation is suffering. While it is aching, it is losing power too.
Newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk invested more money than most Americans even dream of in President Donald Trump’s re-election effort. But his new trillionaire status means his investment was even more effortless than before.
“I'm not going to start with Musk being worth a trillion. I'm going to go back to 2024, when he invested $250 million in the American election,” said Wolfers, professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. “That was almost certainly enough to win Donald Trump the election. Trump winning margin across the three swing states was only 230,000 votes, so you needed to switch 115,000 voters. … Even if he was so inefficient, it cost $1,000 per vote switch, Musk's money won the election for Donald Trump.”.
But that was just the start of it, assured Wolfers.
“That’s Scary Fact No. 1: we've already got an oligarch who put a billionaire in charge of our country. Let me blow you away with Scary Fact No. 2,” Wolfers went on. “This is where you need to understand the difference between $1 trillion — that’s what the bloke’s got — and $250 million, which is what he spent.”
“That’s not 1 percent of his wealth,” continued Wolfers. “It's not 0.1 percent of his wealth. It's 0.025 percent of his wealth. Musk bought one American election, and has enough money left over to buy another 3,999 elections.”...
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The French knew how to handle the problem during their revolution. We must restore the gulliotine to its proper purpose and place in history!
The nation is already building 'antibodies' to Trump’s corruption. — Adam Lynch
At the age of 80, President Donald Trump has been plodding around on American dirt for more than 30 percent of the nation’s entire 250-year lifespan.
That is no small number, and critics say his advanced years have been bearing down on him as he prepares to celebrate his 80th birthday at taxpayer’s expense.
“I don’t think it’s a great idea for Donald Trump to be reminding everyone that he’s 80 years old at this moment, when he shows various signs of faltering or saying very odd things,” said New York Times columnist E.J. Dionne on the paper’s Saturday morning “Opinions” podcast, while decrying Trump’s hijacking of the 250 celebration and imposing a UFC fighting ring upon the celebration.
“[But that’s] the only sporting event that Donald Trump could go to these days, and not get booed at,” said columnist Peter Wehner, referring to Trump’s raspberry-filled greeting at the recent NBA finals game before falling asleep. “If you saw him at Madison Square Garden … earlier this week, it was just a cascade of boos, and that’s happened elsewhere.”
Contributor Robert Siegel also noted Trump’s requirement for military persons invited to 250 Celebration “to meet current waist-to-height ratio and physical fitness standards. So, the crowd should look good.”
“Yeah, well, I guess there’ll be an exception for the president,” Wehner quipped.
Beyond Trump’s waning health, however, was the moral stain he will leave inevitably leave on the White House, which all agreed will require heavy elbow grease to remove, particularly since Trump “makes Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout,” according to Wehner.
“He’s easily the most corrupt president in American history, and one of the most corrupt political figures in American history,” Wehner said, while adding that the nation appears to be moving into a new era that values ethics — likely spurred by Trump’s extreme absence of them.
“Sometimes viruses create their own antibodies, and I think in the life of an individual, just like in the life of a country, you begin to take for granted certain virtues, certain qualities, and then, when they’re stripped away from you, you realize why they mattered after all,” Wehner said. “And I do think that this sort of stripping of the public square — the immorality, the depravity, the cruelty, the antipathy, all of those things — that takes a toll. And I would say that this year, more than at any moment in the last 10 years, I’m beginning to see something else. I think despondency is giving way to people who are energized, and it’s focusing itself on the repair.”...
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The virus will still be with us long after the cause of our disease is gone.
Court critic drops bomb: Alito 'doesn’t care' that he's flagrantly partisan — Adam Lynch
Pamela Carlin, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery professor of Public Interest Law and a founder and co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law school, has argued 10 cases before the Supreme Court. And during that time, she’s come to an assessment about Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: the man is a partisan hack — and he makes no bones about it.
They don’t care if they make the court “look nakedly, openly political,” said Carlin speaking on Slate’s Amicus podcast with host Dalia Lithwick.
“They have just decided they have the power right now to undo the second Reconstruction, and they’re happy to do that,” said Carlin. “And they don’t care that it’s obvious that that aligns with a particular wing of the Republican Party … When you now have a Republican Party, especially in the south, that has no interest whatsoever in attracting Black votes. … [I]t’s a party that is not interested in being a multiracial, multiethnic party.”
Carlin took particular issue with the court’s recent move to “eviscerate the Voting Rights act of 1965,” which is a statute that President Johnson called the “most monumental act in the history of American freedom” when he signed it and which Carlin said President Ronald Reagan referred to as “a crown jewel” when he signed the reauthorization of the act in 1982.
Consider the court’s recent 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, wherein the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map drawn to include a second majority-Black district. The ruling found that intentionally creating districts to satisfy Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
But that’s the character of someone like Alito, said Carlin.
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The POTUS swine for the Land of the Happy Negro.
Fox Wails After SF Giants Go All-Out For Pride Night
Zack Dean writes for Fox’s sports site Outkick:
We’re nearly at the halfway point of June, which means we’re halfway through Pride month. Yeah, it’s Pride month. Haven’t you heard?! It’s only been all over Major League Baseball these past few weeks. Some teams celebrated the month with a typical PR social media post. Others, like the Dodgers, celebrated it by wearing rainbow hats last weekend. Others, like the Texas Rangers, didn’t acknowledge it at all and instead are having a “Faith and Family Night” next week.
And that brings us to the San Francisco Giants, which held their obligatory Pride Night on Friday by having 10 gay couples renew their vows in a pregame ceremony that included having a drag queen along the first base line. Renewing wedding vows on the field before a baseball game is a new level of virtue-signaling that I didn’t think existed. Shame on me. I should’ve known better. Never doubt the left! Never let your guard down with them. You give ’em an inch, and they’ll take a mile!
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America celebrates freedom! Don't forget the score on chaild rapists motherfucker: Drag Queens -0, Xianist molesters -Infinity! LMAO at the inscure incel retards!
Burgum Blames Democrats For High Gas Prices [VIDEO]
“I have to smile every time I see on the screen the national average for gasoline, because it’s about like if a weather reporter said, Here’s the temperature in America tomorrow. It’s gonna be 46 degrees.’ I mean, it’s not a criticism of Fox, but the price of gasoline varies across our whole country, largely right now by state policy and state taxes, not by the underlying fundamentals.
“The underlying fundamentals, like you opened with, we’re producing and exporting more oil than we ever have, producing more natural gas than we ever have.
“We are an abundant nation but the states that went down, about half the states that went down this path where they overrotated towards ‘we’re going to have energy transition, we’re going to move from affordable, reliable secure American energy and we’re going to rely on intermittent, highly subsidized, weather-dependent sources of energy,’ they’ve got substantially higher energy prices than the states that don’t.
“And so, I think that we’re going to see prices continue to drop across the country but they’re going to drop unevenly because some states — I mean, for example, California. California was importing, two months ago, 60% of their oil from foreign countries. California was dependent on oil coming from the Strait of Hormuz. No other state, other than Hawaii, had that condition.
“That was self-inflicted, and with California shutting down refineries — they used to have 40 refineries. They’re heading towards having six. Texas has 38 refineries.
“Who’s got the most number of internal combustion machines? California. They are going to have high gas prices. You can thank Gavin Newsom for that and their state legislature for the policies they put in. That has nothing to do with the Strait of Hormuz.” – Doug Burgum, on Fox News.
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Extremely weak tea from a low IQ person Trump shill. The oil corporations are the villians and he knows it. His rhetoric is a pile of horseshit covering the felon Trump's failure.
Key West Cancels Arch Due To DeSantis’s DEI Law
The Key West Business Guild writes:
The City Attorney has now confirmed what many feared and sadly what we anticipated: Florida’s new Senate Bill 1134 effectively ended the Rainbow Arch project before it could even begin.
According to the City’s legal opinion, the Rainbow Art project cannot lawfully proceed because its purpose was to celebrate diversity, inclusion, and the freedom of LGBTQ+ people to live openly and authentically.
The attorney concluded that even if the arch had been completed before the law takes effect on January 1, 2027, it would still be subject to the statute because it would require ongoing City ownership, maintenance, and support.
Let’s be clear about what this means. The Rainbow Art project was not canceled because of a lack of community support. It was not canceled due to a lack of funding. It was not canceled because the project was flawed. It was canceled because a new state law targets initiatives associated with diversity, equity, inclusion, and LGBTQ+ visibility.
For years, the Rainbow Crosswalk and the proposed Rainbow Arch Project represented something bigger than paint, steel, or public art. They were symbols that told LGBTQ+ residents, visitors, families, and young people that they belong here. That they are welcome here. That they are part of the fabric of our community.
The removal of the Rainbow Crosswalk and the cancellation of the Rainbow Art project send a message. But so does our response. No law can erase the people these symbols represented.
No statute can eliminate the diversity that exists in our community. And no political movement can change the fact that LGBTQ+ people have always been here, will continue to be here, and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.
"Today's Republican Party must be destroyed. Every. Single. Republican must be voted out of office.
The future of America and American democracy is at stake." — another_steve (comments)
"Money has become the new god in Key West it’s not as gay as it used to be even wealthy gays can’t afford 5 million dollar real estate and if they can where do the common people live or rent." — Dwight Williamson (comments)
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Your law is illegal as well as retarded and inhuman, you Nazi shitstains. It's unconstitutional as all hell.
Diversity is America and you can't live with it because you have the perverted idea you are better than another human.
Kentucky Pastor Gets 10 Years On Child Porn Charges
The Daily Independent reports:
The Greenup County Circuit Court sentenced a former pastor to 10 years in jail on child pornography charges Thursday. Steven Gartin, 46, of Flatwoods, pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of matter portraying a sexual performance by a minor under 12 and two counts of the same involving a minor between 12 and 18.
The court sentenced Gartin to 10 years on each count of the crime involving a minor under 12 and five years apiece on the other two counts. The sentences will run concurrently for a total of 10 years.
According to Kentucky State Police, Gartin told KSP he downloaded and possessed child sexual abuse material on his personal computer and iPad. Gartin was listed as the senior pastor at Freedom Hall Tabernacle, a non-denominational church in South Shore.
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Another misinformed Paulinist bites the dust.
Anti-Vax J6 Rioter Makes Ballot To Replace Donalds
Florida Politics reports:
With U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds running for Governor, Florida’s 19th Congressional District will host the most crowded field of congressional candidates in the state.
With the qualification deadline passed, the Republican Primary field includes two former Congressmen who previously represented other states: Madison Cawthorn and Chris Collins. Major self-funders include Jim Oberweis, a dairy farm owner and former Illinois lawmaker, and Jim Schwartzel, president of Sun Broadcasting.
But others with high profiles include author and health activist Catalina Lauf and former congressional staffer Ola Hawatmeh. Veteran Mike Pedersen also qualified, as did late entries Greg “Tex” Bukowski, a Sarasota County Charter Review Board member, and Linda Sawyer, a former researcher at the NIH. Pardoned Jan. 6 insurrectionist John Strand also has a place on the GOP Primary ballot.
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Criminals and traitors should not be permiited to run for office in our country. Against being woke? This guy looks like he's never had any sleep in hi pitiful life.
Just WTF was he doing in our Captiol on Jan. 6? Taking a fucking tour? Bullshit liar!
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna: I’m Introducing Resolution To “Void The Fraudulent Impeachment Of President Trump”
Spectrum News reports:
The White House on Friday commended reported efforts aimed at voiding President Donald Trump’s first-term impeachments. “Trump-deranged Democrats have spent years launching phony attacks against the President and weaponizing the government against him,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Spectrum News. “It’s no surprise that sane individuals are recognizing these sham efforts and are interested in undoing those shameful actions.”
A resolution to void Trump’s two previous impeachments would likely be symbolic as constitutional scholars largely contend that impeachments cannot be expunged, but Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, who served as part of Trump’s defense team in his first impeachment trial in the upper chamber, told The Wall Street Journal that the legality is unclear.
Efforts to expunge Trump’s impeachments have been floated in the past. In 2023, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Rep. Elise Stefanik, R- N.Y., proposed a resolution, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., introduced his own measure in April. Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida said Friday on social media she planned to put forth her own resolution.
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If she uses any more of that Botox in her forehead and those fat liips they will all expode and make a worse mess of her former looks.
"You're not getting younger now, even though you'll try somehow..." — Leave It To Me, Men of Extinction. ROTFLMAO!
This Is Your Brain On Trump: Rep. Randy Fine's Fox Business Meltdown -- John Amato
Rep. Fine's words are frightening.
Rep. Randy Fine joined Fox Business to promote Trump's claim that an Iran peace deal is near, and whined that not enough people love his Dear Leader.
This reminded me of the old anti-drug commercial using an egg to describe what happens to your brain on drugs.
Trump caused the problem and now can't rectify it, but Rep. Fine has faith.
FINE: But I also trust Donald Trump, and I know if anyone can get this done, it is him.
I place my faith in him, and I know this is an incredibly difficult thing, and the only thing I wish is that people would support the president more as he's trying to do something that will protect us all, because Iran having a nuclear weapon would be catastrophic to the United States.
And I just wish the Democrats understood that and would support the president as he's fighting for all of us.
Trump is fighting only for the wealth class and his elitist friends. If he supported the actual country, he would have never signed off on a tax cut for the rich bill. Trump has put most of the country's healthcare in jeopardy, while his failed policies are strangling the economy to a point where people can't buy groceries....
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Being an overweight, brainless fascist is no way to go through life.
Geography Is HARD: Trump Says Maine Lobsters Come From Japan — John Amato
This is a deteriorating brain on narcissism.
During a presser in the White House on Thursday to announce he was calling off the strikes on Iran, Trump disassembled into waxing that fishermen love him, and then devolved into claiming "you have to go to Japan to get a Maine lobster."...
Even if he is trying, in some way, to attack Canada, his words make no sense.
Maine's Department of Marine Resources has stated that "they have no issues getting Maine lobster from Maine fishermen. "Over the last 20 years, Maine fishermen have caught between 75 million and 130 million pounds of lobster each year, bringing in roughly $430 million a year. Lobster is Maine's second largest export."...
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What used to be brains now leak out of his bullet ridden ear.
REPORT: Airline Pilot “Nearly Blinded” By WH Lights
The Meidas Touch reports:
A commercial airline pilot that spoke to MeidasTouch this evening has filed aviation safety reports after powerful lighting used during the construction and testing of the UFC octagon on the White House grounds allegedly shone directly into their cockpit during a nighttime approach into Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The pilot, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the incident, was flying into Reagan National on a recent flight when aircraft on approach encountered intense white light associated with the UFC event held on the White House South Lawn.
According to the pilot, the lights illuminated the cockpit during the final stages of landing, a critical phase of flight when pilots rely heavily on visual references. The pilot described the incident as “10 times worse than any laser illumination event” the pilot ever experienced.
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The United States has malignant Trump cancer.
US Solar Power Generation Exceeds Coal For First Time
ABC News reports:
The amount of solar power generated in the U.S. is continuing to grow despite efforts from the Trump administration to slow down the renewable energy sector, according to two reports released this week.
The U.S. has generated more power from solar compared to coal for the first time, according to a report by Ember, a think tank focused on the clean energy transition. In May 2026, solar supplied 12.8% of U.S. electricity, while coal supplied 12.2%, according to an analysis of official monthly and preliminary hourly generation data.
A record 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) of solar energy was generated in May 2026, exceeding the output from May 2025 by 17%, the think tank found. The record could be broken again in the upcoming summer months, as solar output typically peaks in June and July.
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But, but...Dear leader wants beautiful coal back again. Beautiful, polluting, black-lung coal!
GOP has a new plan to kill off Medicare and Social Security — Heather Digby Parton
Trump has repeatedly vowed to defend these landmark safety-net programs. It was another lie.
...Asking wealtheir people to pay payroll taxes on wages above $185,000 would fund the system long into the future. Of course, that’s the last thing Republicans want.
...Maybe we could think about reversing some of those tax cuts for billionaires Johnson and Trump love so much. Or we could put a stop to Trump’s foreign adventures, which are costing the taxpayers untold billions. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted to approve Trump’s $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget last week, and Congress has appropriated $518 billion over the last year for the Department of Homeland Security to deport working people who are paying into Social Security with no prospect of ever collecting benefits. Maybe they could think about dialing back some of this reckless spending on wars and police actions that nobody wants and are making everyone poorer and less secure.
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But we have a plan to end Nazi Republicans
The motherfuckers are spending $60 million on a shitshow fight. They are the ones causing the debt to be so high with Trump's vanity scams! Wake up, asswipes!
Stop putting whatever Trump says about Iran in the headlines — Dan Froomkin
Ever since he intemperately attacked Iran over three months ago, Donald Trump’s every prognostication about the war has commanded major news headlines.
Whether he is declaring victory, threatening annihilation, or insisting that a peace deal is two or three days away — all of which he has done, in succession, many times now — his words are splashed across the top of news pages everywhere.
But pretty much every time, those words have turned out to be meaningless. So those headlines served to deceive the public rather than inform it.
The headlines were particularly head-snapping today. In the morning, they were all “Trump says US will hit Iran ‘very hard,’ take control of energy infrastructure.” But by early afternoon, they were all “Trump cancels US strikes in Iran and suggests agreement is close.”
Whether it was another example of “Trump Always Chickens Out,” or another bout of wishful thinking, or just plain brain rot, we don’t yet know.
But it should be clearer than ever to newsroom leaders that Trump says whatever he feels like saying, with little or no connection to reality or to what comes next.
So it’s not really news anymore. In fact, it’s bullshit.
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Stop Trump is all that needs to be said.
'Perfect metaphor': Texas GOP's elephant urine debacle sparks mockery — and anger — Matthew Chapman
The Texas Republican Party created a viral moment in all the wrong ways at their convention when they brought a live elephant out to promote Gov. Greg Abbott's re-election campaign — and it began to urinate loudly and dramatically on the floor.
The incident prompted a predictable round of mockery from commenters on social media.
"Governor Abbott closed out his speech at the Texas GOP convention with a live elephant. It then peed on the floor as it left the room. The perfect metaphor for the Texas Republican Party," posted the official account for the Texas Democratic Party.
"The elephant turned the entire convention into a gender neutral Bathroom," wrote the "Organizermemes" account.
"Elephants are smart. Not sure what to tell you," wrote conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller.
Not everyone had a witty quip to offer, though. Many others, including some conservatives, were angry about the way the GOP was mistreating the elephant....
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Too bad it didn't shit all over the fascists.
World Cup watchers loudly boo US during National Anthem — Bennito L. Kelty
World Cup audiences showed their anger with the United States by booing renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner.
Canadian spectators at a watch party jeered nonstop during the U.S. National Anthem at the opening of the U.S. versus Paraguay match in Los Angeles, according to a social media video.
Those boos followed heckling and hissing as the U.S. flag came out during the opening ceremony of the Canada versus Bosnia match in Toronto earlier in the day, per more video.
Trump was notably booed during his appearance at Madison Square Garden when the Knicks played the Spurs during Game 3 of the NBA Finals....
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What did you expect? Cheers for a rogue nation?
Trump hit with stinging order for twisting national park exhibits into 'half-truths' — Matthew Chapman
A federal judge in Massachusetts scorched President Donald Trump's Interior Department on Friday for orders to remove all exhibits pertaining to race, sexuality, and climate from national parks — and issued an order to reverse all of it.
U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, went into painstaking detail about the significance of the exhibits being torn down under the so-called "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" order by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
"The National Park system ... serves as a cornerstone of public learning, providing rich and informative signs, exhibits, and interpretive waysides on topics ranging from civil rights to environmentalism," wrote Kelley, citing "the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harpers Ferry ... the genesis of the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument ... [and] the retreating ice of Glacier National Park."
The park system, she continued, is sometimes called “America’s largest classroom,” and to that end, "the Government’s stewardship of these park sites ... carries a responsibility to present history in full rather than in favored fragments."
Unfortunately, she continued, "Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this Administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at National Parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths."
Similar policies have led to the Trump administration's removal of slavery exhibits from the original Presidents House in Philadelphia, which was also ordered illegal by a court....
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The Trump Ministry of Truth hits a snag. 2 + 2 does no equal 5.
'60 Minutes' rocked by another exit as 34-year veteran left 'exasperated' by Bari Weiss — Bennito L. Kelty
A veteran "60 Minutes" producer is bolting after clashing with CBS News boss Bari Weiss over a "white genocide" story, per a new report.
Michael Gavshon worked alongside correspondent Anderson Cooper on a story that debunked Trump's claim of "white genocide" in South Africa, which left him exasperated, according to an exclusive by The New York Post. Gavshon announced that he'll leave the show at the end of June, per a memo obtained by the Post.
"The old chestnut, I have stood on the shoulders of giants, couldn't be more true," Gavshon wrote in the memo. He noted that he spent 34 years at "60 Minutes" and 41 years at CBS News.
The story drew heavy scrutiny from Weiss, who is also blamed for firing correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, executive editor Draggan Mihailovich, veteran producer Guy Campanile, and digital operations chief Matthew Polevoy, the Post reported.
Veteran correspondent Scott Pelley was also fired by "60 Minutes" executive producer Nick Bilton after confronting him and saying that Weiss is "murdering" the show.
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The Caustic Bitch Syndicate is showing us it's a Nazi racist organiztion supporting the felon Trump.
DOJ Sues Virginia For Banning Masks On ICE’s Thugs
ABC News reports:
The Trump administration is suing Virginia over new state laws surrounding immigration enforcement, including one that bans U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from wearing masks. Following this most recent General Assembly session, Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) signed multiple pieces of legislation that put restrictions on immigration enforcement activities in Virginia.
This includes Senate Bill 352 and House Bill 1482, which prohibit any law enforcement officer — including ICE agents — from wearing a facial covering while carrying out their official duties, with some exceptions. Violations could result in dismissal, demotion, suspension, transfer or decertification. The officer will also be guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor if they do not display required identification.
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Tell Trump's Department Of Jackasses to go fuck themselves all the way off!!
Paxton Threatens To Sue Big 12 For $200 Million Over Texas Tech QB Sanctioned For Betting On His Games
Lubbock’s ABC affiliate reports:
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton warned the Big 12 Conference on Thursday that the conference could face major legal liability if it moves to punish Texas Tech for continuing to support QB Brendan Sorsby amid his eligibility fight with the NCAA.
Paxton’s office sent a formal letter to Big 12 officials as conference leadership prepared to discuss possible action following a judge’s ruling this week in Lubbock that temporarily blocked the NCAA’s permanent ban on Sorsby. He warned the conference and its member schools could be exposed to more than $200 million in potential damages, including lost football revenue, harm to donations and recruiting, and attorneys’ fees.
Sorsby received a temporary injunction Monday that restored his eligibility while his legal challenge proceeds. He has acknowledged placing thousands of bets totaling more than $90,000 over four years from 2022-26, including dozens of wagers on Indiana football games in 2022 while he was a reserve player for the Hoosiers.
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So the possibility of a player betting on his team to lose and then doing everything he can to throw the game so he can defraud the public to win his bet is perfectly alright with this candidate for Senate?
Sounds like a setup for fraud to me.
Texas Lt Gov Declares That Talarico Is Going To Hell
The Texas Tribune reports:
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick on Friday said Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate Rep. James Talarico will “go to hell” for his interpretations of the Bible, as Talarico has made his Christian faith a cornerstone of his campaign.
Speaking at the Republican Party of Texas’ convention in Houston, Patrick accused Talarico, an Austin state representative, of introducing faith into the contentious Senate race, expected to be expensive and brutal as Democrats seek to capitalize on anti-Trump sentiment to claim the minority party’s first statewide victory in more than three decades.
“It’s James Talarico who decided to bring the Bible into this election. And let me tell you, that’s not a Bible I’ve ever read. I’ve never seen so much blasphemy from anyone running for office,” Patrick said to an uproar of applause. “Let me tell you what, I’m going to pray for that guy, because when he loses the Senate race, if he campaigns against God as he’s been doing, he’s going to Hell, for sure. That’s what we’re up against. That’s the darkness. That’s the light. That’s why we must be one.”
Read the full article. Obviously, Ken Paxton will not go to hell for adulterously fucking those women, even though it’s a Top Ten no-no in the book of fables. You will recall that Dan Patrick got a sudden $5 million donation just before he presided over Paxton’s impeachment trial.
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Dan should know because we have heard that's where he's from. We hope he goes back home soon.
The Decline of the Republic Comes with a Claw — William Kristol
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: After threatening a resumption of major military action against Iran this week, Donald Trump abruptly reversed course yesterday, saying that no more strikes were necessary because negotiators had made some breakthroughs and a peace deal was now imminent. Iran, by contrast, said no deal had been made. But the state-owned news agency was reporting this morning the contours of the deal that are—shall we say—unrealistically unfavorable to Trump.
Will it happen? Who knows. One of these days, predictions of an imminent deal may end up being true. Happy Friday.
Circuses and Circuses
by William Kristol
Near the beginning of his great biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, Winston Churchill takes a few pages to sketch for his readers “the differences of feeling and outlook which separate the men and women” of his time from ours. The first difference he cites? “They gave a very high—indeed, a dominating—place in their minds to religion. It played as large a part in the life of the seventeenth century as sport does now.”
Now sports may not be quite as central for us as Churchill (perhaps a bit sardonically) suggests, but they are a big deal—as we Knicks fans would be the last to deny.
And that’s my apology for remarking this morning on this coming Sunday night’s Ultimate Fighting Championship spectacle on the South Lawn of the White House, part of the administration’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of our independence. No, the UFC event is not as important as the war in Iran, or the economy, or the 2026 elections. But I do think it’s an event that captures something about this moment in our history.
After all, it’s vulgar, it’s violent, it’s commercial, it’s grandiose, it’s tacky, and it dishonors a place once thought worthy of care and respect. In other words, it’s Donald Trump.
Our country has been better, and can be again. Join our pro-democracy community to do a better kind of politics with us.
Yesterday, the New York Times’s White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh attended a preview tour of the event site offered by the Trump administration.
They came to see the Claw.
The White House welcomed reporters and influencers from around the world onto the South Lawn for half an hour on Thursday morning to inspect the towering, claw-like superstructure that has been built there for the Ultimate Fighting Championship bout that President Trump is hosting on his 80th birthday this weekend. Jack Posobiec, the right-wing commentator best known for spreading the “Pizzagate” paranoia, stood with a White House official next to the octagonal ring down in the nexus of the claw and looked around in awe. “It’s literally Vegas,” Mr. Posobiec said excitedly. “Vegas is in D.C. now!”...
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There is a good chance for rain on this criminal parade. The only thing better would be an earthquake.
THREE Senate Races Move Toward Democrats! Shower These Candidates With Money! — Evan Hurst
The other day on Bluesky, we said this in response to the results in Maine, for any people who are not happy about what happened there:...
And we stand by that, because of course we do. Graham Platner needs to win there, because Susan Collins needs to lose. Period. (And if you’re happy about Platner, be happy!)
But oh boy, big election forecasting news from Larry Sabato and his Crystal Ball, specifically regarding some of those races we mentioned in our non-Twitter tweet.
Mary Peltola is running to beat and replace Republican Dan Sullivan in the Senate, and Sabato has moved that race from “Leans Republican” to “Toss-up.” In Alaska!
Sherrod Brown is running to beat and replace Republican Jon Husted, who was appointed to the couchfucker’s seat after he became vice president. This would put Sherrod back in the Senate. And Sabato has moved that race from “Leans Republican” to “Toss-up.” In Ohio!
And in North Carolina, the swingy swing state that looks like it might finally be completing its conversion into a blue state, Sabato has moved former governor Roy Cooper’s quest for the seat being vacated by Republican Thom Tillis from “Toss-up” to “Leans Democratic.”
The magic number here, as you know, is 51, because a 50-50 tie would still give couchfucker the tiebreaking vote. Right now, the lineup is 53-47, Republicans. If you are mathing the math, that means Dems have to net four seats. And by the logic of that non-Twitter tweet above, it would be even better if we could net like five or six. (John Fetterman is still there, and he blows a bag of cat dicks. Rendering him less powerful would be a real bonus!)
The magic number here, as you know, is 51, because a 50-50 tie would still give couchfucker the tiebreaking vote. Right now, the lineup is 53-47, Republicans. If you are mathing the math, that means Dems have to net four seats. And by the logic of that non-Twitter tweet above, it would be even better if we could net like five or six. (John Fetterman is still there, and he blows a bag of cat dicks. Rendering him less powerful would be a real bonus!)
Right now the Crystal Ball has four toss-ups, total, including the two new ones. The others are Michigan, the seat currently held by Democrat Gary Peters, where the Democratic primary hasn’t happened yet, but progressive favorite Abdul El-Sayed appears to be surging toward the nomination. He just got the coveted United Auto Workers endorsement. The other one is Maine, which you’ll note Larry did not move upon Tuesday’s results. You can read Sabato’s full analyses on those races here, but here’s a taste of what he has to say about the dynamic in Maine:
Collins may be more beatable than ever: Her own favorability is weak, and she’s only tied with Platner in her own recently released internal polling. Additionally, this being a midterm year as opposed to a presidential one also likely makes her job harder, as it is probably the case that the presidential race itself provided a release valve for those who disliked Trump to vote against him in 2020 but also split their tickets in favor of Collins. There’s no such release valve this year. But Platner’s problems may just be too much for the cross-pressured voters who have backed Collins in the past even as they vote Democratic in other races.
And the two “lean Republican” races? Iowa and Talarico in Texas.
We often are concerned during election cycles about pie-in-the-sky races where a flashy race ends up eating all the resources, even if it’s not mathematically likely to get over the finish line. This year, though? More than ever before, Donald Trump is the most hated, mocked, loathed man on the planet, he has absolutely ruined the economy, he started and the immediately lost yet another forever war in Iran, and oh by the way, everybody is still pretty disgusted by his regime’s cover-up of his best dead pedophile best friend Jeffrey Epstein’s child rape files.
Plus people really hate dictators and wannabe dictators. So there’s that.
Watching the Republican Party’s turbocharged crusade to steal voting rights ad rig elections this year, if they are that panicked, that should tell you something about what is and is not “mathematically likely.”
Support every Democratic candidate. Look up their websites, give money, volunteer, phonebank, do whatever they need.
Let’s beat the fucking shit out of these fascists.
WITH VOTES.
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We must overcome the felon's attempts to prevent us from doing so. No matter what! We must vote the bastards out!
History Will Call Them Monsters: The Politicians Who Cage Children and Called It Patriotism — Thom Hartmann
Future generations will struggle to understand how a nation that claimed to love children could deliberately subject them to fear, isolation, sickness, & despair in the name of Donald Trump & the GOP.
These people are monsters.
Louise and I know what child abuse can do to children. In our late 20s, back in 1978, we started a residential treatment facility for severely abused children and ran it for five years.
Louise’s first intake was a girl who was the daughter of her sister by her father; he’d then started in on her at age 10. Our second was a boy who came to the attention of the authorities because his older brother had been tied to a pole in the basement by his parents where he starved to death; it was the smell that provoked the neighbors to call the police.
And those weren’t the worse.
We saw kids covered with cigarette burns, the victims of rape and torture, beatings, and human trafficking.
Our job (and that of our professional staff: the program continued for another 30 years) was to help them recover their humanity, to find a meaningful sense of self, to overcome the PTSD and trauma of those early experiences; it was nothing short of herculean.
It takes years and years of intense work, and even at that these kids are scarred for life, leaving them with challenges and memories that will haunt them to their dying days....
But, hey, as monsters like Trump, Miller, Hegseth, and Vance will be the first to tell you, they have to save “western civilization” by purging America of those people whose skin is darker than your average European
Even if it does mean destroying children’s minds and lives forever.
Louise’s Daily Song: “The Monsters Among Us”
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The monsters among us must be destroyed by any means necessary.
They don't want you to know the REAL reason Social Security is in trouble — Robert Reich
But I'm going to tell you anyway
Friends,
The trustees of the Social Security fund said Tuesday that the fund will be depleted by late 2032, a year earlier than the trustees’ projection last year of 2033. If nothing is done, benefits will automatically be cut six years from now.
The common understanding is that Social Security’s shortfall is due to the huge postwar baby boom, now retiring, and to America’s increasing life expectancy. The usual recommended fix is to reduce Social Security benefits or raise the age of eligibility. As Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, warned Monday, “entitlement programs” like Social Security “have to be adjusted and fixed.” He said Republicans will introduce a plan to do that. Brace yourselves.
I used to be a Social Security trustee, and I call bullsh*t.
The baby boom can’t be blamed for Social Security’s shortfall. The Greenspan Commission, which in 1983 recommended the reforms that Congress then made — raising Social Security payroll taxes and also raising the eligibility age for collecting Social Security benefits — knew all about the baby boom and figured it into its calculations. (Early boomers like me can now start collecting full benefits at age 66; late boomers born after 1960 have to wait until they’re 67 to collect full benefits.)
Americans’ increasing life expectancy isn’t at fault, either. While wealtheir Americans are living longer, that’s not the case for lower-income Americans. The Urban Institute estimates that life expectancy in the top 20 percent of
income-earners is 91 years for people born in the 1990s, four years more than people born in the 1950s. Yet the life expectancy in the lowest 20 percent of income-earners is fewer than 80 years.
So what’s the real cause of the Social Security shortfall? What did Greenspan’s commission fail to predict? Widening inequality...
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If it wasn't for the greedy billionaires supporting their kakistocracy the problem would be easily corrected.
Vote these bastards out!
Rumors swirl that top Trump aide is next on chopping block: analysis — Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump could be considering a replacement for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an analyst said Friday.
Salon's White House columnist Brian Karem reported that while White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has been on leave, the Trump administration has been auditioning different "guest host" Cabinet members in the press room, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Oz is now being rumored to be a potential replacement for Kennedy.
"It’s unheard of for Cabinet members or the vice president to take such a lowly job," Karem wrote. "Maybe Dr. Mehmet Oz getting tasked with it is somewhat more appropriate. Of course, rumor has it that Oz became a substitute host because he’s auditioning for the Health and Human Services job currently held by Robert F. Kennedy Jr."...
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Meet the new creep. Same as the old creep.
Kennedy Center sued by National Opera over $17M of withheld funds — Tom Boggioni
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is facing another catastrophic financial blow after the Washington National Opera filed a $17 million lawsuit against the troubled institution for refusing to release funds the company claims belong to them.
According to New York Times reporting, the suit filed Thursday accuses Kennedy Center officials of withholding "endowment funds, donor gifts, and other contributions" collected for the opera's benefit since the company struck out on its own earlier this year.
"W.N.O. reluctantly files this case to preserve its future and to protect its donors and artists," lawyers for the opera said in court papers, identifying the funds as donor gifts received over years that are "critical" to its operations.
The opera's attempt at negotiation went nowhere, it said. "For months, W.N.O. repeatedly tried to address these issues with the Kennedy Center, including through written requests, requests for meetings, and meetings with Kennedy Center leadership. Those efforts were met with indifference," the suit states.
According to the Times, the opera's departure in January marked a dramatic rupture with an institution where the company had performed since 1971. Kennedy Center officials claimed at the time they decided to part ways "due to a financially challenging relationship"— but the lawsuit suggests a more sinister financial maneuver....
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What number is this on the lawsuits list against the felon Trump? And why doesn't the United States of America sue him for malpractice, grand theft, assault and homicide?
Terror as Trump official calls impending nuclear threat 'exciting times' — Nicole Charky-Chami
Experts and political commentators were stunned on Friday when a Trump official referred to a looming nuclear threat as "exciting times ahead."
Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum spoke with CNBC about the Iran war and argued that Americans would ultimately be better off for it.
"President Trump truly has set up America for an age of abundance — what we're going to see coming out the backside of this — now with the threat of having a terrorist group having a nuclear weapon and their will to use it, their desire to use it, their stated desire to use that weapon, is again gonna be a game-changer for America and exciting times ahead," Burgum said.
But the internet did not agree with his remarks.
"Love to invent incredibly unlikely threats, set off a massive war that does serious damage to U.S. interests at obscene fiscal costs to fight that incredibly unlikely threat, then declare victory on a claim that the incredibly unlikely threat now definitely won't happen," Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow of the American Immigration Council, wrote on X.
"'Exciting times'? bro that's a terrifying way to describe nuclear terrorism. This ain't a thriller movie — real people die. When did the potential end of millions of lives become something a government official calls exciting?" Qadir Khan Yousufzai, a journalist and columnist covering international security, wrote on X.
"To have such ignorant and arrogant 'leaders' is an affront to any country that considers itself civilized- let alone enlightened," progressive political commentator Helen McGinnis wrote on Bluesky....
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That would be "Butthead" Burgum!
Trump unleashes fury at 'dishonorable' Iranians as leaked deal threatens 'humiliation' — Alexander Willis<
President Donald Trump lashed out Friday following the reported leak of details on the latest deal to end the Iran war, insisting the purported details bear “no relation to the truth,” while also attacking Iranian negotiators as “very dishonorable people.”
“The terms that Iran leaked out to the Fake News have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing. What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.
“Very dishonorable people to deal with. With them, there is no such thing as dealing in good faith. AMAZING! Also, their totally rebuffed Drone attack last night against Indian Ships leaving the Hormuz Strait is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. They better get their act together, and FAST!”...
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It appears that will never happen. Trump has lost the war he started. When your opponent never surrenders you have lost. Tell me, where is the refrree who will stop the fight?
Trump threatens to snatch city if mayoral candidate wins: 'We won’t put up with it' — Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed he would take over Washington, D.C. if the mayoral candidate he doesn't want to win gets elected, according to The Washington Post.
Trump made it clear for the first time that he was opposed to democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George winning the Democratic primary next week.
"One of the two leading candidates is running a Zohran Mamdani campaign focusing on socialist policies," a reporter said. "How would you feel if she wins?"
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that he "wouldn't like it" if Lewis George wins. He also threatened that his administration “maybe would take back Washington, run it on the federal basis.”
Lewis George, who has been leading in polls and criticized the president throughout the campaign, issued this statement:
“We are not going to get ICE off our streets by fearing this president. We are not going to protect our rights or Home Rule by obeying in advance. Threatening Home Rule because you do not like how residents vote is an attack on democracy itself. The people of DC elect the mayor of DC. And they want someone who will stand up to Donald Trump.”...
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Trump is delusional every day. His racism is exposed with this. He must be removed and tried for his murders.
'At Least 37 Times': Fox's Tarlov Whacks TACO Boy For Latest Iran Deal Claim — Heather
After her cohorts on this Thursday's The Five pretended anyone can believe a word that comes out of Trump's mouth on Iran, Jessica Tarlov, once again, injected some sanity into the conversation.
After her cohorts on this Thursday's The Five pretended anyone can believe a word that comes out of Trump's mouth on Iran, Jessica Tarlov, once again, injected some sanity into the conversation.
Following more threats by Trump to hit Iran again this week and "seize Kharg Island, only to back down and say he's not going to hit them after all, and then claim that a peace deal is going to be signed soon, the right wing hosts on the show heaped praise on Trump, and were just sure that this is the time some sort of negotiation is going to take place.
Which was promptly shot down by Tarlov....
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Deluded or more Nazi lies.
Hell will freeze over before it re-opens it appears.
Tim Scott Calls Worst Inflation In 3 Years 'Good News' And Yes, He Said That Out Loud — Conover Kennard
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott tried to spin the news about high inflation under the Trump administration on Maria Bartiromo's Fox Business show. Scott started so well, correctly noting that "the trend is not going in the right direction," then he bent down and licked Trump's cankle-filled boots with a positive take on inflation....
So, less money in our pockets actually means more money in our pockets. Am I doing this right?
"We saw this last report is that inflation ticked up to 4.2%, highest in three years," Scott said. "Last month it was 3.8, the month before that was 3.3. The trend is not going in the right direction."
"But Maria, one of the things it signals is resiliency in our economy, which is in fact good news," he insisted. "Because of Donald Trump, we have more Americans with more money in their pockets because we returned to them or kept in place a $5 trillion tax cut, and your tax return is up 11%. So there's more money to be spent on household necessities."...
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This man has lost touch with reality. In fact, his Nazi Party has lost any grip on reality. There are families in America that can longer make it in this lost country they have created.
We Want More Trump Impeachments, Not Less — Susie Madrak
Trump and his minions have discussed pushing lawmakers to pass a resolution aimed at voiding his first-term impeachments.
He's such a petulant child, isn't he? There is no legal way to do this, but you can put it right up there with his gold peace prize.
Trump and his minions have discussed pushing lawmakers to pass a resolution aimed at voiding his first-term impeachments, according to people familiar with the matter. (Probably really incredulous people, who hope to embarrass him into stopping?)
The resolution would allow Trump to claim a symbolic victory on a matter that has dogged him since his first term, part of a broader effort to burnish his presidential legacy. It would have little legal significance, however, because the Constitution provides no procedure for undoing an impeachment, according to experts....
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Just give us ONE that takes!
A deeply sick and guilt-ridden man.
Rubio Compares Cage Match To 1969 Moon Landing
The Huffington Post reports:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio attempted to hype up Sunday’s UFC cage fight at the White House on Thursday but in the process made a comparison that some might call “looney” or “spacey.” Speaking to reporters, Rubio praised the event, which will honor President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, and suggested it is in keeping with the “audacious” spirit of America that has been present since its founding nearly 250 years ago.
Then, before signing a deal that will allow the use of “cage fights for diplomacy,” Rubio compared the UFC to the 1969 moon landing. “When President Kennedy announced that we were going to put a man on the moon and return them safely to the earth, no one thought that was possible, and we did it,” Rubio said. “We are a nation founded on doing what no one else dared to do, and no one else aspired to do.”
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Trash begets trash. Solid proof here.
Rubio is only fit for the garbage.
US To Significantly Reduce Military Support For NATO
The New York Times reports:
The United States plans to significantly reduce the aircraft and warships that it makes available for NATO operations in Europe, according to two senior European officials, accelerating America’s effort to scale down the protection it has offered to European allies for eight decades.
The decision would limit NATO’s ability to launch long-range strikes and conduct surveillance. It was communicated to allies in early June in a written document, parts of which were reviewed by The New York Times. The European officials, who were briefed on the decision, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak more freely about sensitive military plans.
The Pentagon has not yet publicly revealed the timeline for the drawdown but American officials have indicated it will take effect very soon — far earlier than European counterparts had been preparing for. The abrupt cutoff of American forces would affect NATO’s ability to, for example, monitor Russian submarine traffic or launch long-range Tomahawk missiles deep into Russian territory.
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The former United States has now become the new Soviet Union under Trump.
Tina Peters: Democrats Are “Stealing Our Elections”
Democracy Docket reports:
Less than two weeks after leaving prison, convicted election denier Tina Peters appeared on another far-right podcast where she continued to spread conspiracy theories about rigged voting.
Peters, a former Colorado GOP election clerk who was convicted for her role in a 2021 voting system breach, appeared as a guest on the podcast of the conservative activist Steve Stern Wednesday where she ranted about getting rid of voting machines and said Democrats are stealing elections.
“The truth is that they’re stealing our elections, and they’re very bold about it,” Peters told Stern. “And so far nothing’s being done. My main concern when I was in prison was that we’re going to lose this country if people don’t start exposing this and speaking out.” Peters also falsely told Stern that voting machines are being used to change election outcomes.
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Is she a parrot?
Really? Is that why your holy Republicans are so often being convicted for the crime?
Voting machines have been used since I was a child. Is she really that retarded?
Burgum: Wind Farms Are “National Security Threat”
The Mirror reports:
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claimed on Thursday that wind turbines are a “national security threat” as he launched into a theory about how they could exacerbate a drone attack against America. “We also have the report from Secretary Pete Hegseth, which conclusively — this is a national security threat,” Burgum said before taking a minute to slam Democrats and hype up Trump, over whose shoulder he stood.
“These wind towers that President Trump has worked to try to stop — the towers themselves can be 600 feet. The blades are 250 on top of that,” he continued. “You could launch an attack on the U.S. in the Northeast, in our most populous area, with a bunch of autonomous drones coming through a wind tower field, which covers thousands, if not tens of thousands, of miles.”
The attack, he said, would be “undetectable” until it was right on America’s doorstep, because the turbines interfere with radar. Undersea drones would also be able to break through, he said, because “the vibration of running the wind towers affects the undersea sonar.”
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This miscreant is starving for attention here. Old right-wing Texas is filled with wind farms, you dumb shit!
GOP Rep: Trump Was “Born A Very Special Baby”
The Daily Beast reports:
A pro-Trump Texas congressman was widely mocked for sucking up to the president by saying he was surely born a “very special baby.”
Troy Nehls, who in April said Trump was “almost the second coming,” on Thursday found another way to sing his praises. This time, Nehls felt the need to imagine the circumstances of the president’s birth nearly 80 years ago.
“Donald Trump is the best thing to happen in this country in a hundred years. He was born a very special baby. I bet you the doctors said, ‘I can tell this is a very special baby,’” the 58-year-old told reporters, according to a video posted by Meidas Touch correspondent Scott MacFarlane.
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"Almost the second coming." Is that anything lke "Almost a virgin" or "Almost pregnant"? I see he's bought into the con that Saul/Paul spread after he started his Jesus of Nazereth scam.
AI data centers are taking over. These Americans are fighting back -- Jelinda Montes
Energy and water intensive AI projects are draining communities. The revolt is just getting started
In a rare moment of bipartisanship, there’s a force uniting Americans across the country: opposition to data centers.
In nearly every state, hyperscale data centers powering artificial intelligence are being proposed and built. These facilities need much more computing power compared to other data centers and that comes with a much larger footprint, in the literal and carbon sense. A typical hyperscale data center needs 10 acres, or 435,000 square feet of land. However, many of these proposed sites plan to use over 1 million square feet, which could fit a few Eiffel towers or roughly 50 Boeing 737 jets.
The list of potential drawbacks for communities receiving a data center are plentiful. The huge increased pressure on energy grids translates to higher utility bills, which puts additional strain on gas and coal plants, which of course jacks up toxic air pollution. Furthermore, the centers’ cooling systems need a lot of water, draining local aquifers and water tables, with the more efficient systems still requiring significant amounts. Even noise pollution from constant humming of the servers impacts local quality of life.
“When we bring this massive amount of electricity demand to the grid, and there’s a couple ways the grid can respond,” Jeremiah Johnson, an environmental researcher at North Carolina State University, said. “One is we have existing power plants that aren’t used at their full capacity, and we increase their output. Another way it can respond is neighboring regions can increase their output and ship electricity by transmission to where the data centers are, and a third option would be to build new power plants.”...
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Data centers will be an existential problem because they threaten hunam existence.
6 states publicly decline to participate in Trump's Great American State Fair — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Oregon have publicly declined to send official delegations to President Donald Trump's Great American State Fair on the National Mall, opening June 25.
Three additional states remain uncommitted two weeks before the grand opening, according to reports by NOTUS.
The boycotts follow a wave of musical acts dropping out of the Freedom 250 music festival, with performers including Martina McBride and Bret Michaels citing misleading information about the event's political nature.
Trump responded by announcing he would open the fair with what he described as the greatest rally ever.
The controversy reflects deeper tensions between Freedom 250, Trump's entity producing the event, and America 250, Congress's bipartisan commission....
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Like everything else Trump touches, this "Great American State" boondoogle is dead and ruined for America. There is nothing to celebrate any longer. All states should have the common decency to decline it.
Trump 'wants to sink his party's fortunes': Data guru draws mind-boggling conclusion — Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump's economic polling looks so bad that CNN's Harry Enten wondered whether he was engaged in self-sabotage.
The president blurted out "I love the inflation" when asked about the last month's 4.2 percent spike in costs, and the data analyst said that certainly won't help Trump or his Republican allies on the most pressing issue for American voters.
"I would just say, if I'm an American, based upon the polling I'm seeing, I hear the president, go, 'What the heck did I just hear? What the heck is going on?'" Enten said. "One of the most politically tone-deaf statements I've ever heard, and you can see it in the numbers right here. Americans don't think don't like the inflation, they hate the inflation. They don't love the inflation, they hate the inflation."
Trump is 50 points underwater on the issue of inflation in at least eight polls — a historic first, Enten said.
"Every other president and every other year, the answer is zero," he said. "Trump is not only the first one to reach minus-50 points or worse, net approval rating on inflation. He's done it many times, so when I hear Trump's statement, I just, I feel like [the character] Mrs. White in [the 1985 film] 'Clue' and going, what what is what is happening here?"
The president's approval rating on gas prices, which have exploded since he launched a war on Iran, is even more gruesome.
"How about an 80 percent disapproval on gas prices?" Enten said. "Which of course is fueling this frustration with inflation. Take a look here, the only president with an 80 percent disapproval rating on gas prices of all time is Trump in 2026. You can see Trump there, he's pointing the arrow to it. Yes, he has done it, this Iran war has done it. It has fueled record frustration, inflation and record frustration when it comes to gas prices. The only president ever with at least an 80 percent disapproval rating on gas prices, Donald John Trump in this year, 2026."...
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Cue the sorrowful violins.
White House blames 'assassination culture' after '86 47' etched into National Mall — David Edwards
Federal investigators swarmed the National Mall Thursday after a massive "86 47" marking appeared etched into the grass near the World War II Memorial.
U.S. Park Police and members of the National Guard responded to the scene, collecting grass samples for testing. The numerals — visible only from height, such as the top of the Washington Monument — showed the numbers 8, 6, and 7 clearly; the 4 was not fully defined. How the markings were made remains unknown.
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Interesting how this phrase has come to be equated with murder. It's Trump's fault that it has. He started it by accusing Comey and the photo of sea shells. We all know this was done by UFOs!
Gaffe-Prone Sleepy Don Making All Kinda Free Ads For Democrats! — Evan Hurst
We don’t know if this is related to whatever is requiring 22 specialists at a time to examine Donald Trump’s very good brain and beautiful body, But Axios has noticed that Trump simply cannot stop making free ads for Democrats this month.
Did you see Trump babbling to reporters yesterday that “I LOVE THE INFLATION”?
The report this week is that inflation is at 4.2 percent, its highest rate in three years, and it’s being caused by Trump’s idiot war in Iran, which he lost on the first day, and which will also never end. This is the first time in three years it’s been over four percent. Gas prices have obviously skyrocketed. Beef up 10 percent. Lettuce and tomatoes, 25 and 32 percent each. Plane tickets, 26.7 percent.
Just everything fucking more expensive.
But Trump loves the inflation! (He is bullshitting to the New York Post that what he he meant was that he’s happy it isn’t higher. Which is not the flex he may think it is?)
Also, affordability is a Democrat hoax! That’s another one he can’t stop saying.
So yes, obviously, the inflation thing will be a great ad for any Democrats who decide to use it, which should be all of them. (Hey, maybe if certain new Democratic Senate candidates get bored of using their ads to accuse “establishment” Democrats of loving Epstein — especially the same week as bombshell revelations are coming out about the full-on Situation Room-level panic the Trump regime has been in to cover up the Epstein Files — they could make a quick ad about Trump loving inflation. We are just saying.)
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” he said on May 12.
Two weeks later, on May 27, Trump said, “I don’t care about the midterms.”
Yikes. Trump doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation. Trump doesn’t care about the midterms. He loves the inflation!
Also, again, he loves hiding the truth of what he did in the Epstein Files, named after his dead best friend the child rapist Jeffrey Epstein.
And he loves paying out the kid touchers and terrorists he pardoned on his first day in office. Surprise, Todd Blanche is not actually dropping the slush fund idea. Now who could have guessed Trump’s loyal pomeranian would be so loyal and persistent about that?
And he loves building fucking ballrooms and arches and naming them after himself while people are struggling financially, and he loves starting losing wars of choice and playing fast and loose with American troops’ lives, and of course there’s that appalling bouncy house kiddie playset Trump had built on the White House lawn for literally the trashiest sporting event this country has ever come up with.
Has Trump apologized for any of these remarks? Haha. No. Axios reports that Trump told Fox News that his thing about not thinkng about Americans’ financial situation was “a perfect statement” and “I’d make it again.” Put that in the commercials too!
Axios notes that Trump’s approval rating on the economy is 29 percent.
Get to making those fuckin’ ads, Democrats.
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The man is not well.
'TACO Thursday': Internet tears into Trump after he ditches attack — Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump was mocked online Thursday after reversing course on attacking Iran.
Trump backed down after saying Thursday morning on his Truth Social platform that he had ordered the U.S. military to hit Iran "very hard tonight," but then he changed his mind.
"Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening," Trump posted.
The internet reacted to the president's move.
"TACO!" Stock trader Tom Hearden wrote on Bluesky
"Taco Thursday, y'all," journalist and radio host Kai Ryssdal wrote on Bluesky.
"Trump cancels his Iran escalation and pulls back on Bill Pulte. Looks like we've got a 2-for-1 TACO Thursday special going on," columnist David Rothkopf wrote on Bluesky.
"Trump says he has called off continuing strikes on Iran, saying this time there is a deal & 'final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved.' He also says US naval blockade 'will remain in full force' until deal is signed," Abigail Hauslohner, Financial Times U.S.-Mideast foreign affairs correspondent, wrote on X.
"How many times are we going to do this," Tommy Vietor, co-host of Pod Save America and former Obama administration official, wrote on X.
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As many tmies as Trump thinks he needs to keep his war going as cover on the Epstein crimes.
Trump and Putin: When Delusional Idiots Go to War — Harold Meyerson
There’s something in the water of autocracies that infects their nations with gratuitous quagmires. Russia, of course, is no stranger to autocracies: Under the tsars, under Stalin, and now under Putin, there have been no internal countervailing powers that could stop their leaders from inflicting horrendous pain on their own people.
In theory, that’s not how the United States is supposed to work. Going to war, our Constitution flatly says, is up to Congress. Even when it has been up to Congress in recent decades, as it was in a de facto way in Vietnam and a de jure way in Iraq, we’ve opted for wars of choice with disastrous outcomes. Under Donald Trump, however, not only was our war of choice in Iran decreed solely by our autocratic president, but that president never bothered to make even a semi-serious case for that war to his fellow Americans.
More from Harold Meyerson
Autocrats don’t have to be delusional, of course, but by the very nature of autocracy, they tend to staff themselves with aides who affirm and aggrandize their autocrats’ power and fail to challenge their bosses’ worldview. Putin surrounded himself with staffers committed to his project of restoring Russia to the role of supreme Orthodox counterweight to the louche West, in control once again of all the territory where the tsars once reigned supreme. He believed that retaking Ukraine would be a matter of weeks, or even days, and no one in his inner circle would or could say that he might be wrong. If the generals not in his inner circle had misgivings about the probability of a cakewalk to Kiev, they weren’t going to be general for very much longer.
As to Trump, none of his lackeys dared tell him that Iran might not crumble if we joined Israel in going to war on the regime, and while our top generals did issue some muted demurrals, none dared say, “No way.”
As a result, Russia appears stuck in a bloody stalemate from which its forces have made virtually no advances for the better part of a year, while Trump appears stuck in a war that he cannot end. Israel keeps attacking Lebanon, and Iran still blocks the Strait of Hormuz. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies at the beginning of the year estimated that the number of Russian soldiers killed, wounded, or missing since the war began was 1.2 million. The number of U.S. casualties in our war on Iran is relatively tiny so far—just 13 fatalities according to the Pentagon—but that will rise if Trump concludes that getting a deal with Iran requires boots on the ground (as Republican war hawks keep arguing)....
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Of course, that's not how the United States is supposed to work. It doesn't alter the fact we have a deluded Nazi criminal at the head of out administrative branch and a bunch of fascist dumbasses in our Congress that say nothing and do nothing about it, and a corrupt SCOTUS that grants his crimes. End this bullsthit!
Republicans Are Triple-Dipping Funding for Mass Deportation — Ryan Cooper
The basic structure of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was this: savage cuts to social benefits of all kinds, including Medicaid, food stamps, and (implicitly) Obamacare, coupled to massive tax cuts for the rich, and a stupendous increase in funding for mass deportation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) together got a whopping $170 billion—making it better funded than any military outside of China, Russia, and the U.S. itself—with little if any controls or oversight on how the money was spent.
The supposed point of this was to pre-fund the deportation surge through Trump’s entire term, in case Democrats won the midterms. That funding is available through 2028 at least. In response, and in protest over the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Democrats shut down the base Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget and refused to fund ICE and CBP any further. The thinking was that these agencies could use their surge money for normal operations until they got back toward a normal budget outlay.
More from Ryan Cooper
Republicans then did another end run, with a reconciliation bill that added $70 billion in base ICE and CBP funding for three years. This comes to a total of $240 billion—almost a quarter-trillion dollars—for these two relatively minor agencies.
Unbelievably, it turns out that House Republicans are working on a DHS appropriations bill for the next fiscal year that would increase ICE/CBP funding even more, by another $28.4 billion. This represents a bulked-up appropriation for these agencies, even though that was just passed in the second reconciliation package. They are apparently pretending the whole double pre-funding thing didn’t happen. The number, when it comes to mass deportation at least, can only go up.
And yet few Democrats are making a stink about this endless ratcheting up of funding for Trump’s mass deportation machine. The ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Homeland Security is once again Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), back after Trump pardoned him out of his Biden-era corruption indictment. Little can be expected from that quarter. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the ranking member of the overall Appropriations Committee, at least put out a statement condemning the reconciliation bill. “I am leading the way to implement major reforms that will transform these agencies which currently operate like an unaccountable paramilitary force,” it said. But it’s fair to say there has not been a coordinated Democratic effort to point out that this tripling down for deportation funding is happening.
It’s worth taking a moment to process the stupendous ramp-up in deportation spending over the last quarter-century, and particularly the last two years. In 2024, total congressional appropriations for ICE and CBP were a comparatively modest $17.4 billion. If you average the reconciliation packages over the last two years, funding is now something like $120 billion per year—a roughly 700 percent increase (though it’s unclear how much of the last bill’s funding is remaining).
But even those 2024 figures were a major increase compared to prior years. ICE got just $3.4 billion from Congress in 2004, its first full year of operation. CBP’s budget, including both appropriations and fee-funded programs, increased by 189 percent in inflation-adjusted terms between 2003 and 2024....
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So, fuck our healthcare and fuck our grocery and gas prices. There are families in America that can't make it anymore. I heard that news today!
Senate wants to force US to share sensitive intel with Israel — Paul R. Pillar
A measure in a must-pass bill would dramatically increase Israeli access to American secrets.
Buried deep inside a 192-page intelligence authorization bill is Section 622, titled “United States-Israel Intelligence Sharing Enhancement.” It would require the president, acting through the director of national intelligence and as necessary the secretary of defense, to “expand and enhance intelligence sharing with the Government of Israel” on a list of subjects that encompasses almost every topic of intelligence interest in the Middle East.
The bill, put forward by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would prohibit any suspension, reduction, or limitation of such sharing “except on the basis of a specific and identifiable national security concern determined by the President.” Any such exception would require a report to Congress within fifteen days detailing not only the reason for the change but also the categories of information involved. The same report would require an assessment of the anticipated impact on regional security and various other matters.
This proposal is one of several recent moves by those in Washington who carry the Israeli government’s water to keep the United States tied to Israel despite plummeting support for the country among the American public. The most salient form of U.S. support to Israel has been more than $300 billion in economic and especially military assistance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to get ahead of the declining public support and avoid embarrassing losses by suggesting it would be fine with him to phase out the military aid....
An irony is that the Congress considering this mandate is the same Congress that has in effect surrendered to the president its powers under Article I of the Constitution to set tariff rates and to decide whether to wage war. And yet, Section 622 would involve congressional micromanagement of a matter that by its nature needs to be the business of the executive branch and especially the intelligence agencies.
In intelligence, Israel is more of an adversary than an ally. Being an adversary in intelligence means indulging in the hostile act of espionage. Israel has a long record of conducting that type of hostile act against the United States. The best-known case involves the spy Jonathan Pollard, who stole such an overwhelming volume of U.S. secrets that then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger stated to the court that sentenced Pollard that it was difficult “ to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”...
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Just say no.
'Unbelievable': Mockery as MAGA-boycotted brand now plastered across Trump's White House — Daniel Hampton
Bud Light branding plastered across the White House grounds ahead of Sunday's UFC fight drew sharp mockery online, particularly from critics who remember when the beer became MAGA's most boycotted brand.
The South Lawn has been overtaken by a massive temporary arena for UFC Freedom 250, a seven-fight card staged on June 14 to mark President Donald Trump's 80th birthday and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Reporters touring the site on Thursday found the cage padding adorned with logos for Ram, Morgan & Morgan, Bud Light and Crypto.com.
The Associated Press reported that the temporary arena covers nearly the entirety of the South Lawn, where Marine One usually lands and children scramble during the annual Easter Egg Roll.
In 2023, conservatives furiously boycotted Bud Light after the brand sent a commemorative can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Kid Rock filmed himself shooting cases of the beer with a submachine gun and then-presidential candidate Ron DeSantis denounced the partnership as part of a trend of "woke companies" trying to change the country.
The backlash was severe enough that CBS News reported Bud Light lost its place as America's best-selling beer after more than two decades, slipping behind Modelo Especial in June 2023. Anheuser-Busch InBev later estimated the boycott cost it roughly $1.4 billion in North American revenue.
The sponsorship lineup landed with immediate mockery, as the same political movement that turned Bud Light cans into target practice watches the brand's logo decorate the White House lawn.
Ron Filipkowski, the attorney and MAGA chronicler who edits MeidasTouch, was among the first to flag the spectacle.
"The White House brought to you by Bud Light," he wrote on X alongside photos taken by Getty.
"I thought they were boycotting Bud Light remember?" replied attorney Tracey Gallagher.
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No gospel quartet to complete this side show showdown? Our country is now a con man's carnival midway!
JD Vance targeted for testimony after he's 'implicated' in Epstein 'cover-up' — Tom Boggioni
The ranking Democratic member of the House Oversight Committee is calling for Vice President JD Vance to testify under oath about his involvement in the White House’s Jeffrey Epstein cover-up.
Appearing on MS NOW with host Ana Cabrera, a fuming Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) cited an explosive report in the New York Times on Wednesday that Vance headed meetings held in the White House Situation Room to deal with fallout from the Epstein files. According to Garcia, Vance, along with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles — who has also been in attendance at the secretive meetings — both need to be hauled before the committee headed by Rep. James Comer (R-KY).
“Well, look, obviously, [acting AG] Todd Blanche is near the top of the list [for testimony],” Garcia told Cabrera. “But there has been now new bombshell reporting where we have learned, as you know, that JD Vance, the vice president, has been holding meetings in the Situation Room, which is used for national security purpose just to discuss Epstein and looking at ways to exonerate President Donald Trump, coming up with a strategy on how they're going to use Ghislaine Maxwell to clear Trump's name.”
“And the vice president, for the very first time, is now implicated in part of this cover-up,” he accused. “He's meeting with Susie Wiles, he's meeting with [FBI Director] Kash Patel, he's meeting with Todd Blanche, he's meeting with [former Attorney General] Pam Bondi. And so it is now important that we, at some point, this committee has to talk to the vice president. We have to talk to Susie Wiles.”...
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The arms of the octopus increase! Closer, ever closer.
‘It’s Total Confusion’: MS NOW Analyst Argues Trump ‘Kneecapping’ Any Actual Strategy to End Iran War — Alex Griffing
Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant Secretary of State under Barack Obama, tore into President Donald Trump’s strategy in the war with Iran on Thursday in a panel discussion led by MS NOW anchor Ana Cabrera.
After a discussion about President Donald Trump’s latest threats to bomb Iran for a third straight day on Thursday and the president publicly threatening to invade Kharg Island, Cabrera asked why Trump is seemingly giving away his playbook to the Iranians.
“Other military analysts say that would leave our military members as sitting ducks, essentially, in one place,” Cabrera commented about a potential invasion of Kharg Island, adding, “Joel, President Trump, for the second day in a row, is now giving Iran a heads-up about these attacks. Why broadcast it? Is that a negotiating tactic?”...
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Trump will be happy spending the remainder of his term engaging in his war.
Why Does Trump Need 22 Specialists To Show Him Dementia Test Camels? — Evan Hurst
Here’s a weird one for you in the chronicle of Donald Trump’s ongoing health scares and hand bruises and apparently rapidly advancing dementia. Trump has reportedly set a new record for how many specialists looked at him a few weeks back, the last time he went to Walter Reed for his routine dementia tests/cankle exam/to have his anal glands expressed like a shih tzu.
Twenty-two. That’s how many.
Is that normal, oder … ?
The Washington Post reports on this figure, comparing it to HW Bush seeing five specialists in 1989 and W seeing 12 on his first checkup as president. And sure, when you are the leader of the free world, we imagine there are certain times where they really want to get under the hood and make extra certain there are no surprises lurking beneath.
Trump, of course, is not the leader of the free world, because the free world wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire. But any casual observer can tell there’s a lot wrong under his hood. So on one hand, it makes total sense that every specialist in the building would want to come by and look at how gross and fucked up his body and brain are.
Of course it leads us to ask what else the White House is lying about.
And they are lying. Jonathan Last stated the obvious after Trump’s confused, agitated, and angry Meet The Press interview when he wrote that “The president’s medical team is about as trustworthy as Vladimir Putin’s. No credible explanations have been given for any of his obvious physical problems. There are no explanations for frequent medical appointments. His health records are only selectively released. His physicians tend to be Rasputin-style quacks.”
Likewise, in response to this news, Trump’s spokesfluffers are polishing his sack, releasing statements that say things like “The involvement of multiple specialists reflects a comprehensive, multidisciplinary evaluation consistent with best practices for executive-level medical care.” Sure, giant wanking motion dot gif, whatever.
“We have nothing to hide,” [an] official said.
Haha, OK. That must be why some of these specialists came from Harvard, Duke and other faraway places. You know a man’s brain and body are healthy when doctors start getting on airplanes to come gawk at them....
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The old man is coming apart before our very eyes! Is he farting or shitting his pants in that photo?
It's Worse Than Ever — Robert Reich
We cannot continue to deny this reality
Friends.
Either he knows he’s lying — in order to further undermine confidence in our elections and as a prelude to attacking the outcome of the midterms — in which case he needs to be impeached and convicted.
Or he doesn’t know he’s lying — he really believes that our election system is “crooked” and that the major media are “crooked” — in which case he’s seriously and dangerously mentally ill, and the 25th Amendment needs to be invoked to get him out of office.
Take your pick. Either way, he has to be removed from office. And soon.
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By allowing this farce to go on shows how our government has lost its way. It has failed its citizens and it has failed its misson. We have been BETRAYED!
How Dark Money Captured America — And How Hawaii Just Declared War on It — Thom Hartmann
From Citizens United to Trump-era oligarchy, the billionaire takeover of American politics seemed unstoppable. Then Hawaii found a way to strike at the heart of the system
Against all odds and massive dark money, Graham Platner won. And won big.
The oyster farmer and Marine Corps veteran who turned a long-shot run into a movement just took the Democratic nomination to challenge Susan Collins for her Senate seat in Maine, and he did it the hard way, the clean way, the way that’s supposed to be impossible in this age of unlimited corporate and billionaire money.
He out-raised a sitting governor backed by the entire party establishment and their corporate funders, he packed arenas with Fighting Oligarchy rallies alongside Bernie Sanders, and he built the whole thing out of small-dollar donations from working Mainers rather than checks from corporate political action committees.
He’s been a sharp critic of AIPAC and the river of industry cash that flows through our politics, and he’s pledged to keep that money out of his campaign.
Now look at the woman he’s running against. Susan Collins is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which means she sits atop the federal spending faucet for defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, banks, and agribusiness, and wouldn’t you know it, those are exactly the industries pouring money into her reelection.
The single largest organized source of cash in her campaign is AIPAC, the pro-Netanyahu lobby that bundled more than half a million dollars for her in a single filing period and accounted for nearly a fifth of everything she raised last year....
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You can't alwasy get what you want. But if try sometimes, you get what you need. — Rolling Stones
Meth Scandal Rocks Nascent Greg Bovino 2028 Campaign — Will Sommer
The Meth-Tied GOP Operative Behind Bovino 2028
Just five months after being fired from his leadership role in Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, former U.S. Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino is eyeing a run for president. He made his interest formally known earlier this week, after having just returned from a racist convention in Portugal in which he appeared alongside literal neo-Nazis.
“If running for President is what it takes to actually get it done, then all options are on the table,” Bovino wrote in a post on X endorsing the exploratory bid.
This post raised a lot of questions. Does terrorizing a major American city for weeks on end really serve as a strong platform for a run for office? Are there height restrictions for presidential candidates? And who, exactly, is behind this effort?
After all, to most observers, you’d have to be on meth to think that Bovino could actually prevail in a 2028 GOP primary against the likes of Vice President JD Vance or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Right?
Well, maybe!
Bovino’s 2028 exploratory run is the brainchild of Jacob Engels, a former protégé of notorious dirty trickster Roger Stone and a Laura Loomer pal who has since turned on them and the rest of Trump world....
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Scumbag Central. Meth? A favorite drug of the Nazis. Read the full story.
Why MAGA can’t hear the Trump boos - Sophia Tesfaye
Once you understand the MAGA reaction to the NBA Finals boos, everything else snaps into focus
The most revealing moment of Donald Trump’s week was not the boos that rained down on him at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. It was the almost instantaneous insistence, by him and his media ecosystem, that the boos never happened. What we witnessed this week — the feverish, almost liturgical insistence that a crowd loudly booing the president of the United States was actually chanting “USA!” — is something more disturbing and dangerous than ordinary propaganda. It’s now clear that the crisis we face is not a lack of information; it is a profound detachment from reality, cultivated by right-wing media and anchored by a president who demands that his followers reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.
Because once you understand why MAGA can’t hear those boos, everything else — from the right’s election denialism to Trump storming out of interviews — snaps into focus....
The MAGA base does not care to hear the Madison Square Garden boos. They do not care that the Los Angeles vote counting process is legal. They do not care that Trump’s overall approval rating has plummeted to a dismal 27% — the lowest for any president since Richard Nixon the week he resigned in disgrace. Ultimately, however, a movement that reflexively constructs alternative realities whenever reality becomes inconvenient will find itself increasingly isolated from the democratic norms that depend on a shared understanding of what is true.
The boos at Madison Square Garden were not politically significant in themselves. The refusal to hear them was.
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Then she can add to that: "They don't care about reality." They accept nihilism.
The failure of our country is being ignored by a pen full of nihilist swine.
We have nothing to celebrate this 4th of July as we turn away from freedom to slavery.
Bari Weiss brings Trumpism to “60 Minutes” — Sophia Tesfaye
Scott Pelley firing shows Weiss is more interested in loyalty than journalism
Bari Weiss is running the Trump playbook at “60 Minutes.” It goes like this: Take an institution that still commands public trust, install loyalists with no relevant experience in positions of authority, fire the people who push back, dress the whole operation in the language of reform — fairness, innovation, a new direction — and you dare anyone to prove that what you’re really doing is building a protection racket....
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The Peter Principal illustrated.
Death to fascism!
Trump Vows US Will “Bomb The Shit” Out Of iran
TReuters reports:
The United States launched new strikes against multiple targets overnight in Iran, the U.S. military said, as President Donald Trump vowed even more attacks if no peace deal is secured.
The ?military’s Central Command announced the strikes were complete about four hours after they began shortly after midnight in Tehran, saying in a post on X that the targets included “military surveillance capabilities, communication ?systems, and air defense sites across Iran.”
Trump told Fox News reporter Trey Yingst on Wednesday evening that the strikes would stop shortly but that he would “bomb the shit out of them” if Iran’s leaders did not sign an agreement with the ?U.S. immediately, Yingst wrote on X. Iranian news agencies reported explosions in several cities, including Sirik, Kargan, Bandar Abbas, Minab, Varamin and Karaj.rump Vows US Will “Bomb The Shit” Out Of iran
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The mobster speaks. What with? Are the stories we've run out of ordinance true?
Fox Hosts Rip Trump’s Claims Of Imminent Iran Deal
Media Matters has the transcript:
JOHN ROBERTS (HOST): A lot of military experts we’ve talked to think it’s long past time for the United States to go back to full-scale war against Iran, saying nine weeks ago we had Iran on the ropes, and ever since then President Trump has been talking about this elusive deal. Listen to what he’s said over the weeks here. (Plays clips.) That’s nine weeks of ‘we’re close to a deal.’ At some point you’ve got to acknowledge it’s not happening.
BRIT HUME (GUEST): Yeah, and John, you begin to wonder sometimes if the president isn’t speaking to two entirely separate audiences here. He, you know — dealing with the Iranians and telling the American public and consumers and the owners of stocks that, you know, we’re close to a deal, in the hope perhaps that that will calm the petroleum markets. At the same time, of course, he says that, you know, we’re ready to attack at any time and that they dare not fool with us.
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Losing Fox, are you Donnie?
California Sues Trump To Block Massive ICE Gulag
The Sacramento Bee reports:
California and Santa Clara County officials filed a lawsuit against the federal administration Wednesday to block what state and local officials believe will be the state’s latest immigration detention facility.
The lawsuit centers on the construction of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in an unincorporated area outside Gilroy, a city about 40 minutes south of San Jose. Last month, the San Jose Spotlight obtained public records that showed the facility would include detention areas, processing areas, visitation rooms and spaces for mothers with infants.
State officials, Bay Area leaders and community organizers have since come out in strong opposition to the project. In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District on Wednesday, Attorney General Bonta and Santa Clara County Counsel Tony LoPresti asked the court to permanently forbid the development.
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America will stop ALL Nazi concentration camps!
Zeldin: No Environmental Standards For Data Centers
Politico reports:
The Trump administration is not going to set nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the rapidly growing data center industry, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said Wednesday. While there are technologies and practices that reduce air pollution and water usage, states and communities know what works best for them, Zeldin said at the POLITICO Energy Summit in Washington.
“Ten times out of 10, I’m not going to sit inside of an agency building in Washington, D.C., and that we say that we know that local community in Georgia or Florida or Arizona or elsewhere, better than everyone there locally,” Zeldin said.
Just 37 percent of Americans would support a data center being built in their area, according to a POLITICO poll earlier this year. There are myriad reasons cited by opponents, but water usage and air pollution are common complaints.
"It's a good thing that nobody would sabotage any of those facilities.
Isn't it?" — Karl Dubhe IV (comments)
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If Americans don't understand the deadly threat to our existence this poses they are far more retarded than I ever believed. It would be too bad if something happened to them.
Hegseth: All Prisoners At Gitmo Should Be Executed
The Daily Beast reports:
Pete Hegseth wasn’t afraid to share how he really feels about Guantánamo Bay detainees. The self-styled “Secretary of War,” 46, appeared at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Wednesday to “engage with troops” amid growing hostilities with the Caribbean nation.
During a late afternoon press briefing with reporters after returning to Tampa, Florida, in which he confirmed that the U.S. would continue with additional strikes on Iran, Hegseth was asked a charged question by far-right influencer Laura Loomer.
“Given Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s detailed confessions to orchestrating 9/11 and other al Qaeda plots, why has the United States government chosen to keep him alive and comfortable at Gitmo for decades, along with these other Islamic jihadists, instead of executing them and delivering justice for the 3,000 victims of 9/11?” Loomer, 33, asked.
“I appreciate the question,” the defense secretary said. “Listen, I’ve written extensively about it. I—I—These Gitmo detainees should have been executed, in my mind, personally, a long time ago, for the crimes of what they committed against the American people.”
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In your gas chambers, Nazi bastard?
‘Name the Time and Place’: Stephen A. Smith Hits Back at Trump for Calling Him ‘Low IQ’ — Willa Pope Robbins
ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith responded to President Donald Trump’s attacks against him on Wednesday, telling the president directly that if he thought “those one-liners gonna work, you got another thing coming.”
Trump and Smith’s feud has dragged on for days after the commentator spoke out against the president attending Game 3 of the NBA Finals at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Trump trashed Smith after the game, doubling down on the attack in a Wednesday morning Truth Social post.
He wrote:
Stephen A. Smith is an arrogant fool, a low IQ individual. In other words, he’s “dumb as a rock,” and totally unqualified to ever think of running for high political office, or even low political office, for that matter! He’d get annihilated in a debate by the most incompetent of politicians. Joe Biden’s now “fabled” performance would look great by comparison to anything that this loudmouth huckster has to offer, which isn’t much! Within a few weeks, they’d laugh him out of politics!!!
Smith hit back at Trump, reminding him of his past remark to Chris Cuomo that he’d “love to see” Smith run for president. He then called out Trump for the hypocrisy of his attack.
“Because I called them out for inconvenience in the momentum that we had built in route to entering game three for the NBA Finals, I’m a fool,” he said. “He actually called me arrogant. You, of all people, will call somebody arrogant? Really, Mr. President? That’s where you’re going?”
Smith repeatedly said that even though “the president wanted to get personal,” he would not, claiming, “I respect the office,” before adding a further reason for his restraint.
“I will not disrespect this man on a personal level. And I have to say this before I go where I’m going. The president said I was a nice guy. I got to tell you something. He’s always been nice to me. The first insult or cruel thing he said about me was in the quote on his post on his Truth Social platform,” he said. “Of all the years that I’ve known Donald Trump, that’s the first mean-spirited thing he’s ever done to me personally.”
Though Smith stated directly that he had no intention or desire to run for office, he took issue with the president’s claim about his performance in a debate. He told Trump to “name the time and place,” launching into a series of debate-like questions he would ask the president.
Those one-liners you threw at Hillary [Clinton] and before that in Republican primaries, whether it was Little Marco [Rubio] or it was Low Energy Jeb [Bush] or anybody of color, [Carly] Fiorina, she’s a four, and all of this other stuff that you were saying or getting on Chris Christie about his weight or whatever, you try that with me. You think those one liners gonna work, you got another thing coming. You did real estate, and you’re a businessman, and obviously you know what you have an idea about what you’re doing, whether people want to like it or not, as the presidency. Debate? I do that every day. Every day. You really, really think being on a stage against me would be comparable to you being on a stage with Joe Biden?
[…]
You really think that would be me, Mr. President? You sure about that? Name the time and place, and I’ll show up. Because you see, Mr. President, I don’t have a record when it comes to issues. You do. I must ask you, sir, is inflation heating up again? I think it is. Didn’t you promise us it wouldn’t? Are gas prices painfully high? I think it is. Didn’t you say you didn’t care? The war in Iran is dragging on over 100 days. Didn’t you say we weren’t in a war before you said we weren’t in a war? Before you said it would be over, before we realized it’s not over. Isn’t the Straight of Hormuz still closed? Aren’t drones still being blown out of the sky because Iran are sending drones to ships to try to go through? Didn’t that stuff happen? How about Russia and Ukraine? Didn’t you say you would end that in a day? Isn’t that still going on?
Smith continued to ask questions, including ones concerning the president’s personal financial gain during his second term, before reminding Trump of the millions of votes New Yorkers cast for him....
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Donald, you fucked with the wrong Negro!
Scientists Have Detected Something Deeply Alarming at the Bottom of the Ocean — Joe Wilkins
Mysteries of the Deep
Something is stirring in the waters off the coast of Greenland, and it isn’t a submarine fleet sent by Donald Trump.
According to reporting by the New Scientist, evidence is mounting that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — a massive system of deep sea currents that acts like a conveyor belt for the world’s oceans known as AMOC — is starting to slow its gears. As it does, cold waters from the Greenland ice sheet are allowed to pool in the North-Atlantic, creating a “cold blob” that’s only getting colder as the rest of the world warms up.
This in turn has a major impact on jet streams, fueling extreme weather across the world. Should it collapse, the New Scientist notes that the AMOC could act as a climate tipping point, setting off a chain reaction resulting in much colder weather for some, and much drier weather for others by as early as 2040.
“The cold blob can disturb the atmospheric jet stream and storm activities, so it has implications for extreme weather events in North America and Europe,” Laifang Li, assistant professor of meteorology and atmospheric science at Penn State explained in a press release announcing an earlier study on the AMOC.
Identifying how severe this cold blob ends up being may depend on the cause for the weakening AMOC — a topic which has researchers split. Some, like Li, say it’s caused by atmospheric forces, while others have identified oceanic conditions as the culprit.....
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Oh, here it comes. Here comes the cull!
Trump Moves to Deeply Censor the Entire Internet — Joe Wilkins
The White House and Congress are working on a deal to clamp down on what US citizens are allowed to say online. According to new reporting by Axios, the Trump administration is negotiating with key senators in an effort to shoehorn a massive legislation package which would limit states’ abilities to regulate AI in exchange for placing broad federal limits on digital speech.
Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Trump administration’s push to revoke AI regulation from individual states. Though the White House and its allies frame this as a matter of “safety” and “national security,” the timing is telling, coming as progressive state governments move to restrict the building of AI data centers and hold tech companies liable for harms their AI systems cause.
What makes this deal particularly insidious is the trade-off at its core. Per Axios, congressional lawmakers lead by Republican Marsha Blackburn are essentially offering to surrender their ability to regulate AI in exchange for three federal censorship bills: the Kids Online Safety Act, the NO FAKES Act, and a federal age verification mandate.
While the language around these three measures suggests common-sense cyber regulation, activists say they really amount to a massive censorship regime that is fundamentally anti-democratic.
In a blistering statement, the first amendment group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) warns that “taken together, these bills would fundamentally change the internet as we know it.” That’s especially striking because FIRE is funded by conservative private interests like billionaire Charles Koch, meaning its opposition highlights the degree to which Trump is butting heads against fellow members of the US ruling class...
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Trump thnks he can dictate anything. This crazy SOB will start some really dangerous replies to any censorship which is fundamental to American freedom. We get pretty goddamn deadly when we are threatend like that!
Fuck around and find out.
Mullin: Communist Mamdani Is Letting Criminals “Run Rampant” And We’re Going To “Protect The Homeland”
“First of all, Mamdani is a socialist communist that I have zero respect for. He’s ruining a great city by allowing lawless activity to continue to run rampant on the streets. President Trump ran on the fact that he’s going to restore law back in American cities, even in sanctuary cities.
“I have said this multiple times. I don’t care if it’s a red state or a blue state. We’re going to protect the homeland and what happens in these sanctuary cities, like what Mamdani is running, is that the criminals go to the safe haven in New York City, but they disperse throughout other parts of the city or the state and other parts of the country and continue this criminal activity.
“So we’re are going to go where the heart of the crime is. Listen, 98% of the American people — President Trump states this fact all the time — 98% of the American people are law abiding citizens. It’s the 2% that runs rampant and destroys our cities and our towns and our communities.
“And what we’re doing is we are going after the worst of the worst no matter where they’re at and that’s including in New York and Mamdani can’t do a thing about it because we’re going to enforce laws, not pick and choose which laws we are going to enforce like he chooses.” – Sec. Markwayne Mullin, on the promised ICE surge in New York City.
"Blah blah blah SOCIALIST! Blah blah blah blah COMMUNIST!
Christ JESUS these stupid motherfuckers don't even understand what those words even mean. He just throws these words out like red meat to a pack of wolves." — Woke AF (comments)
"The people of Minneapolis fought back - so will the rest of us." — Refugay (comments)
"Crime in NYC is way down, and Mullet has a plan to fix that! (By sending in platoons of ICE terrorists to foment violence.)" — Asthmatic Fox (comments)
"'Socialist.' 'Communist.' 'Trans.' 'Drag queen.'
To Mullin's and Trump's low-IQ base, they all mean the same thing." — another_steve (comments)
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JohnWayne is 100% of that 2%.
Veterans and relatives see no place for Trump's arch near Arlington National Cemetery — Rachel Treisman
Some of the most forceful objections against President Trump's proposed triumphal arch are coming from — and on behalf of — veterans.
That's because the 250-foot structure would be built on a roundabout near the main entrance to Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for over 400,000 active-duty service members, veterans and their families.
The Trump administration says in its proposal that the purpose of the arch is to "celebrate the triumphs of the American people, inspire patriotism and love of country, and beautify our nation's capital."...
A group of three Vietnam War veterans, joined by an architectural historian, is suing the administration on those grounds to try to block construction of the arch.
One of those veterans, 83-year-old Shaun Byrnes of Virginia, met NPR on Monday outside the cemetery entrance on Arlington Memorial Bridge. It's just steps from the grassy traffic circle where Byrnes hopes an arch will never stand.
"There are other important monuments to our best presidents in Washington," he said. "They were all constructed not at the direction of those great men, but after they had passed away by our citizens as a way of honoring them and keeping their memories alive. This current arch does not check any of those boxes."
In the fight against the arch, Byrnes says he is thinking of his friends, and not just those who are buried in Arlington.
"Perhaps more important, at least more meaningful to me, is I have a lot of friends that I lost that are not buried here because we never recovered them," he said...
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Fuck Trump's garbage dump.
Trump claims he tanked the US economy on purpose — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday he loves the 4.2% inflation hitting a three-year high, claiming it was part of his deliberate strategy when launching the Iran war on February 28.
"No, I love it," Trump said, "The numbers were great."
Trump stated his administration has secretly seized millions of barrels of oil and destroyed Iranian radar capability, thus explaining current oil prices. He claimed to have met with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Attorney General Todd Blanche to discuss the attack's economic consequences, asserting they all agreed the high costs justified destroying Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Trump acknowledged predicting a stock market decline of up to 25%, but defended himself, saying, "It was worth it not to have a nuclear weapon."
His comments represent an explicit acknowledgment that economic harm to Americans was an accepted consequence of his military decisions.
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And the problem here is that Iran didn't have a neclear weapon when he started his war. They will now be certain to obtain one! Wake the fuck up!
Trump’s Pick for Attorney General Is Even Worse Than You Think — Sarah Longwell
Trump's AG nominee Todd Blanche lost Trump's own criminal trial, built an illegal slush fund, and lied on Fox News—and Republicans are confirming him anyway. Sarah Longwell and Andrew Weissmann discuss what Democrats can actually do at the hearing, why Trump is screaming election fraud while gutting the unit that investigates it, and why his DOJ now holding the only copy of the Fulton County ballots should concern you. Plus: A federal judge ruled Trump's Kennedy Center takeover illegal, his lawyers told a court they could bulldoze the Statue of Liberty, and there's now a grotesque 92-foot metal structure on the White House lawn....
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Trump is the Ugly American!
Scott Pelley Spills The Beans, Or The Tea, Or The Tea With Beans In It. — Doktor Zoom
Just a few days after being shitcanned for speaking too freely to the new boss (definitely not the same as the old boss), former 60 Minutes anchor Scott Pelley sat down with the New York Times “Interview” podcast (gift link) for his first interview since he was fired.
In the interview with reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro (yes, formerly of NPR), Pelley discussed in detail the turmoil and fuckery at CBS News wrought by Bari Weiss, and specifically the dismantling of 60 Minutes by Weiss and the show’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, neither of whom has any experience at all in television. (Worse, we keep misreading his name as “Nick Bitcoin.”) Pelley frequently grew emotional as he talked about the firings of his colleagues and the deliberately Trump-friendly direction Weiss is taking the news operation, because for Crom’s sake, he’s grieving the very real harm to his professional family and home. As the interview wrapped up, he joked, “Fox News is going to just run the parts where I’m crying and say I’m a lunatic.”
Pelley also answered one of the biggest questions from the statement he released immediately after his firing last week, in which he said the new management had “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” and that he was “told to include assertions that are unverified.”
That attempted interference involved a February 60 Minutes segment on ICE’s invasion of Minnesota that had already been okayed to go to air. Shortly before airtime that Sunday, well after the deadline for final edits, Weiss emailed then-executive producer Tanya Simon to demand two changes: that footage of protesters be changed to make them appear more violent, and to add narration that described Good as “driving toward the officer” who killed her. Pelley refused to make those changes.
He pointed out that 60 Minutes staffers shared a bond similar to a family, especially considering that he and his colleagues “travel together. We dine together. We go into literal combat together. My former boss and former producer Bill Owens saved my life in a firefight in Iraq. So, these bonds are pretty tight, and when somebody wipes out, murders, a large number of your family members, people are desperate for some explanation, and as you and I sit here today, there still has been none.”
Instead, Bilton sent a weird email days after the “massacre,” condescendingly informing everyone at the top-rated show on TV that “it wasn’t 1968 anymore, and he helpfully noted that gasoline doesn’t cost 32 cents anymore, suggested that we had all been frozen in amber in 1968 when the program first went on the air.” Bilton appeared unaware that the show already had a significant online presence, as well....
Throughout the interview, Pelley is gratifyingly critical of the changes being wrought at CBS News by the new team, but perhaps a little too gracious in attributing some of the fuckery not to malign intent, but to Weiss et al. simply being unfamiliar with television as a medium. He’s not making excuses, though; it’s more of a matter of seeing that Weiss has an agenda, but also that she’s in over her head....
Pelley closed out the interview by commenting on the statement from the three remaining 60 Minutes anchors — Lesley Stahl, Bill Whitaker, and Jon Wertheim — that they will stay on at CBS. He said he hasn’t talked to them since he was fired, but assumes that they’re staying for the same reason he stayed after Weiss came on: “[We] have had conversations before this about staying to maintain the principles of the broadcast. If we leave, we can’t help.” But he also noted that may not count for much, because now “that trust is broken.”...
Asked if he thinks Weiss should be removed, Pelley said, “Oh, gosh, yes. Look, she’s a lovely person. And her Free Press organization that she founded has been very successful. But television’s not her thing. This is like somebody walking up to me and saying, ‘There’s a 747, there are 400 people on it, we need you to fly it to Paris.’ I’m going to decline because I don’t have a clue.”
He wished Weiss had had the good sense to reply to the job offer by saying “Oh, that’s not for me, I don’t know how to do that,” which suggests he hasn’t read enough about Bari Weiss. She’ll fly that fucking plane into the ground with a smile on her face, all while insisting it’s a great day for freedom.
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This story exposes more details of what occurred during the meetings on 60 Minutes. It reveals the unprofessional aspects of the facist punks that have intested the formerly great CBS Network.
Everybody Free To Wear Sunscreen After FDA Approves First New One In Almost 30 Years — Robyn Pennacchia
After years of people finally becoming more educated about the necessity of sunscreen, there has been a seriously concerning resurgence of not just tanning, but (ugh) tanmaxxing, particularly among Gen Z. While much of this comes from the unfortunate resurgence of Y2K aesthetics like extreme thinness and those backless tops that were the bane of my existence when I worked at Wet Seal, some blame certainly goes to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and all the other MAHA weirdos crying that those of us who give a damn about skin cancer prevention are waging a war on “sunshine” and cruelly trying to deprive them of Vitamin D and other nutrients.
Recently, Kennedy, clearly a fan of tanning beds himself, blocked a new rule that would have barred minors from using them. Unlike most age-based restrictions, this rule was less about responsibility and personal choice than about the fact that the younger you are when exposed to the sun and things like tanning beds, the more likely you are to develop melanoma later on (like, it’s specifically more dangerous for your kid to get a tan than for you to get one).
But, incredibly, it was just announced that the FDA, under that asshole, just went ahead and approved a new sunscreen ingredient for the first time in 27 years. Hooray! Clearly, after that shit, we could all use some good news on this front.
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"If you need a tan, I'm your scam!"
Scared of ICE, Angry at Trump, and Facing Red Tape, Many Are Skipping World Cup — Sasha Abramsky
Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the number of international travelers visiting the United States has fallen by more than 5 percent. The number of Canadians visiting the country has plummeted by more than 20 percent.
All told, the fall-off in international tourism has translated into a decline of $8.4 billion in tourists’ spending in the U.S.
The World Travel and Tourism Council has estimated that 80 million more people traveled internationally in 2025 as compared to 2024. Yet, with horror stories circulating of tourists being arrested and sent to immigration detention centers for weeks or months, and of travelers having to hand U.S. border agents access to their cell phones and laptops, none of that tourism boom is filtering down to the U.S. And would-be tourists may grow even more leery if Trump succeeds in implementing his proposal to force many of them to disclose the last five years of posts on their social media accounts.
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His evil infects the world.
Experts Warn Trump Order Would Effectively End the Ability to Vote by Mail — Brad Reed
Congressional Democrats and all 23 Democratic state attorneys general are urging courts to block the order.
President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting the distribution of ballots by the US Postal Service could effectively end the ability to vote by mail if it isn’t struck down, experts told CNN on Wednesday
The order, which was signed in March, instructs the USPS to not deliver ballots in any states that have not given the federal government access to its voter lists. It is being challenged by congressional Democrats and all 23 Democratic state attorneys general, who are urging courts to block the order before it potentially disenfranchises eligible voters.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told CNN that, unless courts intervene quickly, “you will see a virtual elimination of mail-in voting.”...
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What does it take to make Americans realize we have been infected by a deadly disesase called Trump.
Trump Admin Moves to Denaturalize 17 Americans in Attack on Legal Immigration — Shireen Akram-Boshar
On Monday, the Trump administration announced that it is seeking to strip the citizenship of 17 Americans born outside the U.S. in the largest denaturalization effort in decades.
The administration claims that the individuals committed serious crimes and failed to disclose them during the naturalization process. But this is only the latest maneuver in President Donald Trump’s attempt to ramp up denaturalization and target immigration, including legal immigration.
Of the 17 targeted individuals, 11 are from countries in Latin American and the Caribbean, three are from Asia, two from Africa, and one is European.
Last month, the administration announced that it would begin the process to denaturalize 12 other citizens.
Trump has moved to ramp up denaturalizations since his first term, and even more so in his second....
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The barbarian has done enough damage to our freedom. It's past time. He must be stopped. Abolish Trump!
Trump Has Only Just Begun To Finish Losing War He Started In Iran — Evan Hurst
Early this morning on Truth Social, Donald Trump, while presumably sleeping nude on all fours atop his golden bedpan in his golden bed, declared Iran dead...
Iran’s military is a mess and it doesn’t exist and Iran has been completely defeated and Iran is dead and Iran won’t negotiate a deal (like they did with Barack Obama) and now Trump will make Iran pay, even though it is already dead.
‘Kay? ‘Kay.
Nobody has ever seen a bigger blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, nothing gets through, it is impermeable steel, also all the oil is getting through the blockade. Allahu akbar!
‘Kay? ‘Kay. (Praising Allah is his way of being a bigot.)
Yet not 24 hours ago, Trump, presumably in the same naked all-fours “truthing” position, allegedly, atop the golden bedpan in the golden bed, was having to respond to that completely dead Iranian military shooting down a US helicopter busy patrolling the strait that Trump completely controls, Iran does not control, Trump does, the strait that wouldn’t be open right now, and also blockaded, if Trump hadn’t decided to start and immediately lose this war with Iran. Praise Dear Leader!
We hate to be the fake news about this, but we should note that some notable Republicans no longer appear to be buying Trump’s lies and bullshit and reassurances that he even understands what he is currently doing here, much less has an actual plan to get the fuck out of it, now, two weeks from now, or ever....
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Trump is proud of pissing in the wind!
While America Burns, Trump Builds Himself a Colosseum — Thom Hartmann
The UFC spectacle is more than a cage fight: it's a monument to corruption, self-enrichment, and the imperial Roman politics of bread and circus
If you’ve wandered anywhere near the White House this past week, you couldn’t have missed it, because there’s now a ninety-two-foot, six-hundred-ton tangle of steel and floodlights squatting on the South Lawn like a carnival ride that ate a cathedral. The UFC calls it “The Claw.”
It’s taller than the White House itself, tricked out like a Fourth of July beer can, and bolted down right over the patch of grass where Marine One usually lands, all so that on Trump’s birthday, June 14th, two grown men can punch and choke each other bloody in front of thousands of howling fans.
Trump liked it so much he floated leaving it up forever, then had his handlers walk it back when somebody gently reminded him the President still occasionally needs a helicopter. Replacing the torn-up lawn afterward will run about seven hundred thousand dollars, which is roughly seven hundred thousand dollars more than this spectacle is worth.
There’s an ancient phrase for governing this way, and it isn’t a compliment. The Roman poet Juvenal, watching his republic rot into empire, sneered that a people who once handed out commands and legions had shrunk their whole appetite down to two things, panem et circenses, bread and circuses.
Keep the mob fed and entertained with a little blood, and they’ll never notice the men in charge stripping the place down to the studs. Nero fiddled, so the story goes, while Rome burned, and Caligula reportedly wanted to make his horse a Consul, which honestly would’ve been a step up in competence from a few of Trump’s Cabinet picks.
The line from those emperors to a reality-show host who wants cage fighters walking to the Octagon from the Oval Office isn’t hard to trace, and I wrote about exactly this hunger, the narcissistic strongman who governs by spectacle, in The Last American President.
The men who built our republic studied Rome until their eyes bled, and the thing they feared most is sitting right where Trump sits now, a demagogue who keeps a restless public dazzled and furious while the actual work of self-government quietly dies of neglect....
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The decandent evil that is Trump.
Britain Blasts Musk For Inciting Anti-Immigrant Riots
Politico Europe reports:
The British government hit out at X owner Elon Musk Wednesday, accusing him of whipping up tensions online ahead of disorder in Belfast. Houses, cars and a bus were set on fire Tuesday evening in response to a knife attack in the Northern Irish capital. A 30-year-old Sudanese man has been charged with attempted murder over the knife attack and will appear in court Wednesday.
Musk, a long-standing critic of the Labour government, said on his X platform ahead of the disorder: “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” He had shared a post from far-right activist Tommy Robinson, listing dozens of locations where people could protest.
Labour Party Chair Anna Turley tore into Musk’s posts Wednesday, saying the tech boss doesn’t have to live with the consequences far away from Northern Ireland. “It’s appalling. Anyone that is seeking to drive and exploit a situation like this to drive their own political agenda is grievously wrong and doing damage,” she told LBC Wednesday. “We’ve seen children, families having to flee their homes on the streets of Belfast last night.”
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For someone who so many refer to as "genius" he proves to be one of world's biggest assholes.
Newsmax Host: Democrats Wanted The Knicks To Lose So They Could “Blame It On Donald Trump” [VIDEO]
“The president was booed during the national anthem when he was put on camera, and he just kinda grins it away as he salutes the nation, in a very blue city where I think he had a lot of supporters in the crowd.
“But who has the stones to cheer for the president when it’s Donald Trump and you’re sitting in New York City? So I think all the people that wanted to clap probably just cowered, and then the boos were as aggressive as they possibly could be.
“Lefties are blaming the loss last night on Trump’s attendance, of course. New York liberals are claiming he jinxed the team by attending the game. In reality, though, when you think about it, it wasn’t him attending the game. It was all of the Democrat hype over him attending the game.
“So what’s the real story here? The real story is that the Democrats wanted the Knicks to lose last night so that they could blame it on Donald Trump. And so they put all of that energy into it, and they got what they asked for.” – Newsmax host Rob Schmitt.
"'But who has the stones to cheer for the president when it’s Donald Trump and you’re sitting in New York City? So I think all the people that wanted to clap probably just cowered, and then the boos were as aggressive as they possibly could be'
So the MAGAs in attendance are weak beta cucks lacking 'stones' and are intimidated by those librul soy boy trans for everybody DEI loving not suitably masculine people at the game who booed Trump?
Cupcake, didn't think this one through, did ya?" — DaddySnark (comments)
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Rob, you better go back to spin doctor school. Did you forget that everything Trump touches dies? This means you too, Rob. And your propaganda outlet.
Dan Rather: Every CBS News Report Should Now Come With An Asterisk “*This Story Was Approved By Trump”
CBS News legend Dan Rather writes on Substack:
For anyone who watches the next season of “60 Minutes” this fall, understand this: It is not the “60 Minutes” we have all come to trust and respect. It will be a diminished, Trump-approved version.
There is a tendency to view this as a story about journalism and corporate finance. But more than anything it is about big business in bed with big politics to monopolize news for their benefit, not for the country as a whole.
It pains me to write this, but the president and the corporate billionaires who curry his favor have eviscerated the best news program in the world, one that I called home for many years. So far, three correspondents have been fired, one left, and the broadcast’s top producers were let go.
Going forward, every interview, every story, every shot should come with an asterisk superimposed on the screen right next to the CBS eye: *“This story was approved by Donald Trump.”
**********************
Tick, Tick, Boom
Paramount delivers “60 Minutes” to Donald Trump on a gold platter
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The blind eye of the former CBS network must schedule a retina implant.
Labor Dept: Inflation Spikes To Highest Rate In Years
The Washington Post reports:
Inflation crossed 4 percent for the first time in three years in May, as sustained pressure from the Iran war makes clear that the inflationary hit to consumers is far from over. The Labor Department’s consumer price index rose at a 4.2 percent annual pace in the year ending in May, up from 3.8 percent in April.
The reading marks the first time inflation has reached that level since May 2023 — a span in which prices had been retreating from their pandemic-era peak of above 9 percent, the highest in nearly 40 years, without ever returning to where they were before covid.
The pain is showing up at the checkout line. Energy costs and tariffs are pushing grocery bills higher, with fresh produce and beef recording among the sharpest increases — and there is little sign of relief in the near term. Services inflation, which includes shelter costs and is insulated from tariffs on goods and energy prices, also is running consistently above 3 percent, a sign that price pressures involve more than the obvious culprits.
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And Trump continues to piss in the wind with his war on Iran. Pissing in the wind! The reason for the goddmaned tribulation he has put upon us!
Todd Blanche's deal would bury the largest presidential corruption scheme in US history — Robert Reich
Let me get right to the point. The Senate should not confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.
Blanche, who used to be Trump’s private lawyer, has treated the Justice Department as Trump’s private law firm. He still believes that Trump — rather than the United States — is his client.
At the very least, the Senate should insist, as a condition of confirming Blanche, that the May 19 deal Blanche devised to immunize Trump and his family from all future prosecutions — which Blanche alone signed — be nullified.
The purpose of that immunity deal — which resulted from Trump’s own bizarre lawsuit against the IRS — should by now be clear. It’s to prevent any future government inquiry into the corrupt dealings of Trump and his family.
The breadth of the so-called “settlement” agreement between Trump and, well, Trump is staggering. Take a look at it, here.
Boiled down to its bare essentials, the deal “forever” protects Trump and his family from “all claims” or “causes of action” or “requests for any relief” including “examinations” that “could have been” asserted by the United States against Trump, his children, “or affiliated individuals” or “parties” which arise out of “any matters” or of “Lawfare and/or Weaponization” or of any matters that “could be pending” before the United States or its agencies and departments.
Put another way, the U.S. government is prohibited from looking into any of the corrupt s--- Trump or his family have gotten into.
And there’s a lot of corrupt s---.
Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. Since being in office for a second time, he’s so far increased his wealth by an estimated $4 billion, and his sons’ and daughters’ wealth by billions more....
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What? We are to ignore crimes against the nation by this perverted and corrupt idiot? NEVER!
Read the list of crimes that he owns!
Trump must pay. And pay he will.
Furious Trump cheerleader loses it on Fox over president’s lies — Adam Lynch
Fox News host Laura Ingraham is getting bummed with President Donald Trump’s mixed messaging and embarrassing fabrications, especially when they keep producing cringe moments in U.S. invasion of Iran, reports Mediaite.
Specifically, Ingraham was aggravated that Iranians were still able to strike U.S. targets when their military was allegedly destroyed, as Trump and his cohorts keep claiming....
“One thing that a lot of Americans can’t really wrap their heads about here is we keep hearing that they’ve been destroyed, decimated. The word is often used ungrammatically, but nevertheless … we hear that, and we know there’s extensive damage. Yet these drones are lethal, and they’re easy to make. They’re fairly cheap, and obviously did some damage to us last night over Oman. How can we guard against that? How can we protect against that, given the stakes here, again back home, and over there?”
Sales insisted “the Iranian military threat has been substantially degraded,” but “it hasn’t gone down to zero.”....
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Both she and Fox News have been kissing Trump's ass for a long time. As Trump would tell her, "That's on you, darling!"
Mr. 'The Elections Are Rigged' Is Destroying DOJ's Election Integrity Training — Susie Madrak
These actions — and inactions — have alarmed current and former prosecutors, who say the Justice Department is not prepared to deal with threats to election integrity in the November elections.
Ha, ha! Trump has said, “if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t really have a nation.”
But five months out from the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, his Justice Department has canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, fired most of the lawyers in its Public Integrity Section and failed to replace the director of its Election Crimes Branch. Via Spotlight PA:
Also, the DOJ has not taken the usual steps to establish a “command center” to monitor and address the typical emergencies that pop up around Election Day, three sources with knowledge of the situation told NOTUS. A command center team would address things like voter intimidation and targeted disinformation meant to hinder a fair process.
These actions — and inactions — have alarmed current and former prosecutors, who say the Justice Department is not prepared to deal with threats to election integrity in the November elections....
"This is how the Trump grift works, it's a dumbing down of the entire system. Similar to how he gutted the training of ICE officers and hired en mass thousands of unqualified applicants. It's also like Christian fundamentalists, and why they prefer their children to be "home schooled."
If you can remove science-base precedent and put in its place the dictates of a figurehead, you have a cult. Trump despises institutions because institutions have rules and guidelines that constrain Trump's inner grifter.
Think of how Trump appointed Elon Musk to take a wrecking ball to this country's institutions, as nothing else should dictate other than the dictator himself. Courts don't mean anything, laws don't mean anything, regulations... none of it matters unless Trump says it does. :D" — NoNamington (comments)
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The DOJ is Trump's personal hit squad. It has been taking our Constitution and ripping it to shreds. We watch them do it every day and then turn on our TVs and forget it.
Trump: “The Bully Iran Is Dead, Praise Be To Allah!”
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The rant of an insane man isn't fit to print. He must be removed if we are to survive.
Racist Paul LePage Wins Maine GOP House Primary
Reuters reports:
Former Maine Governor Paul LePage won the Republican nomination on Tuesday to run ?in the state’s 2nd Congressional District, U.S. ?media projected, setting up a November contest in a race that could help decide control of the ?U.S. House of Representatives.
The district, which ?covers much of Maine’s forested interior, is ?considered a key battleground and one of ?a handful of competitive seats likely to play ?a decisive role in determining the balance of power in Congress.
LePage, a combative political figure who served ?two terms as governor, is seeking a ?return to elected office and is expected to mount a ?high-profile ?campaign.
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This old fart again? Dump his Nazi ass come November!
British Poll: Majority Say Brexit Has Been A Failure
Bloomberg News reports:
A UK poll shows that a new Brexit referendum would reverse the vote that led to Britain’s departure from the European Union a decade ago.
Fifty-two percent of Britons think the UK should rejoin the EU, according to an Ipsos survey of 1,137 British adults conducted between May 14 and May 20. That’s the inverse of the mood in June 2016 when a comparable share of the electorate backed Brexit.
Almost half of Britons support a repeat of that referendum, with opinion evenly split on whether it should happen before or after the next general election. Asked how they would vote in a hypothetical redo, only 33% said the UK should remain outside the EU. Nearly one in 10 remained undecided.
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Golly, it's too bad no one warned them.
And yet. the vile culprit leads in polling. Some people never learn.
Pete Hegseth’s Mormon diss explodes a MAGA myth — Amanda Marcotte
Christian nationalism isn't just immoral — it's incoherent
Pete Hegseth is not a coherent thinker. This was demonstrated yet again on the D-Day anniversary event in France, where the defense secretary gave a speech that was supposed to be anti-Nazi but ended up employing a metaphor that made the Nazis sound like the victims in WWII. Hegseth claims he wants military promotions based on merit, but has systematically blocked promotions of people are more qualified than he’ll ever be, for no other seeming reason than they aren’t white men. And, of course, he keeps saying the U.S. has won the Iran war, which still has no end in sight, while also begging for more time and money to wage it.
So it’s no surprise that the famously incompetent Donald Trump appointee recently claimed to be “simplifying” the military’s religious coding system, but only ended up sowing unnecessary confusion and rancor. Even more entertainingly, the move backfired — which was obviously more about Hegseth’s Christian nationalist inclinations than efficiency anyway. In his eagerness to marginalize people of non-Christian faiths, Hegseth accidentally exposed a major MAGA myth: that there’s a coherent, much less peaceful, way to impose their theocratic views on the country. On the contrary, any effort to turn this into a “Christian nation” is destined to reveal the deep divisions between Christian factions, one which are only concealed now because of the secularism Hegseth so despises....
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Christian nationalism is based on a hoodwink.
Trump insiders in 'Epstein War Room' feared 'surreal' accusation against president: report — Tom Boggioni
According to excerpts from the forthcoming book "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump" by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, Vice President JD Vance and senior White House officials engaged in an extraordinary debate over whether to publicly release an uncorroborated allegation of sexual assault involving the president.
The White House converted the secure Situation Room—"the same facility where President Obama's team monitored the raid that killed Osama bin Laden"—into an Epstein "war room" to manage fallout from a DOJ memo claiming no "client list" of Epstein's associates existed. The memo "backfired spectacularly," triggering loud backlash among the MAGA base and prompting the Wall Street Journal to prepare a damaging article about Trump's relationship with Epstein.
Trump's senior officials gathered repeatedly in the Situation Room without the president, attempting to manage public fury over the administration's refusal to release Epstein files. The secure space, traditionally used to assess foreign threats, became instead a political bunker for managing a domestic crisis involving Trump's long friendship with Epstein who died while in custody under suspicious circumstances, the report notes....
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Closer, ever closer...
Morning Joe hosts fire back live after Trump snaps at their Epstein reporting — Tom Boggioni
Any question over whether Donald Trump was watching MS NOW’s "Morning Joe” on Wednesday morning was put to rest after he fired off a furious Truth Social post moments after the hosts read excerpts from a bombshell New York Times report on the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Following an interview with Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, co-host Joe Scarborough broke the news that Trump had just lashed out at the show.
According to the president, “Joe Scarborough’s ever shrinking, low rated show, one of the most inaccurate detailers of truthful facts on television, is being crushed in the ratings. His serious case on Trump Derangement Syndrome, often referred to as TDS, has made him a laughing stock among those who know what is going on in the ‘Wonderful World of Television.’ His show is being cut because his ratings are TERRIBLE, and Mike and Willie, who wants to be his father but doesn’t have the talent, are falling further and further into the TDS Swamp! They all suffer from Low Ratings Disease!!! President DJT.”...
"Rapist, pedophile, twice impeached, pathological liar, cheating kids charities, killed 1 million americans with his stupidity on covid, told his cult to drink bleach, stupid motherfucker even his parents couldn't stand. Fucking morons vote for fucking morons to destroy this country and everything he touches dies. He is a world class failure and they voted to be in his cult." — SunMoonSars (comments)
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Notice how, when backed into a corner, Trump always throws out garbage as "low IQ" or "low ratings." He's a very weak and disgruntled man. He will meet his doom for his link to Epstein very soon.
Strategist baffled as Epstein scandal 'continues to unravel' with disturbing new turn — Robert Davis
A Democratic political strategist was flabbergasted on Tuesday after new reporting indicated that the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has taken a disturbing turn.
On Monday, Scripps News reported that former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas was told to "stand down" from investigating disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch, about 40 miles south of Santa Fe. He told the outlet that he had been looking into crimes that Epstein may have committed there in 2019 until he received a call from the Southern District of New York telling him to back off as the federal government investigated the property.
Mike Nellis, a political strategist, said in a new podcast episode on Tuesday that the report was both "disgusting and disturbing."
"We have essentially one of the world's, if not the world's, greatest human traffickers, greatest abusers of little kids, greatest blackmailer who has blackmailed so many people, corrupted so many people in business, in politics, in government, in Hollywood, God knows where else he's stuck his dark, twisted influence in. And our government has never searched his New Mexico ranch," Nellis said. "A ranch that, by the way, was sold to a Republican mega donor who was also running for statewide office in Texas very recently. So the tangled web of this coverup and this scandal continues to unravel, and the more it does, the more it pisses me off."
Trump has been trying to outrun his previous promise to release all of the Epstein files in the government's possession throughout his second administration. However, his administration has been plagued by scandal after scandal that has kept the Epstein files in the forefront of many Americans' minds....
What makes Balderas's revelation so disturbing, according to Nellis, is that the order came down at a time when Donald Trump was, in theory, in control of the Department of Justice.
"Now, it's even worse because Trump has full control over the DOJ," Nellis added. "They won't release all the files. They keep lying about it. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, soon-to-be, if the Senate confirms him, actual attorney general, is basically just Donald Trump's personal attorney. But again, at a bare minimum, the incompetence around this case is staggering. But I think we all know there's a certain amount of stupid you can tolerate before it's just outright corruption."
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Closer, ever closer...
James Comer mocked for eye-popping claim on Fox News: 'Not even trying to mask it' — Bennito L. Kelty
Political analysts and observers referred to a GOP lawmaker as a "racist" after he made remarks that seemed to reveal his thinly veiled thoughts.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) spoke about Medicaid fraud during a Fox News interview, where he said, "What we're seeing, especially in the blue states, is there is rampant fraud, especially in the minority communities."
He added, "The only way we're going to stop is if people are put in jail."
Commentators reacted to Comer's comments with disgust, accusing him of making a not-too-subtle racist remark.
"Ah yes, the black people! (sic) of course!" Alex Cole, a progressive news personality, wrote.
"James Comer, fraudster and rank racist," reacted Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and contributing editor for The Atlantic.
"When they write about how America collapsed, it will be because we allowed one of our political parties to get away with this sh—," wrote Rachel Bitecofer, a national political analyst and pollster.
"Remember in the pre-Trump era where they were subtle?" asked political writer Zaid Jilani.
"Here he is saying it out. 'Especially in the minority communities,'" former U.S. ambassador Luis Moreno posted. "Folks like Donald Trump Jr., Bankman-Fried, Brett Favre, nearly all of the white collar fraudsters pardoned by Trump would like a word."
"They are not even trying to mask it," agreed writer and editor Keith Murphy
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Comer is a purebred member of the Land of the Happy Negro!
Trump's 'stunning' chat with reporters raises red flags for analyst: 'His brain is mush' — Robert Davis
President Donald Trump's "stunning" chat with reporters before he boarded Air Force One to fly back to the White House after Game 3 of the NBA Finals on Monday night raised red flags for one political analyst.
David Pakman, host of the "David Pakman Show" on YouTube, argued during a new reaction video on Tuesday that Trump's press gaggle with reporters revealed the state of the president's mental health. Trump seemed like a bird distracted by a piece of tinsel as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum responded to a reporter's question, Pakman argued. Trump then chimed in, taking the conversation in a strange direction.
"We have a lot of respect for a lot of the people before me," Trump said, standing next to Burgum on the tarmac. "I know some of you very well. But take a look at that plane. See that plane? That's in perfect mint condition."
"Take a look at that," the president said, pointing. "Look at that. Isn't that amazing? And everything should look that way. We work with the military. We do a real job. But you look at the polish. Everything is beautiful."
Pakman said Trump's comments were "stunning" and concerning for multiple reasons.
"His brain is mush," Pakman said, adding that Trump may have been "fully sundowning at this point in time," referring to a condition that is associated with dementia....
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Burned to a crisp.
20 House Republicans cross party lines to pass pro-union bill — Meredith Lee Hill
Twenty House Republicans broke with Speaker Mike Johnson to help pass a Democratic-led bill Tuesday aimed at making it easier for workers to form unions, widening the divide between a bloc of pro-labor Republicans and GOP leaders.
Democrats successfully used a discharge petition to sidestep Johnson and force the vote with the help of a handful of House Republicans, including Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Nick LaLota of New York.
“It's passing,” Fitzpatrick said before the vote when asked about Johnson's efforts to whip Republicans against the bill.
The Faster Labor Contracts Act aims to reduce the amount of time between workers voting to form a union and negotiating their first collectively bargained contract, in part by requiring the parties to more quickly enter federal mediation. It's the latest in a series of employment bills that pro-union House Republicans have bucked their party on in recent months....
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Srick with the union.
Vance: Iran Peace Deal Might Not Happen For Months
“Right now, I feel that we are in a position to get a deal that is good for the United States economically and that really does deal with the Iranian nuclear program, not just now, not just while Donald Trump is president, but for the long term, to where my kids can say when they’re adults, ‘Iran is not going to have a nuclear weapon.’
“That’s the goal of the policy. And I think we’re very close to achieving that goal. But we still got some wood to chop. We’re going to keep doing it. I think we’re going to know a lot before the midterm elections.
“Look, I think that the deal could happen in the next week, but the deal could also happen months from now.” – JD Vance, hours after Trump said that an Iran peace deal could happen in the next “two or three days.”
The clip is an excerpt from a coming CBS interview.
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Or never. And that will mean a new great depression.
We already know a lot, dipshit.
FIFA Is Paying For Empty Space In Trump Tower
The New York Times reports:
For the past year, FIFA, the governing body of international soccer, has leased an office on the 17th floor of New York’s Trump Tower that has sat all but empty. The rent goes to President Trump’s family business, but soccer officials say the space sits largely idle.
Paying rent to the Trumps was the choice of Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, who has made being close to Mr. Trump a top priority. He has lavished the president with praise, trophies and a medal. He has made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, the Trump National Doral golf club and even the “Melania” documentary premiere.
Mr. Infantino has publicly boosted the president through impeachments and plummeting poll numbers. It was all in service, Mr. Infantino’s supporters say, of ensuring that the World Cup, which begins this week, goes off without a hitch. Mr. Trump could disrupt the games in any number of ways. Mr. Infantino, allies say, is handling a volatile president who responds to praise and gifts.
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Fuck FIFA!
Trump Might Have To Replace Bozo DNI Pick, Since Even Republicans Hate That Guy —Evan Hurst
And what’s the news today? That literally everyone may hate Bill Pulte, Trump’s choice to go after his enemies as Tulsi Gabbard’s (acting) replacement at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, so much that he might have to pick a new DNI altogether. Pulte is the guy they call “Little Trump,” because he’s just as much of a loser as Trump! (Just as ugly too, look at that square head. There seems to be a strong correlation between white men being sad MAGA creeps with Daddy issues and their heads having corners. We’re just saying. It’s not right.)
The headline in Semafor this morning was that behind the scenes lots of Republicans want Pulte — who currently also is rubbing his butthole all over the leadership positions at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — to GTFO out of contention for the DNI job. Democrats in Congress are going to block votes to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), because hello, those are some pretty awesome spy powers to hand over to a little fuckwitted bitch like Bill Pulte.
And apparently nobody on Capitol Hill loves him enough to fight for him!
“Democrats are not going to vote to pass 702 until he’s withdrawn,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “And we need that done. That’s 60% of the president’s daily brief is materials generated by FISA 702. So the stalemate needs to be broken.”
Haha, John Cornyn, Donald Trump is not capable of reading or absorbing the daily brief, hahaha.
Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Semafor that “This problem was created by the White House” and “Nothing has changed about Mr. Pulte’s qualifications.”
As of this morning’s update, Senate Majority Leader John Thune was being described in Semafor as “unsure” of the status of Pulte’s nomination. Real vote of confidence from the man of the president’s party who runs the Senate!
All the news articles we have read are similarly bereft of supportive words for Pulte from any elected Republicans, if that tells you anything about how well this is going for Dear Leader....
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"MAGA creeps with Daddy issues!" Says it all!
Congress Must Act Now to Protect Social Security—Make the Wealthy Pay Their Fair Share — Newswire Editor
The following statement was issued by Richard Fiesta, Executive Director of the Alliance, regarding the Trustees’ reports on the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds released today.
The report states that the Social Security Trust Fund is able to pay full benefits and expenses until 2032, while the Medicare Trust Fund is projected to remain solvent until 2033. If Congress does not make any changes, the Social Security Trust Fund will only be able to pay 78% of scheduled benefits to all current and future beneficiaries.
“The new Social Security Trustees Report serves as a warning. Congress must act to increase revenue into the Social Security system. This will prevent current and future beneficiaries from losing roughly $500 a month in Social Security benefits they have earned over a lifetime of work in just six years.
“The wrong response is to continue down President Trump and congressional Republicans’ path: passing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans that undermine Social Security's finances, and implementing tariffs and policies that harm our economy and put Americans out of work, while laying the groundwork to gut the program through benefit cuts, a higher retirement age, and privatization.
“The right solution is simple, has broad support from the majority of Americans, and would fix Social Security's finances for the next 75 years. Today the wealthiest Americans benefit from a loophole that lets them stop paying Social Security tax after the first $184,500 they earn while the rest of us pay on every dollar we make....
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Just how many years have we been prodding these wealthy grifters to fix the problem? Too damned many!
When do we think these jackasses will hear this problem and pay attention to it?
Sam Altman’s Eyeball Scanning Company Now Laying Off Workers — Joe Wilkins
Look, nobody roots for workers to lose their jobs. But some companies are built on such a ridiculous premise that it’s impossible to ignore the cracks in the foundation — making layoffs all but inevitable.
On Monday this week, the Sam Altman-founded startup Tools for Humanity announced it was laying off an unspecified number of employees, Business Insider reported. The company, which had employed more than 500 people, is valued at $2.5 billion, with backing from big name tech investors including Andreessen Horowitz.
It’s main product is the Orb, a biometric ID device that scans irises in order to provide “proof of humanity” to clients. Basically, the idea goes, Orb is the only way to combat the growing risk of AI deepfakes and scams — a development which Altman, as chief executive of OpenAI, is coincidentally spearheading.
“As we enter the next step of our company strategy and operating priorities, we have made the hard decision to make changes to some roles and teams across the company,” the company told staffers in an all-hands email viewed by BI.
The layoffs come as the company has struggled to find a suitable market for its Orbs. As Time noted in reporting from earlier this year, Tools for Humanity was caught woefully unprepared to scale its technology when AI agents began swarming the internet back in February. “We acknowledge we have a problem,” the company’s chief business officer Trevor Traina told Time. “We’ve been Orb-constrained.”...
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Look at things through THOSE eyes.
New York Pastor Gets 17 Years On Child Porn Charges
Newsday reports:
A former Brentwood pastor was sentenced to 17½ years in federal prison Tuesday for enticing minors to perform sexually explicit acts and sending videos of the encounters to other men. Jose Saez Jr., 31, who has been a pastor at Iglesia Cristiana Alumbrando El Camino church on Second Avenue in Brentwood, had pleaded guilty to sexual exploitation of a child in March 2025.
U.S. District Judge Joan Azrack said despite Saez committing “reprehensible” acts that are “among the most serious this court confronts,” his past history as an abuse victim, the good he did as a pastor and his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis since his arrest were factors in giving him a below-guideline sentence.
Saez, seated in a wheelchair, apologized to his victims, his family and his church community. He said he was particularly remorseful for thinking only of himself in the immediate aftermath of his arrest. He said he feels shame for his actions. “I failed the standards I preached,” Saez told the court, “the values I believed in.”...
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Another Xianist bites the dust.
Make sure this is delvered to the hate scumag, Ben Shapiro and the scumbag hate group, Focus On The Family.
Your people are the ones doing this to our chilldren. We all know it , we all see it. You aren't fooling anyone.
""…[M]ost men who molest little boys are not gay. Only 21 percent of the child molesters we studied who assault little boys were exclusively homosexual. Nearly 80 percent of the men who molested little boys were heterosexual or bisexual and most of these men were married and had children of their own."
MAGA influencer falsely accuses a Californian senior citizen of election fraud — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
MAGA influencer Nick Shirley confronted an 86-year-old woman named Doris at her home, claiming California records showed she is 126-years-old with 51 votes cast.
Shirley, a pro-Trump YouTuber, recorded himself confronting Doris and shared the video online.
On Tuesday, Democratic strategist Tom Bonier exposed a fundamental flaw in Shirley's investigation: California's voter database VoteCal, built on the Microsoft SQL Server, generates a default birthdate of January 1, 1900 when date fields contain errors or are blank. This explains the 126-year-old discrepancy, he argues.
Bonier wrote on X, "This dips--- discovered that SQL server at one point replaced blank date of birth fields with a default of 01/01/1900, so he harassed an 86 year old woman."
The woman disputed Shirley's claims, stating she was in her mid-80s and refusing to review his documents.
Despite Bonier's explanation exposing the database glitch, the baseless fraud claim spread among right-wing influencers, including Elon Musk, who amplified the false narrative.
This isn't the first time Shirley's inaccurate reporting gains traction amongst MAGA circles. His unsubstantiated investigation into alleged fraud by Somalians in Minnesota was supported by the Trump administration, NPR reports.
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More evidence of brain rot from retarded Nazis.
Trump's perfect image of 'decadence and rot' could be his undoing: Ex-GOP operative — Nicole Charky-Chami
Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist, ripped President Donald Trump after he showed up at the Knicks' NBA Finals game at Madison Square Garden, right in the heart of New York City, where he appeared to fall asleep during the historic game. He warned this could signal Trump's undoing.
The co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project described how Trump's 30 percent approval rating, the Iran war and his declining health were all leading to MAGA's pending implosion after he was viciously booed by the crowd during the National Anthem on Monday night....
"He just doesn't care about anyone besides himself, and that's the point in New York City," Schmidt said.
"It's not about him, but Donald had to make it about him," Schmidt added. "He needed to inconvenience hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, and ruin the experience for lifelong fans so he could fall asleep in the luxury box. It is the perfect image for the sloth and the corruption, the decadence and the rot that has descended over America."
He explained how, as gas prices rise and when people around the world see "this obese sloth," they know "that our greatness has turned into a necrotizing rot, that we are a falling republic."
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Trump cares only for your praise. Forget the rest.
Coming To America For The World Cup? America Would Prefer Some Of You F*ck Off — Gary Legum
God, do we love the World Cup, which kicks off Thursday with a match between Mexico and South Africa. For starters, the Cup is one of those sporting events that is considered perfectly acceptable to watch while drinking pints in a bar at 8 A.M. Also, there is some other stuff that’s cool about it, we guess. But mostly it is the drinking at 8 A.M. thing.....
Yes, the United States. Thanks to the xenophobes and bigots who have been fucking up America’s reputation as a nice free country for foreigners to visit or move to, this year’s World Cup already has a body count of sorts. Not literal dead bodies, but foreigners who have been denied entry to the country and so cannot participate in the Cup or go wherever they want to cheer on their team.
The latest casualty is Omar Artan of Somalia. Artan was selected by FIFA to be one of the 52 referees who will work World Cup matches. He is by all accounts a highly respected ref who was named referee of the year in 2025 for the entire continent of Africa. He is a celebrity in Somalia, where he is “lionized.”
Artan secured his proper papers in Nairobi last week, flew on to Istanbul and then to Miami. That was when he was taken aside by border agents and questioned overnight for 11 fucking hours. Then he was put in a holding cell for a few more hours. Then he was ignominiously shoved onto a return flight to Istanbul, having been denied entrance to the United States for unknown reasons.
Did we say unknown reasons? We meant racism, it’s always the racism:
Mr. Artan said that border officials had asked him why he had come to the United States and about politics in Somalia. Those questions, Mr. Artan said, included many about the militant group Al Shabab, which controls parts of Somalia and which has fought a yearslong insurgency against the government..
Sure. Everyone in Somalia, all 20 million or so of them, is a member of Al Shabab. That’s just common sense.
Artan is reportedly devastated, as he had been training for this opportunity, including taking classes in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. All that down the drain because some CBP officer at the Miami airport is an asshole. Shameful.
We already know how our giant wet baby of a president feels about Somalia, an attitude shared by the morons he has hired into his administration. Dr. Oz was on Fox News being hugely racist about Somalians just on Tuesday morning:
Being a racist is the worst thing you can be in other states too! Maybe not some of the Southern ones, but others! Someone should mention that to Dr. Brain Genius there.
Artan is one person. But the entire Iranian team and members of its entourage also got screwed over because of our bigoted immigration authorities. The team had planned to make its home base for the tournament in Tucson. Which made sense, since Iran has two group matches in Los Angeles and a third in Seattle between June 15 and June 26.,,,
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Some of us don't give a kick!
There’s a Terrible Reason Why This Ebola Outbreak Is Different — Jill Filipovic
Landing at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in early June felt like arriving into a scene from a different time, specifically the COVID-19 pandemic era. Officials in full personal protective equipment—blue gowns, white masks, clear goggles—funneled the travel-weary hordes past a thermal temperature sensor to identify anyone with a fever, and we had to scan a QR code so we could be tracked for contact tracing. Two days earlier, Kenya’s high court had ordered the suspension of a plan to transport Ebola-exposed Americans from nearby countries into Kenya for quarantine at a military base; the government went ahead with the plan anyway, which fueled furious protests in which two Kenyans were killed by police. So far, Kenya has seen no reported Ebola cases, and the population would certainly like to keep it that way. As of Friday, neighboring Uganda has had 16 confirmed cases and one death. The Democratic Republic of Congo, which borders Uganda and is where the outbreak originated, has seen 363 confirmed cases and 63 deaths. Nearly everyone agrees that these numbers are probably an undercount. Things are poised to get worse.
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The Deadly Ebola Virus is still coming to take you away.
Local Brand Realizes Customers Hate Its AI Ads, Switches to Charming Homemade Ones Instead — Victor Tangermann
In late 2024, the Coca-Cola Company released an unsettling, AI-generated remake of its beloved 1995 “Holidays Are Coming” ad, triggering a major outcry. A followup AI ad in November 2025 didn’t fare much better. Coke vowed that it took an army of “AI specialists” a month to make, but netizens were left appalled, accusing the company of relying on cheap “AI slop.”
The widespread distaste for AI has only grown since then, but some companies finally appear to have learned a lesson. After getting berated for using AI for its advertisements, a New Jersey-based snack brand called Chookie opted to do a 180 — and it’s already paying off in a big way.
One of its AI ads was rife with misspellings and terrifying, googly-eyed chocolate bars. Another of them shows an AI-generated figure producing the cookie bars in what appears to be lab. For the most part, the ads were almost completely ignored online, with the stray comment criticizing the use of AI.
Then, the company launched a new marketing stunt surrounding its attempts to launch a fictional airline, dubbed “Chookie Air,” dedicated to delivering its line of cookie bar snacks. (The goal was to bring attention to its new, real-world partnership with delivery service company Gopuff.)
Instead of relying on generative AI, Chookie built handcrafted airplanes out of cardboard and an even a fully-fledged treehouse “HQ,” inhabited by a pair of hand puppet animals. The result was quirky, roughly edited, and unmistakably human.
One clip shared on Instagram shows the hand puppets getting to work to construct a plane. A makeshift camera rig made out of a painter’s pole allowed the staff to make it look like the plane was flying.
“We started noticing consumers weren’t rewarding polish the way brands thought they were,” said Chookie founder Zev Ziegler in a press release. “They were rewarding effort. Humor. Tiny human decisions. When we compared the performance of our handmade work against AI-generated creative, the difference wasn’t subtle.”...
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Artificial? Yes. Intelligence? Duhhhh!
McDonald’s Deploying AI-Powered Drive-Thru System for Ordering Its Nauseating Foodslop — Frank Landymore
Coming (back) to a McDonald’s near you: AI-powered drive-thru lanes.
That’s right. Those feeling déjà vu aren’t mistaken: this is McDonald’s second foray into using AI at its burger delivery pit stops, after the first attempt — a collaboration with IBM — fell apart like a soggy Big Mac.
What, if anything, is different from the last rollout? The fast food chain is touting a new AI system called ArchIQ, which it’s testing in partnership with Google, according to Restaurant Business. “Archy,” as it’s nicknamed, is being deployed in five locations to start with, as part of McDonald’s horribly-branded “> NEXT” business strategy, aimed at giving the eatery’s tech stack a refresh.
One major McDonald’s franchisee, which runs an X account called “McFranchisee,” claimed in a post that Archy is already seeing action, and has processed over one million orders, with about 90 percent of the orders requiring no human intervention.
“Archy will not only assist drive-thru orders but act as a master brain to help managers run a better restaurant,” the franchise owner enthused, adding in another post that the AI system “will tell you if your freezer is down, have a choke point in the kitchen or something else that needs your attention.”
These claims weren’t received warmly. Plenty of customers piled into the replies to rage against the return of AI drive thrus, fearing that it’ll put employees out of work and that, just as importantly, the AI may kind of blow and make for a frustrating ordering experience.
“This sucks ass the ai drive thru at every restaurant I’ve been to suck,” was the critique leveled by one eloquent skeptic....
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Want fries with that?
He Profits Off Raw Milk That’s Making People Sick. The Government Isn’t Stopping Him — Annie Waldman
A white Ford pickup truck broke through a thick curtain of fog one morning in February, winding its way down a muddy farm road in California’s Central Valley. From it emerged a 64-year-old dairyman, burly and tan, who left the engine running as he lumbered toward me with open arms.
“You must be Mark,” I said, warning him I wasn’t one for hugging.
“I’m a hugger,” he said, pulling me in anyway. “I feel like I’ve known you for a lifetime.”
I had spent the past couple of weeks corresponding with Raw Farm founder Mark McAfee, who’d filled my inbox with messages and PowerPoints extolling the virtues of his most important, and controversial, product:
It is delicious.
It makes you feel good (the gut-brain serotonin and dopamine cycle).
It’s great for asthma and literally saves lives.
He was talking about raw milk, which, if you trust 150 years of bedrock science, offers little reason to consume. By definition, it has not been pasteurized, the simple process of heating milk to kill off harmful bacteria. Before the practice was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of babies died each year from illnesses linked to contaminated dairy. Today, most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its sanitized counterpart, cannot treat or cure disease and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children....
McAfee’s Dairy Has Sickened Hundreds of People Over the Years, According to Regulators.
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Feel free to rape and plunder as you please under our criminal president who recognizes no law he can't break!
With a retarded populace there will be no one to ever care.
'Red mirage' propaganda to blame for Trump's Meet the Press 'eruption': expert — Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump, like a lot of Republicans, seems to have believed former reality TV star Spencer Pratt's social media success would carry over at the ballot box, but a tech writer explained why the conservative media bubble provided a distorted view.
The 79-year-old president melted down over the weekend during an interview with "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker, who pressed him for evidence that California elections were rigged against Pratt and other GOP candidates, but tech writer Gil Duran and The New Republic's Greg Sargent agreed that Trump was duped by the social media he consumes.
"A big reason Trump is so angry, we think, is that the MAGA online disinformation universe has been unable to entirely reinvent reality and use propaganda to inflate the GOP candidate’s strength into something it isn’t," Sargent said. "In a sense, then, this saga is really about the failures of MAGA propaganda."...
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Trump Pattie-Melt. A new hamburger?
'I hear a sound coming': Ex-Trump official predicts impending GOP mutiny against president — Alexander Willis
Former Trump administration official Miles Taylor predicted Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s “self-serving agenda” may soon trigger a GOP Senate revolt, one that could potentially sink his future nominees for the remainder of his term.
“I hear a sound coming from the Republican side of the aisle,” Taylor wrote in an analysis published on his Substack. “It’s not exactly the sound of ‘the resistance,’ but it’s at least worth calling ‘the reluctance.’ There’s a growing unease among Republican senators about Trump’s self-serving agenda.”
Where such a GOP Senate revolt may first materialize, Taylor theorized, could be in the Senate confirmation hearings slated for Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who Trump selected on Monday to serve in the role permanently
Taylor suggested that, much like Trump’s nomination of Bill Pulte to serve as his new Director of National Intelligence, “surely some [Republican senators] rolled their eyes at the nomination of Blanche.” Pulte’s nomination has sparked unprecedented pushback from conservative voices, a sign, Taylor argued, of an impending break in the status quo.
“So what’s that sound I hear? Somewhere inside the flaccid consciences of those Republican senators who I used to work with, there’s a smaller conscience trying to get attention,” Taylor wrote. “A conscience within a conscience. He’s squeaking desperately in the dark, while his master turns up the volume on Fox and Newsmax.”
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Test 1-2-3...is there an echo in here?
Why That Next Hamburger Is Going to Cost You — David Dayen
The primary driver of inflation in the U.S. economy—the forever war in Iran—has not yet taken full effect. Now we’ve found an entirely new driver.
Last week, the flesh-eating parasite known as the New World screwworm was found in a calf in Texas; a second case was identified about five miles away shortly thereafter. (A third case was found in a dog.) Screwworm flies lay their eggs in the live tissue of warm-blooded animals, from livestock to pets to humans. These larvae “screw” into the animal’s flesh, and while they are not very harmful to humans, in that the horrifying effects of maggots chewing into your skin are relatively easy to notice and address, they can kill a livestock host if not treated. In a widespread infestation, one of the last resorts would be mass culling, which would obviously have huge impacts on a diminished U.S. cattle herd.
The total herd count already sits at a catastrophic 75-year low, in part because of the screwworm outbreak that broke past a firebreak in Central America starting in 2023. The U.S.-Mexico border has for the past year been closed to live cattle auctions, affecting the feeder cattle that come in through Mexico to rebuild herds. But closing the border did not stop the flies from coming.
Low cattle volumes have sent the price of beef skyward to levels not seen since the Korean War, up between 20 and 35 percent in the past year. A screwworm outbreak would seriously aggravate that spike. In other words, you probably should have ordered your last hamburgers of the summer a week ago.
An outbreak would dramatically impact ranchers who have been in a deep hole for the past decade from reduced stocks, and more recently from drought, tariffs, imports of cattle pushed by President Trump to lower the price, a war in Iran that has spiked costs of fertilizer and fuel, and now the screwworm. “The cattle producer in the U.S. has already been under extreme financial stress,” says Joe Maxwell, president of Farm Action Fund and a farmer in Missouri, where he once served in the state legislature and as lieutenant governor. “This is serious, the screwworm outbreak. But it’s even more serious because of the financial position they were already under.”...
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Everyone understands hamburgers!
Talk of Canceling Elections Shows Trump Is Unfit for Office — Robert Dallek
IN A CONVERSATION with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last August, President Donald Trump noted that Ukraine hadn’t held elections since the Russian invasion, asking whether elections are called off during a war. Before Zelensky could respond, Trump added: “Oh, that’s a good thing.” Five months later, Trump mused apophatically about canceling elections out of disdain for Democrats. Just days after that, in an interview with Reuters, Trump reflected with his typical braggadocio that, given his great success as president, “we shouldn’t even have an election” this November. The sheer number of times Trump brought up canceling elections forced White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to clarify that the president was only joking.
But in light of Trump’s repeated affronts to democracy—including January 6th and his sustained lies about the results of the 2020 election—we are forced to take these remarks seriously. His comments show that he does not understand the essential place elections hold in our constitutional order and, in doing so, reveal a man unfit for the office he holds.
If and when Trump, believing he will lose control of Congress and face a third impeachment, tries to suspend November’s congressional elections, voters need to remember that Americans have held elections through national and international upheavals far more worrisome than anything the forty-seventh president can cite.
In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War that killed as many Americans as every other conflict in the nation’s history combined, Abraham Lincoln did not try to suspend the country’s congressional elections. Nor in 1864, when he ran for a second presidential term against Union General George B. McClellan, did he defy the country’s electoral laws and traditions.
Similarly, in 1898, during America’s war with Spain, William McKinley never tried to call off America’s congressional elections. And, despite warning against the dangers posed to the country’s democratic and economic systems by “radical” Democrats led by William Jennings Bryan, McKinley did not try to block the presidential election in 1900. Since there were no polls to encourage McKinley’s hope of winning, he simply believed Americans would not abandon their regard for traditional political institutions by electing Bryan. He, of course, was right.
Between 1914 and 1918, as Europe fought World War I, which the United States joined in 1917, Woodrow Wilson believed it essential to hold the 1916 and 1918 presidential and congressional elections. These elections demonstrated that, even in times of crisis, American democracy remains an effective form of governance....
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As Churchill said, "We will never surrender!"
Experience, Knowledge, and Talent Need Not Apply — Robert Reich
Trump suck-ups are poisoning America — not just inside the U.S. government
Friends,
Bari Weiss was hired by CBS to be editor-in-chief of CBS News in October 2025, when Paramount Skydance acquired CBS.
Weiss had no television-news experience. She was a New York Times Opinion staffer and founder of The Free Press.
In May, Weiss made Nick Bilton the new executive producer of “60 Minutes.” He has no television experience. He has no management experience, either.
I remember when CBS News was the most admired news organization in America — home to Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. They spoke truth to power. Cronkite had the guts to challenge Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Murrow had the guts to expose Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunt.
Now, CBS News is a disgraced shell of a news organization that last week fired famed “60 Minutes” senior correspondent Scott Pelley after gutting most of the rest of its team.
Pelley says Weiss repeatedly interfered in stories “60 Minutes” sought to run. When, for example, the show did a piece on the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Weiss wanted to make “the protesters look more violent” and to describe Good “as driving toward the officer,” when videos show her driving away from him.
Pelley concluded that Weiss was trying to put “a thumb on the scale for the President’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News. … a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the President.”
Why was Weiss doing this? Presumably because her boss, David Ellison, wants to suck up to Trump, and hired Weiss to help him — and she hired Bilton to aid her in doing so. And she fired other staff because they wouldn’t.
Trump, meanwhile, has chosen Bill Pulte to be acting director of national intelligence. Pulte has no background in national security. He was head of Trump’s federal housing agency. His entire professional experience before that was at companies tied to his family’s wealth.
Trump chose Pulte not because he knows anything about intelligence but because of his eagerness to advance Trump’s political revenge campaign. He used his housing office to attack Trump’s enemies, leveling accusations of mortgage fraud against people Trump considers political enemies — Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Lisa Cook, a Fed governor Trump has sought to fire.
Trump has also chosen Todd Blanche to be attorney general. Blanche’s qualifications? As acting attorney general, Blanche oversaw the Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI director James B. Comey over a photo he posted on Instagram in May 2025 of seashells on a beach that spelled out “86 47,” which the department characterized as a threat to the president....
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Making a total ass of himself anywhere and everywhiere in the world. It seems to be his mission in life.
Boooooooo! Tabs, Tues., June 9, 2026 — Evan Hurst
The Knicks lost last night and ended a 13-game winning streak, because Donald Trump was there, and everything he breathes on or farts on or shits on dies. [Inquirer]
Good news, though, nobody has ever been booed as much as Trump was last night. [Washington Post]
Donald Trump is telling himself they were cheering him, though. [Daily Beast]
In related news of delusional people who think they’re wanted, UFC head Dana White thinks Trump’s birthday bouncy house cage match for human trash is going to get “Super Bowl numbers.” So that’s sad. [MMA Junkie]
Mike Johnson is reading his bootlicking lines for Daddy, says the California election “stinks to high heaven” and suggests what’s happening there is so “diabolical” you could never even prove it! Eat shit, Sunday School boy. [CNN]
And Donald Trump’s name is now GONE from the Kennedy Center website. These lawsuits matter, y’all. [Washington Post]
Aaron Schock’s comeback tour looks … very grifty! [Politico]
Professional Chubby Bunny player Tom Homan threatening to flood New York City with ICE, and right here as the World Cup is about to start too. It’s like these people enjoy ruining things. But is it good business for them to ruin and humiliate the US during the World Cup? [Guardian]
Meanwhile Laura Loomer thinks we should cancel the World Cup, because she’s scared people from Africa are going to get Ebola all over her. She’s racist. [Media Matters]
Ken Paxton’s former lawyer has endorsed James Talarico LOL. [New York Times]
Trump has officially nominated currently most enthusastic asslicker Todd Blanche to be his next personal attorney general. [New York Times]
Fox News idiot Brian Kilmeade, the one who always looks like he just got hit in the face with a Looney Tunes ACME anvil, is pretty sure Trump’s lost war in Iran is going to be over in two weeks, and America is gonna like it. [Media Matters]
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All the news that fits.
Are Today’s “Evil, Heartless Bastards” Rebuilding the Confederacy? — Thom Hartmann
How white nationalism, anti-immigrant fear mongering, and open racism are reviving the politics that once tore America apart.
Yesterday, Louise and I drove home from a ham radio convention in Seaside, Oregon and on the roughly 2-hour drive listened to rightwing radio. It was like stepping into a time machine tuned to the 1860s.
One host was pounding on how “our tax dollars” are being used to support “those dirty Somalis” in Minnesota who were committing “massive welfare fraud that’s just fine with Tim Walz and the Democrats.”
Louise and I were astonished as we heard another note that immigration across the Southern “open border” during the Obama and Biden administrations not only brought us “rapists and murderers,” but these (mostly Catholic) people carried a “dangerous ideology” to America. They were wiping out our healthcare system and depriving “good [white] Americans” of benefits through their “massive fraud.”
These Black and Brown people are even fraudulently voting, handing elections to Democrats, another ranted, lying that that’s “why Democrats always open the borders.”
Meanwhile, rightwing news sites brag that under Trump, Vance, and Miller, only white people have been legally admitted into the US during the last 6 months (true) because Trump is “protecting the [racial] integrity of America.” It echoed Trump’s false complaint that the white people of South Africa are experiencing a “genocide.”
And one host we heard proudly proclaimed he was an “evil, heartless bastard” for his opposition to social programs that may help minorities, particularly Black Somalis and Puerto Ricans. Callers to his show proudly proclaimed that they, too, were “evil heartless bastards.”
This is the modern version of the language of the white supremacist Confederacy, an oligarchic, fascist, race-based movement/government that had fully ended democracy in the South by the mid-1850s, seized control of the press, imprisoned its opponents, and then attacked the rest of America to end democracy nationally. (I write about this at length in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.)
And what’s most astonishing is that our mainstream media, much like Confederate newspapers in the 1850s, never, ever call it what it is: racism....
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Thom, the Land of the Happy Negro was created just for this moment! We saw this coming a long time ago and have been fighting it since!
Leave it to Pete Hegseth to ruin D-Day — Heather Digby Parton
The French are still grateful for America’s 1944 sacrifice. Hegseth’s loathsome tirade may have changed that
If you’ve ever been to Normandy in early June of any given year, you probably saw something that’s not all that common. Around the anniversary of the D-Day invasion on June 6, the whole place turns into a love-fest for America. Or at least it used to. After what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did on his visit this year, I’m not sure that will ever happen again....
Thankfully, America didn’t send Donald Trump to Normandy this year to rant about the 2020 election or show off pictures of his glorious ballroom. Instead, we sent Hegseth, who was at least as bad. Actually, he was worse....
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America always sent its best. Now there is no best to send. We live in ridicule.
'Mass paranoia' as Trump defense chief destabilizes Pentagon: insiders — Alex Henderson
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insist that they are making the U.S. Armed Forces more efficient by stamping out "woke" policies at the Pentagon and restoring what Hegseth calls a "warrior culture." But military insiders, according to CNN, fear that they are making the military dangerously unstable during wartime by firing experienced leaders.
CNN reporters Haley Britzky and Zachary Cohen point to the firing of Gen. Randy George, former U.S. Army chief of staff, in early April as a prime example of why insiders are worried. George brought many years of experience to the table, but Hegseth fired him before the general even had a chance to meet with the defense secretary and make his case.
"Hegseth has fired more than two dozen senior officers, pushed out a Navy secretary he clashed with, and reportedly intervened in promotions across the military branches directly shaping leadership," Britzky and Cohen report in a CNN article. "While the timing of George's firing was abrupt and unexpected, occurring while Army Secretary Dan Driscoll was out of town and catching senior Army leaders off guard, the firing itself was not. It was the culmination of months of tension between Hegseth and senior Army staff, and George in particular. Hegseth and other close Trump allies had been skeptical about George from the beginning, partially because George served as an aide to former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during the Biden years. The apolitical military assignment was one of several posts in a long career, which included commanding troops during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, that put George in a position to develop extensive relationships with lawmakers."...
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Put an end to Trump. Do it now or say goodbye to America.
Justice Sotomayor Torches 'Wrong' Conservative Court Over Racial Bias: 'Double Standard' — David Edwards
Under Mississippi's standard, a defendant must show not only that prosecutors illegally excluded jurors because of their race — but that the trial outcome itself would have been different. Sotomayor said that the standard "imposes the burden to persuade courts of the very conclusion" that the law was designed to prohibit: that a juror's race affects how they vote.
A Black man sits on death row in Mississippi, convicted by a jury of 11 white people and one Black juror — and now a Supreme Court justice says the far-right state court that keeps rejecting his appeals is applying a standard that is "almost certainly wrong."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor used a Supreme Court order Monday to rebuke the Mississippi Supreme Court over its handling of racial bias claims in the case of Tony Terrell Clark, a death row inmate whose lawyers say prosecutors systematically weeded out Black jurors at his trial.
Clark was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death for the 2014 robbery and killing of 13-year-old Muhammed Saeed at a convenience store in Canton, Mississippi....
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The deah ole Land of the Happy Negro making de sunny southland safe for the white man again! De per old cracker been shut out too long!
Bovino: As President I’ll Deport “106 Million Illegals”
“NewsNation is reporting I’m exploring a run for President in 2028. Here’s the truth: My one and only priority is deporting the 106 million illegals who are here. That’s it.
“The grassroots support I’m seeing tells me the polls are completely wrong…If I’m getting this much energy, it’s probably because 90% of the country wants mass deportations and the media just isn’t asking the right questions.
“My commitment is simple, liberate America from this invasion and restore our quality of life. If running for President is what it takes to actually get it done, then all options are on the table. House Bovino. Men fight back.” – Greg Bovino, posting to X.
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Nazis aren't men. They are Devo! Shit and fall back in it!
Vance Refers Walz To DOJ For Criminal Fraud Probe
CNN reports:
Vice President JD Vance, who leads the White House anti-fraud task force, has referred allegations of complicity surrounding fraud in Minnesota, including against Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation.
The criminal referral stems from a House Oversight Committee report on an ongoing investigation that alleges “fraud warnings were elevated to senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible red flags emerged.”
Detailing the report in a letter to Vance on Sunday, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer encouraged the vice president’s task force “to direct the appropriate executive branch agencies to conduct a thorough review of all of Minnesota’s social services program integrity measures, oversight processes, reimbursements, and enrollment from 2019 to the present.”
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The Vice President of the U.S. does not have the authority to make criminal referrals; this power is typically held by Congress and the Department of Justice. The Vice President's role is primarily supportive and does not include direct involvement in criminal investigations or referrals.
Tell Vance to go fuck his fraudulent corrupt self!
“Trump Jinx” Blamed After Knicks Break Winning Streak
Mediaite reports:
New York Knicks fans unhappy after their team lost to the San Antonio Spurs on Monday evening aimed some of their frustration at President Donald Trump, accusing him of jinxing the team by attending Game 3 of the NBA Finals in person. The Knicks had won 13 straight games — a 46-day winning streak — including taking down the Spurs in San Antonio in the first two games of the best-of-seven series. That ended Monday night with the Spurs’ 115-111 win.
Trump had already ruffled the feathers of some fans and local New Yorkers over his decision to attend the game, which triggered much stricter security protocols to protect a sitting president. When the final buzzer sounded, social media users again flung insults, blame, and mockery in Trump’s direction. One video posted after the game showed Knicks fans in the street chanting “F*ck Donald Trump” in the aftermath of the loss.
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Didn't the Knicks owner invite the Red Death in?
Bari Weiss on verge of major promotion for 'fantastic job' bosses think she's doing at CBS — Travis Gettys
Bari Weiss could be taking over the editorial leadership of another news network.
Paramount has begun preliminary conversations with several top media executives about a business-side counterpart to Weiss, the CBS News editor-in-chief, as the company awaits regulatory approval of its proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, two sources familiar with the matter told Axios.
"The search implies that if Paramount Skydance's deal with Warner Bros. Discovery goes through, Weiss would oversee all news editorial across both CBS News and CNN," Axios reported. "Her potential counterpart would manage business operations across both companies."...
"what a fucking shitshow. the ellisons know nothing about journalism. so how do they know she's doing a great job? she also knows nothing. she's a pseudo intellectual nitwit. she's full of it.
Rose Nylund: Do these glasses make me look stupid?
Blanche Devereaux: Let's just say they don't hide it." — Deborah Paley (comments)
"If you had any doubts that the Ellison's had any intention other than to fully dismantle and destroy CBS, you can lay them to rest.
The problem is, they are operating on the Public Airwaves, and to that end, they ostensibly have a responsibility to The Public, not just themselves.
But enforcing that responsibility would require an active and responsible government, so....
Bye, CBS." — Time2Resist (comments)
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The new Queen of Nazi television! Spreading her Nazi virus all over a formerly free country!
A Special Kind Of Loathsomeness — Abby Zimet
Bad Men Behaving Badly Chap. 746: 'Cause it's not awful enough we have to endure the racist crap spewing from our home-grown jackasses, the rest of the world bore grim witness to it as dunk-tank Christofascist Pete Hegseth chose a D-Day remembrance to flip the script on World War 2, trash European allies for not being fascist enough, and liken (good-guy) Allies landing at Normandy to an "invasion" of brown people "with "dangerous ideologies." Fact: "This is repulsive and confused, unless you're a Nazi."
Speaking of: Last week, under cover of darkness, "shameful" Senate Republicans pushed through a "Secure America Act" (sic) gifting yet more billions to keep out more of the swarthy hordes Pete's so scared of. Without making any of the reforms Dems had demanded, they added to last year's obscene $191 billion gift to DHS another $75 billion for ICE and $65 billion for CBP, 4 to 7 times their previous budgets, with most allocated to expand detentions, deportations, facilities, goons - not, as it could, to fund free childcare for over a million kids, groceries for over 10 million households, a year of SNAP benefits to 31 million people, health care tax credits for a year etc etc ad nauseum. Their wise leader, meanwhile, was throwing tantrums on TV - "Dude is losing his shit" - because a reporter dared ask for evidence of his flood of unhinged claims.
And greasy, self-proclaimed Secretary of War (Crimes) Pete lurches along on his unholy quest to turn America into a white nationalist theocracy. A blood-lusting warmonger though (because?) he never saw combat, he acts the macho, racist buffoon at every turn. He posts klutzy videos of himself working out; in one, he prances in a t-shirt that reads, "This Is War." (No, this is reality TV). Sporting Crusader tattoos - Deus Vult, but whose God wills it? - he stripped 180 faiths from those the military recognizes - all the Christian ones remain - "a religious purge dressed up as paperwork (telling) thousands of service members their beliefs don't matter to the government they're risking their lives to protect." He cut dozens of female and Black Navy officers from leadership-approved promotions, dissing "historic so-called firsts” that make the military "less lethal."
And to mark this weekend's 82nd anniversary of the June 6, 1944 D-Day landing of Allied forces on the beaches of Normandy - perhaps the most pivotal moment in a long bloody fight to defend democracy against fascism - he gave a pro-fascism speech, embracing a Great Replacement theory that calls for a return to the racial ideology on which fascism is based. Speaking at the American Cemetery in north-west France where about 9,400 are buried, he'd barely recalled the courage of Allied Forces from multiple countries wading ashore in history's largest amphibious operation to liberate Europe before pivoting to warn "their legacy requires our active vigilance." European leaders may have grown too "comfortable," he said with the chutzpah of the deeply ignorant, and they may have somehow "forgotten that freedom is not free."...
And now, in the name of their mythical, bigoted, white, male, Christian Republic, the US - Hegseth, Trump, Vance et al - have the audacity to be hectoring their European “allies” to “up their white supremacy game” to stop an “invasion” of what Trump has called the brown and black “vermin” who once flocked to our “shining city on a hill,” now a beacon of hate. Hamlet's ghost: “O, what a falling-off was there.” Last weekend, in France, Hegseth didn’t even stay for the international ceremony at the cemetery where so many are buried - per Trump, all those suckers and losers. Pete likely didn’t know the denizens of a nearby village had weeks earlier asked that his visit be cancelled. "It seems to us," they said in their request, "that this man does not share our democratic values." We feel your pain.
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No American has forgotten.
John Oliver On The Conservative Attack On New College Of Florida — Susie Madrak
We know Ron DeSantis is a right-wing whack job. We also know DeSantis-appointed board trustee Christopher Rufo has made a career out of trolling liberal with made-up facts.
But there's so much more! Here's a response by Don Moynihan, Professor of Public Policy, Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, to the New York Times report that whitewashed the new regime:
"It is not just the environment of New College itself, but the broader public university state environment in which it operates. You would never learn that Florida is a state featuring some of the most restrictive constraints on campus speech in the country, leading the way in passing educational gag orders, such as the Stop WOKE Act, that violate the first amendment.
"Florida has so politicized higher education that it can no longer recruit well qualified leaders who do not match the ideological pre-requisites of Republicans and advocates like Chris Rufo. Even after Santa Ono, the President of the University of Michigan, denounced DEI, he was denied a position to lead the lower-ranked University of Florida. DeSantis personally intervened to block the recruitment of a Dean at the University of Florida because right-wing social media influencers considered all of the candidates to be too woke....
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"When you awake you will remember everything...." — When You Awake, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel
Beyond Parody: Trump's Ag Secretary Blames Biden For Screwworm Outbreak — Conover Kennard
2026 called. Trump’s Agriculture Secretary just set a new world record for most pathetic excuse by blaming a screwworm outbreak on Biden on CNBC's 'Squawk Box.' These people are allergic to responsibility.
Beyond parody strikes again. On day whatever of the new Trump administration, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has officially declared that the emerging screwworm outbreak is Joe Biden’s fault. Yes, actual parasitic worms eating into livestock are apparently part of the Biden legacy. Even though the last appearance of the parasitic flies with larvae that burrow in healthy tissue of cattle, deer, horses, and other warm-blooded animals in the mainland United States was in the 1960s. Still, it's Biden's fault.
"I do think it's important to note that under the last administration with the massive movement under the open borders policy, the cartels, etc., border security, that's when it began to make its way back up toward America, hitting Mexico in early 2023, moving its way up through Mexico in 2024, and when we walked in the door last year, I was sworn in on February 13th of 2025, they laid this all out for me and I said, well, where are the sterile flies, right?" she said.
"I mean, this is, we've beaten it before, we've got to beat it again, and obviously not much had been done to push back," she added....
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Ask not for who the screwworm screws. The screworm screws for thee.
A Farmer Donated Land For a Public Park and the City Sold It to a Data Center Developer for $10 Million — Justin Caffier
The City of Taylor, Texas, is facing public outcry after residents found out a data center's being constructed on land donated as a public space.
In Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece, Ikiru, a lifelong bureaucrat in Tokyo’s Public Works Department is forced to reckon with the life he’s led and the legacy he’ll leave behind after a surprise cancer diagnosis reveals he has less than a year to live. It’s while the protagonist grapples with his impending death that he truly begins to savor living in ways he never had before. Inspired and reinvigorated, the man dedicates his final months of work and life to cutting through the red tape that had been hindering a group of concerned parents who wanted to drain the toxic cesspool their kids were forced to play in and build them a proper public playground in its place. With a BAFTA-winning performance by Takashi Shimura in the lead and a bittersweet-yet-hopeful message about what we leave to our children, it’s no wonder why Ikiru is consistently cited as one of the greatest films of all time.
In what can only be described as a “reverse Ikiru,” a plot of land that had been deeded to a city with the stipulation it be turned into a public park is on track to be turned into an environment-destroying blight on the landscape after being sold to a data center developer.
As reported by 404 Media, the City of Taylor, Texas, paid a paltry $10 in 1999 to accept a donation of almost 88 acres from the Bland family farm. According to documents reviewed by 404, the conditional language in the original deed granted the land to the “Texas Parks and Recreation Foundation, a Texas non-profit corporation, to be held in trust for future use as parkland by Williamson County, Texas.”...
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"Screw, little screwworn, screw and scammer!"
— The Fat Texas Grifters.
POLL: Fewer Say Democracy Is Central To US Identity
The Associated Press reports:
Fewer Americans are saying that democracy is central to U.S. identity ahead of the country’s 250th birthday, according to a new poll.
In The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, 66 percent of respondents said that “a democratically elected government” is either “extremely important” or “very important” when it comes to “the United States’ identity as a nation.”
Twenty percent said that a democratically elected government is “somewhat important” when it comes to their country’s identity, 13 percent said a democratically elected government is either “not important at all” or “not too important” in relation to U.S. identity and 1 percent refused to answer the question or skipped it.
Two years ago, 76 percent of respondents saw a democratically elected government as either extremely important or very important for their country’s identity, marking a 10-point drop between 2024 and 2026....
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Did any of these retarded fuckwads ever take a course in Civics? My guess is they never heard of it.
How does this square with the Medicare for all poll? Someone is passing bullshit.
More than 325 Organizations Affirm Support for Medicare for All — Newswire Editor
Today, more than 325 organizations including labor unions, advocates for seniors and people with disabilities, women’s rights organizations, and more, released an open letter to those seeking to reform the health care system, laying out why now is the time for Medicare for All.
The letter is led by Public Citizen, National Nurses United, People’s Action Institute, Social Security Works, Physicians for a National Health Program, Labor Campaign for Single Payer, and Healthcare-NOW. Other signatories include Indivisible, MoveOn, and several prominent labor unions, including UAW, APWU, IFPTE, AFA-CWA, UE, Actors Equity, and more.
Medicare for All is overwhelmingly popular and commands majority support nationwide, with 63 percent of all voters in favor, including 90 percent of Democratic voters. In Congress, more than half of the House Democratic Caucus now supports Medicare for All, and Senate legislation has added three co-sponsors since the last Congress.
Some D.C. insiders are urging members of Congress and health care advocates to think small and prioritize incremental health care tweaks. This letter is a clear warning that half-measures will not meet the scale of the health care crisis. As health care costs soar, affordability is top of mind for American families, and it's a particularly important kitchen table issue ahead of the 2026 midterms. The American people need, and demand, Medicare for All....
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NOW!
Pentagon Drops “Christian” Label From All Churches After Mormon Senators Rage At Not Being Included
The Washington Post reports:
The Defense Department on Monday edited its new list of religious “codes” for service members so that no group is labeled “Christian” — drawing praise from Mormon lawmakers who were angered last week when their faith was categorized as outside of Christianity.
On Friday, the Pentagon released a new, dramatically pared-down list of religious groups. It classified groups including Catholic, evangelical and Methodist, among others, with the tag: “Christian.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was listed without the tag. After the outcry from several leaders who are members of the Mormon Church, the revised list simply states religious groups, without adding the tag “Christian” to any.
U.S. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who is Mormon and had spoken out multiple times over the weekend on social media against the list, posted on X on Monday that he was “grateful” to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for the change. A spokeswoman for Lee said he had spoken to President Donald Trump and Hegseth about the issue “and they assured him that the classification will be fixed.”
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Fixed the Xianist tag.
Trump faces 'perfect storm' brewing against him in court: Legal expert — Matthew Chapman
President Donald Trump might have just stumbled into a "perfect storm" that could lead to a federal court smackdown against his planned UFC cage match on the White House South Lawn, former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance told MS NOW's Alex Witt on Monday.
This comes as a lawsuit filed by two local activists, including a Vietnam veteran, details the appearance of corruption surrounding the event, as well as its defacement of public property and violation of multiple regulations and the constitutional separation of powers.
That complaint, noted Vance, tears at the heartstrings on top of it all: "If you don't mind, I'll just read you two sentences that explain where we are. Mr. Romano writes 'One of the most moving and powerful aspects of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is its quiet tranquility. That tranquility both honors the fallen, the fallen, and allows those who have come to pay their respects an opportunity to reflect and remember without interruption.'"
This, she noted, is part of a "forceful case" that the UFC event will desecrate these sites, which gives them legal standing to challenge it.
"Can I ask you on a big picture level, Joyce, what is the point of having rules, of having laws that require congressional approval if they are treated as mere suggestions?" asked Witt.
This sort of brazen defiance of the law, Vance replied, is "the modus operandi for this administration" as they do all they can to "plow past laws and regulations that don't suit them, acting on the assumption that no one will get in their way, that Congress will continue to be supine, that the courts won't interfere."
Unfortunately for them, Vance said, the lawsuit has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta — a jurist who has a long history with Trump....
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The point is, grifting trailer trash must not and cannot be permitted on hallowed ground. Larger point: Trump is the one that rigs everything he can possibly rig!
UFC Head: Cage Match Will Get “Super Bowl Numbers”
Yahoo Sports reports:
UFC Freedom 250 is less than a week away, and expectations could not be higher. On Sunday, the world’s premier MMA promotion makes its first, and likely only trip to the White House, hosting one of the most-talked about sporting events of the year — cage fights on the White House lawn.
UFC CEO Dana White marveled that this is really about to happen. “It’s definitely a one-of-one event,” White told TNT Fight Sports. “And when you think about where we came from, and how this whole sport started, and how it was frowned upon in the United States, to now be headed to the White House is pretty surreal.”
“For UFC fans all over the world, this is a very unique experience for everybody,” White said. “We’re expecting Super Bowl-type numbers for this fight.” For reference, Super Bowl LX, which took place in February, drew 124.9 million viewers in the United States. The most-viewed MMA event of all time is currently the Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano Netflix card that took place in May, drawing 9 million domestic viewers.
"What a pathetic joke this country has become." — Asthmatic Fox (commens)
"Those lights ain’t gonna polish that turd one bit." — jharp (comments)
"They don’t need anyone to tune in; the Nazis will simply lie about the ratings, the way Der Pedoführer lies about his crowd sizes, his health, and absolutely everything else.
We live in a post-truth world." — Asthmatic Fox (comments)
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"...and how it was frowned upon in the United States, to now be headed to the White House is pretty surreal."
Really, kid? When the POTUS is trailer trash we certainly know who he hires.
Homan Vows ICE Surge In NYC During World Cup
The Hill reports:
Border Czar Tom Homan on Monday said New York City was about to see its largest deployment of ICE officers in response to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s recent legislative package that provides residents with added protections from federal authorities.
“You are going to see more ICE agents than you have ever seen in New York City. And it’s coming. I just reviewed an operational plan. I’m not going to tell you exactly when it’s going to happen, but it’s coming,” Homan said during a Monday appearance on Fox News’s “Fox and Friends.”
“I’m keeping my promise. We are going to send more ICE agents to New York because you took away the efficiencies of safe arrests in county jails,” he added.
"I really wish these dickheads would stop taking out the mess they have made of their own lives on the rest of us." — Cerberus137 (comments)
"So why would any foreign athlete or spectator come to the States, given the risk of arrest & abuse?" — Uncle Mark’s Big Gay Mugshot (comments)
"Eventually this cold Civil War will be hot.
Also I can’t think of anything more likely to bring global condemnation and calls for war than the racist ass serial killers of ICE capping an international superstar because they assume he must be “one of dem immigrant types”." — Cerberus137 (comments)
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Of course, it will be no shock when ICE murders a foreign football player.
Murder, Inc. Death will take dominion over a great city of the world by a diseased ham from a sick Sci-fi movie.
Trump's second term 'already a lost cause' and 'getting lamer every day': analysis — Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump's abrupt walkout on "Meet the Press" over the weekend shows his second term is "already finished," an analyst revealed on Monday.
Following his mid-interview exit from NBC's Kristen Welker, Trump appears to have given up amid mounting frustration, according to MS NOW political analyst Matthew Bartlett. And while he maintains his control over the Republican Party, he has lost his standing among voters who question his economic priorities and policies.
"In the year and a half since Trump’s return, it seems everything has changed — except the economy," Bartlett wrote. "It is very hard to say that the president’s second act has improved the lives or financial status of many, unless of course your last name is Trump. His second administration has been a historic misread of a political mandate, and a tragic mistake of a presidency."
Trump has lost touch with what voters are concerned about, Bartlett argued.
"The president has lost all credibility on the economy, the No. 1 priority of the American public," Bartlett wrote. "He has lost control over ending the war. The administration is rudderless. Trump is enamored with being president, yet wants nothing to do with the job. His Cabinet members turn their attention from serving the people to appeasing their boss. Many top officials now hold their jobs in an acting capacity — not just in title but in their emphasis on performance for an audience of one."
The political focus will now shift to the 2026 midterm elections and then the 2028 presidential election.
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The final curtain is coming.
Stephen Colbert's replacement frantically spins 'ratings disaster': 'CBS has won big-time' — Nicole Charky-Chami
Stephen Colbert's "Late Show" replacement — media mogul and standup comic Byron Allen — appeared to shake off a massive ratings drop after CBS replaced the longtime host, according to a Los Angeles Times interview.
Viewership to the show dropped by 85 percent since Colbert left, The Daily Beast reported.
Allen worked out a $15 million "time-buy model" deal with CBS and his company Allen Media Group, according to The Times. He pays CBS, and keeps advertising revenue.
But the first viewership figures saw the floor drop out of viewership for the time spot.
"The final episode of The Late Show attracted 6.7 million viewers — its highest-ever weeknight viewership — and the next night at 11:35 pm, Allen’s Comics Unleashed garnered just 995,000 viewers. On June 1, the first day when rival late-night hosts aired new episodes following Colbert’s exit, Comics Unleashed dropped to only 628,000 viewers," The Daily Beast reported.
Critics called it a "ratings disaster," according to The Times....
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But wait! This may be the new trend in a Chrsito-fascist America, The only shows you'll see on TV will be independently produced and owned by billionaires! Won't that be ducky? Think of them as big-assed Infomercials! And where did our Fairness Doctrine go but the toilet.
Trump Is Making the U.S. an Increasingly Irrelevant Power — Fred Kaplan
...y most measures, the United States still hoists plenty of power on the global stage. It possesses the most lethal and far-flung military; it controls the leading currency; its leaders’ words and deeds are more closely observed and analyzed than those of any other leaders.
But Trump has proved remarkably inept at brandishing this power. He seems to believe that he can rule the world through crude threats and assertions of unilateral dominance, that (to use Mao Zedong’s phrase) power grows out of the barrel of a gun. And so when this formula fails—when he backpedals from his threats, when his bark carries no bite, when relentless volleys of firepower destroy targets but fall short of accomplishing political aims (because he mistakenly thinks that the former automatically yields the latter)—then the rest of the world, friends and foes, start to take his (and, therefore, America’s) threats and assurances less seriously. They start going their own way, and try setting security arrangements and supply chains that avoid U.S. control.
In other words, Trump’s misunderstandings and abuses of power in the short run are sparking a recalculation of power balances in the long run....
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What could possibly go wrong?
Trump Mentals Strong. Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen. Vietnam. — Jonathan V. Last
1. Covfefe
Maybe you haven’t seen Trump’s appearance yesterday on Meet the Press yet but OMG it’s a train wreck. People are fixated on the fact that Trump walked out on Kristen Welker, but honestly that’s the least worrisome aspect of the interview.
The United States is at war and the president is non compos mentis.
We’re going to talk about what has to be the most bat-shit insane presidential interview in the history of our country. And then we’re going to talk about what the effects of this performance will be as other countries—both allies and adversaries—start to understand that the American president is not all there.
But first we should just list some facts:
Trump turns 80 next week.
He has severe bruising on both of his hands.
He frequently falls asleep in public, during official events.
His legs are swollen.
There is a rash on his neck.
In October 2025 he said that he’d underwent an MRI, but couldn’t recall what part of his body was imaged. Months later, it was revealed that he had been given a CT Scan and not an MRI and that his chest and abdomen were imaged.
He’s been inspected by doctors three times in the last fourteen months. (This is in addition to three dental appointments.0
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Don't forget the great IQ scores.
Canada Built a New Bridge From Ontario to Detroit. Trump Refuses to Open It. — Gabrielle Gurley
By rights, opening the Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, should mean celebrating the Saskatchewan-born Detroit Red Wings hockey great who spent 25 years with the NHL team. After nearly a decade of construction, the longest cable-stayed bridge on the continent should be providing long-sought relief from chronic traffic bottlenecks for commuters, vacationers, and truckers at the United States–Canada border.
Last week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told the Senate Appropriations Committee that U.S. customs and border employees are “ready to go.” And yet the bridge stretching 1.5 miles across the Detroit River has become a point of leverage in the trade talks between the U.S. and Canada. Both Canada and Mexico have called for a renewed 16-year USMCA agreement. President Trump responded with another “51st state” post. Neither Canada nor Mexico is budging. Meanwhile, Michigan and Ontario drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians wonder how much longer they’ll have to wait before they can use the river crossing....
THE AMBASSADOR BRIDGE, the Detroit River crossing between the Motor City and Windsor, Ontario, opened about two weeks after the stock market crash that sent the globe spiraling into the Great Depression. In recent decades, replacement proposals have gone nowhere. The privately owned toll bridge conveys about $300 million in commercial goods daily, about 25 percent of the annual land trade between the U.S and Canada. But it has lost its ranking as busiest span between the two countries. It has high tolls and is decrepit, congested, and basically living on borrowed time: Many commercial drivers go two hours north to use the Blue Water Bridge into Ontario.
The Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, the world’s sole underwater international border crossing and a third option to cross the river, prohibits trucks carrying hazardous materials. An estimated 400 commercial vehicles will cross the Gordie Howe Bridge every hour, saving truckers 850,000 hours—if it ever opens....
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Building bridges but not allowing anyone to cross. This is as retarded as it gets.
It's Easy To Create Lots of Shitty Jobs — Robert Reich
So don't break out the champagne about Friday's jobs report
Friends,
Friday’s jobs report — showing that America added 172,000 jobs in May — stimulated a lot of celebratory bullsh*t.
Trump said, “It’s raining jobs!” White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett claimed the job market is "hitting on all cylinders.” The mainstream media called it a “blowout jobs report,” “stronger-than-expected jobs data,” the labor market’s “best three-month stretch in more than two years.”
What all this acclaim left out was that wages are falling relative to prices.
Average hourly earnings for private-sector production and non-supervisory workers — that is, for most employees — rose by only 8 cents (or 0.2 percent) in May. That’s the weakest pace of wage growth since 2021.
Meanwhile, prices are rising quickly — by around 3.8 percent annually. Hence, real wages — that is, their actual purchasing power — are dropping. The paychecks of most American workers aren’t covering rising costs. They’re getting poorer.
It’s no cause for celebration that the American economy is adding a lot of jobs that are paying less. Hell, if paychecks keep shrinking relative to prices, there’s no telling how many jobs can be added. June’s job report could top May’s 172,000 new jobs.
There’s no limit to the number of terrible jobs an economy can create. If inflation-adjusted pay keeps dropping, we could see many hundreds of thousands of crappy new jobs per month. But most Americans would be getting poorer and poorer.
Bottom line: Don’t fall for any breezy, celebratory focus on the number of new jobs. Always ask: What about real (inflation-adjusted) wages?
When real, inflation-adjusted wages are dropping, we’ve got a real problem — regardless of how many jobs are being created....
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More people working for less wages. That does not compute. How far off can slavery be?
Too Emotional To Be King. Tabs, Mon., June 8, 2026 —Evan Hurst
Surely we will be saying more about this today, but wow, did you see Donald Trump looking all red and wet and close to death absolutely screaming at Kristen Welker on Meet The Press because she kept asking for one scintilla of evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen, or that California is being rigged right now? Oh man, that two-bit dictator loser LOST IT. Credit to Welker for keeping going, though as always we note that it is permissible to use the words “lie” and “liar.” Anyway, he stormed off, big tantrum, too emotional to be king.
Biggest little bitch in the whole wide world.
Haha, Trump’s loser bouncy house wrestling birthday might get struck by lightning. [Bloody Elbow]
Can you imagine the audacity of that ugly-skinned pig Pete Hegseth setting foot in Europe, surrounded by a continent full of his superiors, and criticizing them for how they handle their business? On D-Day? That little boy was lied to, clearly, about how he is a special child of God, fearfully and wonderfully made, etc. [Guardian / France 24]
While all the Albanian citizens loudly scream that they don’t want those dead-eyed trash holes Jared and Ivanka building their shit resort on an Albanian island, the European Union is also warning Albania that Jared and Ivanka’s little project might hurt their chances to get into the EU. Oops. [Politico Europe]
Related, Donald Trump now would like to buy some islands in the Indian Ocean, to punish the UK for refusing to let him use the Diego Garcia military base as a staging ground to lose his stupid Iran war on the first day. [Reuters]...
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And too damaged to be a functioning human.
Elite journalists aren't speaking truth to power — they're just pretending — John Stoehr
You have probably heard the news about journalist Scott Pelley. This week, CBS News, under the leadership of Bari Weiss, fired the longtime anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent. What you may not know about is his parting shot. Here's the section that stood out to me.
New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified. To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them. Recently, politicians have been invited to choose correspondents for interviews on the broadcast. Giving politicians control over 60 Minutes interviews is not how this is done. Finally, incompetence and unprofessionalism ... have wreaked havoc. In a case involving one of my stories, the entire program came within 19 minutes of not getting on the air at all.
From a man of Pelley's standing, this is pretty much like a summary execution. In another time and place, it would be the end of Weiss's career, as her reputation would be irreparable. (Ditto for Nick Bilton, whom she hired to run 60 Minutes.) Forget about politics. Their team can't get the details right. Pelley is calling out a mortal sin with the authority of the pope.
And then, as if to confirm the allegations against him, Nick Bilton actually wrote to Pelley explaining his reasons for firing him. Of course, they are not good reasons, as you can see.
You hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday's performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal. Despite yesterday's misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested ...
You can read about the details of that meeting in the Times – Scott Pelley accused the "new management" of "murdering" 60 Minutes – and judge for yourself. From where I'm standing, however, Nick Bilton got mad that Pelley made him look like a putz, because, well, the truth is often painful. Nick Bilton is a p---. According to the Post, the newsroom literally laughed at Bilton and applauded after he left. There isn't enough room at CBS News for him and an award-winning journalist who commands the respect of millions. P--- stays. Pelley goes....
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That's Putz that's staying. You are free to vote with your remote control.
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/elite-journalists-trump/
Blanche: “Not a Crime to Party with Mr. Epstein” — William Kristol
Blanche ? Epstein
by William Kristol
There are many, many Republican lawyers in America. Many, sadly, are also pro-Trump. But it is Todd Blanche who has been selected by the president to be attorney general of the United States. He has this distinction: He is the prime orchestrator and key executor of the Trump administration’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.
As former Attorney General Pam Bondi told the House Oversight Committee recently, it was Blanche who, as deputy attorney general, “supervised [the] entire process” of dealing with the Epstein files. “He was leading the Epstein matter and the release of everything from the beginning,” she testified. Blanche has also been the most visible public defender of the coverup, and of the decision not to investigate or prosecute anyone else for crimes.
Blanche stepped boldly into the Epstein spotlight on July 24, 2025, when he traveled to Florida to interview convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. The meeting was initiated by Maxwell, and she received limited immunity via a proffer agreement.
But Maxwell didn’t use her immunity as an opportunity to be more forthcoming than she’d been previously about anything to do with Epstein. As every sentient observer familiar with the Epstein case agreed, she simply continued to stonewall and lie. But Blanche wasn’t sure. He told CNN a couple months later that deciding if Maxwell was a “credible” witness is “an impossible question to answer.”
Really?
In any case, Blanche explained, “The point of the interview was not for me to pressure test every single answer she gave.”
Why not?
Because “the point of the interview was to allow her to speak, which nobody had done before.”
This was laughable. But the real point of the interview became clear a few days later, when Maxwell was moved, contrary to Bureau of Prison guidelines for sex offenders, to a comfortable minimum-security prison....
“It isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.” But “Mr. Epstein” (it’s kind of striking that Blanche added the honorific) pled guilty in 2008, and then was indicted again in 2019, for horrible crimes arranged or committed or celebrated at some of those parties. The Justice Department could now be following up on the testimony of scores of survivors to finally, properly investigate those crimes and their perpetrators. But Blanche’s Justice Department hasn’t even pretended to be seeking further evidence. Blanche’s DOJ has no interest at all in investigating or prosecuting the men who have done truly horrible things. After all, “it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.”...
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The Toad continues his cover-up for Trump.
Even in purple Colorado, Republicans can’t find a normal candidate — Amanda Marcotte
The lead in the GOP governor’s primary claims he’s an expert at “Cajun Karate” — the other two aren’t much better
Victor Marx says the first time he participated in killing a man, he was merely 7 years old. He says he was forced by his stepfather, but also would like folks to believe he’s killed many, many times since then — though he refuses to say how many people — but of course, only for the greater good. According to him, the military empowered him to order strikes that killed 70 ISIS fighters. He has also claimed he rescued over 45,000 women and children from slavery around the world, like something from a high-stakes action movie. He later pulled that number off his All Things Possible Ministries website when called out on it. He bragged that he’s led over 130 missions in over 30 nations, but claimed ignorance when asked for details of these daring rescues. He performs exorcisms over the phone, assuring folks that one doesn’t need to be in person to cast out demons....
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When will qualified candidates return to America again? It seems to be a desert at this time.
Scott Pelley: CBS News Boss Bari Weiss Ordered Us To Make Minnesota ICE Protesters “Look More Violent”
Mother Jones reports:
Scott Pelley spent 37 years at CBS News, only to be fired last week after coming into conflict with Free Press founder Bari Weiss, who took control of the network last October. In a New York Times sit-down interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro published Sunday, Pelley said Weiss personally interfered with the network’s coverage of the ICE officer who killed Renée Good in Minneapolis.
Pelley told Garcia-Navarro that, hours before an episode of 60 Minutes on the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti was set to air, Weiss sent an email to his boss asking for changes to the episode. “Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.”
On June 3, Pelley posted on Instagram that “New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.” Now, it’s clear that story was about the ICE agent who killed Renée Good: video of Good’s final moments posted by CBS Evening News does not in fact show her driving toward an officer.
"'Bari Weiss cannot help herself. She's incompetent. She has no experience running a news network. She lies. She lies again. Then when she's caught in her lies, she whines the press is treating MAGAs unfairly. Rinse lather and repeat.'
Sounds a lot like the Turd." — AncientMariner (comments)
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This could be framed as an attempt to cover up murder. Renée Good was murdered and that is a fact!
Paxton’s Criminal Defense Lawyer Endorses Talarico
NOTUS reports:
A Texas lawyer who helped lead Republican Ken Paxton’s defense during his 2023 impeachment trial is endorsing Democrat James Talarico in the state’s critical Senate race this November. Dan Cogdell, a Houston-based defense lawyer who represented the Texas attorney general in both the impeachment trial and a long-running securities fraud case, told NOTUS in a statement that his former client “has lost sight of his core mission, which is to represent the people of Texas.”
“And unlike Ken, I believe to my core that James Talarico believes in unity over division and that he knows how to assemble not only Democrats, but Independents and Republicans, and we need that right now,” Cogdell said. His endorsement of Talarico comes just after the third anniversary of Paxton’s impeachment by theTexas House of Representatives over allegations including bribery.
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As he should.
Lee Blast Hegseth For Excluding Mormons From Its List Of Christian Religions: “Not Cool, Get Rid Of It Now!”
“I find this offensive, not just because that happens to be my faith, not just because it happens to the faith of tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel, but it’s also just repugnant to any sense of decency, any sense of our common heritage and our common belief that the government needs to not weigh in on doctrinal disputes between various religious denominations. I’m imploring people at the Pentagon to reconsider this, not just reconsider it but undo it. Secretary Hegseth, tear down that wall. This is not cool. Get rid of it. Get rid of it now!” – Sen. Mike Lee, in a video posted to X. On Friday, both Lee and fellow Mormon Sen. John Curtis first posted objections to the new Pentagon list of approved religions.
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Hegseth made a big mistake. This is not someone we wenat running our military!
Lying Trump On No New Wars Promise: 'I Didn't Promise Anything' — Heather
Grandpa sundowner with more revisionist history on this Sunday's Meet the Press.
During a hostile ridiculous interview that never should have been aired in the first place because of all of the lies Trump was allowed to spew, host Kristen Welker asked Trump about his promise not to start any new wars, and was treated to this nonsense by Trump:
WELKER: So you're saying you didn't break your promise and yet, Mr. President, in your first term, you held to that promise and it was so fundamental to who you were as a candidate, to a first-term president. What changed, because you insisted "no new wars?”...
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The sick liar has told so many lies he's forgtotten most of them.
Trump labeled ‘emotionally unstable’ after ‘embarrassing’ outburst: ‘His brain is broken’ — Alwxander Willis
President Donald Trump was torched on Sunday over what critics labeled his “embarrassing” outburst with NBC News’s Kristen Welker, an outburst that preceded the president ending the interview and storming off.
Aired earlier on Sunday, Trump was pressed by Welker on his false claims of the 2020 election being “rigged.” Trump responded by raising his voice, attacking the media, and declaring the interview to be over before standing up and leaving.
Trump is no stranger to abruptly ending interviews after being challenged on his claims. In 2020, Trump cut an interview with CBS News short after facing what he categorized as “unfair” questions, per Adweek, and in 2022, he ended an NPR interview after being pressed on his false claims of election fraud.
The most recent incident, however, sparked widespread commentary given the intensity with which Trump berated Welker prior to his leaving.
“This man lost his mind a long time ago,” wrote Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) in a social media post on X. “It’s shameful that Republicans in Congress continue to enable him in every way. He’s destroying this country and his mental decline and erratic behavior is a national security crisis.”
Tim Nichols, a staff writer with The Atlantic, called Trump “emotionally unstable,” and described his outburst as a “man [going] on [a] paranoid, babbling rant.”
Neikias Duncan, an analyst, podcast host and writer, described the clip of Trump’s outburst as “such an embarrassing watch.”
And Hemant Mehta, another podcast host, writer and reality television star, used the incident to urge Republican voters to reconsider this November.
“His brain is broken and if you vote for any Republican at any level, this is what you're supporting: being an a------ at every turn, no matter what anyone says, because that's what the party is,” Mehta wrote in a social media post on X.
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His brain blew some time ago. It has taken a long time to realize this for some of us.
One can't debate with an insane person.
Fired '60 Minutes' Star Scott Pelley Accuses CBS News Boss Bari Weiss of Pushing Trump's Agenda and Demands for Her Removal -- Olivia Salamone
Scott Pelley unloaded on CBS News leadership in his first interview since being fired from 60 Minutes, accusing editor-in-chief Bari Weiss of favoring President Donald Trump's administration and calling for her removal, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
The veteran journalist claimed Weiss repeatedly interfered with editorial decisions, pushed for stories to reflect the president's views, and lacked the experience needed to run a television news operation.
Speaking with The New York Times' Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Pelley said he had reservations about Weiss from the moment she was hired.
"What concerned me was that she had zero television experience and had never managed a large global operation like CBS News," he said. "Those were red flags to me, but I thought, [Paramount Skydance CEO] David Ellison thinks she's the right person for the job."
Pelley also mocked Weiss' push to modernize the news division.
"Of course we have to reach out to a younger and younger audience, but their argument about joining the internet age is just disingenuous," he said. "It's almost as if Bari Weiss and [new 60 Minutes executive producer] Nick Bilton were sealed in a time capsule in 1990, and it just cracked open. They've just discovered the internet, and they're running around telling everybody how important it is."
Pelley pointed to a dispute over a 60 Minutes report about anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis as evidence of what he described as Weiss' editorial interference.
"About four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon," Pelley recalled. "Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I'm paraphrasing. I don't have the quote, but that's what was communicated to me."
He added: "And the other thing, Renee Good's car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer."
According to Pelley, the available footage contradicted that characterization.
"This is not what you see on the video," he said. "On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good's wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer."
Pelley continued: "We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn't enough for Ms. Weiss."...
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Putting squares in charge always ruin a good thing with their arrogant cluelessness. They always ruin it for everyone. She not only used her thumb, she used her ass.
Trump ignores an economic crisis — the one conservatives built their brand attacking Expand this article — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump, as a Republican, should theoretically support fiscal conservatism. Yet according to a report by a financial journalist, under Trump America’s national debt and deficit are ballooning to dangerous levels.
“The price that the U.S. government has to pay to borrow money for 30 years has already punched through 5 percent a year, its highest level since the financial crisis of 2007,” reported The Washington Post's Matthew Lynn on Sunday. “For 10-year money, the annual price is 4.6 percent and climbing. Amid all the noise about the rise of artificial intelligence and the booming space economy, something far more significant is happening in the financial markets. The cost of borrowing is being reset.”
Lynn added that this raises the possibility that American voters will care enough about deficit reduction that it can become a politically viable issue again.
“The U.S. national debt has reached $39 trillion, with interest payments now exceeding $1 trillion annually, compared to the near-zero interest rate after the 2008 financial crisis,” Lynn wrote. “This could trigger a financial crisis and, even worse, modern political leaders are no longer even paying lip service to the need for deficit reduction.” As a result, “the big space in American politics will be waiting for a leader who can steadily balance the books while restoring competitiveness, keeping inflation under control and maintaining government services.”
Lynn concluded, “That won’t be easy. The U.S. deficit came in at 5.8 percent of gross domestic product in 2025, and it is not likely to be any lower this year. Bringing it down will require sustained hard work, lots of patience and the ability to tell hard truths. Those are not qualities that Washington has in abundance. Even so, it would be a big prize. The only real question is whether there is a leader out there who is willing to step up and take it.”
Lynn is not alone among finance experts who are concerned about America’s growing debt crisis, which has grown worse under Trump due to his tax cuts for the wealthy, war against Iran and spending cuts on programs that help low-income Americans.
“Unless we change course, the debt will only get worse—fast,” Brookings Institution senior fellow William Galston wrote for The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we are on track to accumulate more than $24 trillion in debt over the next decade, for a total of $56 trillion—120 percent of estimated GDP in 2036.”../
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Sure. The National Debt has always been something they harp upon. But so was states rights, which they now ignore because facism corruption rakes more cash their way!
The Coming Revival of America — Robert Reich
Trump has shown us why we need a good and decent government.
Please hear me out.
Even before Trump, we were barreling down the wrong road. Inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity were worsening. Legalized bribery was soaring in the form of mounting campaign contributions from big corporations and the wealthy. Workers were getting shafted. On Wall Street and in C-suites, fealty to the rule of law was giving way to “greed is good” selfishness. Giant corporations were monopolizing ever more of the economy. America was losing its moral authority in the world (think Abu Ghraib and the torture memo).
We couldn’t have remained on that road. Even if we didn’t know it then, most of us understand that now. Trump has opened our eyes to the consequences of extreme greed, corruption, cruelty, and utter disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law. His brazenness and shamelessness have awakened us to much that we took for granted.
He and his regime are still dangerous as hell, of course. But the American public is catching on. His polls are in the cellar; they continue to fall.
It’s as if the nation has been through basic training in democracy, a stress test in civics, a crash course in the importance of having a decent and good government.
Before Trump, how many Americans understood the importance of “checks and balances” among the three branches of government, as envisioned by the Founders?
Now nearly everyone knows, because we’ve seen what happens when the head of the executive branch usurps the power of Congress and defies the federal courts.
How many of us really knew what “due process” meant when it came to giving people accused by the government an opportunity to defend themselves?
By now most of us have seen videos of people dragged out of their homes in the dead of night by masked agents of the U.S. government and thrown into detention camps without so much as a hearing. And we’ve seen government agents murder American citizens in cold blood on the streets of our cities.
Did we understand the meaning of corruption, bribes, self-dealing, and pay-to-play before Trump extorted corporations and billionaires to contribute millions to his campaign, his PAC, his inauguration, his ballroom, and his 250th birthday party? Now, we surely do....
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Ever heard the term, "as stubborn as a mule," Robert? Many Americans go through life just like that and never understand.
Paxton Falsely Claims Victory Over “Big Gay Swim Day”
The Independent reports:
Texas Attorney General and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton claimed on Friday he secured a “major victory” in a lawsuit from the state over an LGBTQ+ pool party — even though the suit has been dropped without any apparent changes on the ground.
Last Thursday, Texas sued the city of Denton, located outside of Dallas-Fort Worth, over the planned rental of its Civic Center Pool for a private “Big Gay Swim Day” event. Paxton’s office alleged that city officials hadn’t done enough to ensure event organizers complied with a state law known as SB 8 barring gender-neutral changing rooms.
By the following week, however, the city and state had agreed to dismiss the suit, with Denton saying it hadn’t made any changes because it was already following the law in regards to sex-segregated spaces. Paxton nonetheless framed this outcome as a significant win.
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"Old Ragged Eye" is desperate.
Conservative says Trump has destroyed an important pillar of American life — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump has weaponized the Justice Department so egregiously, he has literally destroyed an important pillar of American life, at least according to one conservative commentator.
“President Trump's $1.776 billion weaponization fund to compensate January 6th rioters for their troubles is now (probably—perhaps mostly) dead,” The Bulwark’s Elliot Williams wrote on Sunday. “But that doesn’t mean that you should stop paying attention to it.”
Williams pointed out that, despite Trump saying he is no longer going to dispense money from the fund, the president has already indicated that it could be revived. Even his fellow Republican senators have not foreclosed the possibility, as they pointedly refused to ban the fund as part of the recently-passed reconciliation bill. Similarly, they have not taken a strong stand against the provision of the agreement that gives Trump’s family from IRS audits of any of their past tax returns.
“Those are important dimensions of this story, of course,” Williams wrote. “But the thing that remains most troubling is what’s going on with the underlying case—Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS—and the way it attests to an alarming trend in the U.S. justice system.”
He added, “A federal judge in Miami who is involved in the case recently took the step of reopening it because she feared that the Department of Justice might have lied to her. Technically, what the judge said was that she wants to investigate ‘grievous allegations’ that the deal to resolve the suit was ‘premised on deception.’ (That’s federal judge-speak for ‘The United States Department of Justice might have lied to me to get this done.’)”
Williams emphasized that this is not normal behavior in a functioning democracy, and that it indeed imperils the rule of law in the United States.
“But in the age of Trump, it isn’t the first documented instance of the administration upending the abstruse but foundational legal principle that government officials are assumed to have acted honestly and in good faith,” Williams wrote. “It is called the ‘presumption of regularity,’ a centuries-old concept conceived in England and baked into American law. The Trump administration has acted with almost total disregard for it hundreds of times. And its de facto loss has huge ramifications that are being felt throughout our legal system.”...
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Textbook fascism.
Trump repeats same story over and over as signs of deterioration mount — John Stoehr
Either the nearly 80-year-old Donald Trump believes a cognitive test is an intelligence test or he's lying about his mental health. I don't think there's a gray zone here. If it's the first, he's demented. If it's the second, he's hiding something (probably dementia). Either way, it's bad.
It happens too frequently to ignore. The president brags about passing a cognitive test to the point where he seems to believe it's a measure of his IQ. In public remarks, he often puts special emphasis on the word "cognitive" as if to stress that it demonstrates his intelligence. Here's what he told the New York Post after a third trip in a year to Walter Reed. "I do physicals because I think I have an obligation to do it. I took a cognitive test and I got 100 percent on it. The doctors told me very, very few people can ace it. It's actually a tough test."...
...It had a question like "pick a number, sir, any number." Okay, 203. "Multiple by 9. Divide by 2. Add on 1,324. Subtract 1,292. Sir, multiply it out one more time by 19. What is the answer, sir?" I got it right. And the one doctor said, "I've been doing this test for 20 years. I've never seen anybody ace it."...
Think of it this way. By passing "the cognitive," Trump believes that:"
nothing is wrong with him;
indeed, something is very right with him;
it's better than all other presidents combined;
his enemies are intellectually inferior and;
it's evidence beyond a shadow of doubt of his genetic superiority over lesser mortals, who in turn have no right to challenge him. Donald Trump is a Very Special Boy. He aced it three times! The doctors were wowed! Science proved it! Enemies can now shut up.
That's not just narcissism. That's dementia, too. They can't be separated. Indeed, as he grows more demented, he will grow more narcissistic (as hard as that it to believe). That he appears to have given up on being president illustrates the point. While the war against Iran burns up the American economy, Trump talks about reflecting pools being taller than the Empire State Building. He posts deranged images of enemies on social media. He falls asleep on live television. None of that matters. "The cognitive" affirms his right to rule unchallenged.
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And the answer to the math problem was... not stated. Sure, Don. We would rather have a mental incompetent as POTUS than have to invoke the 25th Amendment. Our government is as retarded as Trump is. Perhaps more so.
NY Post Flack Conflates Trump's Ballroom Monstrosity To Obama's Basketball Court — Heather
This is the same New York Post columnist that CNN feels compelled to constantly inflict on their viewers during their idiot panel discussion shows that usually ends up getting her ass handed to her when she spews nonsense on NewsNight or Table for Five.
But this was Fox, so you're not going to see any fact-checking during segments like this one. Instead, the audience was treated to Fox News Live host Aishah Hasnie spewing as much propaganda for Trump as the guest on her show this Saturday.
Hasnie started things off by pretending that Trump turning the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into something that resembles a swimming pool while lining his friend's pockets with no-bid contracts for the work and his ballroom that he didn't get Congressional approval for are somehow beautifying Washington and wonderful for the city, before allowing her guese Lydia Moynihan to pretend what Trump is doing in any way, shape or form is comparable to Obama's basketball court....
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Our retarded Fox media.
Trump Desperately Pumps Money Into Dying Coal Industry — Frank Landymore
The coal industry has been in decline for decades. But tell that to president Trump, who’s firmly convinced he’d rather save coal from dying than the Earth’s climate.
Extolling the power of “clean, beautiful coal,” Trump announced Thursday that the federal government will heap $700 million towards supporting the coal industry, which will go to existing coal-burning plants as well as fund the construction of two new ones.
“We’re into energy that really works,” Trump said during a briefing at the Oval Office, calling his plan a “historic action to bring down the price of energy.”
Pound for pound, coal is the most carbon-emitting fuel and is the largest source of global CO2 emissions, releasing loads of other toxic pollutants. For decades, many countries, including the US, have been phasing out coal power, with it accounting for just ten percent of domestic energy production.
But the rapid rise of the AI industry has seen a surge in demand for more power, and coal plants once on the verge of being sunsetted are increasingly being brought back online to meet those energy needs.
Trump is procuring the $700 million in funds by invoking the 1950 Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era law that gives the president emergency powers to control domestic industries in the name of national security. It’s part of a playbook he’s used in the past: in 2025, he declared a national energy emergency in a similar bid to revitalize the coal industry.
In a grimly ironic twist, these funds are coming from money Congress originally set aside to reduce CO2 emissions from heavily polluting industries, according to The New York Times.
$425 million of the funds will be used to upgrade 13 coal plants and keep them online past their expected shelf life. Additional funding will go towards the construction of two new plants in Alaska and West Virginia, which will be the first new coal plants built in the US since 2013.
The move was unsurprisingly blasted by environmental experts....
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Insane and also getting money for it.
‘I’ve Had Enough!’ Trump Storms Out of Meet the Press Interview in Wild Fashion — Explodes On NBC’s Kristen Welker After She Hits Him With Fact Checks — Joe DePaolo
President Donald Trump stormed out of a Meet the Press interview Sunday — after moderator Kristen Welker repeatedly fact-checked his claims on a variety of topics including; Jan. 6, his “anti-weaponization” fund, and election fraud.
The heated six-minute final block of the interview began with Welker pressing Trump about the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund he continues to promote — despite his administration officially abandoning its efforts to launch the fund. Welker pressed — attempting to confirm that Trump is indeed throwing in the towel.
“Just to be very clear, are you backing off the fund completely as your acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has said, or are you looking for another avenue to revive the fund?” Welker asked.
Trump launched into a lengthy defense of the fund....
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"If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen!" — Harry Truman.
If the demeted fart has had enough he can resign and go back to Mar-Uh-Lugo and stay!
Hegseth Warns Europe to Defend Itself Against a Second D-Day — Alex Nguyen
In a perplexing speech Saturday commemorating the World War II D-Day landings in Normandy, France, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called for European leaders to combat what he implied was a second, modern D-Day—in which European countries were being “stormed by different dangerous ideologies” accompanied by “boats and men.”
The original D-Day was the Allied invasion to liberate France from Nazi German domination: the defenders were Hitler’s National Socialists and their army, and the “dangerous ideology” was anti-fascism.
At Normandy in 1944, genocidal far-right extremists “defended” a conquered Europe against a multiracial force fighting for democratic ideas. In 2026, Hegseth’s speech suggested, it was happening again: “When will European capitals do something about that invasion?,” he asked.
Hegseth may have been confused—or, then again, we might be at the stage where our government explicitly aligns us with Nazism. After all, every single refugee we admitted to the US this year was supposedly fleeing anti-white persecution....
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Was this a threat? Confused and hungover is no way to go through life.
Military vet files federal lawsuit to stop 'deeply corrupt' White House UFC plan — David McAfee
A Virginia political organizer and a military veteran filed a federal lawsuit Sunday seeking a court order to halt UFC Freedom 250, the upcoming mixed martial arts event planned for the White House South Lawn and Lincoln Memorial on June 14 — a date that is simultaneously the 250th anniversary of American independence and Donald Trump's 80th birthday.
The suit, reported by CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, calls the arrangement a corrupt transfer of public resources to a private business ally. "This plan is deeply corrupt," the complaint states. "The President is giving White and his company what none have enjoyed before: unfettered access to the White House and Lincoln Memorial to stage a private, for-profit sports event, with all the promotional and branding opportunities that accompany such access."
Dana White, the UFC's chief executive and a close Trump friend and ally, has publicly framed the event as a celebration of America's semiquincentennial. But the lawsuit notes that White has also admitted the event "was Trump's idea," and argues that UFC Freedom 250 is in reality "a celebration of the UFC's brand and the 80th anniversary of Donald Trump's birth" — and therefore does not qualify for the special permits that allow use of national monumental grounds.
Federal law tightly restricts private use of the South Lawn and Lincoln Memorial, both of which are national parklands administered by the National Park Service. Under the NPS's standard permitting regime, no special events of any kind, including sporting events, may be held on the South Lawn...
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Someone needs to put a stop to this disgrace. Our very foundation as a country is being shat upon by Trump.
Damning new details emerge about would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks — David McAfee
FBI records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit reveal that a Butler County Sheriff's deputy exchanged two emails with Thomas Matthew Crooks — the gunman who shot and wounded President Donald Trump at his Butler, Pennsylvania rally on July 13, 2024 — prior to the attack. The content of those emails remains unknown. The records are heavily redacted....
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More information on the staged assassination attempt. Notice the article never states "alleged" anywhere in his description of the the gunman. As a commenter stated, the gunman was "Never arrested, never charged, never tried, never proved and never convicted." This shooting was so staged and has so many holes in it that it is a disgrace even to the depths to which Trump stoops. The ear cartilage, the blood flow directon, the stances the CIA assume, is all total wrestling match bullshit. Shameless fakery!
Scott Pelley fires back at Trump's attacks on his patriotism in new interview — Matthew Rozsa
The broadcast journalist who stood up to CBS News' increasingly pro-MAGA bias is now speaking out about his views on President Donald Trump and the First Amendment.
Speaking with The New York Times in an interview released on Sunday, Pelley was asked about Trump referring to him as part of a gang of "stupid, crooked people that don’t care about your country."
"Stupid? I can, I can take that," Pelley said. "Stiff? Yeah, probably. Don’t care about the country? I’ve never worn the uniform, but I’ve been in combat for this country, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kuwait. Been shot at. Spent nights in foxholes filling up with water in the desert. I’m not aware that the President of the United States has ever done any of those things for his country. Please correct me if I’m wrong."
Pelley added, "You become a journalist because you love the First Amendment. You become a journalist because you love the country. And while all the other descriptions, that the president used about me might be applicable. Not that one. There is no democracy without journalism. It can’t be done. And that is why I am a journalist."...
"My hope is that the leadership of Paramount will say to themselves, 'OK, this isn’t working,'" Pelley told The New York Times. "We have respected journalists saying that there is a thumb on the scale for one political party over another. And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at '60 Minutes' before or at CBS News before. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane, but right now, CBS News, in my view, is on fire."...>
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Hopfully, CBS and it's fascist owners will burn to the ground.
Todd Blanche Promises To Protect Trump From Future Prosecutions — John Amato
There is no Project 2029 to imprison Trump, but lies are all they have.
Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche made clear that he is putting up roadblocks to protect Trump from any future prosecution after he leaves office.
This is not the role for an Atty. General, but it is the role of a sycophantic groupie that wields the power of the DOJ.
Former Fox News host Katie Pavlich now has a show on News Nation, and she brought up a new conspiracy to wet their whistles on....
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The Hop Toad will have his hands full of indictments. May he and Trump spend eternity in prison.
RFK Jr. seeks to peek at Americans’ medical records for clues on autism and vaccines — Amanda Seitz and Darius Tahir for KFF
U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pursuing federal government access to most Americans’ medical records, in a quest to research a link between vaccines and autism — a connection the medical establishment studied for decades and flatly rejects.
The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking data from little-known state systems that allow hospitals and clinics to exchange detailed, identifiable patient information, KFF Health News has learned.
In private meetings, some public health leaders have objected to giving Kennedy’s team access to such data, raising doubts that it’s legal or that the information would even be useful.
They have also expressed concerns about allowing the federal government to peer into the minutiae of Americans’ medical records, which could mean viewing anything from doctors’ notes to prescription history. HHS has offered no insight into how it will protect or handle the personal health information it obtains....
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The ugly SOB can get bent. He nor anyone but a doctor can look at my medical records or yours! Stop fascism now!
NYT: Sec. Brain Worms Roadkill Is Shirking His Duties
The New York Times reports:
Shortly after the World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak in Africa a public health emergency, a reporter asked Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if he was worried about the virus. Six Americans had already been exposed. His response was brief: “Yeah, we’re working on it.”
In the nearly three weeks since, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed travel restrictions to keep the virus from coming to the United States, Mr. Kennedy has made no public comments about the spreading outbreak. He has received very few briefings about the virus from C.D.C. scientists.
Mr. Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues. Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.
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Hopefully, he will find The Deadly Ebola Virus! -- Hungry Chuck
MTG Gets “Anti-Aging” Stem Cell Therapy In Mexico
TMZ reports:
Marjorie Taylor Greene is trying to get ahead of Father Time … telling TMZ she and fiancé Brian Glenn are in Mexico receiving stem cell treatments aimed at fighting aging and promoting long-term health.
The ex-U.S. Representative tells us they underwent stem cell IV treatments Saturday at Dream Body Clinic in Puerto Vallarta. MTG says she’s always been proactive about her health — dating back to her days owning a CrossFit gym — and believes stem cell therapy can be an effective tool for anti-aging and wellness.
MTG also says she doesn’t carry health insurance … opting instead to spend that money on preventative treatments and health-related therapies she believes work for her. There’s one catch, though … the stem cell procedure isn’t approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is why they traveled to Mexico for treatment.
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"...You’re not getting younger now
Even though you’ll try somehow..". — Leave It o Me, Men of Extinction.
WH Demands Lawyers Hand Over Info On Migrant Kids
The Lever reports:
The Trump administration is withholding pay from legal aid groups while demanding they share confidential case data about unaccompanied migrant children fighting to remain in the country, according to records reviewed by The Lever.
For months, the records show, the primary legal services provider for unaccompanied migrant youth has been locked in a standoff with the federal government over these unprecedented demands, which advocates say would represent a breach of attorney-client privilege and could put vulnerable children at risk.
As a result, legal clinics across the country that provide a critical lifeline to migrant children, shepherding them through the byzantine immigration court system that they would otherwise face on their own, have not been paid for their work since December, threatening their existence.
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The evil of the Trump Nazis. Child molesters! Why do we allow it? Disgraceful.
NYT: CIA’s Gold Bars Thief Created Fake Spy Program
The New York Times reports:
A C.I.A. employee who was found recently with $40 million of gold bars in his house had created a secret intelligence program to funnel millions of dollars from the federal government to himself, according to two U.S. officials. David Rush, the employee, created a fake “special access program,” a sensitive intelligence tool that has highly limited visibility even within the C.I.A., the officials said.
Mr. Rush was arrested late last month and charged with theft of public funds based on a lie about joining the Navy Reserve after serving in that branch of the military, from which he was discharged in 2015, according to court documents.
Mr. Rush, a C.I.A. officer for 17 years, was arrested on May 19 after F.B.I. agents found 303 gold bars weighing about one kilogram each in Mr. Rush’s home, according to an affidavit. The agents also seized nearly three dozen luxury watches, many of them Rolexes.
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Another member of the Trump Crime Syndicate.
Postal Union “Deeply Alarmed” By Plan To Limit Ballots
Democracy Docket reports:
The American Postal Workers Union (APWU) says it is “deeply alarmed” about the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) new rule created to carry out President Donald Trump’s plans for restricting mail-in voting.
Calling it an “unconstitutional attack on the millions of Americans who vote by mail,” the APWU said in a press statement that it “rejects the premise” that the USPS needed to comply with Trump’s order.
“The Executive Order also ignores the fundamental purpose of the Postal Service and postal workers, which is to provide universal service to all,” reads the statement. “The Postal Service serves all Americans – regardless of party, religion, or race; it is not a tool for politicians to pick which Americans get which benefits.”
Trump’s March 31 order calls for the creation of federally managed lists of citizens the administration deems eligible to vote. It also calls for the USPS to only send absentee ballots to voters on lists that states have submitted for federal approval.
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Just say NO! to Trump's Crime Syndicate!
Christianity is profoundly queer — Su Yon Pak - Kathleen T. Talvacchia
The Christian right acts like LGBTQ+ people are religious outcasts. They are wrong
As Pride Month unfolds, the Trump administration and its allies are ramping up their attacks on LGBTQ+ communities.
The Education Department has launched a Title IX probe into Smith College for admitting transgender women, targeted schools that provide education on gender and sexuality, rolled back federal protections for LGBTQ+ students, and erased LGBTQ+ identities from federal agencies and recognition. In state legislatures, bills targeting drag performances, gender-affirming care and same-sex families have proliferated at a record pace.
Leaders use a variety of weak explanations to justify these policies — that queer people are perverse, that we denigrate nuclear families and make a mockery of American values. But they all rest on a common foundation: a narrow interpretation of Christianity that frames LGBTQ+ identities as sinful, disordered and incompatible with faith.
We are queer Christians who have spent decades studying theology. And we want to say plainly: that narrow interpretation of Christianity is shaky at best....
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Shaky isn't even close. Most of those yahoos know nothing of Biblical history and the history of Jesus of Nazareth.
I suggest they commence reading anything written by Reza Aslan.
Who's Most Responsible for the Monopolization of America? — Robert Reich
Hint: I was in his class
Friends,
I focused this morning on Chevron and the Big Oil monopoly — and the importance of antitrust enforcement. I’d like to give you a bit more background on what happened to antitrust in America.
Whether it’s Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Tech, Kroger and Albertsons dominating the grocery market, or Big AI (Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX), corporate concentration is on the rise.
And its social costs are growing.
— The typical American household is paying more than $5,000 a year because corporations can raise their prices without fear that competitors will draw away consumers.
— Such corporate market power has also been a major force driving inflation.
— Huge corporations also suppress wages, because workers have fewer employers from whom to get better jobs — limiting the ability of workers to negotiate higher wages and benefits. According to the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, this drop in labor market bargaining power costs U.S. workers more than $1 trillion annually.
— And corporate giants are also fueling massive flows of big money into politics (one of the major advantages of large size).
Yet the federal courts have been slow to do anything about this. And the monied interests — as exemplified on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — argue that antitrust shouldn’t be enforced. Why? Because of a man named Robert Bork....
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More to hang on this miscreant.
Trump's Masked Goons are a Criminal's Dream — Thom Hartmann
America spent two centuries learning that law enforcement should show its face. Now we're watching the consequences of ignoring that lesson.
It was January 20, 2025, the day Donald Trump returned to the White House promising the largest mass deportation operation in American history, when a hooded man kicked down the bedroom door of a Mexican immigrant in Greensboro, North Carolina, shouting “ICE! ICE!”
The man raised his hands. He thought he was being arrested. Instead, four assailants robbed the house at gunpoint, pistol-whipped one resident so hard that his split forehead required ten stitches and four staples, and pointed a gun at a baby while demanding cash from the infant’s terrified parents.
They weren’t ICE. They weren’t police. They were criminals who had figured out that in Trump’s America, all you need to terrorize an immigrant family with impunity is a mask, a gun, a camo outfit you can buy on Amazon, and a loud enough shout.
NBC News and Noticias Telemundo just published a sweeping investigation documenting how that Greensboro robbery was not an isolated horror. Reviewing court records, police reports, and news accounts from across the country, they found 31 separate cases in 2025 of criminals impersonating ICE agents to commit violent crimes, up from an average of just five per year over the previous decade.
That’s a 484 percent increase in a single year.
In New York, a Dominican woman was dragged into a basement, beaten, and raped by a man claiming to be an immigration agent. In North Carolina, another woman was raped at her workplace by a fake agent. In Philadelphia, an armed man claiming to be ICE and wearing a vest marked “Security Enforcement Agent” zip-tied a fifty-year-old Dominican cashier and robbed his business.
The FBI quietly warned in an internal bulletin last October that this was happening, but the administration’s response has been to keep keep the bulletin on the QT while telling ICE agents to stay masked up.
My home state of Oregon, at least, is doing something about it. On Wednesday of last week, the Portland City Council voted 8-4 to bar law enforcement officers from wearing face coverings within the city and to require them to display clear identification.
“Secret police have no place in a democracy,” Councilor Sameer Kanal said, and he’s exactly right: The principle Portland is trying to defend is older than the republic itself....
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Every one of them is a criminal.
Comatose Trump's own words are coming back to haunt him — John Casey
I had a great uncle who was notorious for sleeping sitting straight up in his chair. His eyes would glaze over as family conversations swirled around him. Inevitably, his eyes would shut, and whether it was a dream or the shrill sound of his wife’s laugh, his eyes would pop open.
He was always teased about his frequent chair napping, and he always, always denied he was sleeping. “Just resting my eyes,” he would insist. Then he’d “rest his eyes” again a few moments later.
Nobody was fooled.
Asked by Rep. Ted Lieu whether he’d ever seen Trump fall asleep during a Cabinet meeting, Secretary of State Rubio responded defiantly like my great uncle. “That’s false. I’ve never seen him fall asleep. On the contrary, the guy doesn’t sleep — he calls me at 2 in the morning. He calls me at 5 in the morning.”...
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Right, Little Marco, he sleeps on the job!
Trump forced to deploy border czar to clean up Markwayne Mullin mess: report — Tom Boggioni
Violent clashes between protesters and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at Newark's Delaney Hall detention facility forced the Trump administration to deploy its top immigration official for emergency de-escalation after newly appointed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin made the situation dramatically worse.
According to Politico reporting by Myah Ward, tensions that had been escalating nightly cooled only after border czar Tom Homan was dispatched to meet with state and local officials and negotiate a resolution to the standoff.
The crisis began when images and videos surfaced showing violent clashes between pro-immigrant demonstrators and ICE agents outside the 1,000-bed, privately run detention facility. The unrest followed allegations of poor conditions inside the facility and a detainee hunger strike. Democratic lawmakers descended on the site to condemn detention conditions and accuse federal agents of violence against protesters.
Mullin's response made matters worse. The new DHS secretary threatened to pull customs staffing from Newark Liberty International Airport—a threat that shocked administration officials and sparked airline industry fears of travel chaos across the region....
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Johnwayne made matters worse? Tsk, tsk!
The Pope’s AI Warning Could Help Workers Seek Religious Exemptions From Using AI — Bruce Gil
A North Carolina software engineer already secured an accommodation allowing her to avoid using AI at work based on her religious beliefs.
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A most certain occurrence.
Researchers Put AI Models in Charge of Analyzing Sports, and They Choked Spectacularly — Joe Wilkins
Good news for sports broadcasters and fans who’d prefer their play-by-plays to have that human-touch: AI doesn’t know ball.
A new study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Northeastern University found that top AI models are horrible at analyzing professional sports. The yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study sought to analyze how capable the most popular AI models are in the fields of perception, reasoning, simulation, and agency — four traits which are difficult to evaluate with existing testing methods.
To probe how AI performs in these areas, researchers turned to the wide world of sports to create a new kind of AI test. Called strategic video intelligence, or “SVI-bench,” the novel test comprised 35,000 hours of sports footage from basketball, soccer, and hockey, as well as 15 million annotated plays, 15,000 hours of professional analysis, 23,000 post-game reports, and 103,000 statistical records.
Where AI performed the best was in perception: identifying which player performs which action at a given point in the match. But even there, they struggled badly. The models, which included ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and the open-source model Qwen, successfully eyeballed which player was doing what roughly 74 percent of the time — a rate which would get even a volunteer Little League announcer sacked.
The AI models did far worse on causal reasoning, or explaining why certain plays went down the way they did, with success rates falling near 40 percent on average. For example, when researchers asked the models to identify what was unusual about a Cody Martin three-pointer — which bounced off the top of the backboard before landing in the bucket — ChatGPT replied that it was “his first made three of the game.”...
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Gasp! Struggling!
Over 150 Mathematicians Warn Governments Not to “Believe the Hype” About AI — Victor Tangermann
Earlier this year, a 23-year-old without any formal mathematics training made headlines by claiming he’d used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to solve one of the “Erdos problems” — a database of challenging conjectures left behind by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos.
Then, last month, scholars were taken aback when OpenAI claimed its AI had disproved an 80-year-old “unit distance” conjecture, also devised by Erdos.
“This marks the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open problem central to a field of mathematics,” OpenAI boasted at the time.
But whether the frontier AI models powering tools like ChatGPT really represent a major leap in our ability to solve problems that have been plaguing mathematicians for decades remains hotly debated among experts.
In perhaps the strongest public rebuke yet, a new declaration signed by over 150 mathematics experts from around the world warned governments not to “believe the hype” when it comes to AI’s capabilities to solve complex mathematical problems, throwing cold water on claims of a revolution in the field.
In a statement accompanying the 11-page “Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics,” International Mathematical Union vice president Ulrike Tillmann argued that AI “raises questions that cannot be left unexamined.”
“The future of mathematical research must be guided by human judgment, fair and transparent practices, and the shared values of the global mathematical community,” Tillmann said.
“There is currently a strong commercial incentive on the part of the technology industry to overstate the capabilities of their products,” the declaration reads, advising policymakers to “consult with experts, including mathematicians, in forming policy decisions rather than relying on press releases or popular reporting of mathematical results.”
Worse yet, AI models may produce convincing-sounding solutions that don’t actually withstand scrutiny....
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Not so fast, AI!
Americans are on the brink of losing it all — and good people know it — D. Earl Stephens
Let’s start with some questions today, before we arrive at the answer.
What if Kamala Harris had become president, promptly leveled the historic East Wing of our White House, and then spent each day like a petrified drama queen shrieking that taxpayers should purchase her a new ballroom?
What if Harris had spent her time in office plastering her face and name on inanimate objects, while food prices she promised to lower spiraled out of control, and then belittled the people who dared mention this?
I’m not done.
What if Harris and her administration had spent their time attacking science and vaccines and then did nothing as Measles — MEASLES — made a deadly comeback across America?
What if Harris had become president and picked silly and insulting fights with our NATO partners who have been with us since WWII, while threatening to invade Greenland like some petulant child?
What if after running a campaign on no new wars, Harris appointed a drunken, racist talk show host to be her Secretary of Defense, who then proceeded to commit a series of war crimes, shared top-secret intelligence with God knows who, brazenly blocked military promotions of women and people of color, and then led a moronic war in Iran that has only succeeded in making America a more dangerous and expensive place?
Sorry, I’m not done yet.
What if instead of supporting Ukraine during their heroic fight on the frontline of democracy that benefits America, Harris berated its leader and then rolled out the red carpet for the murdering fascist, Vladimir Putin, on U.S. soil?
What if instead of prosecuting law and order, Harris appointed HER personal lawyer as OUR attorney general and then went about spending billions of taxpayer dollars to reward the traitors who attacked us on January 6, 2021?
Can you imagine?
What if Kamala Harris had become president and leveled idiotic tariffs on every country she could locate on a map that resulted in making things more expensive for Americans?
What would all those sanctimonious MAGA farmers say about that?...
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We'll wait for the answer but my guess is it's "I don't respond to hypotheticals."
'Exhausted' Trump now too sleepy to hammer 'sleepy Joe': report — Adam Lynch
For years President Donald Trump has joyfully plundered former president Joe Biden’s perceived lack of energy and measured, sluggish delivery for insults. But during one of his Oval Office afternoon televised announcements the Trump showed some semblance of mercy.
Irish Times correspondent Keith Duggan says it’s almost like the famously snoozy Trump was feeling a rare bout of empathy.
A reporter specifically asked Trump if he had noticed a cognitive decline in his predecessor when they met at the White House following Trump 2024 November victory, and Trump — in his typically crass way, of course — almost showed a hint of mercy.
“No, not really. He was the same guy I was watching for a long time. I mean you can go back 40 years, I watched him 40 years, 30 years ago. He was never the sharpest guy — you do know that. It wasn’t like he was sharp as a tack. But no, it was the same guy,” Trump said.
“But then we met also, as you know, we did the ritual and he was fine as far as I was concerned,” Trump added, again with an unfamiliar measure of compassion. “I dunno, something happened him during the debate. … I would say this: he did not have a good night. No, he spoke softly, very softly. I mentioned this to people – he spoke very softly, very low and as we talked we got along really well. And I thought he was fine.”
In the memoir of the former first lady, Jill Biden released this week, the author shared her account of her husband’s disastrous debate performance in Atlanta.
“Is this a stroke? Has he been drugged?” she recalled thinking as she watched. “To this day I wish I’d thought of asking for a blood test.”...
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Everyone knows he needs to be removed.
'He lied': Trump voters are revolting at the scope of White House betrayal — Adam Lynch
Bulwark founder Sarah Longwell hosts frequent surveys with Trump supporters. And her latest foray reveals Trump’s fans have had it with the president’s failure to deliver on promises, however, and they may sit home in a huff as Republicans tumble in November.
“My brain is literally spinning with so much,” reports one Trump voting woman. “I think that he sold us a bag of — I'm not going to curse, but I do not like the way things are going, even with ICE. And border control for me was a very big thing. That was one of my biggest concerns with this election was cleaning up the country and getting these dangerous illegals out. But I don't like how innocent people, professionals have been incarcerated or taken.”
Many others evinced outward fury at Trump’s lies about his plan to improve the U.S. economy and U.S. households.
“I don't think he's helping the people that need help right now. He's helping his friends, the rich ones,” said another woman.
“Unless you are a millionaire, regular everyday things that used to be very common are near impossible to do, whether it be outings or just going to get something to eat,” complained another Trump voting woman. “I grocery shop every week so like I know when thing when prices are going down and up — and I'm, like, he's lying. Nothing is okay. … I've never paid $9 for ground beef before, ever, not even the good kind. That is really, really crazy and getting very scary.”..
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The people speak. And it means curtains for Trump.
Republicans are weaponizing a backlash against marriage equality — Michael Signorile, The Signorile Report
This year at least five red states are trying to erase Pride month, renaming June to celebrate the heterosexual family—as if it’s not celebrated every day in American life.
The homophobic MAGA GOP Congressman Andy Ogles of Tennessee—one of the aforementioned red states—this week posted on X that “homosexuality has no place in America,” wishing his followers a “Happy Nuclear Family Month.” After much outrage he deleted it, blaming it on a “staffer,” though we’ve heard no news of the staffer facing dismissal or any punishment. Ogles, let’s not forget, is a hardcore bigot, who also posted earlier this year that “Muslims have no place in American society.”
Gallup released a poll this week showing a sharp drop in support for marriage equality, as anti-LGBTQ sentiment rose dramatically within the Republican Party.
And attacks on trans rights have escalated in states across the country as Donald Trump has grotesquely vilified trans people, including kids, pushing to make them invisible—literally removing their gender markers from passports and replacing them with those of their “biological sex”—and putting their lives in danger as he promotes the kind of rhetoric that fosters violence.
This is where we stand in 2026 as we mark Pride month, and it’s important to see that MAGA, which has itself taken over the GOP, has enacted a full-blown assault on LGBTQ rights, meant to strip those rights entirely....
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The mean and heartless. Failed humans.
Fed’s May Beige Book Shows Working Families Falling Behind As Trump Is ‘Choosing to Keep Prices High’— Julia Conley
Middle-income households were “squeezing more life out of every dollar before deciding to spend it” last month, while low-income families and individuals “showed greater financial strain.”
The Beige Book, a monthly report on consumer spending, labor markets, and inflation from the Federal Reserve’s 12 districts across the country, offers an up-to-date look on how the US economy is impacting households across the US—and this week, the report for May showed a continuation of the trend that accelerated after President Donald Trump joined Israel in attacking Iran more than three months ago.
“This month’s report, the third since the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East, reveals that soaring input costs are triggering price hikes for consumers,” said the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative.
The report notes that regional contacts at the Federal Reserve’s districts described middle-income households as “squeezing more life out of every dollar before deciding to spend it,” while low-income families and individuals “showed greater financial strain.”
“Overall, there were reports of increased credit card usage, fewer retail visits, and stronger demand for necessities,” reads the Beige Book....
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Trump's end is nearing.
Officials powerless to stop 8 new data centers that could transform small Texas county — Alejandra Martinez
At least 248 data centers are planned to be built in Texas — nearly half in unincorporated areas
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The future is not what it used to be on a dying planet.
The Thoughtlessness of AI Filmmaking — Sonny Burch
IT’S BEEN FUN WATCHING 20-year-old Kane Parsons—the director of the frightfully good Backrooms—take a victory lap this week. He is well-spoken, guarded in a way that belies his years, and thoughtfully provocative in ways you might not necessarily expect.
Consider his take on the use of AI in filmmaking. Speaking with the Australian, Parsons said, “If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would. Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me.” When Matt Belloni, on his podcast, asked Parsons to elaborate, the young director made a crucial distinction:
When I see in a project online that generative fill or some sort of generative AI has been used in some way for some detail, the part of my brain that desires to really live with a piece of art and look into the details and the nooks and crannies and get excited about what I might see in the background or look for little details and just look for a general deliberate richness in the set direction—that immediately goes away.
Because if the artist is willing to make that kind of completely arbitrary choice and whatever the tool they’re using to create that piece of media is going to obviously not be something that came from them, it’s something they didn’t place there. If it becomes arbitrary, I’m then open to conclude almost any choice in that project is arbitrary on a human level.
I think the underlying issue with AI, at least from a creative perspective, is this precise question of intentionality, this idea that our work is our own. It’s why, when confronted with something like Steven Rosenbaum admitting to using falsehood-introducing AI in his book about AI and the nature of truth, we react with something like revulsion. At least, I do. Because what’s the point of writing if you are not choosing what to include and what not to include, if you are not doing the research yourself and instead trusting some hallucination box to do your work for you. And when I read Rosenbaum try to defend himself to Wired by saying, functionally, that everyone does it anyway, I just want to stand up and scream “No, actually, we don’t, and the fact that you think everyone does suggests no one should ever read anything you write ever again.”...
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Curb your AI.
MAGA rep buried after claiming misaddressed ballot proves Dems stealing elections — Matthew Chapman
Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), one of the House GOP's most recently elected lawmakers, flew into a rage on social media over the fact that the mail ballot for the previous resident of his D.C. apartment was sent to him.
"Yesterday, I received an official mail ballot at my Washington apartment for a woman I’ve never heard of," wrote Fine on X, posting an image of the ballot with identifying information blocked out. "I’ve rented this place since I got elected OVER A YEAR AGO. All anyone would need to do is fill it out, sign it, and send it back."
"Democrats are stealing elections every day," he thundered, demanding that Congress pass President Donald Trump's SAVE America Act, a draconian package of new voting procedure restrictions.
But many observers on social media, including a prominent former elections official, immediately poked holes in Fine's claims, noting that a mistakenly-sent ballot is something routine that the law has built-in measures to address, not evidence of anything being "stolen."
"*Sigh* I realize my tiny account will never match the reach of @RepFine's, but this is straight-up false," wrote Pat Garofalo of the American Economic Liberties Project. "Unless the signature on the ballot matches the signature on record at the Board of Elections, the ballot is thrown out."
"'All anyone would need to do is fill it out and sign it' as if that would be legal," wrote Julian Andreone of Drop Site. "Nope! That would definitely be fraud!"
The most detailed analysis came from Stephen Richer, the former Republican recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona.
"Sure. You'd just need to: 1) Forge her signature (commit a felony). 2) Hope your forgery is sufficiently accurate 3) Hope that she (intended voter) doesn't call election office and ask about why she never got a ballot (in which case that mail ballot would be deactivated, and it would be investigated if returned) 4) Hope that she doesn't send back a replacement ballot or show up to vote in person (in which case the same as #3 would happen)," wrote Richer....
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Burying Randy Fine is always a good idea.
Only Candace Owens Could Prompt MAGA to Acknowledge Russian Disinformation — Anna Merlan
Far-right podcaster Candace Owens made a surprise trip to Russia this week, where she spoke on a panel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), a Davos-style event meant to build relationships between Russia and other world powers. Owens, who initially claimed that she was only taking a family vacation, used her trip to tweet at length about the country’s beauty, safety, and friendliness to Christians. “The Christian expression and heritage here is unmatched,” she tweeted, alongside photos of Russian Orthodox churches. “Unsurprisingly, they are lying to us about Russia.”
“I’m starting to understand why the talking heads panic and shout and lie about ‘Russian collusion’ when they learn an American with a platform is traveling here,” Owens added in another tweet. “It’s Plato’s allegory of the cave. It is genuinely shocking how clean, beautiful and ordered this city is. It is so far removed from media depictions.”
The baldly propagandistic nature of Owens’ trip generated condemnation from an unusual quarter: other MAGA figures, who suddenly found themselves unusually concerned about Kremlin-backed disinformation.
“I’m just wondering how long some of these people… have been activated as foreign agents.”
Glenn Beck, for instance, tweeted that Owens’ trip is “proof that Russia and Alexander Dugin’s massive propaganda operation is working.” (Dugin is a political philosopher and ultra-nationalist figure who is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain” due to his reported influence on the president.) A MAGA podcaster named Matt Tardio responded in agreement: “I’ve respected Glenn Beck for years on his honest reporting. Finally, people are waking up. Russian disinformation has been fooling influential people in the west with one goal, to destroy us from within.”
“Candace continues lying openly to her audience and they still clap like brainless seals,” declared Jessica Reed Kraus, the MAGA gossip blogger who writes the House Inhabit substack. “Russia is cool guys!” she added, mocking Owens’ fans....
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These sick times...
Broadway’s “Wicked” Sued For Anti-White Male Bias
Gothamist reports:
The Broadway musical — you know the one — about a witch who is ostracized and othered because of her green skin is being sued for racial discrimination.
Kevin Lynch, 35, a white male theater professional with roots in Rockland County, alleges in a federal lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court in Manhattan that he was barred from even applying for a post with the musical “Wicked” because of his “immutable characteristics,” including his race and gender.
The claim was also brought by conservative activist Edward Blum [photo]. Blum, who is president of the American Alliance for Equal Rights, has been instrumental in bringing successful challenges to affirmative action policies, including a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated race-conscious admissions decision-making in higher education.
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The most retarded thing we've ever heard of.
New York Times Roasted for “Profiling” the “AI-Generated Actress” Tilly Northwood — Frank Landymore
The New York Times is getting torn apart by readers after its magazine published a “profile” of the AI “actress” Tilly Norwood.
“I Profile Celebrities for a Living. Nothing Prepared Me for Tilly Norwood,” the article headline reads.
The sub-headline builds on this anthropomorphizing framework: “The AI actress on her craft, the future of film and how she definitely does not intend to murder us.”
Tilly Norwood, for those unfamiliar, is the brainchild of former actress Eline Van der Velden, who founded anAI firm calledParticle 6 Productions. The AI creation was unveiled last year to near-universal backlash from audiences, and importantly, actual performers. (Beloved character actor Ralph Ineson had a succinct response: “F*ck off.”)
At this point you may be asking yourself: how does a profile of an AI model even work? It’s a question that the NYT journalist, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, grapples with throughout the nearly 8,000 word piece, digesting the absurdity of the exercise while unpacking some of the tech’s dispiriting implications for the industry.
It’s far from a paean to AI, in other words, and Brodesser-Akner humorously pokes holes in the AI industry’s promises. But many readers were appalled that the NYT was giving such a huge platform to the AI venture in the first place, on top of the insult of framing it as an actual celebrity profile.
“Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a wonderful TV writer… and marched with us during the writers strike. The fact that she wrote this op-ed is just so damn disappointing,” lamented one Redditor. “Yes it’s farcical, yes it’s skewering the whole idea but that doesn’t take away from the fact that she’s giving oxygen to this cruel and demeaning fever dream of the anti-art oligarchy.”...
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No one said "Hope you live in sick times!" No one ever.
CEO Says There Will Be No Raises Because He Spent All the Money on AI
For years, tech CEOs have used AI as an excuse to justify layoffs. In reality, though, many experts say that what’s really happening is that execs are diverting financial resources into AI at the expense of everything else — including employee retention.
In one of the most egregious examples yet, cloud software company Teradata told its more than 5,000 employees not to expect a raise this year because its budget was being spent on AI instead, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.
“We will fund this AI investment by reallocating the budget from 2026 annual salary adjustments,” Teradata CEO Steve McMillan wrote in the memo.
Besides likely drawing the ire of everybody involved — as if there wasn’t enough of a growing anti-AI sentiment as it is — it may not have been the wisest choice. Tech leaders are starting to question whether sidelining human labor in favor of AI investments was such a good idea after all.
For one, researchers are finding that many of these investments are simply not paying off, leaving leadership to hold the bag. An oft-cited MIT report from last year found that a staggering 95 percent of AI pilot programs at companies are failing and delivering little to no measurable impact on profits.
Then there are the soaring costs of actually replacing human staffers with AI, with employers racking up enormous AI coding usage fees and leading some to wonder whether employing workers was actually cheaper.
In short, the line of thinking that AI will eventually replace workers and bring down costs is being seriously challenged by reality, making moves like cutting raises in favor if AI investments a highly questionable one....
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The U.S. was at its best when it invested in human beings!
Louisiana Police Threaten To Arrest Diabetes Experts For Handing Out Anti-Trump Editorial At Convention [Video]
MedPage Today reports:
Members of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) were escorted by police out of the convention center in New Orleans during the organization’s annual meeting on Friday as they handed out copies of an editorial criticizing Trump administration changes to U.S. biomedical research. Among them was Steven Kahn, MBChB, the lead author of the editorial, which published online in late April in the organization’s flagship journal, Diabetes Care. Kahn is also the editor in chief of the journal.
A video taken by MedPage Today shows Aaron Kelly, a pediatric obesity expert from Minnesota, being shoved by an officer wearing a badge of a local Constable’s office, with Louisiana State Police following close behind. A plainclothes security agent rips the editorials from Kahn’s hands. Kahn is then asked to step outside with the officers and security detail.
In a separate video provided to MedPage Today, Kahn and Justin Ryder were shown outside of the convention center talking with police after they were escorted outside. Kelly, who was also outside taking the video, said they were “threatened to be arrested for handing out the editorial.”
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Yes, we are Nazi Germany!
This is a naked vilotaltion of the Frist Amendment. Sue the shit out of them!
Megyn Kelly: Ban Californians From Voting If They Can’t “Get Off Their Lazy Fat Asses To Get To Polling Stations”
“It just undermines the faith and integrity of elections to allow this kind of voting. I don’t care how convenient you want to make it for people. Do we really want to make it that convenient? I mean these are lazy ass people.
“If they can’t get off their fat asses and get to election polling stations on election day, then we don’t want you, OK? We don’t want your vote. Who gives a shit about you? You’re too lazy.
“You’re too busy, sure, to make it down to the polling station on election day. Then get out. Goodbye. You don’t get to vote. That’s how it always has been. Why wasn’t that system OK?
“Because we needed to widen the field so we could get people too lazy to get down there to have their ballot counted? I mean, it’s just absurd. If you don’t prioritize the vote, your vote shouldn’t be prioritized.” – Megyn Kelly.
"I got off my ass, dear. Because I can no longer trust the post office to deliver my ballot, I went to the drop off box. That is directly due to you and your filthy ilk.
I’ve been getting off my ass to vote since at least 1971, and possibly earlier. I don’t remember when 18 to 21-year-olds were allowed to vote. I have missedonly one Election in all of those years, because I was out of the country for several months." — BensNewLogin (comments)
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Did it ever occur to this retarded moron that many people can't be in their state at election time for whatever reason? That some people are disabled and can't get to the polls? Our militrary and other Americans overseas? Voters who can't get off work to vote? Would she be happy if they all were able to get to the polls when the lines to vote would then stretch to Canada and take days to allow Americans the right to cast their votes. Death to Nazis who attack our election system!.
James Talarico Trolls Ken Paxton With Texas BBQ Feast
The Dallas Morning News reports:
After weeks of Republican taunts that he’s a vegan, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico sat down to a platter piled with brisket, ribs, sausage and brisket boudin. Then he dug in.
“It’s so good,” Talarico said at Smokey Joe’s BBQ in Oak Cliff. “I’m from Central Texas where there is great barbecue, but they don’t have anything on Oak Cliff.” The lunch stop at Smokey Joe’s was equal parts meal and message.
The large meat platter included Texas Twinkies, bacon-wrapped jalapeño pepper stuffed with cream cheese and chopped smoked brisket. Talarico dismissed the vegan attacks as a distraction. “What’s bad is lying,” he said. “And there’s a very clear public record of me loving Texas barbecue.”
"We’ve gone from policy debates to debate by meme over the past decade. I hate it.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good laugh and moment but if there is any hope we need to return to actual intellectual discussion, otherwise Idocracy is here to stay." — CDPlayer (comments)
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"...actual intellectual discussion"? Lord, are there any minds left in the U.S.?
So eat it, accusers!
Trump Is Forcing Coal Pollution on Consumers and Communities — Jim Hightower
Has your family consumed its lump of coal today?
In one of the most perverse Big Government moves ever, last year President Trump proclaimed an “energy emergency.” Since then he’s unilaterally ordered five electric utilities to re-open, or keep open, their old, coal-burning power plants.
These coal plants are toxic bombs that continuously spew mercury, carbon dioxide, and a mix of other killer pollutants into our air, water, and bodies. Mercury emissions are especially vicious, causing early death in adults and permanent IQ damages to fetuses and children. Even the president’s own health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has excoriated mercury pollution from coal-fired utilities as “the most powerful neurotoxin we know of in the universe.”
That’s why people have rebelled against the greed of coal barons in past years, finally replacing their deadly fuel with wind power, solar, and other renewable energy sources — which also lowers consumers’ electric bills. So why push to re-impose a horrific corporate poison that the people have already rejected – and that progressive utilities have moved beyond?
Crass corruption, that’s why. For hailing dirty coal as “beautiful,” while demonizing and defunding clean energy, Trump has been showered with millions of dollars from old-line coal profiteers. And never underestimate vanity — he even got a custom bronze trophy from the polluters, hailing him as the “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal.”
After America began replacing coal with clean energy, mercury pollution plummeted. Since declaring an energy emergency and ordering several coal plants to remain open, the Trump administration has also weakened mercury-pollution rules. Mercury emissions from U.S. coal plants rose about 9 percent in 2025, reversing a years-long decline.
Since he tries to merchandise everything, though, you might be able to buy an autographed lump of coal from him.
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Trump deserces a sock-full this Christmas.
We Are All Scott Pelley — Thom Hartmann
We must all become truth-tellers, whether our platform is radio, TV, Substack, social media, a local newspaper, or a protest sign raised in the town square
I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.
The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of MSU SDS.
I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news — accurate, factual, honest information — was sacred.
It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hourlong news block in prime time on TV.
We did this — and embraced the Fairness Doctrine — because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for 8 years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.
Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.
Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and now Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.
Over the past year-and-a-half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the FCC, go to CPAC conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel — again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.
And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo-baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s number-one news magazine show, 60 Minutes....
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Such is the power of an unfree and intolerant broadcast system run by Nazis.
Andy Ogles Didn't Tweet Anything MAGA Republicans Don't Actually Believe — Evan Hurst
Andy Ogles, he is this Tennessee Republican congressman who is dumb as a bag of hammers, and also just a complete sack of shit. (Yes, he’s the one who raised $23,000 to build a burial garden for stillborn infants, which was subsequently never built.)
Ogles thought he had a good tweet to commemorate Nuclear Family Month, the thing conservative Christian white nationalists and kid-touchers are doing as counterprogramming to Pride Month this June. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is calling it “Fidelity Month.” Kay Ivey in Alabama is calling it “Strong Families Month.” And in Ogles’s Tennessee it’s Nuclear Family Month.
It’s all euphemisms, what they mean is that God hates fags. They’re vile, irredeemable, bigoted human execrement, and that’s what they’re doing to oppose Pride month.
But Republicans didn’t like Ogles’s tweet, we guess because it was a little bit too honest about their intentions:
Hasn’t Ogles heard? We’re only saying “nuclear family month.” We’re not saying the first part about God hating fags right now. That completely defeats the purpose of creating a euphemism like “nuclear family month”!
Dumbass!...
All of these people are cross-burning trash, albeit perhaps on different levels. Pardon us, though, if we’re not real concerned with differentiating who votes for the Nazis because Hitler makes the trains run on time vs. the ones who are truly in it for the Jew hate. They’re all voting for, and representing, the Nazis....
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End Fascism!
What Would America Look Like Without Citizens United? — Thom Hartmann
Imagine an America where elections cost less, voters mattered more, and public policy followed an honest path.
It’s beyond time for some good-old-fashioned truth telling. There’s a singular cancer at the core of our democracy and it shows up in dozens of ways that don’t seem related to most Americans. It’s tearing our country apart, paralyzed our government, and has gutted our middle class.
That cancer is big and dark money in politics.
The story of how we got here is fascinating and I’ll get into it in a minute, but suffice it to say that fraud, lies, and corruption are at the core of every aspect of it.
Its main cause in the present moment is one of the most corrupt Supreme Court decision in history, where 5 on-the-take Republicans on the Court ruled in 2010 (Citizens United) that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as free speech. The wreckage of this decision is all around us.
Without Citizens United we’d have a national healthcare system like literally every other developed country in the world.
We don’t because the for-profit health insurance industry (which doesn’t even exist at this scale anywhere else on Earth) extracts hundreds of billions in profits from us every year and uses Citizens United’s legalization of bribery to pay off legislators to maintain the status quo. Big Pharma and Big Hospital are also in on the game, and massive New York hedge funds are buying up physician practices as fast as they can nationwide, knowing that people will pay almost anything to regain their health or postpone their death.
Without Citizens United we’d have high-quality public schools in every community in America.
Instead, children who live in poorer parts of America regularly score up to four full years behind children from wealthy districts. Teacher pay has been functionally frozen for decades when you consider inflation; they make on average 26% less than people with comparable degrees. Charter Schools drain money from public schools, making the situation far worse for those families who can’t get their kids into private education. National reading and math scores have fallen to their lowest levels in decades, with only about 28% of 8th graders proficient in math. All approved by politicians “incentivized” by “campaign contributions” to shovel more money into the coffers of a for-profit education industry that wants to take over all of America’s schools after first bankrupting them....
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End Citizens United.
Greg Bovino Launches 2028 White House Bid Website
The Daily Beast reports:
Gregory Bovino, the formerly self-styled commander-at-large of the deadly Minneapolis migrant crackdown, is gearing up for a 2028 presidential bid following his rocky tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, the Daily Beast can reveal.
“If I were President, I’d lead that [deportation] effort from the front and be on the front lines from time to time,” Bovino said in a statement—a thinly veiled jab at Donald Trump, whom he has accused of backing away from aggressive immigration enforcement.
To gear up for his White House run, supporters of the 56-year-old have rolled out Bovino2028.com, and mapped out a nationwide tour to rally supporters. A team of political outcasts from MAGA’s far right are leading the charge, including one aide who was arrested on meth possession charges two weeks ago.
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At least he admits he's a Nazi. Now we'll know all those that support him will be as well. Not that we needed confirmation.
Senate GOP Defeats Bill To Block Trump’s Slush Fund
The New York Times reports:
Republicans on Thursday defeated an initial effort by Democrats to bar President Trump from establishing a fund that could compensate his political allies, although more attempts to add such a measure to the party’s immigration crackdown bill were expected later in the day that could draw their support.
The first vote was on a motion by Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, to send the bill back to committee and add a prohibition on the creation of the fund. It failed 50-to-49, with three Republicans facing re-election — Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Jon Husted of Ohio and Dan Sullivan of Alaska — joining Democrats in support.
Though the Justice Department has said it will no longer pursue Mr. Trump’s plan to establish a $1.8 billion fund pay people who he claims have been victimized by the government, the amendment was a bid by Democrats to force Republicans to cast a politically painful vote on the matter.
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These fascists have authorized all "wrongly prosecuted traitors" in America to likley payements from our taxes. All must face prosectuton.
Trump Appointee: Trump’s Arch Doesn’t Violate Zoning
The Washington Post reports:
The head of a federal commission reviewing President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot triumphal arch said Thursday that he believed a federal law limiting the height of construction in Washington should not apply to the controversial project.
Will Scharf, the Trump-appointed chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, said that he had “thought deeply” about whether the Height of Buildings Act, which was enacted in 1910 and intended to preserve the capital city’s historical views and character, should apply to the project.
The law restricts most construction in Washington to a maximum height of 130 feet, and the commission has historically applied the law when deciding whether to approve projects in the region.
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The 1910 act was put in place exactly to keep our Nation's Capitol in a specific form to preserve its history. You cretin asswipes want to destroy it! It is subject to our law, not your goddamned dictator edict! Stop being fucking idiots!
Longtime allies now view America as a threat — thanks to Trump: Bush DHS official — Alex Henderson
..."Recently, Norway, a NATO founding member, became the ninth European country to sign up for French nuclear protection," the former DHS official observes. "Given the Russian threats and the broadly faltering trust in U.S. reliability, France has offered to extend its nuclear umbrella — with its roughly 290 nuclear warheads — to protect all of Europe as a replacement for American promises. But our allies are not only less willing to rely on and trust America. They are also coming to see America as a threat. Association with America is now a risk that needs to be taken into account and, if possible, reduced."
Rosenzweig continues, "Here's one example: Increasingly European governments are moving away from U.S. tech giants as service providers…. But the more insidious and troubling problem is that the belligerence of the Trump administration towards the continent has generated fears that bellicose language will be translated into hostile action. After Trump's sanctions against the International Criminal Court cut off six judges from their banks, credit cards, and even e-mail addresses, Europeans have a legitimate fear that that Silicon Valley giants could be compelled to cut off access to critical services for a whole government or even a whole country. It's no wonder that Europe is, increasingly, seeking to reduce its digital dependence on the United States."
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As stated here some time ago. America has become a threat to world peace. A Fascist government is a threat to the world including itself.
Which Monopolies Are Bribing Trump For His $60M Cage Match? — Cliff Schecter
Joe Walsh & I poured the tequila and followed the money: TKO Group's eating a $30 million loss. So what are they buying? Ram Trucks, Crypto.com, and Monster Energy are Trump's UFC sponsors - What do they get?
A new Tequila Talk, and we took on the "Bread & Circuses," UFC embarrassment that would've made the Founders cry at what their country's become. A truck company, crypto exchange, energy drink, and a media giant that needs Trump regulators to approve a $111 billion merger all chipping in for his 80th b-day cage match on the lawn you own. Trump needs you to look away from his ever increasing number of f*ck ups from Epstein to the Iran disaster.
Joe Walsh and I poured the tequila and followed the money:...
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Bribery, sexual assault, election tampering, open crime on the USA!
SSA Planned To Mark 2.7 Million Living People As Dead
The Washington Post reports:
The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive.
The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services.
Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s IT modernization efforts before leaving in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead could violate federal law.
Schofield said he realized the plan’s possible intent — to intimidate and worsen the finances of immigrants — as well as its potential unlawfulness after taking a sample of people from the 2.7 million and discovering they were all alive. Some were U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens, including one widow who was a legal permanent resident receiving survivor benefits.
"All of these Nazis need to face execution trials for their betrayal of America." — JT (comments)
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May hell take them all!
NPR Reporter Says Santos Threatened Him With “Gun In Your Face” Over Report On Alleged Insider Trading
NPR reporter Bobby Allyn writes:
I was winding down my work day here in Los Angeles when my phone rang at 5:37 p.m. from a blocked number. It was former Congressman George Santos. He was boiling with rage. The day before, I published a story revealing that the Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission had opened investigations into his trading activity on the prediction market site Kalshi.
I asked him who his lawyers are, and he refused to answer. I questioned whether he really does have attorneys. He replied: “I’m George f*cking Santos, of course I have a legal team.” What Santos said next took me aback, even by his outlandish and brazen standards. “This story is going to get you a gun in your face,” Santos said. I asked him what he meant by that. “You know what I mean.”
While he had been calling me from a blocked number, I tracked down his cell phone from a public records search, and I sent him a text message confirming it was him. He greeted it by launching into full-throated denial. “I NEVER SAID ‘this story would get a gun in your face, I said ‘it’d blow up in your face,” he wrote in a text. He then called me “an insane person,” “a clown,” among other broadsides.
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Life in prison will suit him.
DOJ Accuses 15 Medical Schools Of Anti-White Bias
The Guardian reports:
The US Department of Justice’s civil rights division has launched investigations into 15 medical schools over allegations of potential race discrimination in their admissions processes. Thursday’s announcement follows the DoJ’s recent findings that the medical schools at the University of California, Los Angeles and Yale University illegally used race in their admissions.
“Many of America’s top medical schools appear more concerned about the demographics of their incoming classes than training students to succeed in the profession,” assistant attorney general Harmeet Dhillon of the DoJ’s civil rights division said on Thursday.
“Under this justice department, we will continue to protect American students from discriminatory and illegal preferences in admissions – especially in professions as critical as medicine, where quality of training should be the top priority,” Dhillon added.
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Pam Bondi's thug-mate.
There is no anti-white bias in this country! There hasn't been since the white race started slaughtering indigenous peoples as soon as they landed here.
“Commander-In-Sleep” Again Dozes Off On Camera
Mediaite reports:
Liberals had a field day on Thursday after President Donald Trump appeared to visibly nod off in front of reporters, tilting back in his chair with closed eyes in the Oval Office. Trump spoke to reporters during a lengthy Thursday press conference alongside EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and other cabinet members.
During multiple points throughout the conference, the president seemed to fall asleep, closing his eyes and leaning to the side while others were speaking. Democrats were quick to call out it out online. “The Commander-in-Sleep clocks in,” wrote the official Democrats.
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Sleeping on the job because he stays up all night to fuck around on the internet. Dumbass.
Senate GOP Kills Bill To Bar Spy Chief From Serving
The Hill reports:
Three Republican senators — Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.), Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) — voted for a Democratic amendment Thursday to bar William Pulte from serving as temporary director of national intelligence while he also serves as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).
The three GOP senators voted for an amendment to the budget reconciliation package sponsored by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
It would have prohibited any Senate-confirmed head of another federal agency or department from performing the role of director of national intelligence in an acting capacity. The amendment failed on a vote of 49-49. All three Republicans had questioned Pulte’s credentials to oversee the nation’s intelligence agencies.
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These deplorable criminals must be removed from our government if we are to have a future.
Hannity: Trump Is Right, Dems Are Stealing CA Election
“California, we’re being told, may not give us the final results of this election for a number of weeks. Now, President Trump rightly is calling out Democrats, saying they’re probably cheating, trying to steal.
“Why would you believe the people that don’t want proof of citizenship or voter ID, which should be no-brainer decisions for anybody that wants integrity in the process and confidence in the results?...
'Counting all votes that are postmarked by Election Day is stealing nothing. Dems don’t need help getting votes in CA." — Prost (comments)
"It's not a delay. This is how long it takes. You count 20 million ballots safely, securely, and accurately, see how long it takes you." — bovsklo (comments)
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You irrelevant muckraker! Only citizens can vote in our country. You know it, I know, the American people know it. Are you trying to incite a Civil War, you sniveling little rat-faced git?
Do you have any fucking clue that California is larger than some countries in our world? The state’s landmass is larger than 138 of the world’s 195 countries. Whining little Nazi! We certainly don't trust a jerk-water Trump traitor such as you! Who listens to this twisted little jerk?
WH Releases Film Against Church/State Separation
Peter Montgomery reports at Right Wing Watch:
The Trump administration has partnered with its religious-right allies to produce and promote a propaganda “documentary” that promotes Christian nationalist ideology and portrays the Biden administration and the left in general as enemies of faith and freedom. It puts a Trump-era spin on the religious right’s longstanding strategy of claiming anti-Christian persecution as a way to mobilize its political supporters.
The film, “By Dawn’s Early Light,” is essentially a video version of the deeply flawed report released at the end of April by the administration’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. That report distorted U.S. and constitutional history to promote a privileged role in policy and law for a narrow category of Christians, according to Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
The film features current and former members of Trump’s cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Attorney General Pam Bondi, right-wing members of Congress, and religious-right leaders and activists like Eric Metaxas.
It takes direct aim at the separation of church and state, which protects all Americans’ religious liberty. “People have come to believe in concepts that are foreign to our Constitution,” says the narrator, while video shows someone at a protest march holding a sign supporting church-state separation.
"'As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.'
Article 11, Treaty of Tripoli, 1796" — Rebecca Gardner (comments)
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Seditious criminals. Flush their manifesto from hell down the toilet!
Shut your proselytizing mouths!
Bill Pulte Was a “Degenerate” Buffoon. Now He’s Head of U.S. Intelligence. — Will Sommer
YEARS BEFORE PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP nominated him to be the acting director of national intelligence for the government of the United States of America, Bill Pulte was spending his time circling a gullible group of investors trading shares in a dead company.
The year was 2023 and Bed Bath & Beyond, after prolonged death throes, finally stumbled into bankruptcy in April; its stock (“BBBY”) was delisted from Nasdaq in early May. But a portion of the shareholders went on believing a resurrection was possible. Over the previous year, the retail chain had become a prominent “memestock”—the subject of intense speculation and rumor—and after the company shut down they refused to accept that their investments were worthless. Many of these diehards kept trading shares “over the counter” (as “BBBYQ”).
Pulte claimed in the summer of 2023 that he was “captivated” by the “incredible BBBY community.” And he went to extraordinary, often ridiculous lengths to promote it. On a livestream in September 2023, Pulte donned a jacket with astronaut patches, implying that the bankrupt company’s stock would somehow still go “to the moon.” At some events, Pulte would wear a bulletproof vest for fear that an unnamed cabal acting against the home-goods store might try to kill him....
On Tuesday, commenters in a subreddit devoted to tracking and mocking the antics of this world reacted in disbelief to Pulte’s appointment. How, they wondered, could this man keep failing upward?
“If I was American I’d be crying,” wrote one.
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He's in good company. He appears to be joining a coterie of buffoons.
Scott Bessent's combative hearing results in tense stare-down with steaming lawmaker — Nicole Charky-Chami
Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) had a stern response to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday during a congressional hearing after he attempted to dodge her question.
Bessent was testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee when Chu directly asked him if he had the same thoughts as President Donald Trump, after he recently told reporters in interviews about the impact of the Iran war on Americans' cost of living that he wasn't concerned. Trump said, "I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody."
"Do you agree with President Trump that you also do not care about Americans' financial situation?" Chu asked.
Bessent attempted to avoid the question altogether.
"Who was the president during World War I?" Bessent asked in response.
Chu sat silently for a moment, staring at him, and then responded.
"Can you — are you refusing to answer my question?" Chu said.
He repeated his question.
"Who was the president during World War I?" Bessent asked.
People started laughing in the room.
"I don't know but clearly, you are not answering my question," Chu said.
Bessent continued to ask the same question.
"I'm clearly getting the idea that you do not want to answer, whether you agree with President Trump, that you do not care about Americans' financial situations," Chu said.
"President Trump does care about financial situations," Bessent said.
Chu cut him off and said, "Well, he actually says that he doesn't."
CHU: Do you agree with President Trump that you also do not care about Americans' financial situation?
BESSENT: Who was the president during World War 1?
CHU: ... ... can you answer my question?...
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To what is he referring to when he is invoking Woodrow Wilson in context with current American's financial situations? WWI economy?
Is he comparing WWI to the current Iran War economy? So far, that's a no answer.
Democrats Opposed to Tlaib’s Resolution to Stop US Joining War on Lebanon — Shireen Akram-Boshar
Democrats are reportedly “not happy” that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) is pushing for a vote on a war powers resolution to limit U.S. support for Israel’s war on Lebanon, according to an Axios report on Wednesday.
The resolution, which is likely to face a vote on Thursday in the House, calls for President Donald Trump to end all U.S. participation in Israeli military operations in Lebanon, including removing U.S. forces and ending any intelligence sharing with Israel in Lebanon.
But according to lawmakers and aides, this resolution has engendered more opposition within the Democratic Party than Iran war powers resolutions.
“The United States is assisting this destruction [in Lebanon] through the weapons, intelligence, logistics, and diplomatic cover it provides the Israeli government,” Tlaib’s office explained in a press release.
Tlaib wrote on X on Monday that, “Our country should not be assisting or supporting indiscriminate bombings and forced displacement anywhere, including Lebanon.”
According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Israel’s war on Lebanon is “quickly turning southern Lebanon into the ‘next Gaza.’” Israel has killed over 3,400 people and displaced over 1.2 million in Lebanon since its latest war on the country began in March. But Israel has been engaged in a lower-scale but longer-term war on the south of the country since 2024....
In a statement to Axios, Tlaib said: “Poll after poll shows that the American people do not support our government sending a blank check and unlimited military assistance to the Israeli government as it massacres thousands of innocent civilians and demolishes entire cities and communities.”
“Members of Congress should listen to them,” particularly as Israel’s campaign in Lebanon “threatens to prolong the disastrous war with Iran,” she said.
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The Democrats can be spinless cowards. Why do they want to support yet another genocidal maniac? Do they not see that Israel has been taken over by one just as their own country has been?
The Middle East is not being molded into the form that both Bibi and Trump think they are shaping it.
Trump Says UFC Bouncy House Could Be Permanent, Like Eiffel Tower! — Evan Hurst
It’s impossible to give every visual atrocity Donald Trump has imposed on this nation against its will the time it really deserves. The senile old man thinks he was once one of the world’s great developers and businessmen, perhaps the most evil lie people who allegedly love him allow him to believe. It sets him up for embarrassment after humiliation after embarrassment.
He thinks the cheap Home Depot faux-gold plating and dementia labels he’s put all over the walls inside the White House are pretty.
He seems to truly believe the malodorous lie that, whatever else he is trying to build in place of the former East Wing — bunker for scaredy presidents who don’t want to leave? Epstein Files Library so he can go focus on his good memories when he’s having a full dementia day or is just sad? — for him to design a gaudy, trashy ballroom on top would be a gift to the country, nay, to the world.
Same with his ugly, trashy dictator arch. The wrecking balls it’s going to take to start demolishing all of this starting on the first day of the next administration, it’s going to be the best money your tax dollars ever spent. (And yes, next president, it needs to happen that fast. He needs to be forced to watch every monument he’s built to himself crumble. He needs to experience that rejection and pain. It’s the only way for America to heal.)
Trump is obsessed with the idea that if you were somehow able to stand up his Reflecting Pool, it would be taller than many skyscrapers! He is also obsessed with the fact that the word “reflecting” is in its name.
That was yesterday. “Our Pool Is Bigger than Skyscrapers.” You can imagine a young, needy Trump whose father doesn’t hug him telling all the kids at school about it, and the other kids being like “Why does this ugly weirdo think that’s a good size comparison to make?”
Kids: they have Trump Derangement Syndrome.
And also yesterday, perhaps the trashiest thing of them all, Trump said in a TikTok video that maybe the temporary bouncy house-lookin’ ass thing he’s erected on the White House lawn for the June 14 “Freedom 250”/Trump’s Birthday White House UFC Cage Fight — this is hell, we live in hell — might just be left there permanently. Because that is what level of degradation his brain has reached....
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Trump is TDS!
Polymarket Fires Santos After Insider Trading Report
The Associated Press reports:
The online prediction platform Polymarket is ending its paid relationship with George Santos as federal regulators investigate whether the former congressman illegally bet against his own attendance at President Donald Trump’s State of the Union.
Santos placed the bets on another prediction marketplace, Kalshi, after publicly announcing his intention to be at the Feb. 24 speech, according to a person familiar with the investigation. He later blamed a delayed flight for missing the event.
The suspicious trades were detected by Kalshi and referred to the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, a federal regulator that has opened a probe into Santos for possible insider trading. By the time of the State of the Union address he was already working in an influencer capacity for Polymarket, using his substantial online platform to promote the controversial brand.
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The con that keeps on conning!
GOP Rep: It’s Good That The New Spy Chief Has No Experience Since Experienced Ones Went After Trump
“Let me put a little bit of historic context here. The argument is that he doesn’t have national security experience. Well, take a look at some of the people that did have national security experience.
“People like John Brennan and James Clapper. James Clapper was the DNI under Obama. He helped orchestrate the Russia collusion hoax against President Trump. That’s what I see experience gets you.
“If that’s all you’re worried about, then maybe you should think about something else. This guy, whether anybody knows about him or not, at least he’s not guilty of trying to orchestrate a coup against a sitting president of the United States. So, I would say that bodes well for him.
“As far as the Democrats using this as an excuse to say no to 702. You’re saying no to national security because you’re butt hurt about the fact that you weren’t consulted about a nominee that the president has put forward in an acting capacity.
“So, get over yourselves for five minutes. Let’s worry about national security and get on to the next challenge.” – GOP Rep. Rick Crawford, today on Fox Business.
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i guess the Nazi liar forgot about this:
Russian Collusion.
And anyone with conciousness knows that Russian interfence has a long list of colluision with the criminal he is lying for. He's talking to his retarded flat-worlders
January 6, 2021: A coup attempt by Donald Trump's traitors on our Capitol. Get fucked, traitor!
FIFA: Fans Can’t Bring Water Bottles To World Cup
NBC News reports:
Fans heading to games at the World Cup will be banned from taking reusable water bottles into stadiums, a last-minute policy reversal that could add to concerns about heat at this summer’s tournament.
“FIFA made the decision to prohibit bottles to prevent risk and injury to players and attendees,” a spokesperson for the global soccer governing body told NBC News in a statement Thursday
“Outside bottles are already prohibited at several of these venues for safety considerations, and FIFA is applying this consideration across its tournament stadiums,” the statement said. The move comes as heat is expected to be a major issue during the tournament, which is being jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada.
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Fuck the World Cup. We will be so glad when this thing is over.
Trump Wants To Nominate Evil Minion Todd Blanche As Permanent AG — Susie Madrak
This should be an entertaining nomination hearing. Bread and circuses, people!
Tired of dreaming up new gold decorations, Trump said Wednesday he planned to formally nominate acting attorney general Todd Blanche for a full term as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, signaling confidence in his former personal defense lawyer’s leadership of a department over which the president has sought to exert unprecedented control i.e. corruption....
Some Republican senators have already expressed hesitation about supporting Blanche for the job, raising questions about recent comments in which they believed he appeared to excuse violence committed during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
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Trump's personal lawyer isn't this jerk's job. But that's what he is — a lap dog.
As dangerous as a pit viper!
Colorado Youth Pastor Convicted Of Child Sex Assault
The Denver Post reports:
An Adams County jury convicted a Thornton youth pastor of child sex assault on Friday, according to the 17th Judicial District Attorney’s Office. Josh Lucero, 29, was arrested in March 2025 after Thornton police said he assaulted “at least one child” while he was the youth pastor at World Alive Church, where he oversaw teenagers between 13 and 18.
According to a civil lawsuit filed in Adams County District Court, Lucero is the son of Word Alive’s lead pastors and started grooming the victim when she was 15 years old and he was in his 20s.
Lucero began assaulting her in 2018 and continued until 2021, all while he was a youth pastor, the lawsuit states. Attorneys for Word Alive denied the allegations in court filings, and the case was put on hold until the outcome of Lucero’s criminal trial.
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We'll get this done early today. Another one bites the dust!
Starnes: Deport MS Now’s Ali Velshi To “Hut In Kenya”
Newsmax host Todd Starnes writes:
MS NOW anchor Ali Velshi says he is conflicted about celebrating America’s 250th birthday. During a recent cable television segment, Mr. Velshi announced that he feels a “deep unease” about celebrating the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Here’s what you may not know about Mr. Velshi. He was born in Kenya and raised in Canada. In 2015, he swore an oath to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Maybe his Canadian school teachers failed to inform him that more than 640,000 Americans were killed during a war that led to the abolishment of the nation’s “original sin.” Or, perhaps he doesn’t think enough people died.
Honestly, I don’t care what Mr. Velshi or any other ungrateful immigrant thinks about the America 250 celebration. Lady Liberty pleaded with the world to send us people yearning to be free, not a bunch of whiny ingrates. On second thought, maybe we should just denaturalize and deport Mr. Velshi. I’m sure he’d be much happier hosting a cable television program from a hut in Kenya.
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Who the fuck is Todd Fucking Starnes? An overweight Nazi nitwit that had to take a gig with a failing "news" propaganda soap box.
Ingraham Calls For Feds To Take Over CA Elections
“Democrats in charge will always somehow find the votes they need. At this point, Congress needs to step in here, and they could do so under what’s called the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution. And it states that whereby the U.S. shall guarantee to every state of this union a Republican form of government.
“So, my question tonight is, is California’s allowing ballots to arrive seven days after an election really living up to that guarantee of a Republican form of government? I say no.
“The Angle proposes the following: both the House and Senate Judiciary committees should call every major election official in California to testify about their specific process for vote collecting, safeguarding, and counting.
“Testimonies should include how and why their officials ultimately settled on this vote counting regime, along with their refusal to require voter ID.
“So, to assist in this investigation, both chambers can appoint special masters, that’s what they’re called, to oversee the fact finding, and then they could assist in writing a report that they could then present to DOJ.
“Now, it’s important to note this, while courts usually find disputes under this clause nonjusticiable, in other words, they won’t hear the case because they think it’s a political question.
“At least the voters in California and across the country will have a fuller picture of the lengths to which Democrats will go to hold on to power. And maybe, just maybe then, they’ll demand change in what many of us believe is potentially the most corrupt voting system in the western world.” – Laura Ingraham, last night.
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The Nazi agenda. She should be taken over and thrown in a cell awaiting deportation back to hell.
She and her Nazi leaders are the ones attempting to overthrow elections. They are the ones asking for "11,780" votes. This woman is guilty of supporting treason and must be taken off broadcasting forever! Just like they do at CBS!
Miller Accuses Tlaib Of “Hanging Out” With Hezbollah
The Huffington Post reports:
A battle of words ensued on the House floor Wednesday during a debate about the Lebanon war powers resolution after Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) lobbed a misogynistic insult at his colleague, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.). Miller said Tlaib, who is Muslim, “likes to hang out with” the “butchers” in Hezbollah. When Tlaib interrupted him, Miller fired back: “Oh, I’m sorry, are we getting a little emotional?”
“You advocate for terrorism on a daily basis,” he continued as Tlaib yelled. “You advocate for a terrorist regime every single day.” “That is a direct attack on my character,” Tlaib said. “I, please, request … to strike the words down.” Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.), who was presiding over the hearing, ruled that Miller’s language was inappropriate and struck the comments from the record.
Read the full article. Miller was then banned from speaking on the House floor for the rest of the day. You will recall that he is currently suing his ex-wife for defamation after she accused him of physical abuse.
"Using his logic, that means this walking/talking turd of a xian likes to hang out with the pedophile rapist priests in the cath-o-lick church, yeah? So he advocates for the sexual and psychological abuse of little, innocent children who are held down and FUCKED in the mouth and ass by filthy old men?" — Phil da Bern (comments)
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Did I hear he had been hanging out with dogs in a local alley? Is he confused about that?
REPORT: Iran Now At Greater Risk Of Obtaining A Nuke
Bloomberg News reports:
The risk that Iran is covertly pursuing nuclear weapons is higher today than before the United States and Israel launched their first military attacks on the Islamic Republic a year ago, according to western officials who cited new data circulated by the United Nations atomic watchdog.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has warned member countries about new nuclear proliferation dangers posed by Iran’s large inventory of near-bomb-grade uranium, according to a restricted document seen by Bloomberg.
Before the June 2025 air assault that began a 12-day-war, that material was subject to weekly IAEA inspection to ensure it wasn’t diverted for weapons. That’s no longer the case.
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Trump has put the entire world at risk. He must go!
Ohio Lutheran Pastor Arrested On Child Sex Charges
Toledo’s CBS affiliate reports:
A Deshler, Ohio pastor was arrested Tuesday evening and charged with sexual battery of a minor, as well as grooming.
According to records at the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio (CCNO), Christopher Walter, 52, was booked at the jail at 6:32 p.m. Tuesday. He faces a charge of sexual battery, with the specification that the victim was a minor and the offender is a peace officer two or more years older than the victim.
Walter was also charged with misdemeanor grooming. Both charges were filed in Napoleon Municipal Court. Walter is listed as the pastor for Immanuel Lutheran Church in Deshler on social media posts. The church made a Facebook celebrating Walter’s birthday in 2025.
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Oops! Just as we thought we were getting out of this morning without one to report, another one bites the dust!
Trump is destroying 'essential' military protocols: ex-Army commander — Alex Henderson
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claim that they are bringing badly needed reforms to the U.S. military by stamping out "woke" policies, which, they say, made the armed forces less effective. But retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, in the conservative website The Bulwark, argues that Trump and Hegseth are undermining the military's time-tested meritocracy in a very "concerning" way.
"It should concern Americans if the military's most excellent officers are being sidelined in the name of fighting 'DEI,'" Hertling warns in a Bulwark article. "But it should also concern them that political leaders are beginning to substitute personal judgment for one of the most carefully designed and rigorously administered personnel systems in the federal government. At stake is trust in the military's promotion system, an institution that has helped produce America's senior military leaders for generations. Most Americans trust that those chosen to lead the nation's sons and daughters in peacetime and wartime have earned that responsibility through demonstrated competence, character, judgment, and performance. But few citizens — and frankly, even few who wear the uniform — understand how those selections are actually made."
Hertling adds, "That lack of understanding makes the recent interventions by Secretary Hegseth especially troubling, because they involve a process specifically designed to insulate professional military advance."
Hertling, who served as commander of U.S. Army Europe under former President Barack Obama and is often featured as a military analyst on MS NOW, notes that Hegseth "removed nine Navy officers from a promotion list after they had already been selected by a board of senior admirals" (according to the New York Times) and "blocked nine Air Force officers for promotion" (according to the Wall Street Journal).
Hertling emphasizes that in the U.S. military, "promotion boards are not informal discussions," but rather, are "extraordinarily structured." And Hegseth, the former U.S. Army Europe commander laments, has a fundamental misunderstanding of that rigorous process....
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All of our military critiques are coming from ex-commanders. What the hell is wrong with the ones that are active? Are they that cowardly or just more Nazis in disguise?
Trump privately panics as Iran deal is revealed to be worse than one he tore up — Sarah K. Burris
President Donald Trump is panicking, The Atlantic's Vivian Salama, Jonathan Lemire and Nancy Youssef wrote on Wednesday.
According to the report, talks between the U.S. and Iran are on hold while Trump tries to build up to a kind of war "grand finale."
Trump decided that he wanted to combine the Iran deal with the Abraham Accords, a set of agreements between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries to normalize relations.
Trump wanted "those countries that hadn’t yet joined the Abraham Accords [to] get on board." The various leaders gave him a "less than lukewarm response."
One U.S. official told the reporters that a leader spoke up, calling the idea interesting, but then there was silence. During the 90-minute call, there were several times that Trump asked, “Hello? Hello? Anyone there?”
The story explains why there have been so many reports of an agreement with Iran, only for nothing to come to light. Trump reportedly became "irritated" about those comparing his deal to the one established under former President Barack Obama. Trump's was being mocked as "weaker." He wanted to find a way to make his agreement better than Obama's.
There was also the matter of Iran's demand for sanctions relief. Trump has spent years claiming that Obama sent "pallets of cash" to Iran. Fact-checkers have made clear that none of the money was from the U.S. It was Iran's own money that was inaccessible due to sanctions.
The deal from last month would "usher in the first 60-day negotiating period," the report said. "Iran would relinquish its highly enriched uranium stockpile. Sanctions relief would arrive gradually. Commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz would reopen in phases."
Instead, all Trump could accomplish now is a ceasefire. As of Monday, Iran has walked away from the talks altogether....
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Trump retreats. Leaves the problem altogether. What a fool.
Treasury chief stumped when senator reads Trump’s own words back to him — Nick Hilden
While appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent struggled and failed to justify a recent assertion by his boss, President Donald Trump, leading to a tense back and forth.
The exchange began when Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked Bessent about Trump’s recent assertion that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation” when considering his conduct regarding the war with Iran. The president made this statement in mid-May — which he later defended as “perfect” — prompting outrage from Americans struggling with rising prices.
When asked about the comments on Wednesday, Bessent attempted to dodge, saying, “I believe his remarks were taken out of context.”
But Hassan would not be dissuaded so easily, saying, “Here's what he said. He said, quote, ‘I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody.’ So I'm asking you… Do you think about how the American people are paying more for gas, groceries, and utilities since the president clearly said he didn't? And you speak with the president regularly. Are you trying to tell him the truth about how much costs have increased for the American people?
“Well, senator,” Bessent argued, “I'm going to have to disagree with you on some of that, because I have groceries are going down. Since President Trump took office, food prices — or as many people like to call them, ‘groceries’ — food at home in the statistical data is up 2.5 percent.”
“When's the last time you were in a grocery store?” Hassan asked. “Because my husband and I were just in one, and look: the average Granite Stater has paid $3,000 more since Donald Trump took office for basic goods and services. Meanwhile, the country lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025. So do you tell the president this information or not?”
“Again, senator,” Bessent stammered, “The… except for inflation, which is, I believe, going to be a short-term blip, the economic data is very strong. The jobs data has been very strong. The manufacturing has been very strong.”
“No, actually that's incorrect,” asserted Hassan. “So let's move on, because what is very clear to me is that neither you nor the president nor this administration are willing to acknowledge how much more people are paying at the gas pump, at the grocery store, in utilities, for health care, for all aspects of American life.”...
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If he struggles so much with the softballs how in hell can he handle the real hardballs?
Markwayne The Plumber Ain’t Gotta Obey No F*ckin’ Court Orders, Y'all Hear? — Evan Hurst
It must be fun to be a white Republican man, where you always get to be a total pussy who never takes responsibility for anything, never has to be accountable for your actions, never has to act with honesty or integrity. There’s always an asterisk appended to every rule, a reason why it doesn’t apply to you, a justification for why you shouldn’t be required to have the same qualifications for jobs, and so forth.
Markwayne Mullin, the hayseed yokel plumber from Oklahoma with untreated anger and lying issues who currently serves as DHS secretary, testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee yesterday — his former colleagues — and he had one of those asterisk moments. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy was just trying to get the white male DEI hire on the record saying he would pledge to abide by court orders, since the Trump DHS has been so notorious for thumbing its nose at the law and the Constitution, especially when those things are getting in the way of their Nazi immigration enforcement practices.
And Secretary Pigfuck absolutely refused. But don’t worry, he ain’t gon’ break no chicken-pluckin’ Constitution, y’all, OK? He said at DHS they “will never break the Constitution, and we’re not going to break the law.”
BUT, ASTERISK COMETH:
“If we didn’t think courts were politicized, then I would probably be able to answer that,” Mullin said. “But we see courts over and over again that use their bench for their political opinion, not just the rule of law.”
What you think does not matter, pigfuck. You are not qualified to assess such things, and the fact that judges sometimes tell white supremacist MAGA trash no is not an indicator that they are “politicized.”
Yappy little hick....
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A very apt description of JohnWayne.
The DHS BOLO Controversy: Satire vs. Government Overreach — Bill Berkowitz
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has circulated a nationwide “Be on the Lookout” (BOLO) alert to law enforcement targeting Ben Palmer, a Nashville-based stand-up comedian and online satirist whose parody of U.S. immigration enforcement recently went viral. According to investigative reporting by the journalism non-profit Injustice Watch, the federal bulletin has sparked an escalating controversy involving free speech, government overreach, and the boundaries of political satire.
The Spoof and the Viral Fallout
Palmer, known online for his “Palmertrolls” persona, became a viral sensation after creating a parody anti-immigration website and hotline designed to mimic official U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) portals. Believing they were contacting federal authorities, individuals used the spoofed platforms to report neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances on highly spurious grounds.
Palmer recorded and edited deadpan follow-up calls with these tipsters, posting the selected recordings to TikTok and YouTube to highlight what he viewed as prejudice and paranoia surrounding immigration enforcement in American culture. The project garnered millions of views and mainstream media attention—including a profile in The Washington Post—after a widely shared clip featured a kindergarten teacher using the form to report the parents of one of her students.
Federal Escalation and Leak
The situation shifted from an online prank to a federal matter when the DHS Nashville field office issued a BOLO bulletin describing Palmer’s online activity and warning law enforcement agencies about the spoofed operation.
As The Guardian noted, “The Bolo was then shared by the Illinois state police to a distribution list of state and local law enforcement agencies.” The alert was ultimately obtained via public records requests by the Chicago-based Injustice Watch. Because the non-profit was specifically investigating matters in Illinois, it remains unclear how many other law enforcement departments across the country distributed the federal alert....
The Palmer case arrives at a moment of intense scrutiny regarding political comedy, directly following CBS’s highly controversial decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—a move President Donald Trump publicly celebrated after long railing against late-night satirists like Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel.
The Ben Palmer case is a prime example of Trump-era attempts to chill speech and intimidate creators.
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Nazis have no sense of humor. One of the many reasons they are deplorable bastards. Just look at the Caustic Blackshirt Syndicate.
Why America is Falling Apart — Thom Hartmann
Because billionaires strangled democracy, plundered the economy, and told us it was “freedom”.
America seems to be failing, both at home and around the world. But why?
David French published a thoughtful op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times titled The Fire of Stupidity Can’t Be Contained, identifying many of the symptoms of our national decline and wondering out loud why this is happening now.
His best guess is that we’re not remembering the horrors of both fascism and communism from the last century, which is why people — particularly young people — are embracing both. He notes:
“A disturbing number of young people on the right are fascinated with fascism. An extraordinary 34 percent of young people overall express a favorable view of communism, and young Americans are far more likely than their parents or grandparents to say that political violence is ‘sometimes OK.’”
Katy Tur opened an hour of her MSNOW show with French’s article; she similarly was wondering what happened that has so torn our country apart. Could it be that we’re just not as well educated about our history as we once were? Is it the economy? Demagogues like Trump in politics?
Millions of words have been rightly devoted to this sort of inquiry, but most miss the most obvious answer: it’s the billionaires, stupid. Follow along and I think you’ll get it.
When FDR took over America in March of 1933, we’d been a largely laissez faire nation since our founding. There wasn’t much government help for anybody other than the rich and powerful.
Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression.
In 1933 a third of America was unemployed, hunger and homelessness were rampant, and only about 20 percent of us were in the middle class; the country had never gone above a third of us in that class. So, FDR, his wife Eleanor, and Labor Secretary Francis Perkins set out to reinvent America. They legalized unions, restored the 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich, made government the employer of last resort, and instituted the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, built schools and infrastructure nationwide, etc.
The result was dramatic. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, fully a third of us had good union jobs and they set the wage floor for another third of us; as a result, two-thirds of us were in the middle class, and could do it with a single paycheck. A single-family home, a car, an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and retire on a good pension.
But from 1933 forward FDR’s New Deal had been under continuous attack by a handful of extremely wealthy oligarchs who resented capping their paychecks to avoid that top 91% tax rate and hated the regulations that made both consumer products and the workplace safer but cut into their profits....
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“It’s the billionaires, stupid.”
And we DO mean stupid!
Who Murdered "60 Minutes"? — Robert Reich
Hint: It wasn't its renowned correspondents or former executive producer. And it certainly wasn't the viewing public.
Friends,
Famed “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley was fired tonight. “We have parted ways with Scott Pelley,” Nick Bilton, the tech journalist who CBS News’s editor-in-chief Bari Weiss hired last week as the show’s new executive producer, wrote in a memo to the staff this evening.
What had Pelley done to get the axe? At a staff meeting yesterday, he accused Weiss of “murdering” “60 Minutes,” according to an audio recording and a source who was in the room. Others at the meeting applauded him. (Earlier today I gave Pelley this week’s Joseph N. Welch Award for truth-telling in the face of tyranny.)
It was all part of Weiss’s shakeup of the revered broadcast.
Why, you may wonder, is Weiss so eager to shake up “60 Minutes”?
I mean, it’s the most successful television news broadcast in U.S. history. It has remained the #1 news program for 50 straight years and consistently ranks among the top 10 of all Nielsen-rated television programs.
And it pulls in a fortune for CBS. “60 Minutes” is one of the most profitable programs in all of television, generating tens of millions in annual profit for CBS. In one recent year, its advertising revenues were $67.5 million. The network wholly owns the franchise, which makes it a gold mine. It’s the most lucrative and prestigious journalism operation on the network.
I could understand Weiss wanting to shake up, say, CBS’s Sunday morning news program. But why in hell would Weiss want to shake up CBS’s golden goose?
One hint: Besides firing Pelley for insubordination and chucking the show’s former executive producer, Weiss has also cut ties with “60 Minutes” producers Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega....
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Her treasonus plot thickens.
Trump's 'warrior queen' prosecutor weaponizing her office for personal purposes: sources — Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump's top federal prosecutor in Nevada has repeatedly bypassed Justice Department ethics rules, launched investigations to benefit personal associates, and targeted a political rival, according to three sources with direct knowledge of her conduct.
Sigal Chattah, who has led the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nevada for 14 months, is alleged to have intervened in active cases on behalf of friends and former clients, sought status updates on matters from which she had been formally recused, and pushed the FBI to open investigations based on tips from personal acquaintances, reported Bloomberg.
“It’s charitable to call it chaos,” said Rick Pocker, who served as Nevada U.S. attorney under President George H. W. Bush. “I don’t think she quite understands how you’re not supposed to use that office for personal or political purposes.”
Many of those requests were rebuffed by senior FBI and Justice Department officials — but those officials have since departed, raising concerns that Chattah will face fewer checks on her behavior going forward.
“It represents the worst of a small-town politician or mayor,” said Michael Green, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor. “It has to be difficult for people in her office who argue these cases — even if they share her views. If I’m on the other side, I think, ‘Yeah, you’re hurting yourself. Go for it.’”...
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Another Trump toadie takes her fascist agenda to work.
Candace Owens caught secretly joining Russian forum tied to spy recruitment — Jordan Green, Investigative Reporter
Conservative podcaster Candace Owens is scheduled to appear at a panel alongside Russian media figures and politicians under U.S. and European Union sanctions for supporting Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine at a major event in St. Petersburg on Thursday.
The right-wing conspiracy theorist, who has seen her popularity rise as she’s openly feuded with other conservative luminaries such as Erika Kirk and Laura Loomer, has lavished praise on Russia in X posts over the past week for its “Christian heritage and expression” and “family-friendly” amenities.
Owens is scheduled to appear on a panel at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum entitled, “A Big Family, A Big Reach: New Demographics and Narratives for Media Leaders.”
The appearance puts her on the same stage as Alexander Zharov, who was directly appointed by President Vladimir Putin to lead the Russian state’s mass media arm and is currently under U.S. sanctions as an official of the Russian government, and Anna Kuznetsova, a deputy chair of the Duma, a house of the Russian parliament, who is also on the State Department’s sanctions list.
“By speaking at this forum, she’s actively aligning herself with an event that exists to push the interests of the Russian state,” said Hannah Gais, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center who monitors Russia and the far right....
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Yet another traitor in our midst?
Following his firing, Scott Pelley alleges CBS ordered him to air false claims — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
Minutes, issued a detailed statement Tuesday outlining his allegations.
Pelley wrote, "New management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story," adding, "I've been told to include assertions that are unverified."
"To date, in every case, I have managed to ignore these instructions or refuse them."
He denounced the network for allegedly allowing politicians to select which correspondents conduct their interviews, calling the practice incompatible with journalistic standards.
Pelley, who worked for 37 years at CBS, alleged the network's new owner was dismantling the acclaimed program "apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration."
He also revealed mismanagement nearly prevented an episode from airing, coming within 19 minutes of cancellation. Despite these claims, 60 Minutes posted a 9% viewer increase in its 58th season finale.
Pelley wrote, "The collapse of values at the top has become untenable," adding, "The principles I hold dear are gone, and so I must leave as well."
He signed off, praying for the return of sanity, competence, and courage....
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Doesn't all sane America? CBS is now in the hands of Trump Nazis.
'It's not funny, Secretary!' Congressman shouts down Rubio over Trump's new spy chief pick — David Edwards
A House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the State Department's FY 2027 budget turned into a shouting match Wednesday when Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA) unloaded on Secretary of State Marco Rubio over a string of Trump administration national security appointments — and refused to let Rubio laugh it off.
Keating opened by putting Rubio on the spot, asking whether — in all his years vice-chairing the Senate Intelligence Committee — he had ever heard of Bill Pulte, President Donald Trump's newly named acting director of national intelligence.
"Never heard his name," Rubio said.
"Given all your years of experience and your position now — never heard the name!" Keating shot back. He argued that Pulte, whose widely reported misuse of confidential information Keating said had led to the prosecution of the president's political enemies, had no intelligence experience — and was now in charge of the nation's most closely guarded secrets.
Keating then turned to Elias Irizarry, a convicted January 6 rioter who Keating said entered the Capitol through a broken window wielding a metal rod, and who was subsequently hired by the Trump administration for a sensitive Pentagon counterterrorism post.
"That's ironic given that he participated in one of the most significant incidents of domestic terror in our country's history!" Keating thundered.
When Rubio attempted to interject — appearing to suppress a smile — Keating erupted.
"It's not funny, Secretary! It's not funny!"
Rubio fired back: "You can't even answer your questions here."
"He is interrupting me!" Keating told the chair.
Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-FL) declined to intervene. "Do something about it," Mast told Keating flatly — then refused Keating's request to reclaim the lost time.
"That's not how a chairman should act!" Keating said as his time expired.
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Fully illustrating we have a mob in charge of Trump's Crime Syndicate.
Texas State Takeover of Local School Districts Expands, Raising Concerns — Josephine Lee
No state has taken over as many local public school districts as Texas. Just since 2020, the Texas Education Agency has installed its own hand-picked leaders in eight districts. Four of those came this spring. At least another 10 are at risk of takeover, including, as of last week, the Austin Independent School District.
And to lead some of these districts, Texas is turning to a cadre of officials with ties to Mike Miles, the man the education agency chose in 2023 to oversee the Houston school district, the state’s largest. Miles is also a close ally of Mike Morath, Texas’ powerful education commissioner....
Parent organizer Zach Leonard said a new instructional model Fort Worth ISD is rolling out in 19 schools, called “Elevate,” is essentially the same as what Miles has done in Houston, an assertion district spokesperson Tierney Tinnin refuted.
Leonard, along with other parents with his organization, notes the similarities between the programs: “scripted slide-by-slide lessons, rigid timed instruction, and ‘demonstrations of learning’ reduced to data points.”
“This isn’t education reform,” Leonard said, referring to Miles’ model of learning being transported to Fort Worth. “It’s a franchise being handed to our children without a vote.”
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Fascist state government at work, getting their Nazi agenda into pubic schools.
Bari Weiss Addresses CBS Staff After Firing of Scott Pelley: ‘The Path He Chose’ — Zachary Leeman
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss reportedly addressed the firing of longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley during a Wednesday morning call, saying it was the “path he chose.”
Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes on Tuesday just hours after a heated meeting, where the correspondent aired his grievances with the network’s new leadership (Weiss took over in October of last year).
Pelley blasted Weiss and new 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton during the meeting, and reportedly “pointed out” that Bilton has “no relevant experience to helm television’s most prestigious news program.”
The Guardian’s Jeremy Barr first reported on a Wednesday morning staff call in which Weiss addressed Pelley’s firing.
“We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose,” Weiss said.
NEW: Bari Weiss just addressed the termination of Scott Pelley on the network's morning call just now.
Weiss: "I know I speak for myself, and I hope I speak for everyone here when I say that I'm only interested in working in a newsroom that is built on trust and mutual respect.…...
Pelley has remained defiant since the firing, claiming Weiss had no answers for recent firings. He also claimed in a statement that he was asked to “inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story.”
“I depart after 37 years at CBS with one emotion — a heart brimming with gratitude for the men and women of CBS News who encouraged and enriched my work, very often at the risk of their own lives. I pray for a day when those people and their ideals are honored again—a day when sanity, competence, and courage return,” he wrote.....
"The whole point was to destroy 60 Minutes.
Donald Trump has always hated 60 Minutes.
Mission accomplished." — The Confederates were traitors (comments)
"I don't think she is bright enough to understand how she's being used." — rickybobbybojesus (comments)
"Putin utilizes the RT network to promote propaganda, Trump now has CBS that is obviously willing to do the same and promote lies for the Trump Regime. It’s time to hold the corporate sponsors of CBS accountable, by boycotting their products and services." — America Has a Death Wish (comments)
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Then why is she whining "It's not my fault" when she owns it? Such a huge failure in her evil endeavor to join the human race. Just another fascist ass.
Trump Suggests WH Arena Will Be Permanent [VIDEO]
“Many don’t know that in Paris, France, the Eiffel Tower—1889 it was built. It was supposed to be taken down immediately after the World’s Fair. And then they said, we sort of like it, let’s leave it up a little bit longer. And then they said let’s leave it up longer and longer and longer. Well, they never took it down. And you know we’re building something in front of the White House that’s quite attractive to a lot of people. It’s gonna have the big UFC fight on June 14th, and I’m looking at it, and maybe we’ll never, ever take it down.” – Trump, in a video posted to TikTok.
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Neither he nor his pig pen are permanent. HIs cognitive abilities are diminishing with each passing day.
Trump admin breaks Navy protocol to promote inexperienced personal assistant — Thomas Kika
The Trump administration has broken with military protocol, according to a new report from the New York Times, pushing through a promotion for an officer previously exempted due to a "lack of command experience," all amidst a purge of women and minority officers from major roles.
In a report released this week, the Times revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had blocked nine Navy officers from being promoted, after they had already been approved by a board of senior officials. As the outlet noted, this move "disproportionately targets women and minority officers," matching a longstanding trend under Hegseth's leadership of firing or demoting officers who are not white men, or who do not fall in line with Trump's MAGA agenda.
"The net result of Mr. Hegseth’s intervention is a slate of 22 nominees to be one-star admirals that bears little resemblance to the broader force these officers will help lead," the Times explained. "Three of the officers removed by Mr. Hegseth from the promotion list are women and two are Black men. An additional four are white men."
The report noted further that Hegseth's actions in blocking these promotions appeared to run afoul of established military rules surrounding promotions, citing conversations with anonymous sources with close knowledge of the system.
"Mr. Hegseth’s actions, which appear to violate the rules governing a promotion system that is supposed to be apolitical and merit-based, were described by five current and former defense officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters," the report continued. "No female officers were included on the new one-star list, which was released publicly in late May, despite the fact that women make up about 21 percent of the active-duty Navy. The list appears to include only two nonwhite officers, even though sailors who identify as racial minorities make up about 38 percent of the active-duty Navy."
The officers targeted by Hegseth appear to have been "targeted because they took part in some diversity-related event years or even decades earlier," fitting the administration's all-out war against "diversity, equity and inclusion" initiatives at all levels....
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Failure and disgrace. Drum these creeps out our government!
Trump has not held a public event in a week as questions swirl about his health — Sarah K. Burris
Aside from being spotted playing golf and taping an interview with a friendly reporter, President Donald Trump hasn't held a public event in a week.
CBS News reporter Ed O'Keefe made the observation on X Wednesday, saying that the White House announced that Trump would "maintain a closed schedule today."
"Besides weekend glimpses of him playing golf, and a taped TV interview with his daughter-in-law that aired Saturday, he has not held a public event in a week," O'Keefe observed.
The move comes a week after Trump's physical and 11 days before his 80th birthday.
"The seemingly omnipresent president is in reality rather hidden away as his second term unfolds," remarked AFP desk chief Seastion Smith.
The Democratic Party's rapid response staffer, Kendall Witmer, thinks Trump "can't face Americans. Won't face Americans."
Others asked if perhaps he was ill or had a stroke, but one criticized O'Keefe for being a purported journalist and not wanting to get to the bottom of what could be going on.
Former cable TV host Holland Coke asked, "Is Trump bed-ridden?...
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This is why they are making contingency plans to replace him.
Film Community Aghast as Martin Scorsese Extolls AI Startup, Says He Now Uses AI for Storyboards — Frank Landymore
The film community is in meltdown after acclaimed director Martin Scorsese promoted a new AI startup called Black Forest Labs, saying that he’s already using its tech to help plan his movies.
Scorsese revealed this collaboration in a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday, which was accompanied by the release of a new promotional video from Black Forest Labs depicting the 83-year-old film legend using its AI image generation tool for storyboarding, the process of visualizing scenes using illustrations in preparation for filming. According to the reporting, Scorsese signed on as a partner and an adviser to the venture last year.
Such shilling by a venerated artist for AI was, in the eyes of many filmgoers, the opposite of “Absolute Cinema.”
“Cannot stress enough how disappointing it is that Martin Scorsese is collaborating with an AI company and putting a stain on his name so late in his life and career,” wrote one cineaste.
“Putting storyboard artists out of work is bad and that should not be a controversial opinion,” another fumed.
For film journalist Richard Newby, the reaction was visceral. “I feel like I’m going to throw up,” he tweeted....
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One more betrayal to humanity.
'Debases the Democratic process': Sotomayor pens scathing dissent in court's latest ruling — Jake Johnson and Common Dreams
The US Supreme Court late Tuesday gave Alabama a green light to use an aggressively gerrymandered congressional map that a lower court said was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.”
The unsigned decision, from which the high court’s three liberal justices dissented, enables Alabama’s Republican-dominated government to replace its current congressional map, which has two majority-Black districts, with a map that the US Supreme Court struck down in 2023. That map has just one majority-Black district.
In her dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the court today doubles down on chaos.”
“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” wrote Sotomayor. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”...
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These sediitionists are attempting to re-litigate the Civil War they lost.
'Radical crackdown' as Trump turns the Postal Service into a weapon — Terry Schwadron
Donald Trump is wasting no time on legal niceties in pushing for quashing of mail ballots for the November election.
Last Friday, one day after a federal judge declined temporarily to block the provision in Trump's election-related executive order, the U.S. Postal Service essentially announced that it would only deliver mail ballot applications to voters that the federal government recognizes, stopping the delivery of applications to tens of millions or more.
What the Postal Service rules made public last Friday was that it would strictly follow new mail-in ballot rules that require states to submit voter names, addresses and unique ballot barcodes for federal elections. The order also sets forth mandatory "best practices" for federal elections including Election Mail logos, tracking barcodes and design reviews.
No Democratic-run state as well as some Republican-run states has agreed to provide these names and private information to the government, arguing instead that this order is unconstitutional.
Whatever the wording, two things are true: Trump is seeking to stomp out mail-in voting with a federal order telling the states how to run their elections, and despite that single judge's decision not to put a stop to the order right now, the legal issues here are still very much in question.
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Criminals don't give a fuck about legalities! This whiney crank who can't accept losing is attempting to rig another election in his favor breaking every law known to man! Life in prison is too good for him!
'I Know Joe DiGenova Personally. He's Going After Obama.' — Cliff Schecter
From his sources in Florida politics, Lev reports a grand jury in front of Judge Aileen Cannon, with Joe diGenova installed as special counsel, is prepping indictments v James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Barack Obama. Yes, you read that right...
Lev Parnas joins Amped Up w/ Cliff Schecter on Blue Amp Media with two pieces of Breaking News:
1) He's made a HUGE decision in his run in Florida’s 27th Congressional District. Lev discusses the specific moment in a MAGA-red community led to this decision, and how he thinks it will help Democrats...
2) Far bigger: from his sources in Florida politics, Lev reports a Fort Pierce grand jury in front of Judge Aileen Cannon, with Joe diGenova installed as special counsel, is prepping indictments vs. James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper and Barack Obama over the Russia investigation. Yes, you read that right. Trump's big play to get revenge, muddy the waters of all his criming and try to win some of the base he lost with tariffs, Epstein, Iran, massive debt and corruption that have destroyed small businesses, farms, cattle ranches, etc....
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Trump's Crime Syndicate just keeps pulling their rig at every turn. Time to wipe out every stinking one!
Ted Cruz Declares Iran War Totally Fine For Republicans — John Amato
What flavor of Kool-Aid did he drink?
In a bizarre interview, Sen. Ted Cruz told CNBC this morning that the conflict in Iran has not moved the poll numbers against Republicans, and there's a real prospect Republicans continue to hold the House and Senate after the midterm elections.
Sen. Ted Cruz gave a lengthy interview that was bombastic and unrealistic on Trump's handling of the Iran war, the phony reasons why Trump attacked Iran, and how Republicans will do in the 2026 midterms.
Finally, Andrew Ross Sorkin brought up gas prices, the economy, foreign policy, and how it will play out for Republicans in November....
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My guess is he gets the rat poison flavor.
Rep. Andy Ogles Blames Homophobic Post On Staffer
Newsweek reports:
Republican Representative Andy Ogles has apologized after a social media post was published to his X account saying that “homosexuality has no place in America.”
The post also wished his followers “Happy Nuclear Family Month” following a recent designation by Tennessee lawmakers, which has drawn criticism from LGBTQ+ advocates as June has historically been known as Pride month.
Ogles later deleted the post and responded to the backlash he faced, writing on X: “Earlier today while working on the farm, my phone began going crazy because of a post made by a member of my comms team.” He added: “The post was stupid, hurtful and a complete distraction from my America First focus. The employee has been reprimanded.”
Meanwhile, Republican Senator Ted Cruz said that “for all of recorded history homosexuals have been part of humanity,” adding that the “behavior of consenting adults is their business.”
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I see he's following the Trump style of blaming others for his mistakes.
Repulsive!
National Guard Surge Didn’t Deter Violent Crime In DC
Axios reports:
D.C.’s National Guard surge didn’t deter violent crime, a new report says, despite coming at a steep cost for taxpayers. Ahead of America’s 250th birthday events, President Trump plans to double the deployment — currently costing $1.5 million a day — to 5,000 troops.
The big picture: Researchers at the Niskanen Center found last August’s deployment led to a 24% decline in “opportunistic” property crimes.
Auto thefts, for example, dropped sharply; so did other property offenses. But violent crimes — including robberies — were already on a downward cycle pre-deployment, and the deployment didn’t measurably change anything.
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But wasn't it wonderful that the little boy got to play with his "Army men?"
MAGA fails to conquer arts and music — Amanda Marcotte
Trump’s losses at the Kennedy Center and Freedom 250 follow Turning Point USA’s Super Bowl humiliation
Even by Donald Trump‘s erratic standards, his latest meltdown is bad — and deeply concerning....
Being rejected over and over by musicians, artists and celebrities sent the president into a social media posting frenzy. He spent 14 hours posting over 60 times on his Truth Social platform on Saturday, mixing lengthy tirades with artificial intelligence-generated images of himself as a basketball star, a Roman soldier and George Washington’s NASCAR buddy. Trump raved that only he could turn the Kennedy Center into a “Great and Prestigious WINNER,” a sad lie considering how he ran off the performers that created its international reputation, including the Washington National Opera. He whined that the singers who pulled out of the state fair are “Third Rate” and promised he would simply headline the event, swearing he is greater than Elvis, even “without a guitar.” After widespread mockery, Trump himself got “the yips,” which he accused the artists of having, and insisted the organizers nix the event altogether, “just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center.”
It’s unclear if Trump’s followers bought this “you can’t fire me, because I quit act,” as most of the replies to his posts were people — or quite likely bots — who ignored his message, choosing instead to share memes about how they love Immigration and Customs Enforcement and hate Democrats. But the president’s childish screeches nonetheless captured a growing frustration among the larger MAGA movement....
When Trump was elected to a second term in 2024, his coalition genuinely thought his return to office meant it was their turn to be the nation’s cool kids. That expectation is turning out to be false....
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The caption that goes with this photo here is: "So, you can't even get me a gig at the local titty bar?"
Hegseth Does Another Sh*tty Thing To Black And Female Navy Officers — Conover Kennard
In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of two women and two Black Army officers, and now, he's at it again. Hegseth has intervened to deny promotions to nine Navy officers who a panel of senior admirals had already chosen, The New York Times reports. This decision falls hardest on women and minority officers.
The resulting list of 22 candidates for the one-star admiral rank looks very little like the diverse force they would be leading. Among those Hegseth removed were three women, two Black men, and four white men. According to five current and former defense officials who requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter, his actions appear to violate the rules of a promotion process designed to be free of political influence and based solely on merit.
Hegseth's repeated meddling is producing a military leadership that looks nothing like the people it commands. Women make up roughly a fifth of active-duty Navy officers, and minorities nearly two-fifths — yet together they hold fewer than one in five general and admiral positions across the entire U.S. military.
What makes this especially troubling is that Pentagon regulations only allow the secretary to block a promotion when there are legitimate concerns about a service member's ability to lead — not because of who they are. Hegseth appears to be ignoring that rule entirely....
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His little armed force grows weaker each time he fucks with it.
Looking forward to the day when we can do the same to him!
AI Billionaires Are Starting to Get Scared — Joe Wilkins
As it turns out, telling the world’s workers to prepare for a dystopia rife with poverty and alienation isn’t the smartest way to market your exciting new tech.
As data centers are shut down by angry mobs and AI surveillance cameras are ripped from their poles, the world’s tech billionaires and CEOs are waking up to the reality that the masses are, broadly speaking, not on board with their plan to automate the world with AI. It isn’t necessarily that working people want to stay shackled to the wage-based employment system, but that folks need those jobs to have any hope of eating, seeing a doctor, and sleeping with a roof over their heads.
Instead of the tone-deaf hype we once heard about AI’s potential, these rich and powerful figures are now moderating their messaging, calling for policy measures to help workers weather the AI storm — or perhaps head off a violent revolt led by the many who lost their jobs....
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Empathy this day and age? They may be waking up? Nah!
Oz Says “Treating Stupid Is Really Hard” After MAGA Outlet Asks For “Medical Advice For Sufferers Of TDS”
Oz presided over today’s White House press briefing as part of rotating Cabinet members stepping in for Karoline Kennedy, who is on maternity leave.
‘Reporter’ from LindellTV asks Dr. Oz a question in the White House briefing room:
“Do you have any medical advice for the Americans out there suffering from the serious ailment called Trump Derangement Syndrome?”
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Must be. His self-treatments show no visble sign of working! Quack, quack!
USDA’s Insect-Defense Office Is Infested With Bed Bugs
NOTUS reports:
A bed bug infestation at an Agriculture Department building is riling agency staff, reigniting frustrations over remote work policy and making at least some employees sick. The bugs were found in the building that houses the Animal and Plant Inspection Service, the agency responsible for containing and mitigating the spread of invasive pests in the U.S. The irony, one USDA employee said, “was lost on no one.â€
The George Washington Carver Center in Beltsville, Maryland, first notified employees of the situation in mid-May. The department opted to send employees home and allow them to telework for a few days to fumigate the building. When employees returned, however, they complained of noxious fumes and resulting sickness, and USDA once again authorized them to work remotely.
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The photo at the top is one they caught when they finally turned on the lights in the department. Pretty scary!
Paxtons Conveniently Cancel Public Divorce Trial
Dallas’s Fox affiliate reports:
The public divorce trial of Ken and Angela Paxton has been canceled, just weeks before it was set to begin, according to Collin County court records. Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton were set to being the divorce trial in late June. On Tuesday, court records showed that the trial was canceled per the judge.
Julian Johnson, an attorney for Ken Paxton, said in a statement that the couple has agreed to avoid a trial. Angela Paxton filed for divorce in July 2025 on “biblical grounds” and accused her husband of adultery. The divorce petition noted that the couple had stopped living together more than a year ago. The move to avoid a public divorce trial comes just one week after Ken Paxton won a runoff against incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn.
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Try as you may, some of your dirt you just can't hide!
Bill Pulte Lacks Intelligence Qualifications. He’s Perfect for the Job Trump Just Gave Him — Dan Friedman and Hannah Levintova
President Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday that Bill Pulte will serve as acting Director of National Intelligence—taking over the post from the embattled Tulsi Gabbard—makes a weird kind of sense.
Pulte, who currently serves as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no experience that prepares him to oversee the 18 intelligence agencies that the DNI is supposed to manage. But he has used his traditionally low-profile job overseeing the home mortgage industry to help launch dubious criminal probes relating to supposed mortgage fraud by Trump critics and foes. Working with Ed Martin, the former head of the Trump DOJ’s “weaponization” task force, Pulte spurred investigations of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, as well as an ill-fated indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James.
...Pulte may not know anything about overseeing the CIA, but he seems well equipped to carry on the mission of using the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to target Trump’s critics. That’s clearly the job the president has in mind.
Pulte’s experience at the FHFA, and in prior work, has raised serious questions about his own conduct. The Government Accountability Office—an investigative arm of Congress—is probing whether Pulte misused federal resources to launch politicized attacks. And even as he has pursued Trump critics for what in many cases appear to be paperwork mistakes, Pulte has substantial baggage of his own.
Pulte, a third-generation heir to real estate fortune, in 2023 gave $65,000 through a foundation he controlled to a supposed charity to support the poor, called One World Love. We found no indication a nonprofit with that name exits. Instead the funds appear to have gone to a Wyoming LLC tied to the Binnall Law Group—which represented Trump in various matters, including his effort to avoid paying damages after the January 6 attack. Pulte and Binnall have not responded to questions about the transaction.
“These facts raise serious concerns that Team Pulte Inc. may have illegally funneled cash out of a charity to support President Trump,” Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) wrote in a letter last month questioning Pulte about the transaction....
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One hand scratches the other one's back.
After the Trump DOJ Halted Police Reform, This City Stepped In. Then Officers Shot and Killed Katelyn Hall. — Topher Sanders
...The mayor said the local reform plan would allow city leaders to correct these problems and accomplish key goals, perhaps even faster than he outlined.
But police records obtained by ProPublica show just how entrenched the issues were. Two years after the DOJ revealed its initial findings, while the Greenberg administration was charting its path to reform in early 2025, officers were still engaging in the problematic policing practices called out by federal investigators, according to the records. Most notably, police officials were failing to thoroughly review officers’ use of force.
Today, one year into the city’s reform effort, community leaders and civil rights advocates say the results have been mixed.
For example, the city has expanded a pilot program to direct some mental health calls away from police and send them instead to mental health specialists. Yet a panel created to review the department’s mental health practices overall only met for the first time in March, almost a year after it was announced, and it isn’t scheduled to issue recommendations for another year....
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Failure is Trump.
Take This Data Center and Shove It — Gabrielle Gurley
In mid-April, a week before Virginia voters narrowly passed new congressional maps in response to Republican gerrymandering, groups of landowners and land preservationists in Northern Virginia quietly won a state appeals court battle against a deep-pocketed consortium of developers. They had sued the county over failing to follow state regulations about posting public notices involving a data center project.
Between the redistricting vote, Virginia’s legislative budget impasse over data center taxation, and state and federal lawmakers caterwauling from Washington to Richmond and back again, it’s not surprising that a suburban county court case didn’t really penetrate the dystopian news cycle.
applications and hearings are some of the most combative, tedious, yet vital happenings in cities and towns. They are also relentlessly ignored by most residents, who never read those public notices, much less know where to look for the clues about parcels of land being sold or new builds that affect their lives and property. Some real estate developers often count on this disinterest.
But something as simple as failing to adhere to regulations about posting a public notice can upend an entire project. That’s what happened in Prince William County, Virginia, a Washington suburb, when the Board of Supervisors, the county’s policymaking body, mishandled public announcements for what at the time would have been a huge campus, the equivalent of about 12 dozen Walmart superstores.
That was a surprising but welcome development for county residents, who have been incensed that more harms might be foisted on their communities. In just the past couple of years, support for data centers has plummeted in the state and beyond. Northern Virginia is the country’s largest data center market, and it’s become ground zero for an upsurge of defiance, especially against the next-generation infrastructure that supports artificial intelligence.
In an era of poisonous politics, Democrats, Republicans, and independents have found common cause over the value of tax breaks worth billions to Big Tech companies worth trillions. What residents see in exchange are higher electricity and water rates, a paltry number of new permanent jobs, and a host of unsavory environmental impacts, from the desecration of green spaces, erasures of wildlife habitats, and air and noise pollution. The public outcry has had a serious impact: Across America, at least 25 different data center projects were canceled last year, and half of all data centers expected to open in 2026 will be delayed or simply canceled, according to reporting from Bloomberg....
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AI is now being referred to as "sin." We can add that meaning to "data center" as well.
Eight data centers threaten to transform this small Texas county. Local officials say they have no power to stop them. — By Alejandra Martinez, Data analysis and graphics by Alex Ford and Apurva Mahajan, Visuals
At least 248 data centers are planned to be built in Texas. Of those, nearly half will be built in unincorporated areas, where county officials are limited in their ability to regulate development, according to a Texas Tribune analysis.
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America has become a Totalitarian nation now? The people are no longer the government? There is one and only one answer to this. We all know what it its.
'I'm saddened': MAGA lawmaker's 'insane comment' about Pride Month triggers reactions — Alexander Willis
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) kicked off Pride Month on Tuesday by insisting that “homosexuality has no place in America,” and instead voiced support for the non-existent “Nuclear Family Month” in an apparent jab to the LGBTQ community, a series of remarks that elicited sighs from onlookers.
“These posts get sadder and sadder every year,” wrote Andrew Wortman, a prominent political commentator and writer, in a social media post on X to his nearly 300,000 followers.
Ogles has developed a reputation for making provocative and controversial remarks, including his assertion that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” back in March, or that his child “still has nightmares” about former President Joe Biden. His latest remarks, that "homosexuality" had “no place” in the United States, appeared to exhaust several observers.
“Notable that Rep. Andy Ogles isn't even opposing gay marriage here. He's straight up saying ‘homosexuality has no place in America,’” noted MS NOW’s Matt Fuller in a social media post on X. “Seems like the GOP may be retracing its steps on this issue.”
Ogles’ remarks even caught the attention of a fellow supporter of President Donald Trump and ex-lawmaker, former Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who is openly gay....
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The perfectly retarded hater. Homosexuality has been around since humanity first took a breath. It will not go away any time soon.
2 million fewer kids have Medicaid since Trump took office — and it's about to get worse — Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
The number of young children without health insurance in the US rose sharply between 2022 and 2024 and is set to continue surging as the Trump administration implements work reporting requirements and other changes expected to kick millions—adults and kids—off Medicaid.
A report published Monday by the Center for Children and Families (CCF) at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy found that nearly 220,000 additional children under the age of six were uninsured in 2024, a 23% increase from 2022. During that period, the total share of young children without health insurance rose to 5.3%—the highest rate in almost a decade.
The new report argues the rising uninsured rate among young children is “at least in part” attributable to the unwinding of pandemic-era protections that allowed people to remain on Medicaid without undergoing routine eligibility checks. The analysis found that Texas, Florida, and Georgia accounted for more than half of the increase in young children without insurance between 2022 and 2024.
Elisabeth Wright Burak and Aubrianna Osorio, researchers at CCF, wrote that “these data provide a major warning sign for what’s to come, as states grapple with the onslaught of Medicaid cuts from [the 2025 Republican budget law] and new coverage restrictions.”
“One in 4 children in the US have at least one parent who was born abroad,” the researchers wrote. “For these children, the vast majority of whom are citizens, harsh anti-immigration policies and rhetoric are already leading to missed doctor appointments, on top of the ongoing fear, uncertainty, and overall stress that can compromise healthy development of young children. Fears of safety and separation have made more parents afraid to enroll their eligible, citizen children in programs like Medicaid and [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], exposing children and families to additional financial risk and food insecurity.”
“Many more parents of young children enrolled in Medicaid themselves will be at higher risk of losing coverage as work reporting requirements and added red tape come along in 2027,” they added. “We know as parents lose coverage, their children are also at grave risk of losing access to health care through the ‘unwelcome mat’ effect.”...
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Trump hates America. Anyone can see this.
Marco Rubio sweats when pressed on secret Trump admin memo: ‘They don’t want us to see’ — Alexander Willis
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was pressed Tuesday over the Trump administration’s refusal to grant lawmakers access to an official government memo on the U.S. war against Iran, one that Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) suspected may have “something in there you don’t want us to see.”
Rubio testified Tuesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his first appearance before the body since the war against Iran was launched in late February. Kaine, a member of the committee, asked Rubio why the Trump administration has, to date, refused to share with lawmakers the written opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) on the war against Iran, despite having done so for other recent conflicts.
“We can agree with it or not, but the administration presented a legal opinion from the [Justice Department on Operation Southern Spear] that we could review. Absolute Resolve, the effort against [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro, the administration presented a legal rationale that we could review,” Kaine said.
“Now, we could review both in classified, they've not been made public. We're 92 days into a war against Iran and the administration will not let Congress look at the OLC legal opinion justifying the war.”
Kaine pressed Rubio for answers given the $1.5 trillion defense spending request Congress is being asked to approve, a request that represents an approximate 40% increase of the previous year’s defense spending. He also argued that the Trump administration’s hesitancy to share the OLC opinion on the war against Iran gave lawmakers cause for concern.
“Mr. Secretary, you know what kind of thinking we do. If you showed us the legal rationale for two wars and you won't show us the legal rationale for the third... is there something in the rationale they don't want us to see?” Kaine said....
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A nest of crime.
Trump family IRS immunity quietly moves forward as 'slush fund' pronounced dead: report — David Edwards
The Trump administration is pressing ahead with a legal agreement that permanently shields President Donald Trump, his family members, and his businesses from any IRS probes predating the deal — even as the controversial $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" that emerged from the same settlement has been effectively killed off, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.
Under the deal, the IRS is "forever barred" from pursuing any claims related to Trump's tax filings that predated the settlement, according to Bloomberg. A person familiar with the matter told the outlet that the decision to shelve the fund does not affect the audit immunity provision.
The fund — created last month as part of a settlement of Trump's lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns — drew immediate bipartisan fire. Critics labeled it a taxpayer-funded "slush fund" that could enrich Jan. 6 defendants who received presidential pardons.
Two police officers who defended the Capitol during the riot sued to block the fund, calling it a vehicle "to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name." U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema temporarily halted the fund on May 29,barring the administration from transferring money or considering claims.
By Monday, an administration source told Axios bluntly: "It's dead for now."...
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Crime family continues to bilk us out of our rights to prosecute their asses.
Trump Caves On Terrorist Kid Toucher J6-er Slush Fund, Haha, Loser — Evan Hurst
Is there ANYTHING Donald Trump cannot lose this week? He’s completely lost his latest round of mediocre efforts to end the Iran war he started and then lost in its first weekend. He’s lost the Kennedy Center, which is fine, because he didn’t want his own performing arts center with his name on it that staged nothing but CATS anyway. Same for how he didn’t want anybody to play at the Hitler Hootenanny state fair he’s throwing for America’s/his birthday.
If this is the dictatorship the US must live under, it’s a pretty flaccid dictatorship, that is all we are saying.
Several days ago, a mean judge temporarily stopped Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund for paying off all his best terrorist, criminal, and pedophile friends and supporters, AKA the J6-ers and anybody else who claims the Justice Department was “weaponized” against them just because they were MAGA terrorists, criminals, and pedophiles. The Justice Department said it would abide by that ruling.
But now, according to sources, the White House is dropping it entirely. “It’s dead for now,” said a source to Axios. (For now, key words. “How dead it is is what’s being worked on,” said a regime thug to Politico.) Why is this happening? Because this is an incredibly weak president, and Republicans in Congress hate this slush fund even more than they love protecting pedophiles. That’s saying a lot!
Woe is Trump!
Woe is Todd Blanche, the yappy little pomeranian ball-washer Trump installed at the Department of Justice just to do little errands like this!
He will have to wash Trump's balls a different way now!
We’re sure he’ll manage....
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The biggest comedy show on TV these days is watching Toad Blanche attempting to normalize Trump's criminal actions.
BREAKING: Trump Taps Unqualified Hatchet Man As New Intel Chief | Morning Shots — Andrew Egger
Andrew Egger and Bill Kristol went live to react to Trump’s shocking decision to install housing official Bill Pulte as Acting Director of National Intelligence, despite having no intelligence background. They discuss what the appointment says about Trump’s priorities, growing concerns about the weaponization of government power, signs of Republican resistance on Capitol Hill, and whether Trump’s increasingly frustrated behavior signals deeper problems ahead for his presidency.
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Another shady addition to his Crime Syndicate
Trump Has Rewritten America’s 250th Birthday Around One Person: Himself — Thom Hartmann
The Founders fought a revolution against kings; Trump is turning their anniversary into a tribute to himself.
Donald Trump looked at America’s 250th birthday and neurotically concluded that he’s the main attraction.
A celebration intended to honor the founding of the United States is rapidly being repackaged as a celebration of Trump himself: his movement, his grievances, his white supremacy, his misogyny, and his power.
Every new announcement, from the MAGA rallies to the vanity projects to the carefully choreographed spectacles on the National Mall and White House lawn, reinforces the same message: this is no longer about America turning 250. It’s about Trump making sure America spends its 250th birthday talking about Trump and the power of white men.
And if that sounds familiar, it should. Washington has seen this kind of political pageantry before.
The misogynists, racists, and fascists are taking over Washington, D.C. this summer, and the parallel to the massive Klan rally of August 1925, staged under another Republican president who declined to denounce it is the script.
On that August day a hundred and one summers ago, somewhere between thirty- and forty-thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched down Pennsylvania Avenue twenty-two abreast and fourteen rows deep, ending at the base of the Washington Monument. President Calvin Coolidge refused to condemn them.
Their version of America was defined entirely by exclusion: not Black Americans, not Catholics, not Jews, not immigrants, not organized labor, not anyone outside their narrow tribal vision of who counted. That night they burned crosses in Arlington while the band played “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “America.”
A century later, the same Mall is being prepared for the same kind of show, and the artists scheduled to perform are figuring it out and getting out as fast as they can....
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Only the desperate and clueless would consider doing anything for the jerk.
Don’t Let Trump Hijack Our July 4th — William Kristol
The White House’s access reporters at Axios report that Donald Trump “lashed out” at Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli strikes in Lebanon yesterday, saying that Netanyahu is “fucking crazy,” would be “in prison if it weren’t for me,” and that “everybody hates Israel because of this.”
Not so, respond Netanyahu’s access reporters at Israel’s N12 News: “Trump did not make personal remarks about jail or claim Netanyahu is hated globally.”
And hawks in the American media are beside themselves over the whole thing: “THE LEAK IN AXIOS WAS A VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW AND PROVIDED SUPPORT TO THE IRANIAN REGIME AND ITS HEZBOLLAH PROXY,” conservative radio host Marc Levin fumed.
So negotiations to end the war seem to be going great, is the point. Happy Tuesday.
Not His Holiday
by William Kristol
I wrote last week that it’s increasingly and painfully obvious that Donald Trump’s attempted hijacking of our 250th birthday celebration has become a national embarrassment. But Trump’s celebration of the 250th anniversary will be his embarrassment. We need not allow it to be ours.
Embarrassment is an emotion unknown to Trump, and so he’s forging right ahead. Construction is proceeding apace in turning the White House South Lawn into a vulgar venue for Trump’s gladiatorial circus scheduled for June 14, his eightieth birthday. Active-duty military are being pressured to attend, in uniform, to act as props for the birthday boy whose painful bone spurs precluded his own military service.
Then, ten days later, on June 24, to make up for all the performing artists who’ve pulled out of his “Great American State Fair,” Trump plans to take over the National Mall for a speech. And God only knows how much Trump will go out of his way to make himself the center of the festivities on Independence Day itself.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to agitate, in honor of our 250th, for the issuance of a $250 bill with his face on it and for the construction of a 250-foot high imperial arch that only he wants that would loom over our national cemetery.
So here in Washington, D.C., Trump is trying to make America 250 all about Trump all of the time. As David Frum lamented,
a void has opened between the scheduled roster of events and the true purpose and meaning of the solemnity of July 4, 2026. This powerful date will go unmarked by any act of memory worthy of the nation. . . . Trump has made a pitiful shambles of what should have been a glorious moment.
It can all be a bit dispiriting. One’s natural reaction can be to look away from this year, and look beyond towards a brighter future. That was my reaction last week, that “we can reasonably hope that one day soon, after this unfortunate interlude, we will once again have elected leaders who will celebrate our national birthday in a way fitting and proper for this great nation.”
But we can do better than merely hope for a brighter future. We can refuse to allow Trump’s desecration of our 250th to be our desecration....
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The USA will have a great holiday without Trump sticking his dirty nose in it!
'Repent, Marco!' Rubio hit with screaming protests as he walks into Senate hearing — David Edwards
Secretary of State Marco Rubio walked into the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday morning to a chorus of protests — his first congressional testimony since the Trump administration launched the war in Iran three months ago.
As Rubio entered the hearing room, protesters erupted from their seats and screamed directly at him.
"Marco Rubio, stop killing Cubans!" one shouted. "Repent, repent Marco Rubio!" another cried, as Capitol Police moved in to drag them out.
Before the hearing even began, a separate group was arrested outside the briefing room. NewsNation's Joe Khalil reported the group was "very vocal," chanting "Rubio lies, people with AIDS die." The Associated Press also reported protesters chanting, "One child dies every 30 mins."
The disruptions set a combative tone for a hearing centered on the State Department's $36 billion budget request but expected to pivot quickly to the faltering ceasefire with Tehran. Tehran suspended talks Monday after Israel continued strikes on Lebanon.
Rubio's prepared remarks offered little conciliation. "The U.S. government is not a charity," he wrote. "We are not here to play social worker."...
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Who in hell would make the mistake of thinking a government that has taken away medical care from so many, food from so many children and adults, and causing unaffordable living conditions to its citizens could be a social worker, LITTLE MARCO!
Supreme Court Slams Door On Ex-Trump Aide Behind 2020 Voting Machine Plot — David Edwards
A former Trump White House aide who once brokered a plot to seize voting machines, went on a racist Telegram rant, and built a nonprofit around publishing Biden family dirt just struck out at the Supreme Court. On Monday, the justices declined without dissent to hear a petition from Garrett Ziegler — ending his bid to squeeze more protection out of California's anti-SLAPP statute.
The case traces back to a 2023 lawsuit alleging Ziegler had impersonated a Democratic fundraiser to extract information about Hunter Biden's laptop, then published his target's personal contact details — triggering a torrent of harassment. Ziegler responded with an anti-SLAPP motion — a legal tool designed to protect defendants from suits that target free speech activity. He lost most of it.
The dispute began with a 2022 phone call. The plaintiff picked up believing he was speaking with a Democratic operative. After the call, he received an image of a squid, the phrase "NOTHING IS BEYOND OUR REACH," and the words "Marco Polo."...
l
Ziegler brokered the now-infamous Dec. 18, 2020, Oval Office meeting between Trump and figures including Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, designed to convince the president to seize voting machines and overturn the election. After testifying before the January 6 committee in 2022, he erupted in a nearly 30-minute Telegram rant, calling the panel "a Bolshevistic, anti-white campaign" and attacking former colleagues Cassidy Hutchinson and Alyssa Farah Griffin. Raw Story noted he also reshares content from white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes.
At Hunter Biden's 2024 gun trial, his wife, Melissa Cohen-Biden, confronted Ziegler in a courthouse hallway, calling him a "Nazi piece of s---." Ziegler denied the accusation.
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Swimming in denial again.
MN GOP Unapologetically Hold Moment Of Silence For George Floyd's Murderer< — Karoli Kuns
In what can only be described as a slap in the face to George Floyd's family, the Minnesota Republicans held a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin.
If you're wondering what Minnesota Republicans could do to show their racist ass while pretending to give a damn about police, you've come to the right place. At their convention last weekend, they held a moment of silence for poor persecuted Derek Chauvin.
In an interview today on WCCO radio with Vineeta Sawkar, Minnesota Republican Party Chair Alex Plechash defended the decision to rub salt in the wound of George Floyd's family.
When asked by Sawkar about the moment of silence, Plechash defended it first by saying it was a "decision of the body," draping all the Republicans in that moment with that decision, the one to strut as racist haters who support racist murdering cops.
"There are a lot of people I think that believe that Derek Chauvin was improperly convicted and not treated well, and those people wanted to have a moment of silence and recognition because they felt that way," he elaborated.
There was NOTHING -- zero, zip, nada -- improper about Derek Chauvin's conviction. We all saw with our own eyes how he knelt on George Floyd's neck for NINE MINUTES AND TWENTY NINE SECONDS while Floyd said over and over that he COULD NOT BREATHE and still Chauvin knelt on his neck until finally his heart slowed and he died of suffocation.
We all saw it. Everyone. Even these punkass Republicans in Minnesota who think that cops like Chauvin should be justified in all the ways they are racist killers saw it.
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Simply put, disgruntled, sick rascism. The domestic enemy of the U.S.
Trump’s newest attack on US citizens runs into legal brick wall — Alex Henderson
Far-right MAGA Republicans have been calling not only for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, but also, for naturalized U.S. citizens to be stripped of their citizenship because of their political views. Some MAGA Republicans have called for prominent U.S. citizens like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (who was born in Uganda) and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar (who is originally from Somalia) to be denaturalized and deported. But according to National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Jaclyn Diaz, the Trump administration's push for mass denaturalization is proving to be much more difficult legally than the MAGA movement anticipated....
Diaz notes, "Robertson, of Case Western, said the government appears to be intentionally picking cases with criminal convictions because they are easier to win. Still, Robertson, who has studied U.S. denaturalization, worries about where the policy could lead, especially because civil denaturalization cases come with fewer protections than criminal proceedings do."
Robertson told NPR, "It's just a dangerous road to go down for denaturalization. I might not feel sorry for the heinous child abuser who loses their citizenship. I'm not going to lose sleep over that. But I am going to lose sleep over what it does to the system. Because once it becomes easy to take somebody's citizenship away — it becomes easy to take anybody's citizenship away."
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Deport Trump! Problem solved.
Trump Lies: California Doesn’t Allow In-Person Voting
CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale reports:
President Donald Trump has been lying for years about elections in California. He has done it again in the days prior to the state’s Tuesday primaries for governor and other offices. In a Fox News interview that aired Saturday, Trump falsely claimed of California, “Their elections are a fraud; their mail-in votes are a fraud.” There’s simply no basis for those vague assertions. Then, later in the interview, Trump said, “You know, they don’t have voting booths. Everything’s by mail.”
That’s not true, either — as CNN has pointed out when Trump has made such claims in the past. Though all active registered voters in California are sent a mail-in ballot, they have the option to ignore that ballot and vote in person instead. As he has on numerous previous occasions, Trump said in the Fox News interview, “No other country in the world is doing mail-in voting anymore because it’s a fraud.” Both parts of that claim are wrong. In fact, dozens of countries allow some or all voters to vote by mail.
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Trump is the biggest fraud our country has ever had to suffer.
Advisors Tell Putin That War Has Become Unaffordable
Bloomberg News reports:
Senior government officials have warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that spending on the war in Ukraine is on an unaffordable path, the most serious sign of internal division in Moscow since the full-scale invasion began.
Officials in Russia’s Finance Ministry and central bank have advised the Kremlin that the current level of projected defense expenditure risks the government’s budget deficit widening dangerously, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.
The officials, who have grown increasingly concerned about the state of Russia’s economy and state budget in recent months, have proposed new cuts to defense spending, the people said. It will be difficult to mend the country’s stretched public finances without finding further efficiencies, they have advised.
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Trump will soon learn this as well.
Bovino Hails Nazi General As An Inspirational Figure
Politico Europe reports:
European far-right activists who advocate the mass deportation of immigrants and their descendants are getting a boost from the Trump administration’s embrace of their key catchword: remigration.
Some 500 activists and influencers gathered south of Porto on Saturday to discuss the concept, once a fringe term only whispered in far-right circles. The United States’ former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and American white nationalist Jared Taylor were VIP guests at the tightly controlled event, which also included elected officials from Spain’s Vox and Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) parties.
In an interview with a far-right website ahead of the summit, Bovino — who didn’t wear his controversial coat — referenced Nazi Germany’s lead general Erwin Rommel as an inspirational figure and offered his help to end what he described as a “creeping horror,” echoing racist terms used by far-right extremists to describe migrants.
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The little Italian cowboy? Did someone see this as a surprise?
The Problem With Platner — Andrew Egger
Donald Trump wants to know: When are you people going to shut up with your “opinions” about the “quality” of his Iran deal and just let him cook?
“Don’t the Dumocrats, and various seemingly unpatriotic Republicans, understand that it is MUCH tougher for me to properly do my job and negotiate, when political hacks keep negatively ‘chirping,’ at levels never seen before, over and over again, that I should move faster, or move slower, or go to war, or not go to war, or whatever,” the president fumed on Truth Social shortly after 1 a.m. this morning. “Just sit back and relax, it will all work out in the end - It always does!” Happy Monday.
Is This Platner Scandal Different?
by Andrew Egger
Graham Platner, oysterman, veteran, and presumptive Democratic Senate nominee in Maine, has for months faced a steady drip of embarrassing stories about his personal life: from the Nazi-logo tattoo he got while a young meathead Marine to his post-service history of basically unhinged anonymous social-media posts.
Until recently, these stories didn’t seem to be landing with Maine voters, who had adopted a frame of Platner that accounted for those rougher edges. For them, Platner’s whole story was that he got older, wiser, and more politically engaged after struggling mightily with post-war disillusionment. The young dumb soldier simply wasn’t the same person as the one they now supported politically.
But now comes a Platner scandal that threatens to upset that accommodation. This weekend, multiple outlets reported on Platner’s recent turn as an extramarital sexter. When Platner launched his bid for Senate last year, his wife Amy Gertner, whom he married in 2023, told a top campaign aide about a possible skeleton in his closet: She had found explicit texts with a number of other women on his phone in early 2025.
Platner has pushed back on the story—attacking “gossip” from “establishment media outlets” and trying to spin the real villain as the ex-staffer who leaked it. But he hasn’t denied the texts. In fact, he and Gertner have both acknowledged them, saying they worked through the issue in marriage counseling.
That may be enough to survive politically. But I, for one, am not so sure. This story is different from the others: Platner running around on his wife while in his late 30s can’t be written off as a youthful idiocy he later grew out of. And the attempt to redirect the story is silly: Infidelity is bad, speaks poorly of your judgment and character, and is the sort of thing that has caused problems for politicians who get caught doing it from time immemorial. Susan Collins was born, it seems, under a lucky star....
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The problem is evil with no moral ore or compass.
'Dude, stop it!' Data analyst laughs at Trump's focus on 'greatly unpopular' priority — Travis Gettys
..."I'm just going to quote Michael Jordan here: 'Stop it, just stop it,'" Enten said. "The American people are saying to the president of the United States, you could see right here, kids laughing off there on the side. I mean, just look at this, naming government buildings after Trump, acceptable right now as he is president of the United States of America. Just 9 percent, just 9 percent. Literally, you can put it on your two hands. When you can put something on your two hands, you know, it's a very small section of the public. My little footnote on here includes just 17 percent of Republicans, 50 percent say not acceptable at all – the clear plurality here, and then you get this additional 21 percent who say, you know, it's okay to put President Trump's name on government buildings, but only after he leaves office."...
"Americans who believe it's okay right now to name government buildings for Trump, just 9 percent," he said. "To put that into some perspective, 10 percent of Americans believe that the earth is flat, and 12 percent of Americans think that the moon landing was faked, which of course it was not, and of course, the earth is actually round. So fewer Americans think it's acceptable right now to put President Trump's name on government buildings than believe two conspiracy theories, either the earth is flat or the moon landing was fake, and when you're lower than that, you know that you're doing something quite, quite unpopular."...
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It is never OK to put a criminal's name on a government building. Get a grip on morality!
Trump is fast-tracking AI data centers as EPA ignores their potential 'forever chemicals' — Shannon Heckt, Louisiana Illuminator
Data centers require a massive amount of water to cool their systems, which heat up as they process digital information through numerous computers and network servers. Systems that aren’t “closed loop” have to cycle out water that doesn’t evaporate.
Most data centers in Virginia are permitted to discharge water into municipal wastewater systems, the same place household water goes to be treated and recycled for consumption. But there’s limited data tracking of potential chemicals in data centers’ discharge water.
At least one data center is permitted to discharge directly into a natural water source in the state: Northeast Creek in Louisa County. Another is applying for a similar permit to discharge into nearby Sedges Creek which feeds into Lake Anna.
That water is pretreated before being released into the creek and has limits to certain metals and temperature set by the Department of Environmental Quality. But the knowledge gaps about the chemical makeup of data centers’ water discharge poses major questions over whether “forever chemicals” could be contaminating water from the facilities, posing risks to human and environmental health....
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Want to turn the U.S. into Chernobyl? Keep installing this poison and we'll get the same resutls.
Experts sound alarm over Elon Musk's 'coup' that's 'about to rob your 401k' — Alexander Willis
Financial experts sounded the alarm Monday over what some have described as a financial “coup” being carried out by Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO and fierce ally to President Donald Trump, one that could see tens of millions of Americans unknowingly prop up his unprofitable company SpaceX through their retirement accounts.
“The richest guy on the planet is about to rob your 401K,” warned content creator Zack Nelson, writing in a social media post Sunday on X to his nearly 1 million followers.
In a move that one of the United States’ largest unions warned “defies financial logic,” private index providers – the companies that decide what stocks go into major market indexes – have fast tracked SpaceX to be added to indexes like the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100, indexes that millions of Americans buy into via their retirement accounts.
On aggregate, SpaceX operates at a loss, a factor that would ordinarily make the company ineligible to be added to certain indexes without the “newly announced fast-entry rules,” Reuters reported.
“Amazing,” noted investor and market commentator Ari Paul, the chief investment officer of BlockTower Capital, in a social media post on X to his more than 230,000 followers. “Pensions forced to buy SpaceX IPO (initial public offering) en masse even if it’s unprofitable. Impressive coup by Musk.”...
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Gaze upon the face of evil!
Labor Unions Celebrate World Court Ruling Enshrining Right to Strike — Marjorie Cohn
The right to strike is under attack throughout the world, including in the United States. Labor strikes are currently forbidden or restricted in the majority of countries.
Now, in a landmark 43-page advisory opinion issued May 21, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) has determined that the right to strike is protected under the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention No. 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise.
“At a moment when workers’ organizations face sustained attacks around the world, this opinion reaffirms that the freedom to withhold one’s labor is not a privilege granted by the powerful, but a fundamental human right grounded in international law,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement.
The ILO is the United Nations agency that sets global labor standards. It has 187 member states and has adopted 191 conventions since its founding in 1919. The ILO considers Convention No. 87 to be one of its 11 fundamental conventions.
In 2023, the ILO asked the ICJ to settle an internal dispute about whether Convention No. 87 gives workers the right to strike, which is not specifically addressed in the convention. Although advisory opinions of the ICJ are not legally binding, many courts accept them as authoritative legal decisions.
The ICJ ruled in its 10-4 opinion that a strike “is one of the main activities engaged in and tools used by workers and their organizations to promote their interests and improve conditions of labour, thereby ensuring the effective exercise of the freedom of association protected under Convention No. 87.”
The Court found “that protection of the right to strike is encompassed in the protection of the freedom of association provided for in Convention No. 87.”...
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We will not be slaves again!
Major Teachers Union Pleads With Elementary Schools to Stop Giving Young Kids AI — Joe Wilkins
Angry parents aren’t the only ones railing against the proliferation of AI in schools. The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teacher’s union in the United States, has now launched a major campaign calling on schools to keep AI and hardware like iPads out of elementary classrooms.
In a buzzy speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, AFT president Randi Weingarten unveiled ten demands centered around reaffirming human-led instruction. One of the key requests: an immediate ban on AI systems in elementary school classrooms.
The AFT’s action points also included a screen ban for students in pre-kindergarten through second grade, as well as a prohibition on companion chatbots for students under 16, which schools have adopted at an alarming rate.
“If we don’t find a way to call this out from an education perspective, I fear that we will lose a generation of kids,” Weingarten told the New York Times in an interview. “The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without AI.”
In her speech, Weingarten caveated that the AFT’s campaign isn’t some fanatical Butlerian Jihad. She is “not calling for a total ban on AI or a Chromebook bonfire,” but for “getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms.”...
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Keep AI slop away from our kids, Amerika!
Websites Can Now Spy on You Through Your Hard Drive — Dan Goodin, Ars Technica
Thanks to the newly detailed FROST technique, telltale SSD activity can be measured in the browser using simple JavaScript.
Over the decades, there has been no shortage of sites using clever techniques to covertly track visitors’ browsing histories, device fingerprints, and keystrokes and mouse movements in real time. Even Meta and Yandex were recently caught joining in the privacy-invasive free-for-all.
Now sites have a new way to spy on their visitors: by measuring subtle interactions with their solid-state drives. The technique, named FROST (fingerprinting remotely using OPFS-based SSD timing), allows sites to monitor other sites a visitor is viewing and what apps are open on their devices.
The technique, laid out in a research paper, exploits a side channel, a form of leak resulting from physical manifestations such as electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or the time required to complete a task. By measuring the manifestations, attackers can decrypt encrypted traffic and infer other confidential data.
The attack that FROST uses is known as a contention side channel, which measures the interaction of various processes all using (or competing for) a given resource. By measuring the timing of certain I/O (input-output) operations of the SSD a visitor is using, the researchers were able to determine the websites open in other tabs—even on other browsers—and the apps that were open on the visitor’s device. FROST requires no interaction from the visitor other than opening the site hosting the attack.
“Web browsers have evolved from simple document viewers into complex platforms capable of running sophisticated applications,” the paper authors wrote. “Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed full-fledged office suites, photo- and video editors, or even integrated development environments (IDEs) that run entirely within the browser.” The authors went on to note: “While these features enhance the capabilities of web applications and allow completely novel use cases, they also increase the browser’s attack surface, and some have already been shown to introduce new vulnerabilities.”
Unlike previous contention side-channel attacks on SSDs, FROST runs exclusively in the browser. It uses JavaScript that interacts with the OPFS (origin private file system), an allocated storage space that’s reserved for a specific site to run code needed to complete a given task. Websites can create one with no interaction required by the visitor.
While each file system is sandboxed, meaning it’s isolated from other websites and from the device system itself, the JavaScript can measure the I/O interactions. Then, by running those interactions through a pretrained convolutional neural network—a system that uses deep learning to analyze text, audio, and images—the attacker can deduce various apps and websites open on the device.
“The attacker continuously measures SSD contention by performing random reads from a large OPFS file,” the researchers explained. “SSD contention caused by user activity causes measurable latency differences for these read operations. By training a convolutional neural network (CNN) on these traces, the attacker can fingerprint user activity on the host system by classifying new traces using the trained model.”...
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The guardians are now our guard. Big Brother has found ways. Ignore at your own risk.
Trump Tested For Camel-Identification Dementia Every Doctor Visit Now, We Guess — Evan Hurst
They really have him convinced that the dementia tests he’s seemingly required to take at every doctor’s visit now are IQ tests, and that they’re giving them to him because they’re so impressed with his intelligence. It’s the gold-plated dimwit dementia tyrant version of hiding a dog’s pill in a fucking hot dog....
Here’s dipshit:
The results of my Physical Examination, taken at Walter Reed Military Medical Center, and just released, were extremely good. Unlike other U.S. Presidents, none of whom have ever taken an approved, high difficulty, Cognitive Test,
How many lies have they told him about the same exact dementia test every dementia patient takes? “Approved”? By whom? Have they told him it’s been “approved” by a team of experts who think his brain is a very good brain?
“High difficulty”?
He continued:
I scored a perfect 30 out of 30, considered ‘extreme intelligence.’
It is not.
“Are the Dumocrats really surprised? In fact, this is my fourth such test, all PERFECT or, 120 correct answers out of 120 questions asked! It is very rare that anyone gets a Perfect Score, especially when achieved four times in a row.
It is very rare that people are required to take four dementia tests in a row, unless they have severe and rapidly advancing dementia. And if they are lying to him and telling him it’s a smart guy test, they’re probably also lying to him and telling him he’s perfectly picked out “camel” every time.
“All people running for President and Vice President should be forced to take high difficulty Cognitive Tests. Congress, and the Dumocrats, should demand it!”
OK....
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Did the cranky Titty Baby get a cowboy hat for his 80th birthday?
Kristi Noam had the solution for this after all.
Beware of Trump's 250th Rally on the Mall — Robert Reich
He's given up on all the "talent" except for You Know Who
Friends,
Trump often confuses himself with America, and America with himself.
Not surprisingly, his plan for celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary is looking more and more like a celebration of Trump.
Trump’s face will be engraved on a $250 bill. It will be etched onto both sides of a celebratory gold coin. It’s already on passports issued this year. His signature is on dollar bills. He’s emblazoning his name on every edifice possible. If you still fail to get the point, his visage will soon be draped over federal buildings.
There’s also a 250th anniversary summer concert series on the National Mall. It was to have started June 25 with country music star Martina McBride. But McBride announced Thursday she wouldn’t perform, because, as she explained, although she had been “assured this was a nonpartisan event,” that assurance “turned out to be misleading.”
So far, seven of the nine featured musical acts have backed out of the concert series after discovering it would be more a celebration of Trump than of America.
So, what does Trump do? Yesterday, he posted:
“I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance … so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”
It’s difficult to read this without laughing, but it’s no joke. His malignant narcissism is ramping up even higher than its usual galactic level....
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You mean his celebration of his own filthy ego? What a stikning turd.
Iran Ends Peace Talks Over Israel’s Lebanon Attacks
CNN reports:
Iran has suspended talks with the United States in protest at Israel’s actions in Lebanon, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported Monday.
“Given the continuation of the Israeli regime’s attacks in Lebanon, and considering that Lebanon had been one of the preconditions for a ceasefire — which has now been violated on all fronts, including Lebanon — the Iranian negotiating team is suspending ‘talks and exchanges of texts through mediators,’” Tasnim reported.
Iran calls for the immediate halt of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, along with the Israeli army’s full withdrawal from Lebanon, Tasnim said, adding that “until Iran’s and the resistance’s position on these matters is satisfied, there will be no negotiations.”
Tasnim added that Tehran and allied militant groups in the region have placed on their agenda the “complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the activation of other fronts,” including the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, where Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have previously launched attacks on passing vessels.
"Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” (1 Samuel 15:3)
Did no one catch that Netanyahu referenced the Amalekits when asked what Israel's response would be to Hamas, etc? In terms of foreign policy, Israel is a much a theocracy as any of its neighbors." — Robert Conner (comments)
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Robert, you're mistaking Bible believers with someone who actually has read it.
Drump and his numbskull klller pal can't stop their terrorism spree.
Bartiromo Wants To Destroy Social Security To Pay For Forever Wars — John Amato
North Korean TV at its finest.
North Korean propagandist -- I mean Fox News host -- Maria Bartiromo spewed the most vicious anti-American hatred towards the working class in this country when she claimed Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security were destroying the country and Trump needs to fix it.
MAGA Queen interviewed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and he came on and did his usual court jester type loyalty dance in an effort to lie about the economy.
He's fine with destroying and or privatizing the social safety nets for 99% of the country.
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And we will be fine executing both of these treasonous Nazi scums! They deserve it.
Out-Of-Touch Bessent Dismisses Gas Price Hikes As No Biggie — NewsHound Ellen
Sure, no biggie if you’re worth $600 million, like fake soybean ‘farmer’ and Treasury Sec. Bessent.
Another Trump mouthpiece tried to gaslight Americans into disbelieving their own financial struggles.
In this case, it was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisting that our economic woes are a Democratic/news media hoax. As inflation just hit a three-year high under Donald Trump, Bessent said, “Look, for many families, it’s not nothing, but it’s less than $200 in extra gasoline cost.”
For one thing, it’s more like $450 in additional costs per household. For another, that’s only additional costs to date. Given that there is no real end in sight for Donald “Art of the Deal” Trump’s unnecessary war in Iran, there also appears no end to the needless extra expenses he’s causing us.
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The wasted brains of upperclass dickheads
Fox's Ingraham: Mamdani's Plan To Rein In Slum Landlords Will Lead To 'Mass Killings' — Heather
Apparently everyone on Fox loves them some New York slum landlords.
One of the worst examples they cited was Laura Ingraham from this Wednesday, where she and her guest Bruce Blakeman served up this nasty bit of red baiting for her viewers:
INGRAHAM: If Mamdani is the new Democrat North Star, the debate over socialism is already over. The party has moved past it. And that means your future under Democrat rule could get a lot worse....
The total ineptness of the worthless upperclass dumbshits! Send these oppressors to prison!
"INGRAHAM: New York can do so much better. When you mix left-wing Marxism with Islamism, you're going to get a whole lot of trouble raining down on New York and the country.
In other words, you know you are going to be disemboweled for all to see should anyone gets hold of you, don't you, Laura?
You fucking Nazi." — gallbladder (commentsO
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Continued fellating of slumlord Nazis by a disgruntled skag!
Greg Abbott Depicts Himself Dunking On Kathy Hochul
Fox News sports site Outkick reports:
We have officially crossed the Rubicon of political psychosis. With the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks squaring off, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott went completely rogue and dropped a digital war crime on New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s timeline.
The man posted a fully commissioned, AI-generated fever dream of himself catching Vince Carter air in a Spurs uniform just to put Hochul in a body bag at the rim. It’s deranged, aggressively disrespectful, and pure car-wreck appeal.
You physically cannot look away. Abbott paired the high-flying graphic with a caption that read, “Spurs about to dunk on Knicks like Texas has been dunking on New York. Go Spurs Go.”
"I bet he takes the wheelchair into bed when he fucks his wife too." — Stogiebear (comments)
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Only in his crippled, hot wheels dreams!
Powell Warns That Trump Is Undermining The Fed
The Associated Press reports:
Former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell used one of his first major public appearances since leaving office to defend independent institutions while accepting an award Sunday honoring his efforts to preserve the central bank’s independence.
Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library overlooking Boston Harbor, Powell called universities, courts, Congress and the central bank “the foundation and the embodiment of our democracy” and argued that the Fed’s independence was a “priceless asset” that must be protected.
It was one of his most direct defenses of Fed independence, warning that a single administration’s decision to remove bank officials over policy differences would open the way for future elected officials to follow suit, ultimately undermining the credibility that the Fed has spent decades building.
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Of course. Rump continues to destroy our infrastructure and our heritage. He's the biggest threat to kill us all that we have seen as a nation. And yet he is allowed to go on. We are a spineless bunch.
NC Cop Fired After Repeatedly Pummeling Woman
ABC News reports:
A North Carolina police officer has been fired after viral doorbell camera video shows him repeatedly punching a woman during an arrest, sparking protests on Friday. The firing came after the Shelby Police Department completed an administrative investigation into the incident, Shelby Police Chief Brad Fraser announced Saturday.
The officer, whose name officials have not released, had previously been placed on administrative suspension. The findings of the investigation have also been turned over to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation for an independent review of any criminal violations, the chief said.
The doorbell video appears to show an officer repeatedly punching a woman, identified as 34-year-old Cherrie Moore, during an arrest before another officer appears to intervene. It is unclear what happened before the video. Moore’s family is calling for the officer to be charged.
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Charge, indict, convict, imprison! Be done with all these Nazi misogynists!
And yes, the world needs to see the filth of white rascism!
FBI Agents Visit Homes Of 2020 WI Election Officials
The Washington Post reports:
The FBI in recent weeks has interviewed current and former election officials about the 2020 election in Milwaukee, ramping up wide-ranging reviews of voting in the swing states that President Donald Trump lost that year.
Election officials are cautiously watching the developments in Milwaukee to see if agents try to seize ballots, as they did in January in Fulton County, Georgia. The confiscation of tens of thousands of absentee ballots from Wisconsin’s largest city would set off alarms because Milwaukee maintains its absentee ballots in a way that could allow agents to determine who voters selected — undermining the secrecy of their ballots.
In addition to taking 2020 ballots in Georgia, the FBI has obtained images of 2020 ballots and other election data from Maricopa County, Arizona. The Justice Department has also sought 2024 ballots for Wayne County, Michigan, but has not gotten them. This week, agents were planning to interview police officers who escorted the election official responsible for delivering the city’s 2020 results to a Milwaukee County election office, according to WISN-TV.
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Still trying to prove the 2020 election was rigged after 6 years of proving it was not. Why stop with 2020? Why not 1952, 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980...! The answer is ONLY BECAUSE THE TIITY BABY CRIMINAL TRUMP WAS NOT ON THE TICKET YOU YELLOW-BELLIED MOTHERFUCKERS!
Greg Bovino Attends Neo-Fascist Summit In Portugal
The Redoubt reports:
Just before he confirmed his attendance at a neo-fascist summit in Portugal, Gregory Bovino, the former U.S. Border Patrol commander who was once the face of President Donald Trump’s mass deportations, posted a photo on X showing himself giving a salute familiar to anyone who has heard of Nazi Germany.
Martin Sellner, an extremist from Austria, is best known for pushing the “great replacement” conspiracy theory — that Jewish elites are seeking to exterminate the white race via mass migration — that has motivated mass shooters from Pennsylvania to New Zealand. He was the other man standing next to Bovino.
Other speakers included a Belgian fascist convicted of Holocaust denial and the founder of a Swiss neo-Nazi group called “Junge Tat” who is quite open about his fondness for “National Socialism.
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Nazi murderer shows his ugly face at Nazi rally! Fuck this traitor to hell!
Trump fumbles easiest 'layup' is presidential history for one reason: analysis — Alexander Willis
As the multi-day festival organized in part by President Donald Trump designed to celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary continues to fall apart, former presidential speechwriter David Frum flagged on Sunday what he believed was behind the event’s ever-increasing list of problems.
Dubbed the Great American State Fair, the event was organized by the Trump-linked organization Freedom 250, with Trump himself being "actively involved” in the process. A live music concert was initially planned for the event but may be cancelled after “nearly all” performers backed out after learning of the event’s connections to Trump.
“You might have thought that presiding over such a celebration would be an easy success for Trump. He is a showman after all,” Frum wrote in an analysis published Sunday in The Atlantic.
“He loves parades and extravaganzas. It was all an easy layup, a gimme, a chance for a now-unpopular second-term president to reinvent himself as the leader of all of the American people.”
The Trump administration scrambled in the wake of performers bailing on the event en masse, with Trump later proposing to replace the artists with himself, and at an event to be held at the “same time” and “same location” as the fair, except with “only great patriots invited.”
And, as the chaos continues to unfold, Frum believes he knows exactly why the event has appeared to crumble.
“The only thing he had to do was – for once in his life – not act like an insane egomaniac," Frum wrote. “He couldn’t do it.”
Frum argued that the event’s failure was all but admitted to by Trump, citing a social media post the president published on Saturday evening, which Frum described as an “indictment of his own program.”
“Cancel it,” Trump wrote, referring to the Great American State Fair.
Frum continued, “Trump knows he has botched the anniversary. He says so himself.”
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And still there will be creatures who worship his utter failure!
Trump: “We’ve Actually Left Iran’s Military Alone”
Mediaite reports:
President Donald Trump made a puzzling new claim on Iran — stating “we’ve actually left their military alone,” after saying on numerous prior occasions the U.S. has “completely destroyed” it. Trump made the confounding assertion on Saturday’s edition of My View on Fox News — hosted by the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
“Their Navy is totally gone, 100 percent,” Trump said. “Their Air Force is totally gone, 100 percent. Their military, we’ve sort of left it alone — because we think that their military is somewhat moderate. They have other people that aren’t moderate. We’ve taken them out. We’ve taking different forms of leadership out. We’ve actually left their military alone. People would be surprised to hear that. Because mistakes have been made in wars where you wipe out everybody and then you have a country that for 40 years can never rebuild.”
In an April 11 Truth Social post, Trump wrote, “The United States has completely destroyed Iran’s Military, including their entire Navy and Air Force, and everything else. Their Leadership is DEAD!
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Our leader can't tell reality from fantasy. Sad.
Demented Senior Continues AI Slop Posting Spree
The Daily Beast reports:
President Donald Trump spent much of Saturday flooding Truth Social with a torrent of memes, AI slop, political attacks, and fan-made tributes. The six-hour posting marathon unfolded on a day when the only item listed on the president’s public schedule was “Executive Time.” Trump shared or reposted more than 50 pieces of content ranging from patriotic fantasy art and self-congratulatory graphics to crime memes, military imagery, celebrity tributes, and attacks on political rivals.
Among the more unusual posts were separate images showing Trump riding horseback beside George Washington on a dirt road next to a NASCAR race. One particularly strange image showed Trump dressed as a military commander as fighter jets exploded across the sky behind him, beneath the caption: “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.” Another image shared on Saturday appeared to nod to those ambitions, depicting a futuristic “DronePort” perched atop the White House roof as aircraft buzzed overhead.
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I don't mean to insult childen but this is a child playing with fingerpaint for the first time.
And Gutzon Borglum was involved in KKK politics, attended Klan meetings and served on Klan committees.
MAGA “Reporter”: Dems Need Another Renee Good
“Typically what I do is — because I wear disguises when I go out here — I put like a load of conditioner on my hair to look unkempt and everything so I can fit in with the rest of the degenerate crowd out here. And I listen. That’s what I do — I listen to what they’re talking about amongst themselves. And that’s where I’m learning a lot of this information.
“And what I very clearly established at this point, is that there’s a lot of, let’s say — the people at the top, the ones that are organizing this — the leaders on the ground, they are not dumb people, right? They’re very, actually, very smart people. They are good at what they do.
“But they are preying on low IQ people and others that really, I guess, they don’t have any sort of convictions. They’re being told they are helping for the greater good. And so they’re basically just foot soldiers out here.
“The sad part is, I truly believe a lot of the individuals leading the organizational efforts, they want to sacrifice some of these people. They need another Renee Good or Alex Pretti to spur up their movement again across the country. It’s a terrifying thought, but I genuinely believe that.” – MAGA “reporter” Nick Sorter, on Fox News.
Sorter has appeared here several times for wading into crowds of ICE protesters to incite them. His arrest in one such incident earned him a place on a White House panel.
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Dear Shit Fer Brains: You don't have to do all that to blend in with the rest of the Nazi shit. You are a natural turd.
What are the betting odds on his survival?
‘I Have Concerns’: Cory Booker Waffles On Graham Platner After Explosive New
Revelations — Joe DePaolo
Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) waffled on the Senate candidacy of Maine Democrat Graham Platner following the explosive new revelations about him reportedly sending sexually explicit messages to a number of women.
In an interview on ABC’s This Week Sunday, Jonathan Karl confronted Booker about the various controversies surrounding Platner — who, for 18 years, bore a tattoo which closely resembled a widely-recognized Nazi symbol. (Platner recently had the image covered up.) Platner has also had numerous bizarre, lewd posts on Reddit recently revealed.
“Do you have concerns with the weight of all these controversies that it may jeopardize Democratic hopes to get that Senate seat in Maine?” Karl asked Booker.
“Yes, I have concerns,” Booker told Karl. “That guy has questions to answer.”
Still, Booker focused much of his response on the prospect of Democrats winning a Senate majority.
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Cory Booker is an example of the weakness of certain members of the Democrat Party. They and America need braver leaders than he.
Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI — Frank Landymore
When it comes to AI’s place in the classroom — and its role in education broadly — some professors are at the end of their rope. The not quite all-knowing but incredibly adept at bullsh*tting chatbots let lazy students churn out entire essays, solve math problems, and cobble together passable answers for most questions. Needless to say, none of that leaves much room for actual learning.
Such desperate times call for Draconian measures. In a roundup of instructor testimonials on the AI’s impact on their profession from The New Yorker, one pedagogue is taking no prisoners when it comes to punishing pupils who surrender their brains to the tech.
“I tell students that ChatGPT is disallowed from their writing process, that I can immediately tell when ChatGPT has been used, and that I will fail the student on this assignment if it is used — and, potentially, for the entire course, if we go through a formal appeals process,” Neal Hebert, a theatre professor at Grambling State University, wrote to the magazine.
Hebert has an even more merciless warning for theater majors.
“I tell my theatre majors, ‘I get paid the same whether I pass you or fail you,'” he wrote. “‘But what you’ve just done is told me and everyone else in our department that you are so lazy you would rather outsource your collaboration to an app than risk being an artist.'” ...
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FYI: Tex Guard says that 63% of the above text is AI! Text Guard will also humanize this text for you. Will it be considered human when Text Guard anylizes its own? Try it yourself and see.
Text Guard.
It has been said we exist in a computer generated world.
Trump’s Violent Memes Expose Long-Simmering Truths About US Imperialism — Michelle Chen
Trump’s white nationalist revanchism is on display as he turns state violence into entertainment.
t seemed on brand for our meme-obsessed President that the U.S. launched Operation Epic Fury with an epic video mashup. While Trump never bothered to articulate a real justification for waging war on Iran, he gestured toward a righteous mission with a montage of dramatic violent scenes, featuring heroic and antiheroic characters from Braveheart to Walter White of “Breaking Bad,” spliced like a Hollywood trailer under a banner proclaiming “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY.” The cinematic celebration of American “justice” came about a week after about 155 people, mostly children, were killed by a U.S. strike on a school in Minab, in a spate of bombings aimed at schools and hospitals across Iran.
The valorization of military power as a force of justice has always colored the nation’s imperial imaginary. Around 130 years ago, Puck magazine promoted the Spanish-American War to readers with “The Cuban Melodrama,” a cartoon depicting a gallant Uncle Sam in a feathered cap and star-print pantaloons shielding a damsel in distress with a pro-U.S.-annexation flag emblazoned on her hip, while her swarthy Spanish colonial master scowled behind a bandit’s cloak. People in the U.S. continue to see Cuba through media spectacle, detached from the reality of the war back then, and from the cruel U.S. economic siege of the island now. The White House has fired off many such spectacles to glorify or sanitize U.S. and Israeli military operations, including an action-movie–style video depicting the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and a grotesquely surreal AI-slop showcase of a genocide-ravaged Gaza rebranded as Palestine’s Vegas Strip.
The aestheticization of military brutality is not limited to warfare abroad. The administration has posted propaganda videos of immigration raids in Black and Brown communities, lionizing the ferocity with which ICE agents are tearing apart families....
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It's a meme world in Trump's brain.
ICE Agent Arrested in Texas, Charged With Lying About Minneapolis Shooting — Stephen Prager
“Nobody is above the law,” said Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, “including agents of the federal government.”
AUS Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was arrested in Texas on Friday after he was charged by Minnesota officials for allegedly shooting a Venezuelan immigrant during an ICE operation in Minneapolis and lying about what happened.
Christian Castro, 52, was deployed as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push in the Twin Cities, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” and was charged by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty earlier this month with four counts of felony assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime.
The charges stem from the shooting of Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis at his home on January 14 as ICE agents pursued his roommate, another Venezuelan immigrant named Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna.
According to The New York Times, Castro was arrested Friday after being tracked down by investigators with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Texas Rangers and agents with the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General carried out the arrest, according to the Minnesota-based Sahan Journal.
“Today’s arrest is a critical step forward in our prosecution of Mr. Castro,” Moriarty said. “The BCA’s investigative work was instrumental in this process, and we’re grateful for their collaboration as we pursue accountability for this incident on behalf of Mr. Sosa-Celis, his family, and our community.”...
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Tell it to Trump!
Ebola Veterans Are Aghast at Trump’s Plan for the Outbreak — Jonathan Cohn
DOCTORS AROUND THE COUNTRY are baffled, disturbed, and in some cases aghast at the Trump administration’s plan for Americans who get Ebola overseas—in particular, the decision not to bring these patients back home, to one of the facilities that the federal government created precisely for this purpose.
And if you want to know why these medical professionals are upset, ask infectious disease physician Tara Palmore.
Palmore knows better than most what Ebola care looks like in the American facilities, because she provided it during the 2014 outbreak. Although most of the cases were in West Africa, nearly a dozen infected Americans got treatment in the United States, including one who ended up at a facility inside the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.1
That is where Palmore was working at the time. And in a phone interview on Thursday, she described the unit to me—how the surfaces are all nonporous, lest they absorb infected bodily fluids that can’t be fully wiped away, and how there’s extra space for medical equipment, because staff have to bring machines to the patient rather than the other way around....
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You are confusing Trump with someone who cares.
All that’s missing are a few early’80s cars up on cinder blocks. — Andrew O'Hehir
...Millions of people around the world wanted blue jeans and McDonald’s and road movies and Manhattan skyscrapers and California beaches, or at least they thought they did. Little by little they found out that some of those things weren’t worth having and all of them came with asterisks....
It isn’t news to anybody reading this that America’s massive internal fracture, which shows no signs of healing in any of our lifetimes, is leading an increasing number of people with adequate resources and flexible lives to ponder their options. At least three former colleagues of mine have uprooted their families, changed jobs and moved overseas within the last few years. More to the point, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t thought about it.
But what’s really happening, I suspect, is much bigger than a minor demographic shift among a handful of educated libs. It’s more that the deeply ingrained toxin of American narcissism — the conviction, long shared across nearly the full range of political opinion, that this is an exceptional or “indispensable” nation, endowed by God or history or Thomas Jefferson with a unique destiny — has begun to fade...
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Facing reality is difficult for many Americans. We've been living in a TV sitcom too long
Trump plan dead in the water as countries lose trust in America — The Conversation
Sooner or later in every armed conflict, someone will trot out the well-worn aphorism that “Truth is the first casualty of war.” And certainly, in the Iran war truth beat a hasty retreat as soon as the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran and Lebanon on February 28.
But what was meant to be an operation which would be all over within days has now lasted three months. And, during that time, truth – and at points, reality itself – has come in for a thorough beating from all sides.
Fiallo added, “It is not just the number of Trump’s posts that the Daily Beast analyzed, but also their timing and nature: A third of his social media output now comes during the night.” In total the president posted on Truth Social on 189 occasions between 9 AM and 6 AM local time throughout April, indicating that Trump posted at least once at night on more than four out of five nights that month.
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He gets worse with each passing day. Being sleep deprived is no way to go through life.
Behind a Trump aide's surreal plan to shut down travel —and sink the U.S. economy — Michael Signorile, The Signorile Report
You may have thought the dog-killing Kristi Noem was the worst that the Trump administration could get for Homeland Security Secretary.
But here is former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin and current DHS secretary, who doubled down last week on Fox on a threat to shut down Customs and Border Patrol processing of flights at major international airports located in “sanctuary cities”—in other words, cities that direct their local law enforcement not to engage in immigration and detention efforts by working with federal agents.
Now they’re putting a gun to the heads of entire cities and states. Mullen was angry about a protest in New Jersey at a detention facility in Newark, where dozens of demonstrators—including U.S. Senator Andy Kim—were cruelly pepper-sprayed. Basically, Mullen wants the protests stopped, and if they’re not, he’ll stop the processing of travelers on flights into cities that don’t collaborate with Trump’s fascistic actions....
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Again, a brain is a terrible thing to waste!
Sonny Rollins: R.I.P. — John Amato
Another giant leaves this world.
The great Sonny Rollins passed away at the age of 95. He won the Downbeat critics poll for best tenor saxophone player seven times.
Check out the NY Times obit:
In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.
“The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.”That commitment to freshness was the key to Mr. Rollins’s approach, and to his appeal. The jazz critic Francis Davis wrote in 2000 that Mr. Rollins “is the greatest living jazz improviser, and if we redefine virtuosity to include improvisational cunning as well as instrumental finesse (as we probably should when discussing this music), he may be the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”...
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Jazz - The American Music.
NYT: Over 10,000 Lawyers Have Fled Trump Admin
The New York Times reports:
President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda. Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data.
Along with the usual retirements and turnover in the federal work force, the last year saw deep staffing cuts and the resignations of some staff members who objected to Mr. Trump’s policies. Their departures show how rapidly the president has eroded the image of the federal government as the gold standard for lawyers seeking public service roles.
Instead, many of those looking for such work are flocking to the offices of Democratic state attorneys general and nonprofits that are challenging administration policies in the courts, boosting Mr. Trump’s opponents with seasoned lawyers.
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The wheat separates from the chaff.
Trump: My Physical Showed “Extreme Intelligence”
“The results of my Physical Examination, taken at Walter Reed Military Medical Center, and just released, were extremely good.
“Unlike other U.S. Presidents, none of whom have ever taken an approved, high difficulty, Cognitive Test, I scored a perfect 30 out of 30, considered ‘extreme intelligence.’
“Are the Dumocrats really surprised? In fact, this is my fourth such test, all PERFECT or, 120 correct answers out of 120 questions asked! It is very rare that anyone gets a Perfect Score, especially when achieved four times in a row.
“All people running for President and Vice President should be forced to take high difficulty Cognitive Tests. Congress, and the Dumocrats, should demand it!” – Trump, once again mistaking a dementia test for an IQ test.
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This is the Trump derangement syndrome definition.
The gold standard of dementia!
Spencer Pratt: Homeless “Demons” Are Raping Dogs
The California Post reports:
Spencer Pratt has a plan to treat the “heavenly” animals forgotten on the streets of Los Angeles with reverence if voters name him the city’s next mayor. Pratt released a nearly 10-minute video Saturday of his five-step plan to combat animal abuse.
The registered Republican says he will task the Los Angeles Police Department with creating a PAWS (Protecting Animal Welfare and Safety) task force to enforce animal abuse laws in places like Skid Row.
Pratt says there will be harsh punishments for anyone caught abusing animals. “Anyone caught abusing animals is going to prison,” he said. “I will have zero tolerance for animal abuse in our city.”
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Is he referring to Donald Trump's behavior? Or that only dogs should be aware?
BTW, his claim to fame is "reality tv show." ROTFLMAO!
Organizers: Trump Will Now Headline Freedom 250
The Associated Press reports:
An upcoming celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, “The Great American State Fair,” recently had several musical guests back out partly over the event’s ties to President Donald Trump. Now, Trump himself is slated to headline the festivities, the organizers said Saturday.
“I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance,” Trump posted to his social media platform Truth Social Saturday, adding that he was thinking of bringing “the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists.’”
The group organizing the June fair on Washington’s National Mall, Freedom 250, confirmed the billing in a statement, writing, “we are excited to announce that President Trump will personally kick off this historic celebration on Wednesday, June 24.”
"The White House grounds look like a creepy abandoned amusement park." — Sam_Handwich (comments)
"All that’s missing are a few early’80s cars up on cinder blocks." — Bungee (comments)
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Historic in that we've never seen shit stacked that high?
Historic in that we've never witnessed insanity in public this batshit before?
"Trailer Trash Tragedy!"
Trump’s new cringe ploy to save floundering festival ignites firestorm — Adam Lynch
What do you do when you’re a president with a birthday party being abandoned by all the entertainment? If you’re President Donald Trump you offer to fill the hole yourself.
“I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World,” Trump posted on Truth Social with a long run-on sentence, “the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. Trump to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!”
“Third rate” artists — which Trump nevertheless saw fit to hire — have flown his Freedom 250 event, many claiming they were lied to about the nature of the celebration, while others were likely trying to escape the stain of Trump’s historically bad polls.
Sounding like the only kid to show up at his own birthday party, Trump insisted that his popularity was without peer on Truth Social.
“Two years ago, the United States was DEAD. Now we have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. I don’t want so-called ‘Artists’ that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN,” insisted Trump, adding that he was ordering “representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday.”
“Only Great Patriots invited,” Trump added. “It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America! President DONALD J. Trump.”
Predictably, critics on X mangled this latest, lowly hail mary to save his collapsing event.
“It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to…” howled one critic on X.” But some of the worst hits came from Trump’s own MAGA element....
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We no longer live in an age of reason. "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." — Inferno, The Devine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
Markwayne Mullin Hiring Family And Flying On Government Bang Jets Like A Common Kristi Noem — Gary Legum
Scabrous dick weasel Markwayne Mullin was confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security two months ago for exactly one reason: to make everyone forget the incompetence and grifting and fuck-plane-buying that marked the reign of the pustulent puppy murderer Kristi Noem. He was also possibly confirmed because his Senate colleagues couldn’t wait to get him out of the chamber so they wouldn’t have to see or hear him every day. Given his history of trying to start fistfights with hearing witnesses, who could blame them?
It could theoretically be disappointing to the Trump administration that old Two Names Mullin is now being accused of behavior similar to Noem’s. And no, we don’t mean banging Corey Lewandowski, so get that right out of your filthy minds.
What Mullin has been accused of doing that is similar is trying to hire a romantic partner to DHS with little to no obvious qualifications for the job. It’s just that that partner is his wife, Christie. Currently, Christie Mullin is the chair of rural policy at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank the Daily Mail hilariously describes as nonpartisan. Mullin seems to think that if his wife is on the DHS payroll, he wouldn’t have to pay for her plane tickets when she flies with him on DHS jets.
Mullin’s estimated net worth is around $60 million, just in case you were concerned that having to reimburse the government the cost of an Oklahoma-to-DC plane ticket occasionally was going to put his family in the poor house.
Mullin has also reportedly talked about bringing his wife on as a Special Government Employee, which would pay her around $65-70 an hour and limit her to working 130 days a year. This is the exact employment designation Noem gave Lewandowski when he came onboard with the exact same limit of working days, which the frying-pan-faced lothario flouted in all sorts of creative ways.
And boy, does Mullin like to fly. He may not be traveling around the world like Noem did, but he does use a $70 million DHS plane to fly home to Oklahoma almost every Thursday morning, and not fly back until Monday night:
“Mullin seems to think DHS requires less work than a senator, and it shows. Meanwhile, ICE has no direction,” one source told the Daily Mail.
Oh, they’re MAD mad at him. Other sources told the paper that Mullin has been “checked out” of the job since he took it a long two months ago. Another source said, dramatically, that Mullin was paying more attention to his wife than his job at the same time “ICE facilities are being overrun by leftist mobs,” presumably in the alternate dimension where this source lives.
And yes, we believe Mullin is flying home on Noem’s nookie jet, which we found out months ago cost $70 million. We keep laughing at the thought of dozens of reporters emailing the public affairs office at DHS to ask if they can confirm that....
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Meet the new motherfucker. Same as the old motherfucker!
America Just Expanded Voting Rights To Corporations. Yes, Really. — Thom Hartmann
From Citizens United to Delaware, the long corporate campaign to seize the rights of human beings just crossed a historic line
Corporations can now vote in Delaware. And they’re doing it.
Seriously. Not dystopian science fiction or a new novel by an AI version of George Orwell. Actual corporations — what America’s first Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall, in 1819 called “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law” — are today voting in elections for everything from the mayor and town council to referendums on corporate taxes and limits on corporate behavior.
What could possibly go wrong?
There are, after all, more corporations than people in Delaware. They can now decide who’s going to run the government, what the laws are, and — through their votes to elect humans who’ll take corporate money to do what corporations want (something else that corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized) — even what regulations companies must follow and what limits there are on their behavior.
In a few weeks, my next book will be coming out, “Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told,” and the timing couldn’t be more synchronous.
The book, written like a murder mystery but 100% true, tells the story of how a corrupt Supreme Court clerk conspired with a corrupt Supreme Court justice to hand “corporate personhood” to the railroad corporations that were then among the richest and most powerful in the world.
The decision was handed down in 1886; in it, the Court itself didn’t say a single word about corporate personhood. Back then corporations had the rights of “artificial persons” so they could pay taxes, own land, and execute contracts and lawsuits, but nobody seriously claimed they could assert human rights like free speech, privacy, or the right to vote.
But the clerk of the Court, a wealthy plutocrat named John Chandler Bancroft Davis, slipped into the headnote of the case — a commentary for law students and others wanting a summary of a decision, which carries absolutely no legal weight whatsoever — that the Chief Justice, Morrison Remick Waite, had claimed corporations were “persons,” implying they had rights under the 14th Amendment.
The railroads then hired a few retired members of Congress who were on the committees that wrote the Amendment as frontmen and for the next five years they traveled the country claiming that the “actual intent” of the authors of the 14th Amendment was to grant human rights to corporations, not former slaves.
Their efforts worked; just ten years later, in the Covington & Lexington Turnpike v. Sandford case, the Court cited the Santa Clara decision and ruled:
“[C]orporations are persons within the meaning of the constitutional provisions forbidding the deprivation of property without due process of law as well as a denial of the equal protection of the laws.”
That badly abused Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, was written to liberate formerly enslaved people, and its language is pretty clear about that:
“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (emphasis added)...
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America is being usurped by corporate crime and we don't give a shit.
Social media unloads on ailing Trump's 'excellent health' claim — Adam Lynch
Social media critics were not quite ready to accept White House claims of President Donald Trump’s “excellent health” this weekend.
Citing the results of a recent examination, a Friday memo from Trump’s physician Dr. Sean Barbabella asserted that Trump “remains in excellent health, demonstrating strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological and overall physical function.”
To some, the news came as a surprise considering Trump is the oldest person ever elected to the White House, with his 80th birthday arriving in June. To others, the claim was outright comedy.
“I would seriously doubt the rest of any report that still claims he’s 6’3” 238lbs,” said one critic on Bluesky.
“Did the North Korean propaganda team write this for him?” said another Bluesky user, referring to Trump’s history of nodding off in public, his late-night screeds and other obvious signs of pulmonary illness, including apparent tissue swelling of the ankles.
CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner described the severe edema in his ankles as Chronic Venous Insufficiency, despite a White House statement just three months before that he had no edema.
“If you believe those blood pressure numbers, you’re a fool lol,” howled one critic on X....
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Do Trump's spin doctors actulally think everyone is as gullible as they appear to be. Of course they do! It's a job requirement!
Tuberville Complains About American Men Wearing ‘All This European Stuff’— Heather
During a segment on this Friday's The Will Cain Show on Fox, Cain and his guest Sen. Tommy Tuberville made another lame attempt at disparaging Texas senate candidate James Talarico during yet another one of their endless segments on how terrible things are for Democrats despite the fact that their own party and Dear Leader's poll numbers are in the tank.
Here's Tuberville complaining about American men wearing "all this European stuff," while sitting in front of a picture of Mercedes-Benz Gullwing, before pretending he doesn't know where eighth-generation Texan Talarico "comes from" and saying he wouldn't want to spend time with him. I'm guessing the feeling is mutual, Tommy.
CAIN: This is true. There's a real problem with men for Democrats.
TUBERVILLE: Well, first of all, the Democrats have left the building. They're now called the socialist globalist Democrats, and it's just unfortunate — they've left their base. They left their base of middle class and union workers, and now their new focus is illegal aliens and women.
They think all women are going to vote for them. I see it every day on the Senate floor — men are just an afterthought. And that's unfortunate. That's not what this country is about.
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"The socialist globalist Democrats?" I think that's what you Trump Nazis call us isn't it, Führer Fellator?
Tommy is so pitiful. He needs to get out of his hut once in awhile. "European stuff?" Many men love Italian suits. We've been wearing them since the 1950s at least. Maybe he wears them and doesn't know it. Don't tell him.
And yes, Tommy, who wants to spend time with a fucking big-eared, backwoods jerk?
Whiny Titty Baby Rage-Quits The Kennedy Center In Pathetic Meltdown
In a staggeringly lengthy 581-word post consisting of 3,462 characters (!!), Donald J. Trump took to Truth Social to explain that "your favorite President, ME," is rage-quitting the Kennedy Center following a judge's order to remove his name from signage within two weeks. Trump is basically saying, 'You can't fire me, I QUIT' with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, in a 93-page memo, rejected the Kennedy Center's name change because he said, “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it." Unsurprisingly, Trump didn't take that well.
Trump compared the federal court ruling about a performing arts center to a fictional place where children never grow up. The self-awareness vacuum here is impressive. Of course, Trump wrote that the judge was "appointed by Barack Hussein Obama," in his post that simultaneously argues the building is dangerously decrepit (rotting beams! collapsing parking!) AND that the judge is wrong to let it stay open. So, it's too dangerous to renovate, but also too dangerous to keep open.
The president, in a huff, responded to the judge's decision by threatening to hand the whole thing back to Congress, which is exactly what the judge mentioned, but that's classic Trump.
Trump wrote, in part, "Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself. ! I cannot be involved with a situation where danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight."
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Choke on it, swine!
Bondi Refused To Say Whether Trump Interfered In Epstein Files Release
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi testified about the Epstein files to the House Oversight Committee on Friday. But her appearance was held behind closed doors, off camera, and Republicans refused to put her under oath.
Afterward, Rep. Robert Garcia, the Democratic ranking member of the Oversight Committee, told reporters that he asked Bondi five different questions about conversations with Donald Trump. He appears more than 5,300 times in the files related to his former BFF.
Specifically, Garcia said he asked Bondi whether Trump “directed her at any given time on the Epstein files, what he knew, what he asked her to redact or not, and she refused to answer any questions about President Trump.”
“In fact, she said she would not speak or respond to any questions that had anything to do with President Trump,” Garcia added.
You know that if Trump had done nothing to interfere with the release of the files, Bondi would have said so.
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More of what we get when we appoint criminals to enforce our laws.
Waymo Pulled Its Cars From the Freeway After One Fled Police With Horrified Couple on Board — Victor Tangermann
We’ve seen Waymo’s fleet of autonomous taxis cause plenty of mayhem on public streets. They like to ignore bike lanes, drive the wrong way down busy roads, and even rely on remote workers in the Philippines when they get stumped.
Riding them can also quickly turn into a terrifying near-death experience, as one couple in San Francisco found out firsthand. As CBS News reports, the couple was looking to get home in the Mission District only for their Waymo cab to veer off a highway and accelerate to terrifying speeds while driving down a construction lane.
All the while, police vehicles were trying to chase it down with sirens blaring.
“There were construction signs,” resident Elliot Slade told the broadcaster over the weekend. “There were lights going on. Police in the distance and it sped up. That’s when I looked at my fiancée, we’re done.”
“This is it,” he added. “We’re dead. We’re going to die right here in the Waymo.”
The terrifying incident underlines the very real dangers of relying on autonomous vehicles for ride shares, while they still suffer from nagging technical shortcomings that are putting people in danger. It could also further erode public trust in the tech.
In the last two months alone, Waymo’s vehicles have been observed driving through flooded streets and speeding through construction zones, as USA Today reports.
The latest incident also proved scary enough for Waymo to pull its cars from freeways in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami altogether as it works to “integrate recent technical learnings into our software,” according to a statement to CBS.
The offending Waymo vehicle “started freaking out,” Slade recalled, because of a slew of merging lanes, causing cars to be “all over the place.” Smartphone footage Slade recorded shows the dramatic incident from his perspective.
“Holy s***, dude,” Slade can be heard saying in the clip....
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And more news from our devolving world!
AI Filmmaker Compares His Tech to Something That Gets Worse the More You Think About It — Frank Landymore
Jorge R. Gutierrez, the animator behind the beloved animated film “The Book of Life,” is enraging his fans after seemingly selling out to AI.
At a conference held by Amazon MGM Studios on Wednesday, he unloaded a gushing encomium to the tech after announcing that he’d be working with the Amazon studio to create an AI-generated animated series called “Punky Duck.” (A shared still from the series is littered with hallucinations and nonsensical words, like a concert poster that says “Satorsay IUCT7AX – 0 PM.)
Further raising eyebrows, Gutierrez made an utterly bizarre analogy to explain why he had come to love using machine-amalgamated imagery. Per ToonHive, he enthused that animating with AI was like “having sex and then they hand you the baby” — in what may very well be the last attention-getting image he ever produces if he continues to let AI do his job for him.
Gutierrez’s point: you can skip over the actual creative process that goes into art and get instant results. Never mind the figurative pregnancy, in his analogy, when the idea is actually incubated and given life.
“I’m used to two years for a pilot, and something like this… it feels like the most rebellious, punk rock thing you can do right now is to make something this fast,” he said of AI, as quoted by IndieWire. “For someone like me who’s used to waiting so long, this has been a life-changer.”
As a rule, if something has to be described as “punk rock,” it’s not, in fact, “punk rock.” That aside, it’s a revealing insight from Gutierrez, epitomizing the logic of shameless AI boosters who think a machine can replace an artist. The truth is that art is inseparable from the labor that produces it, and any attempt to take that labor out of the equation will produce something hollow. The “I hate writing, but I love having written” crowd can embrace AI all they want, but there is no “having written” with the tech. It’s just doing the work for you. AI takes the labor we loathe out of the process, sure, but also the opportunity to stamp actual intent.
All in a way of saying, sure. Typing a prompt into an AI model is sex, somehow, and the uncanny, and hallucination-mangled images its spits out is just like a precious baby....
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As the Retard Turns.
Tech CEOs Have a Problem: Even Their Closest Allies Now See AI as a Sign of Laziness and Dishonesty — Frank Landymore
Tech founders and CEOs are all rapidly adopting AI, deploying it across their companies and personally using it to handle emails and other busywork.
But Paul Graham, the cofounder of startup accelerator Y Combinator and one of the most venerated names in Silicon Valley, has already grown tired of the tech’s influence. When he receives pitches that are AI written, it’s such a turn off that he now closes them on sight.
“A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style,” Graham wrote this week. ” I know they’re written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it’s hard not to ignore it.”
To say his feelings were mixed on this would be an understatement.
“I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI,” Graham added. “It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?”
This should be a warning sign to tech CEOs, if they’re not too busy getting obsequious advice from a chatbot to notice. Graham, whose word goes far in tech circles, has historically been a major AI booster and investor. Just last month, he proclaimed that AI was the “biggest opportunity for would-be startup founders.” That makes his latest musings distinctly ironic, but all the same, if even someone who’s advocated for AI’s revolutionary power has already turned heel and decided that it reflects negatively on the person using it, it doesn’t bode well for tech’s long-term image.
“It makes me think less of the author. It means they can’t write well unaided (or feel they can’t), and that they’re trying to trick me,” Graham said of AI emails. “It’s not impressive to use AI to write stuff for you; any teenager can do that.”...
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Golly, gee whiz! What garbage will hit us in the face next?
Amazon Pisses Off Animation Industy With AI Animation Fund — Justin Carter
No one's happy about the Amazon AI Creators Fund, with two of the shows drawing even more negativity for different reasons.
Earlier in May, Hollywood took significant steps in trying to bring generative AI into the animation industry. Both Netflix and Amazon announced different plans to use the controversial technology to create animated shows for their respective platforms, with the latter creating a fund to lend their AI tools to creators in the field.
Along with the fund, Amazon announced a trio of Prime Video shows born from it. Reactions to the whole ordeal were negative, with much discussion concerning two series, Punky Duck from El Tigre creator Jorge R. Gutierrez, and Buzzfeed Studios’ Cupcake & Friends. In the latter’s case, Loryn Brantz—who originally created the Good Advice Cupcake that’ll headline the series—condemned Buzzfeed for “taking my character and giving it to an AI platform.” She alleged that when working at Buzzfeed, the company “repeatedly assured me in good faith” it wouldn’t use her character without any input.
But Brantz said she was never provided with legal options to enforce this, hence Cupcake & Friends. As such, hearing that her character was recreated in a show using Amazon’s genAI tech has her feeling “like my intestines were pulled out of my body.” She then claimed (now-former) Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti tried to make her sign an NDA after she “pleaded” with him to not go through with the deal. With no NDA signed, she’s freely called this “an assault on artists everywhere,” and encouraged people to boycott both Buzzfeed and any other AI-produced animated works.
It’s Gutierrez who’s caught the most flak, though. Before this, he’d built up a lot of goodwill with various projects he’s worked on, and for criticizing genAI being used in Hollywood productions. That he was “cautiously optimistic” about this program, and compared the technology to “having sex and then they hand you the baby” didn’t engender a warm reception. Reactions later escalated to death threats against his family (which he swiftly condemned), and he’s since dropped out of the program....
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The concept of "ownership" is rapidly vanishing from our laws. Sombody better get with it before we commit MAGAcide!
Hair Furor Attacks “Radical Left Anti-Trump Hater” Wife Of Kennedy Center Judge In 718-Word Meltdown
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Here's a clue for the ancient retarded one and other knee jerkers. It's not about the judge, screwballs. It's about THE FUCKING LAW THAT TRUMP HAS VIOLATED!
Paxton Ad Calls Talarico “Too Low-T For Texas”
NPR reports:
After Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the state’s Republican Senate primary this week, he delivered a run of insults directed at his general election opponent, Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico. Paxton also quickly released an ad that ends with an image of Talarico next to the words: “Radical Talarico: too low-T for Texas.”
What followed was an immediate, widespread barrage of attacks on Talarico’s manhood from the right. This tactic — the explicit, sometimes vulgar emphasis on masculinity as an electoral argument — is one highly visible way that President Trump has changed the Republican Party, and American politics in general, in the last decade.
White House advisor Stephen Miller used “transgender” as an insult, telling Fox News that Talarico is the Democrats’ “first transgender Senate candidate.” Talarico is not transgender. Florida Republican congressional candidate Dan Weldon questioned Talarico’s masculinity by questioning his football knowledge: “It’s a huge problem for the Democrat Party that you take one look at the men they run for elected office and just know that they couldn’t name a single obscure wide receiver from the early 2000s.”
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Said the goofy schmuck with the lowest voter turnout in the history of the universe!
Trump tears apart his number two and refuses to crown him as MAGA's future — Adam Lynch
Judging by interviews President Donald Trump doesn’t sound eager to envision a world without him in charge, and he’s slow to acknowledge up-and-coming lieutenants who are eager to take the reins.
The New York Times reports that when confronted with the prospect of Vice President JD Vance as MAGA’s next crowned leader, Trump is loathe to discuss it openly — even as his own personal brand struggles to reclaim the supremacy it once held with legions of largely racist, antisemitic MAGA men.
Citing information from more than a dozen anonymous White House sources, the Times reports that Trump “has told several allies that Mr. Vance has never won a tough race without his help. (Mr. Trump’s endorsement got Mr. Vance over the finish line in a tight race for an Ohio Senate seat.) He has brought up the number of vacations Mr. Vance has taken as vice president. (Mr. Trump does not generally take them.)”
The president has also has repeatedly mentioned the vice president’s initial opposition to starting Trump’s wildly unpopular war with Iran and has even pointed this out in front of. Vance, saying “I’m more of a peace person than you are — but I had to do it,” according to the Times. And Trump has also questioned his decision to send a delegation led by the vice president to an international negotiation — which ultimately failed to end Trump’s war....
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One would see by now that Trump is mentally impaired and unfit for his office. Only the most retarded can't see this.
Trump has definitely overplayed his hand this time — Robert Reich
When the history of the sordid and cruel megalomaniac who now occupies the Oval Office is written, it may well be that his deal with himself to set up a $1.8 billion fund for reimbursing anyone he feels was harmed by the federal government is chronicled as the final straw.
Why not Trump’s absurd tariffs, which are really import taxes passed on to consumers? Why not Trump’s needless war against Iran, which caused prices to soar and is unlikely to result in a better deal on its nuclear ambitions than the one struck by Obama? Why not his cruel ICE and Border Patrol dragnets? Why not the Epstein files or dozens of other lawless or outrageous things he’s done?
I think because almost everyone knows that the fund will be used to pay off Trump’s supporters — including the 1,500 who attacked the U.S. Capitol and then were imprisoned for it — and that paying them is a bridge too far.
This morning a federal judge barred the government from taking steps to launch the fund or process payments at least until a hearing is held in June in a pending lawsuit challenging its legality.
The order came in a case brought by a group of individuals and entities who say they have faced partisan attacks by the Trump regime but who say they expect to be excluded from accessing the fund.
It’s unusual, to say the least, that such a group would be recognized by a court as having standing to bring such a suit, because their status is entirely speculative. They merely expect to be excluded. But such is the level of cynicism about the motives and processes of Trump that even a district court judge would automatically recognize the validity of such an expectation....
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This is always what happens when a criminal is given carte blance from an alledged authority. In this case, SCOTUS, which also holds criminal members.
Shut Up, John Roberts: A Supreme Court Corruption Rant — Cliff Schecter
Musk spent $300MM of his own money on the '24 election, something that would've made the Founders puke and only possible because of the biggest set of villains: 6 Republicans in robes on the SCOTUS. 2 due to stolen seats. You'd think that'd make them a bit more circumspect. Nope!
Folks, you know the deal. We have an illegitimate POTUS. A convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, Putin-fluffing traitor. Lost the popular vote by nearly 3MM his first run even as Russia helped him. The second run his margin was historically puny and real questions remain about voting machine vulnerabilities and sketchy Trump/Musk claims.
And we know Russia called in bomb threats to Democratic polling locations. There were Democratic voter purges by GOP Secretaries of State in GA, FL, OH, etc. The FoxNews-ish right-wing + corporate media affect. Sadly, Democratic meekness in standing up to all of this.
Congress is illegitimate. Republicans probably owe 15-20 seats to gerrymandering. There are the voter purges. And the billionaire predators like Musk, who spent $300MM on the '24 election, something that would've made the Founders puke and only made possible by perhaps the biggest set of villains: The 6 Republicans in robes, or flaccid fascists, on SCOTUS. 2 due to stolen seats...
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But the Trump Crime Syndicate is falling apart at the seams!
Judge Opens Fraud Inquiry Into Trump’s Slush Fund
Democracy Docket reports:
A federal judge is probing whether President Donald Trump’s lawyers made the court a “victim of a fraud” by colluding through his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to create the controversial “anti-weaponization” fund.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams opened the inquiry Friday evening, giving Trump’s lawyers until June 12 to respond to allegations that they deceived the court to obtain the $1.8 billion settlement connected to the IRS lawsuit.
The allegations stem from a brief filed by a group of 35 former federal judges who asked the court to reopen the case due to questions about “manipulation of the judicial system.”
“The Court was deceived,” reads their brief. The fund was already temporarily blocked earlier Friday by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who said the hold was necessary to ensure no money was “irreversibly disbursed” from it, since several lawsuits are pending against it.
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That didn't take long to see it was a boondoogle for a crime spree!
Trump Calls James Talarico “This Transgender”
The Wrap reports:
Donald Trump came under fire Friday evening after the president appeared to call Texas Senate candidate James Talarico “this transgender” during a Fox News interview.
The controversy sparked after a sneak peek of Lara Trump’s interview with her father-in-law, which is set to air on Saturday, was released online Friday.
Trump bemoaned the left’s stance on the inclusion of transgender athletes in sports, noting, “They won’t change men playing in women’s sports. They won’t, you know, this transgender, this guy running in Texas, he says there are six genders. He wears a mask all the time. He’s a disaster candidate.”
"What does transgender have to do with high gas prices, the unnecessary war in Iran, AI job losses, record deficit, the Arch and Ballroom wasteful spending and the Epstein files?" — Dick Johnson IV (comments)
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Yes, Dumbo. He's a disaster for you and your goddamn crime spree! What a sick fuck Trump is!
US Chamber Of Commerce And Retail Group Blasts Plan To Halt Customs Operations In Blue “Sanctuary Cities”
Reuters reports:
Major airline, travel and business groups warned that barring border processing at Newark or other major U.S. ?airports could lead to chaos, strand thousands of tourists and Americans trying to get home, and prevent crucial cargo shipments.
Halting ?customs operations at major U.S. airports “threatens to cause unnecessary chaos throughout the nation’s air transportation system,” said the U.S. ?Chamber of Commerce, Airlines for America, National Retail Federation, U.S. Travel and other groups in a joint statement on Friday.
“International aviation networks are highly interconnected, and operational changes at a small number of gateway airports will quickly ripple across the country, negatively impacting travelers, cargo ?shipments, supply chains, and the communities that depend on those connections,” they said.
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Another Trump Nazi that hates America! JOHNWAYNE MULLIN!
The Trump self-loathing is remarkable.
New York Gov Enacts New Restrictions On ICE Agents
Gothamist reports:
Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday signed into law a set of sweeping protections for immigrant New Yorkers, including a ban on law enforcement officers wearing masks and a measure barring local police statewide from enforcing civil immigration laws.
One law also bars Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from entering so-called “sensitive locations,” such as churches, schools and polling places. Another law allows individuals to sue ICE for alleged constitutional violations.
“On behalf of the people of the state of New York, this is our time to act,” Hochul said. “It’s time to show the nation and Washington who we are.”
Hochul, a Democrat, signed the bills at state offices in New York City, amid a crowd of immigration advocates, faith leaders and immigrants and families of immigrants that officials said had been affected by ICE arrests.
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Criminals usually pay no attention to restrictions. But we gotta try something before it comes to bullets.
Trump Screams After Judge Strips His Name From Kennedy Center: I’m Giving Its Operation To Congress
“Shockingly, a Judge appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, Christopher Cooper, ruled that The Kennedy Center, which was going to close in early July for largescale renovations and construction due to years of neglect, decay, and poor maintenance, and which was to be transformed by the Trump Administration into the Finest Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World, is not allowed to close for these renovations, which would not be possible to properly do without such a closure.
“Additionally, Judge Cooper ruled that the 36 Member Board of Trustees, which unanimously voted to add the name ‘TRUMP’ onto the former Kennedy Center, making it The Trump Kennedy Center, did not have the right to do such an addition, and the name, ‘TRUMP,’ must be removed.
“The Kennedy Center has lost, over the years, prior to our getting involved a short while ago, Hundreds of Millions of Dollars — In some cases, including ridiculous construction jobs that were done, over 100 Million Dollars a year....
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One of his tantrums may lead to a deadly stroke.
Bill Maher Brutally Torches Trump’s Cratering Concert — Mary Papenfuss
“Real Time” host Bill Maher bashed Donald Trump’s plans for America’s 250th birthday concert—and he had fun while doing it.
“Lot of exciting things,” Maher laughed in his Friday monologue about Trump’s imagined musical extravaganza at the Great American State Fair, to take place on the National Mall to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday.
“After they announced this all-star lineup of musical guests, a lot of them said, ‘No, what are you talking about? We’re not playing,’” Maher said. ”That’s got to hurt a lot—when you can’t close the deal with Milli Vanilli.”
Milli Vanilli won the Best New Artist Grammy in 1990 for recordings that were later revealed to have been performed by studio session musicians. Their Grammy was rescinded—the first and only time this has happened in Grammy history.
Milli Vanilli’s original Fab Morvan will appear at the Freedom 250 concerts, as will rapper Vanilla Ice. “I don’t even vote, so I don’t even care,” Vanilla Ice told TMZ. The concerts will run June 25 to July 10.
Maher cracked that inviting Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice “is very admirable about the president; it shows he’s concerned about the unemployed.”
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Milli Vanilli Ice "doesn't even vote," he says. Cancel him as he has rejected his duty as a citizen of this country. If you don't have a voting record you cannot perform at a celebration of America. Sorry, loser!
Trump’s 'White Trash Nation' torn apart by conservative — Adam Lynch
Conservative Dispatch writer Kevin D. Williamson says he speaks with experience when he calls the sordid antics of President Donald Trump the trashy things that they are — because Williamson knows white trash when he sees it.
...“Dodging bill collectors, staging weird personal psychodrama scenes in public, getting stupid drunk, facing eviction lawsuits, brawling while the neighbors look on and cringe — that’s what white trash does,” assured Williamson. And “it does not matter whether you live in a trailer park or a brick ranch house or something more grand and getting grander, it is all the same: Tornado bait is tornado bait.”
“[So,] when the Trump administration announced that it was staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, I knew what I was seeing,” said Williamson. “It is as familiar to me as the taste of canned Ranch Style Beans on cornbread or the smell of cigarette smoke soaking into Dacron-upholstered office furniture and slick tallowy well-yellowed linoleum in the grim waiting rooms outside those weepy Al-Anon meetings my mother dragged me to for a while because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. I know my people. My people know what they like.”
“It took 250 years, but you got here,” said Williamson. “All the way down here. From Greatest Generation to White Trash Nation in the space of one lifetime. Welcome to my world, America.”
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This is Trump's support group.
Social media cackles as prosecutor deserts Trump’s 'stupid' Comey prosecution — Adam Lynch
NBC News reports the rookie federal prosecutor who led the case accusing former FBI Director James Comey of threatening President Donald Trump’s life has abandoned the case, and social media is rolling.
“Matthew Petracca, who had been recently hired as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina, is no longer on the Comey case, according to a court filing,” reports NBC News, adding that Petracca also “dropped off of other criminal cases in the Eastern District of North Carolina in recent days, according to court filings.”
Petracca, a former Republican county committeeman in New Jersey hired months ago, had considered leaving the Justice Department altogether, according to two anonymous sources speaking with NBC News. But he instead remained a DOJ employee after taking a week off. NBC reports Petracca had not responded to earlier requests for comment on his employment status at the Justice Department, and did not respond to an additional requests for comment on Friday. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Social media, however, cheered Petracca’s decision.
“Good. Because any lawyer (or anyone, really) knows this is just Trump abusing his office because he’s a vindictive monster,” posted Bulwark founder and publisher Sarah Longwell on X....
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Everyone but the trailer trash is onto your con now, Donnie.
American culture is 'throwing up all over' sundowning Trump: analyst — Adam Lynch
“… Where is the fear that people had in January of 2025, … when Trump seemed like he could be more permanent? All of that is gone, now,” said Heilemann. “The question now is just ‘how can we outlast him? And can we keep enough of the country together and the institutions of the country together?’ Because he's not going to leave a lasting mark on the country. We can see that now. The culture is throwing up all over Donald Trump right now. And I think that that gives us gives people some measure of hope about what's recoverable here with a lot of hard work after he's gone."
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The clean-up after the storm is what we are looking toward now.
Trump Voters Slam the President on MS NOW: ‘He Doesn’t Care About Us’ — Kathryn Wilkens
During Friday’s edition of MS NOW’s Katy Tur Reports, multiple Texans who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 slammed the commander-in-chief, with one declaring, “He doesn’t care about us.”
The segment, focused on the infiltration of AI data centers in Texas Hill Country communities, was led by MS NOW’s Josh Einiger, who explained that “there are people who are very, very upset with what’s going on,” adding that “they feel like there’s been no transparency in how these things are built.”
Einiger interviewed ranch owner Rena Schroeder, who said that despite voting for Trump and being a lifelong Republican, she now thinks he’s responsible for supporting tech companies in building these massive data centers by reducing regulations on their construction last year.
“He doesn’t care about us,” she told Einiger, referencing the moment earlier this month when the president admitted that the financial struggles of Americans motivate him “not even a little bit” to end the war in Iran. “I couldn’t even watch that. I was angry after that. Like, I voted for you, and you don’t care about me?”
Another voter and lifelong Republican, Cheryl Shadden, had complaints about the noise that these data centers produce, describing it as similar to “living on the edge of Niagara Falls.”
She told Einiger that she plans to vote for Democratic candidate James Talarico instead of Trump-backed candidate Ken Paxton in the upcoming Senate race, explaining, “My entire community is gonna break ranks. Everybody. All of us. We’ve had enough.”
“Red or blue, if you vote against data centers, we vote for you,” Shadden added. When asked if she thought data centers would flip the Senate seat in the upcoming race from Republican to Democrat, Schroeder responded, “100%.”...
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The hard right in Texas are forming a team to get rid of the curse he has put upon them.
Tell it to the smirky boy, Jesse Waters. He will love to hear it.
Daily Wire Begs Country Stars To Perform For Trump’s 250th Celebration — Jennifer Bowers Bahney
The right-wing Daily Wire is trying to throw the Trump administration a life preserver by begging country music stars to “do the right thing” and perform on the National Mall for President Donald Trump’s “Freedom 250” concert series.
The plea came as musical acts like Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, and the original singers in Milli Vanilli have all backed out over concerns the event was being politicized, with several musicians saying they were not informed what the concert series would be. In fact, as of Friday, only Vanilla Ice, Flo Rida, and Fab Morvan — the survivor of the two Milli Vanilli frontmen who were caught lip-syncing during the group’s heyday — were still on the bill. Freedom Williams, the lead rapper from C+C Music Factory posted a video that initially said he was out but then indicated he might still perform; the group’s co-founder Robert Clivillés, will not be participating and sharply denounced both the concert series itself and Williams’ use of the group’s name....
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Wow! The trailer trash are on their knees to get their has-beens to entertain them once again. Maybe they don't like your seditious politics now. Sorry, losers. America wants now music like Bad Bunny!
Judge: Kennedy Center Must Remove Trump’s Name
The Washington Post reports:
A federal judge Friday ordered that President Donald Trump’s name be removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and that officials halt its plan to close the venue for two years.
In a pair of rulings, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper granted in part Rep. Joyce Beatty’s (D-Ohio) request for a preliminary injunction to temporarily block Trump from taking any further steps toward closing the institution. The judge also ordered Kennedy Center officials to remove Trump’s name within two weeks.
The ruling throws the Kennedy Center’s near future into uncertainty, blocking leaders from shutting down the performing arts venue after they have canceled most performances in anticipation of the closure.
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The swift sword of justice! May it forever slice fascist bastards!
May his name be erased from the universe.
Donahue Compares Mamdani To “KKK Imperial Wizard
From hate group leader Bill Donohue:
For 61 straight years, every mayor of New York City has marched in the annual Israel Day Parade. But not this year. Zohran Mamdani, the Muslim Marxist Millionaire, told Jewish New Yorkers to take a hike.
“While I will not be attending the Israel Day Parade,” he said, “my lack of attendance should not be mistaken for a refusal to provide security or the necessary permits for its safety.” How magnanimous of him.
Had he tried to deny a permit, he would have gotten a licking in court. Ditto had he tried to prohibit a police presence.
As for safety concerns, it is ironic that this same man who fought a law providing a buffer zone around houses of worship (he yielded only when the vote was veto proof), and vetoed a similar law for schools, made sure that on Tuesday the streets near his mansion had a huge buffer zone—the police had barricades all over—keeping anti-Mamdani protesters away. I was proud to have spoken at the rally.
Quite frankly, the sight of Mamdani marching in a Jewish parade is on a par with the Imperial Wizard of the KKK marching in an African American parade. The mind boggles.
Mamdani is a particularly lousy fit to march in this year’s Israel Day Parade. Why? Because the theme is “Proud Americans, Proud Zionists.”
He’s made it abundantly clear that he is not a proud American, and his hatred of Zionists is undeniable. Mamdani need not pout. After all, he will not feel unwelcome for long. The day after the parade marks the beginning of Gay Pride Month.
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So this racist Nazi is glad Mamdami is not marching. Nice to see. Thanks for your support of muslims and their genocide by a Hebrew gone mad.
USPS Draws Up Plan To Greatly Limit Mailing Of Ballots
Democracy Docket reports:
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said in a yet-to-be-published proposed rule Friday that it’s drawing up plans to radically crack down on mail voting by sending ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government.
The proposed rule, which will be formally published next week, is an alarming step toward implementing President Donald Trump’s sweeping attack on mail voting ahead of the 2026 midterm election. And it would represent a massive expansion of federal control over voting, without congressional authorization.
Trump signed a sweeping executive order in March that, in part, ordered the Postal Service to only send mail ballots to voters on lists created and controlled by the federal government.
The order is currently the subject of multiple lawsuits. USPS’s proposed rule came a day after a federal judge overseeing one of the lawsuits against Trump’s order declined to block it, saying federal agencies hadn’t yet taken steps to implement it. They now appear to have done so.
"The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said in a yet-to-be-published proposed rule Friday that it’s drawing up plans to radically crack down on mail voting by sending ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government.
ZERO fucking authority to interfere with state election. I hope lawsuits are being written, ready to drop as soon as this is published."
— DaddySnark
"The Feds don't run elections. The states do. I'm betting even the red states tell Trump and this rule to Fuck Off like when Trump's DOJ demanded voter rolls from every state." — vap (comments)
"Since the STATES administer elections in EACH STATE individually, there's NO FUCKING REASON that voters have to "register" with the Federal Government in order to vote, this totally SMACKS of TOTALITARIANISM!!! Facism to the extreme, control the elections and you can dictate who wins, ala Putin's shocking overwhelming election every time he runs, simply because the NATIONAL GOVERNMENT CONTROLS THE ELECTIONS! This can NOT stand this needs to be fought with every single legal bullet in the Lawyers arsenal, and if necessary right up to SCOTUS. Totally ILLEGAL move by the USPS!" — BartmanLA (comments)
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Absolute treason by retarded nitwit traitors.The Post Offices will be razed! Bloody revolutions have been started for less!
Elections are run by the states. States rights, motherfuckers! Remember how your seditious asses used to scream about how important it was to you? What up, with that, turncoats?
Shitting on our Constitution. If you Nazi asswipes think you've seen what redemption looks like, think again.
The firing squads and guillotines will be busy when this administration pays for their crime.
Watters: Does “Low T Talafreako” Even Own A Gun Or A Truck, Watch Football, Or “Wear Women’s Underwear?”
“There’s more evidence that this guy is an omnivore. When he was ordering breakfast tacos with Barack Hussein Obama, he ordered a potato, egg, and cheese. No chorizo! Potato, egg, and cheese.
“I have questions I want reporters to ask low T Talafreako. Does James Talarico even own a gun? Is James Talarico a Cowboys fan? A Houston Texans fan? Does he even know the Spurs are playing tonight?>
“Has Talarico ever even been to a football game or is he more of a World Cup guy? Does Talarico own a truck? Does he believe in premarital sex? Does he wear women’s underwear?
“These are things local reporters should be pressing him on.” – Confessed adulterer Jesse Watters, who says that it’s effeminate for men to cross their legs, eat ice cream cones, and use a straw.
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Come to Texass fough guy. Show your face and find out who owns a gun, you shitstain.You are a pitifully weak and retarded even for a white man.
Tesla Insiders Admit Self-Driving Is a Complete Disaster — Joe Wilkins
It turns out not even the people building Tesla’s self-driving tech trust Elon Musk’s extravagant claims about the company’s autonomous vehicles.
New reporting by Reuters interviewed nine former data labelers and a former self-driving engineer about their take on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving mode. The results were overwhelmingly negative, with seven of the data specialists admitting they wouldn’t ride in a Tesla in FSD.
“We have all seen it fail,” one Tesla insider told Reuters. “Definitely don’t trust Elon on this,” the self-driving engineer concurred, referencing Musks’ declaration that the the vehicles are ready for “safe unsupervised” rides.
One erstwhile worker told the publication they wouldn’t ride in a Tesla robotaxi “if you f**king paid me.”
At least five data labelers, whose job was to comb through hours of FSD footage to train the vehicle’s software to avoid past mistakes, told Reuters they routinely saw clips of Teslas driving above the speed limit, an issue which engineers and managers treated like a low-priority compared to edge-case issues.
Those glowing recommendations come amidst concerns that Tesla’s FSD mode may never be truly safe enough for public roads.
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Just like Tesla's owner.
Kids Are Flying Into Lunatic Rages When Their iPads Are Taken Away — Frank Landymore
Parents say their kids are going ballistic when they take their iPads away from them, leaving them unsure of what normal behavior might be — and whether there’s something sinister going on with their child’s connection to the devices.
Rachel, a mother of two, tried limiting her son Jonah’s screen time by warning him that he had put down his iPad to leave for a birthday party at 11 AM. Despite the repeated warnings the day before and several reminders before the hour mark, when it came time to leave, Jonah had a meltdown.
“He just left his body,” the mother told The Cut of her son, who hurled the electronics and started screaming: “You said I had until 11! It’s not 11 yet! You’re always doing this!”
Jonah followed her around the house, distraught, until finally collapsing on the kitchen floor and refusing to move.
“I remember standing there thinking, I don’t know this person,” she recalled. “I genuinely did not recognize him.”
Thirty minutes later, he tied his shoes, got in the car, and acted like nothing had happened.
“That’s the part that really messes with you,” Rachel says. “How fast they come back.”
Think that’s bad? Hear what Nora had told The Cut about her 13-year-old son when she asked to check his phone settings: he accused Nora of ruining his life, before dropping a grenade in conversation.
“You make me want to kill myself,” he lashed out....
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LOL! Don't tell me adults won't do the same.
Corporations Reeling From Huge AI Costs With No Clear Benefits — Victor Tangermann
Companies that fell head over heels for AI are experiencing a rude awakening.
Costs to access powerful AI tools are soaring, forcing company leaders to ask some difficult questions. As Axios reports, the early warning signs are already here, with Microsoft planning to remove its Anthropic Claude Code licenses after opening up access to the tool just six months ago, reportedly for financial reasons.
Uber COO Andrew Macdonald also admitted during a recent podcast appearance that gains in productivity simply weren’t being reflected in the company’s soaring AI-related expenses.
Meanwhile, industry leaders including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are walking back their initial claims that AI will lead to a jobs apocalypse, further stoking concerns that the tech may not be all it was initially cracked up to be during the height of the AI hype cycle.
It’s a perfect storm as companies ponder the real-world benefits from their costly investments in AI, if there even are any. That’s particularly true for companies finding that some of their employees are using AI models for meaningless tasks — like checking the weather, as one CTO told Axios, which is an incredibly expensive and roundabout way of getting a meteorological update.
CloudBees CEO Anuj Kapur told the publication that use cases for the tech are limited and that the “reality of AI right now is that it only works for coding.”
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Or selling fertilizer. Tough titty, suckers.
Brooke Rollins Lies About 'Massive Fraud', Kicks People Off SNAP Without Proof — John Amato
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins spoke today at Post Farms in Marana, Arizona, to local cotton producers about farm economics, bragging that the Trump administration has kicked 4 million people off of SNAP programs but has no idea how many were because of fraud.
Rollins was there to try and promote Trump's trade deals that led the way for a disastrous US economy, where farmers are struggling, despite the lie the Big Ugly bill is making agriculture and small businesses great again.
(Please, don't puke on your computer.)
Rollins was asked about the cuts to the SNAP program. She said it was an important program for struggling people and families, but then attacked Biden and said under his watch there was a 40% increase in the amount of assistance going out.
Yeah, it was because of COVID, you vulture. Millions of people lost their jobs and needed help and still need help.
This reprobate claimed the states shucked their responsibilities and offered no accountability when doling out the funds, but that is a Big FAT LIE.
Here's another unproven whopper.
"Actually live people using dead people's Social Security numbers, but 200,000 dead people getting assistance," Rollins stated. We found 500,000 people getting more than one benefit when they should only get one."
They've refused to release any data on these numbers so it's a lie, too. It's what they do. They lie, and cause people to starve.
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These inhumans only think the people will starve. They will live to cut her throat at election time.
Everyone’s Fleeing Trump’s Freedom 250 Concerts — Inae Oh
It hasn’t even been two days since Freedom 250, the Trump-tied group organizing a bunch of celebrations ostensibly in honor of America’s 250th birthday, announced the lineup for its Great American State Fair concert series. But the series already appears dead on arrival, with more than half of the scheduled performers fleeing.
The latest? Bret Michaels of Poison fame, who announced on Instagram:
“Unfortunately, what was presented to us as a celebration of our country has evolved into something much more divisive than what I agreed to be a part of. Concerns have also been raised regarding the safety of my fans, band, crew, family and myself, including threats that are completely unfounded and unforgivable. Because of that, I have made the difficult decision to step away from this performance.”
As of this writing, Michaels is now one of six of the originally scheduled nine acts to pull out. Some cited the overwhelmingly negative response to their participation in the Trump-backed events; others claimed they didn’t realize the events would be politically charged. They include Milli Vanilli, Martina McBride, Young MC, The Commodores, and Morris Day & The Time. Somewhat up in the air is C+C Music Factory, after its lead vocalist complained on social media that he “doesn’t fuck with Trump.” For now, Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida remain steadfast in their commitments, but anything can change.
So, what other bottom-of-the-barrel performers might we expect to save the fledgling series? Kid Rock? The Village People? Can a country’s humiliation get worse? Yes, it seems so.
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Never knew an artist that wanted to play a gig in a shit hole.
The Murder of ‘60 Minutes’ — Jonathan V. Last
1. Corporate
This week a bunch of people you’ve likely never heard of were pushed out of 60 Minutes by Bari Weiss. Simultaneously, Weiss handed control of the program to someone else you’ve probably never heard of.
I know how boring that sounds, but it’s important. What is happening at 60 Minutes is a demonstration of how institutions fail in an age of autocracy. And it is an object lesson in the dangers corporate ownership poses to free media.
This is inside baseball. But you need to understand it. Let’s go.
60 Minutes is the crown jewel of American broadcast journalism. When journalism migrated from the page to the screen, it was mostly a bad thing for society. But 60 Minutes was the best-case scenario—an example of what serious investigative journalism could achieve in the TV format.
Part of the show’s success was economic. 60 Minutes didn’t just produce outstanding journalism—it made money. It proved that good journalism could succeed on TV and didn’t need to be regarded as a charity or a loss-leader. In 2024, just as a for-instance, 60 Minutes made $206 million in advertising.
Because of this industry-leading success, the show has always been allowed to run independently within the organization that is CBS News. 60 Minutes was its own beast, a state within a state. The show’s independence was such a big deal that when CBS corporate interfered with it in the 1990s, the whole world took notice and Michael Mann made a big-budget movie about the incident.
That’s the backdrop.
Last fall, David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, purchased Bari Weiss’s pro-Trump website, the Free Press, for $150 million. As part of the deal he put Weiss in charge of CBS News, where she quickly went to work making the division’s products more friendly to Donald Trump. We don’t need to recapitulate the entire history here; it is enough to note that, as a business matter, Weiss’s tenure has been an abject failure. Ratings are down across CBS News properties.
But as a corporate matter, Weiss has been a success. First, as a way of greasing the skids of Ellison’s purchase of Paramount, he publicly signaled that he would give Weiss a prominent role at CBS News long before he bought her. Then, once she was put in charge and started breaking things, she made Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery all the more politically appealing to Trump. Trump publicly praised Weiss, and when Ellison and Netflix got into a bidding war for Warner-Discovery, the president stepped in to thumb the scales and make sure everyone knew that he would approve a sale to Ellison but not to Netflix.
So under Weiss, CBS News has been a failure, both in terms of product and business. The journalism at CBS News is getting worse and the audience is leaving. But the particular manner in which CBS News has failed—by broadcasting its obeisance to Trump—has enabled tremendous success by the division’s corporate parent.
This is what happens in a command economy when the head of the government picks winners and losers. CBS News no longer exists as a unit whose purpose is to create journalism that attracts an audience and drives revenue. Its purpose is to keep the president happy so that Ellison’s other businesses prosper.
It’s not quite right to say that CBS News under Weiss is a charity. It’s more like an ongoing bribe....
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May the low IQ traitors die of slow stomach cancer.
What Does Trump Do After He Rapes and Defames You? — Robert Reich
We Now Know
Friends,
Trump’s Department of Injustice Justice has opened a criminal investigation into writer E. Jean Carroll.
I’ve spoken with E. Jean about her cases against Trump and her fabulous (and, believe it or not, hilarious) book about what she’s been through — Not My Type: One Woman Versus a President), which I can’t recommend highly enough. (See the interview Heather Lofthouse and I did with E. Jean on March 14, above.)
First, some background:
In 2022, Carroll alleged that a chance encounter with Trump in at Bergdorf Goodman's Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s ended violently — that Trump slammed her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights, and forced himself into her.
In May 2023 a federal jury in New York unanimously found that Trump was liable for sexually abusing Carroll. The judge in that trial clarified that Trump didn’t just “sexually abuse” her. He “raped” her:
The finding of sexual abuse “does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.” Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
(When Trump sued ABC News over George Stephanopoulos’s assertion that Trump had raped Carroll, ABC chose to give in and pay Trump $16 million rather than rely on the judge’s clarification.)
The jury also found that Trump had defamed Carroll by saying she had lied about the assault. The jury awarded Carroll $5 million.
Trump appealed, but the verdict was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A three-judge panel unanimously rejected Trump’s request for a new trial, concluding that he had “not demonstrated that the district court erred in any of the challenged rulings.”
(Last November, Trump asked the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling. It has yet to decide whether to hear the case.)
After the verdict, Trump denied he had assaulted Carroll and called her claims "a complete con job," a “Hoax and a lie,” and saying she was not his "type."
Trump’s comments caused Carroll to charge Trump with defaming her once again. After this second trial, a unanimous jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million.
The verdict included $65 million in punitive damages. The jury found that Trump had acted with malice in defaming Carroll a second time. Her lawyers had argued that a large verdict was necessary to “make him stop” his attacks on her — which he continued at news conferences, in social media posts and during the trial itself.
The $83.3 million verdict was upheld by a Second Circuit appeals court in a unanimous three-judge ruling, in which the judges found that Trump “never wavered or relented in his public attacks” on Carroll, and that she was subjected to public harassment as a result of his statements, including death threats and threats of physical injury.
Trump has vowed to appeal this case to the Supreme Court as well.
And now Trump is using the Justice Department as another cudgel against the woman he sexually abused (the judge said “raped”)....
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Yes, we do know. He rapes and defames you again. Devil's Island for the rapist!
Reagan Burned Down the American Dream — Can We Still Save What’s Left? — Thom Hartmann
We’re over it, Republicans; we want fun and meaning back in our lives, rather than just working ourselves to death so Bezos and Zuck can buy new yachts.
A new national survey of Americans finds that almost half of us (48%) say our lives are “lacking in fun” with fully 12% saying they can’t recall the last time they had an entire day they could simply enjoy. More than half (57%) said this was because they couldn’t afford to have fun, which makes perfect sense when you consider how 45 years of Reaganomics have destroyed the union movement and progressive taxation, and thus gutted the American middle class.
Like idiots, we Americans bought Reagan’s siren song hook, line, and sinker back in 1980. He told us prosperity would “trickle down” if we just abandoned the largely non-profit healthcare system we had nationwide (most states required hospitals and health insurance companies to be nonprofits), the unions that fought for us to have good pay and benefits, enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, free college, and subsidized housing.
Reagan put what’s sometimes called “the neoliberal agenda” (I wrote a book about it: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America”) into place and no president, Republican or Democratic, has fully repealed it. We still have few union members, low taxes on billionaires and corporations, profitized healthcare and education, and stagnant wages for working class people.
All because we believed the Republicans and their billionaire backers and media owners. Consider how they’ve played three generations for fools:
Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.
Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $70 trillion was transferred over 45 years from the bottom 90% to the top .1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.
Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted wherever they wanted it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.
“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the Second Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill politicians like they tried to do on January 6th. Five corrupt in-the-NRA’s-pocket Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about history to make guns more widely available.
Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world....
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Well...
If ICE Shows Up at the World Cup, Essential Service Workers Are Ready to Strike — Sasha Abramsky
Hotel staff and food service workers who keep SoFi stadium functioning say they’ll walk off the job if ICE is present.
As the World Cup nears, Los Angeles’s service workers — the people who staff hotels and keep the restaurants and bars going inside the city’s big stadium — have threatened to go on strike if the tournament becomes hunting grounds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
They have good reason to be worried. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has indicated that it may not routinely check attendees’ immigration status, but it has fudged on the broader issue of ICE presence, saying its agents will be available at soccer games.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Congress earlier this year that “ICE, specifically homeland security investigations, is a key part of the overall security apparatus for the World Cup.” Newly appointed DHS head Markwayne Mullin has told agents to be prepared to be “out there every day.” Yet, faced with lagging hotel bookings around the country for the World Cup and the risk that international fans will be scared off by reports of preparations for heavy-handed ICE actions, DHS officials have also been trying to assure host cities that they won’t be making arrests at the stadiums.
Unite Here Local 11, which has had a long run of recent successes in its efforts to unionize hotels, airport concessions, and other parts of LA’s hospitality industry, wants to force the issue. The union’s leadership indicated last week that more than 2,000 workers are prepared to walk off the job at SoFi stadium should ICE agents show up during the World Cup.
“Our members are super-charged about this,” Kurt Petersen, co-president of the local, told Truthout. “The threat to workers’ safety is very real, and people are going to have to make decisions about what they’re going to do.” Petersen says several of the union’s members have been detained during anti-immigration surges over the past year; while union lawyers have largely been successful in securing their release, the fear amongst immigrant workers — including those with documentation — is pervasive....
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Fuck ICE back to hell.
Harris Faulkner, Very Stupid Idiot — Evan Hurst
Here is Harris Faulkner, the shameless and remarkably two-faced Fox News host who cannot be as internally stupid as the suits pay her to be, reacting to Plumbercrack DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, scratching himself and shooting his guns in the air and making threats to punish sanctuary cities by pulling CBP presence, effectively banning international flights from landing there.
“Newark Airport alone handles 130 to 150 international flights per day on average, carrying 20,000 passengers. The latest DHS list of sanctuary cities includes Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and along with Newark. All of those airports handle 1100 international flights per day, carrying around 185,000 passengers,” she said.
“Well, they’re not just going to not fly. They’re going to go to places where they’re not sanctuary districts. They’re going to go to red states and cities. And what will that look like? A boon for the red states, and again, people will just really hate living in blue states and their sanctuary districts,” she added.
See what we mean? She cannot possibly be that stupid for real in her heart and in her brain. It must be written into the contract.
People on the internet had, um, lots of thoughts.
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The stupid fucks just get stupider.
Voldemort: When Low Testosterone Transgender Vegan Talarico Gets A Blood Test, Soy Milk Comes Out
“Well, first of all, I think it’s very bold, one could say brave, courageous, that the Democratic Party would choose Texas of all places to nominate their first transgender Senate candidate. He’s clearly transitioning into a female.
“You know, when Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn’t come out; instead, soy milk comes out. This man has less testosterone than Jasmine Crockett. It is a mind boggling choice. They would choose a person to run for that office who looks like he doesn’t belong in the Senate but in a cabaret show.
“Look, at the end of the day, I have a hard time believing that the people of Texas, some of the toughest, roughest, strongest men and women, the pioneer heritage, the frontier history, from the Mexican-American war, through the Alamo and everything else are going to choose somebody with that much soy to be a U.S. senator compared to a real conservative patriotic god-fearing and truly beloved statewide figure in Ken Paxton.” – Stephen Miller, speaking to a giggling Jesse Watters.
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We know who the retards are in this crowd.
These stupid shits don't even know wnat a Vegan is. One thing for sure is Talarico is NOT one. And as Seinfeld used to say "not that there's anything wrong with that," you chickenshits.
They are so scared of Talarico they shit their diapers daily!
Sen. Mike Lee Accuses Talarico Of Child Sacrifice
Raw Story reports:
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) left critics dumbfounded on Friday after suggesting that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate from Texas, would engage in religious child sacrifice.
The official social media account on X for the Democratic Party promoted Talarico’s candidacy this week with a simple message: “James Talarico is the only candidate who will put you first.” Lee, known for his controversial online remarks, issued a response just hours later.
“James Talarico will put you first… On the altar to Moloch,” Lee wrote, referencing the ancient figure of Moloch mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and associated with child sacrifice.
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Time to put retarded monsters in stir. This one has no human trait whatsoever. Perhaps he is the biggest chickenshit on planet Earth.
ICE Thug Wanted In MN Shooting Captured In Texas
The New York Times reports:
Law enforcement officials from Minnesota and Texas on Friday arrested an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant this year and lying about it.
The agent, Christian J. Castro, 52, was caught in Texas after investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension tracked him down, according to the Hennepin County attorney’s office, which had charged him with four counts of second-degree assault this month. He faces an additional charge of filing a false police report.
“Today’s arrest is a critical step forward in our prosecution of Mr. Castro,” Mary Moriarty, the Hennepin County attorney, said in a statement.
Daniel Borgertpoepping, a spokesman for the office, said that investigators from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General and from the Texas Rangers had helped take Mr. Castro into custody.
"Now where are the thugs that killed Good and Pretti?" — vap (comments)
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Not bad for the low IQ Texass government.
E. Jean Carroll still terrifies Trump — Amanda Marcotte
Justice Department efforts to rewrite history show #MeToo still matters
The smartest way for Donald Trump to deal with his E. Jean Carroll problem would be to accept defeat, pay her what he owes and never speak of her again. Both the media and the public seem, sadly, to have moved on after not one but two civil juries found in May 2023 and January 2024 that the retired journalist told the truth when she said Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the ’90s. Even though he has been accused of sexual abuse or harassment by more than two dozen women, a majority of voters either forgot or didn’t care enough about the allegations by the time the November 2024 election came around, instead voting him back into the White House. With this history, the politically wise move for the president would be to stop creating news hooks reminding everyone that his violent, misogynist rhetoric isn’t just a schtick, but a hateful ideology he’s inflicted on real women....
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May he live in fear and be tortured until he departs for hell.
Trump’s latest 'Hail Mary' just crashed and burned — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump's latest ploy to achieve peace in the Middle East was called a "Hail Mary" by The Hill, and according to a new report from the outlet, it has already crashed and burned in the face of reality.
On Monday, Trump demanded that more nations in the Middle East and Gulf state regions sign on to the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic agreement brokered during his first term that attempted to normalize relations between Israel and various Arab nations. Only a few of the latter nations have since signed on, however, including the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain and Sudan. The accords have been criticized by leaders in the Middle East and experts for a variety of reasons, most notably their lack of provisions to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict....
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Trump's war is over. And we are the losers.
Loathed Trump struggling to avoid boos at public appearances — Adam Lynch
MS NOW reports President Donald Trump — or at least his handlers — know well how much the public is hating on him right now.
“Since Teddy Roosevelt, American presidents have regularly given commencement addresses at this time of year. … But setting aside the substance of the speeches, the locations themselves are telling — and that is especially true for President Donald Trump,” MS NOW reports, pointing out that Trump has limited his speaking engagements to military academies like the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy.
“… [T]the only nonmilitary colleges at which Trump has given commencement addresses in both of his terms were the private, evangelical Liberty University in 2017 and the University of Alabama in 2025, both just months after taking office,” said MS NOW. “That is a striking break from his predecessors.”...
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His predecssors? Meaning Attila the Hun, The Kaiser, Mao Zedong, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin?
Creeper Jesse Watters Wants Reporters To Ask Talarico If He Wears Women's Underwear — Heather
More projection from these clowns on Fox.
The propagandists on Fox have been doing their best to help corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton feminize his opponent for US Senate — Democratic state Rep. James Talarico — ever since Paxton won his runoff against John Cornyn.
On this Friday's The Five, while discussing Beto O'Rourke's endorsement of Talarico, cohost Jesse Watters seemed way too obsessed with Talarico's sex life during a segment where they were childishly calling Talarico "low-T."
GUTFELD: You know, when I see a woman, I like to say — what would Talarico call her?...
"Sure is easy to smear a candidate when you can just pull accusations out of your ass. Let me give it a try.
jesse urine DOES NOT own a truck because he's too short to reach the pedals and too weak to push them if he could. He gets around in a limousine driven by his gay lover. He refers to women as 'those things I've never touched one of.' He eats jello exclusively because he's too weak to chew anything else." — GeniusLemur (comments)
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Fucks News 5-year old cocksuckers act like the girls they are trying to turn Talarico into.
The Fuckers are the worst in trailer trash. Both are potential child molesters.
America 250's Musical Lineup Is Auditory Equivalent Of A Folding Chair — Lisa Needham
The United States’ Semiquincentennial is coming up—250 years, baby! Let’s party!
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Better revise the list, Lisa. Both McBride and Day have rejected performing for the retarded traitor. Before it's over it will be down to Lee Greenwood and Kid Rock. ROTFFLMAO!
NYT: Fatal Boat Strikes Have Failed To Curb Coke Supply
The New York Times reports:
With deadly precision, the Trump administration has launched dozens of attacks on small boats in the waters off South America, killing nearly 200 people in a campaign U.S. officials say is meant to curb the flow of illicit drugs to the United States. But almost nine months into the operation, epidemiologists, addiction scientists and public health experts say cocaine, by far the top drug smuggled out of South America, is as easy to get in much of the United States as it was before the strikes began.
The findings — based on evaluations of street prices, lethal overdoses, purity of samples and drug seizures at U.S. borders — raise questions about the effectiveness of the largest U.S. military deployment in Latin America in decades. The costs of these military operations have already climbed to $4.7 billion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, including the deployment of AC-130J Ghostrider gunships, F-35 fighter jets and guided-missile destroyers, as well as about 15,000 U.S. military personnel.
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Hey, hey! Have another whiff on me, Whiskey Breath!
Murder, Inc. has failed to have any effect other than MURDER! Of course, that was their intent! Arrest them all NOW!
WA Youth Pastor Arrested On Molestation Charges
The Olympian reports:
Police detectives arrested a former youth pastor in Thurston County on suspicion of second-degree child molestation and first-degree voyeurism on May 27. According to a post from the Renton Police Department, 53-year-old Derek Nelson was a former youth pastor at Highlands Community Church in Renton. He was taken into custody after he left work on Wednesday and booked into the Thurston County Jail.
According to a May 28 probable cause statement filed in Thurston County Superior Court, a detective with the Renton Police Department had been investigating Nelson since Aug. 14, 2024, and the department was first contacted about the youth pastor on March 30, 2021.
The incident took place in 2015 during a church function at the Great Wolf Lodge located at 20500 Old Highway 99 SW in Centralia, according to the statement. The victim was 12 years old at the time. The victim was playing in the wave pool when he was approached by Nelson, who asked him to follow Nelson to the changing room. Nelson then allegedly locked the door, told the victim to take off his swim trunks, and touched the victim’s genitals. Nelson allegedly threatened the victim and said he’d pay the price if he ever told anyone, which led the victim to keep it secret for 10 years.
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And another one bites the dust!
Xianist suckers are born again every second.
Judge: DOJ Must Disclose Plans For Troops At The Polls
Democracy Docket reports:
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to move faster to fulfill an information request from Democrats seeking documents detailing possible plans to deploy immigration agents or military personnel to the polls this fall.
Writing in a docket entry Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Alaine Howell said several federal agencies have yet to provide substantive responses to the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents on the “potential employment of federal agents and troops to polling places, drop boxes, and election offices.”
In granting the DNC’s request to expedite, Howell, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote that with the midterms only months away, the time-sensitive documents — should any exist — are needed to “inform an imminent public debate.”
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The filthy shitstains of Trump will never succeed in deterring America from rejecting his Nazi ass!
Fox host admits Trump naps in meetings – but begs viewers to 'please stop' highlighting it — Alexander Willis
Fox News' Brian Kilmeade appeared to admit Friday that President Donald Trump's apparent sleeping spells during meetings were real — but mounted a personal defense of the president's frequent snoozing while pleading with viewers to "please stop" drawing attention to it.
“I've been accused of a lot of things but not cognitive decline — anyone who's with me on Friday or Saturday, or sometimes around 2 o’clock on the train, I will fall asleep!” Kilmeade said on “Fox & Friends.” “That's what happens when you sleep four hours a day, and for his case, you have the weight of the country on your shoulders. Sometimes you fall asleep, let alone being 80 years old!”
As the oldest serving president in U.S. history, Trump has drawn growing scrutiny surrounding his physical and cognitive health. Onlookers have observed the president in recent months with bruising on his hands, swollen ankles, a rash on his neck, and appearing to doze off during important meetings....
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Sure. We'll stop as soon as the retard, Jesse Watters and his perverted turd crew stop with their 5-year old fantasy comments!
CEO Receives Violent Threats After Kicking Off AI Layoffs — Frank Landymore
As the Australian software firm WiseTech lays off thousands of employees in a pivot to AI, its CEO Zubin Appoo has become the target of violent threats, the company says.
Richard White, WiseTech’s founder, revealed the news in an email to the company’s staff on Sunday, the Financial Review reported.
White said the company had already been facing “several serious and deeply concerning incidents involving personal attacks.”
But “in the past week, this escalated into a handwritten threat of violence made against our CEO, Zubin Appoo, containing personal information and offensive comments directed at members of his family,” White wrote in the email to staff, per the Financial Review.
Security was ramped up at the company’s Sydney office “because of the serious nature of the threat,” he added, and the threat was reported to police.
The threats come after a dragged out layoff-saga at WiseTech which has left employees frustrated and confused. In February, the company stunned the rank and file by announcing that it was firing 2,000 staff, or about a third of its entire workforce. But who was getting the axe was unclear, leaving employees in agonizing suspense. For months, they waited to hear if they were part of the cuts, but never got clarification.
The agony was amplified Monday, when staff received messages in the morning saying their role was “impacted,” before getting another communication two hours later asking for their personal email address for further communication, according to the Financial Review. Except this was followed by another twist, when the emails were deleted from employee inboxes by WiseTech’s IT administrator, and succeeded by a similar email that gave only a fifteen minute deadline to submit information.
Rubbing salt in the wound, the one thing WiseTech leadership was sure to communicate was their love for AI. Appoo told investors that he was expecting “further efficiency gains” over time as AI capabilities improved. And White, even more blithely, boasted that AI agents could complete training in mere minutes that would take humans weeks....
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This is the equivalent of Hitler using Jewish POWs to guide their felllow man into the gas chambers.
The inhmane paradigm they are dictating is inhuman and greed personified. This will not end well for the perpetrators or anyone else. A major disaster is coming. You have been forewarned.
White House stonewalling on Trump's 3rd physical in 13 months raises questions — Adam Lynch
The White House has not yet released the full results of President Donald Trump’s annual physical, his third in 13 months. The president had medical and dental exams at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Tuesday. Trump has taken to calling it his 6-month physical.
On Thursday, NBC News reported that a “White House official said Tuesday they expected to have ‘a readout in the next day or so.’ Trump, who turns 80 on June 14, is the oldest president ever to have been inaugurated and has been subject to persistent speculation about his health throughout his second term.”
CBS News, also reporting on the lack of results being released, added that the “White House has not yet said if or when a summary will be released.”
“President Trump remains in excellent health, exhibiting robust cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and general physical function,” his conclusion read. “His active lifestyle continues to contribute significantly to his well-being. President Trump’s days include participation in multiple meetings, public appearances, press availability, and frequent victories in golf events. President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State.”
No such memo has yet to be released for the latest physical examination....
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Don't tell me it's because they are ashamed to lie.
Trump's scheme backfiring spectacularly as his approval rating just hit rock bottom — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump recently created a $1.8 billion taxpayer slush fund for both his supporters and institutions directly linked to him. Many experts argue that the slush fund is illegal, but Forbes journalist Sara Dorn recently illustrated a point that is perhaps more immediately relevant for Trump — namely, that it is destroying him politically.
Writing on Thursday, Dorn wrote that as of an Emerson poll released that day “Trump logged a 39 [percent] approval rating in Emerson’s May poll, down from 40 [percent] in April, while his disapproval rating declined one point, to 55 [percent] (the survey of 1,000 likely voters was conducted May 24-25 and has a margin of error of 3).”
Dorn then reviewed Trump’s approval ratings going back several weeks, tracing a consistent decline that began because of his controversial tariffs and equally unpopular war against Iran and then seemingly solidified with his alleged self-dealing at taxpayer expense. Among her most notable findings, Dorn learned from a recent Economist/YouGov poll that “the majority of Republicans, 52 [percent], and a plurality of MAGA supporters, 45 [percent], oppose the controversial fund set up by the Justice Department to pay people who believe they’ve been victimized by the government.”
Dorn added, “Republican lawmakers have also revolted against Trump over the fund, which was established to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS and is widely expected to offer taxpayer-funded payments to Jan. 6 rioters and other Trump allies.”...
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Trump has fallen so low he's approaching the gates of hell.
Trump doesn't understand 21st-century warfare — and it cost America dearly — Alex Henderson
President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are claiming that the U.S. military is being revitalized on their watch, rejecting "woke" policies and restoring a "warrior ethos." But Never Trump conservative Jonathan V. Last vehemently disagrees. Last, in The Bulwark, argues that Trump has "failed" the U.S. military with Iran and made the United States less influential in the world.
"Today, we're going to talk about…. how Donald Trump failed to prepare the U.S. military, leading to our defeat in Iran and the end of the American-led global order," Last explains in the conservative Bulwark. "In addition to Trump's other failures, he has been buying up cavalry horses at a time when our adversaries are building tanks. This stupidity failed the American military, diminished American power, and made our interests across the globe less safe. This is going to be a journey that is nominally about drones, but is really about Trump and the end of the American order."
Last continues, "We start by understanding that the drone is both the present and the future of warfare. This is not new. America was the first military to widely integrate drones, and we did it 30 years ago with the predator and then the reaper…. We gradually turned surveillance drones into weapons platforms, but the emphasis in America was still on big. Our drones were cheap by the standards of fighter jets, but they still cost real money."
Trump launched the United States' war against Iran three months ago in late February, and Last argues that he failed to understand the Iranian regime militarily.
"In pre-drone times," the Never Trump conservative writes, "Iran would have needed to rely on mines, fast-boats, and anti-ship missiles. Mines are hit-and-miss and slow to deploy — plus, they're hard to un-deploy, which is inconvenient for Iran because while they can close the Strait (of Hormuz) in the short term, in the long term, they need it open. Boats and missiles are relatively expensive and can be neutralized by conventional means. The Iranians needed another option — which is why they poured resources into their drone industry beginning in 2010. It was the drone that allowed Iran to close the Strait (of Hormuz) and win the war."
Trump, according to Last, also fails to understand how military technology has evolved in the 21st Century....
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And neither does Whiskey Breath!
DOJ Sues MA Over Confidential Plates For ICE Agents
Boston’s NPR affiliate reports:
The U.S. Department of Justice is suing Massachusetts over the state’s refusal to issue confidential license plates and registrations to many federal immigration agents. The plates are typically issued to members of law enforcement carrying out undercover or other sensitive work.
The Healey administration says the plates are only for criminal law enforcement purposes, regardless of which state, local or federal agency intends to use them. Vehicles used for civil law enforcement — as in much of ICE’s work — do not qualify for special plates, according to the administration.
Gov. Maura Healey on Thursday reiterated that Massachusetts is not a “sanctuary state,” and said the state supports legitimate federal law enforcement work.
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In other words, the Trump Criminal Syndicate can take gas!
NYT: Consumer Prices Rising At Fastest Pace In Years
The New York Times reports:
A measure of inflation closely watched by the Federal Reserve accelerated in April to a three-year high, reinforcing the central bank’s budding support to consider raising interest rates if price pressures do not ease.
The Personal Consumption Expenditures index rose 3.8 percent from the same time last year. It was the fastest annual pace since May 2023, when the Fed was in the midst of raising rates to tame a burst of inflation that had emerged in the wake of the pandemic.
A measure of underlying inflation that strips out volatile food and energy prices also notched a multiyear high. That measure, “core” inflation, increased at an annual pace of 3.3 percent, the fastest since November 2023.
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We already know that inflation has now wiped out wages. How long do we have before the nation is underwater and drowning?
Students For Trump Founder Arrested On Domestic Violence Charges, Allegedly Said “I’ll Kill Everyone”
The Defector reports:
Ryan Fournier, the co-founder and chairman of the group Students for Trump, was arrested early Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C., after he allegedly assaulted and threatened a woman, according to documents obtained by Defector. The Metropolitan Police Department charged Fournier with simple assault and attempted threats to do bodily harm.
In the victim’s statement, she told police she tried to rouse an intoxicated Fournier, who had been passed out on the floor. When Fournier woke up, he “started swinging his fists at her and struck her in the face with a closed fist two or three times.”
The victim also said that Fournier got on top of her as he hit her, and she needed to defend herself. When police asked the victim if Fournier had made any threats during the incident, she said he said, “I’ll kill everyone here,” and added that he reglarly makes statements of that nature.
Read the full article. There’s much more.
Fournier last appeared here in September 2025 when a Wisconsin principal got death threats after Fournier falsely accused her of mocking Charlie Kirk’s death.
Fournier appeared here in 2023 when he was charged with striking his girlfriend with a gun.
He appeared here in October 2022 when he was charged with DUI for a second time after having attacked a GOP House candidate and lawyer for representing people charged with DUI.
As you may recall, the other Students For Trump founder, John Lambert, was sentenced to 13 months in prison in 2021 for masquerading as a lawyer with an Ivy League degree.
Fournier, who reportedly helped Lambert create a fake law firm, testified against him, presumably in return for avoiding charges. Fournier has nearly one million Twitter followers and is also a co-founder of Turning Point Action.
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Perfect example of patriarchal crime that is perpetuated by Trump's Crime Syndicate.
Pastor Gets 35 Years On Child Exploitation Charges
Memphis’s NBC affiliate reports:
A former teacher and preacher accused of sexually exploiting a minor has been sentenced, according to Attorney General Lynn Fitch. Kyle Michael Hilleary, 32, of Olive Branch, Mississippi, for one count of child exploitation following a jury trial.
This case originated from a 2023 AGO undercover operation, Operation Toil and Trouble. Following news of his arrest, Hilleary was suspended from his role as a pastor at Cedar View Baptist Church. Prior to his arrest, he was also employed as a physical education teacher.
On May 26, 2026, Hilleary was sentenced to 35 years, with 25 years to serve day-for-day without possibility for parole in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, and 5 years on probation.
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Another one bites the knob!
Trump’s Pitiful America 250 Event Is Already an Embarrassment — Jonathan V. Last
JVL and Sonny Bunch take on Trump's "Freedom 250" disaster—the washed-up acts already bailing on the Great American State Fair, the UFC cage being built on the White House lawn, and why the whole spectacle looks less like a birthday party and more like something straight out of The Boys.
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Great American State Fair? (who came up with that joke?) Only the 25% Nazi retarded will show up for that shitshow. What a huge failure the loser is. ROTFLMFAO!
Vanilla Ice, The Not-Dead Half Of Milli Vanilli To Headline Trump's Freedom 250 Event — Robyn Pennacchia
To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, the Trump administration has arranged for a 16-day festival on the National Mall, starting on June 25. They are calling it “The Great American State Fair,” on account of how they don’t know what a state fair is, or a state, or how that would be different from an entire nation.
We do not yet know if there will be butter sculptures.
What we do know, however, is that there will be a musical lineup guaranteed to make the organizer of your local ribfest mildly jealous. Or not. Probably not, if we are being entirely honest.
The festival will include performances from such musical luminaries as Vanilla Ice, C+C Music Factory, Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, Commodores (without Lionel Richie), C+C Music Factory (without Martha Wash), Flo Rida, and Milli Vanilli.
Yes. Milli Vanilli. The group that famously got caught lip syncing to other people’s voices. One of whom died of an overdose in (checks notes) 1998. Fab Morvan, the half that didn’t die is, incredibly, still performing and still singing the “hits.”
Here he is performing at The Hague, which feels, I don’t know … appropriate?
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This show sounds like it's at a bankrupt casino of Trump's somewhere off Hiway 61.
Trump wouldn't know an A-flat from a fart. But he's great at fisting!
Vance forbids Air Force cadets from heckling him at graduation: 'You can't boo me' — David Edwards
Vice President JD Vance delivered the commencement address Thursday at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs — and made sure the graduating class knew the rules upfront: no booing allowed.
Addressing more than 900 cadets commissioning into the Air Force and Space Force, Vance acknowledged he'd been watching other graduation speeches this season get derailed by heckling — specifically, corporate executives who praised artificial intelligence and got booed for it.
"This is the only commencement speech that I'm giving this year, and so I've watched a few highlights of graduation speeches where this or that corporate leader will discuss artificial intelligence — AI — and be met with literal boos," Vance told the cadets.
"Now, you can't boo me. I'm the Vice President of the United States."
It was a notable preemptive strike from a politician who has become something of a lightning rod for public heckling. Vance was booed at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan in February, and again in Michigan in March after goading a crowd with a claim about the state's educational rankings.
Active-duty military personnel are bound by regulations prohibiting political demonstrations while in uniform.
"AI will inevitably change warfare," Vance said. "But one of the things that makes Americans unique — that makes you as warfighters unique — is that we wage war justly."...
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That'll be the day!
Trump DOJ Criminally Investigating E. Jean Carroll For Confronting Her Rapist — Evan Hurst
If you were Donald Trump and you were a limpdicked authoritarian dictator wannabe and all these women said you raped them and all these Epstein Files say whatever they say, what would you do? Especially if one of those women, E. Jean Carroll, kept winning multi-million-dollar judgments against you, and a judge explained out loud that, despite whatever legalese terms were wrapped around it, yes, Trump was found liable for raping her?
You’d sic your little ball-sniffing pomeranian bitch boy on her, that’s what you’d do!
And so he has.
It’s being reported that Todd Blanche’s Department of Weaponization is investigating Carroll for saying Trump raped her and winning all that money. Or as they have decided to call it, “perjury.” (She better hope they don’t find any seashells in her apartment.)
But don’t worry! Todd Blanche has reportedly allegedly “recused” himself from this one! Don’t you feel better knowing Todd Blanche has the “ethics” to reportedly allegedly “recuse” himself from this one? He is a serious lawyer after all! Instead, the US attorney from Northern Illinois Andrew Boutros is the one with his tongue all the way up Trump’s butthole swirling around and around, to and fro!
Why the guy in Chicago? Nobody knows. Probably because it was his turn to prove his allegiance to Trump. (It was of course his completely competent office that recently bumblefucked the grand jury investigation into totally imaginary non-crimes not committed by the Broadview Six.)
The New York Times reports on the details, as if we need any further details beyond how Trump’s beclowned Justice Department is going after all Trump’s enemies, because that is their only job right now besides Nazi shit.
NYT:
The investigation centers on whether Ms. Carroll committed perjury in civil lawsuits against Mr. Trump, according to the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Ms. Carroll won a $5 million civil judgment against Mr. Trump that he had sexually abused and defamed her, which the president last November asked the Supreme Court to overturn. She also won a $83.3 million civil judgment against him in another defamation case.
Fuck you, no she didn’t....
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Trump is still on a rape spree!
Trump’s Next Big Lie: Declaring Victory in Iran While America Loses — Thom Hartmann
While Trump declares “total victory,” the world is watching American power, alliances, and credibility unravel in real time.
The war Donald Trump started with Iran in February is now collapsing, slowly and predictably, into the same theater of fraud he’s run his entire life. So get ready for the next Big Lie: it’s coming as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning.
Three months in, his bombing campaign has done less damage than he claims, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, gas is pushing five bucks a gallon, his own Pentagon admits Iran’s nuclear program was only set back a few years rather than “completely obliterated,” and the negotiations he’s been bragging about in Islamabad are, by Iran’s own foreign ministry’s careful phrasing, simultaneously “very far and very close” to a deal.
Translation: there is no deal and it’s unlikely there will be one anytime soon, at least on terms Trump can honestly defend. And so, just as Wall Street learned to call his serial lies, bluffs, and retreats on tariffs the “TACO trade” — Trump Always Chickens Out — we’re about to watch the wartime version of the same play.
He’ll declare “Total Victory” (complete with the caps), the billionaire-owned right-wing media will trumpet it as the greatest foreign policy triumph since Yalta, and the rest of us will be expected to swallow this newest Big Lie and just shut up about it.
But a brutal reality is still there, even if the White House won’t acknowledge it. Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that Obama signed in 2015, Iran shipped 98 percent of its enriched uranium out of the country, capped enrichment at 3.67 percent (what was needed for their one nuclear power plant), dismantled thousands of its most advanced centrifuges, redesigned the Arak reactor so it couldn’t produce weapons-grade plutonium, and accepted IAEA cameras and inspectors at every nuclear facility on its soil.
The deal pushed Iran’s breakout time back hard and was verified by international inspectors who reported to the world every ninety days. Trump stupidly tore it up in 2018 because Black President “Barack Hussein Obama” had negotiated it, and within three years Iran was enriching to 20 percent and barring inspectors.
Then Trump bombed the sites he himself had freed Iran to build, and now he’s trying to negotiate his way back to something resembling what Obama already had, except he doesn’t have the leverage Obama had, because he’s shown the world he’d rather bomb than talk and he’s already used used up so many of our munitions that it’s become a crisis for the Pentagon.
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End Trumpism for good!
Abolishing ICE Is a Start — Whitney Curry Wimbish
Despite what Republicans and some mainstream Democrats would have us believe, half of Americans agree that ICE should no longer exist. Progressive candidates across the country have taken note and are using “Abolish ICE” as a rallying cry to organize their communities and win elections.
Rep. Analilia Mejía (D-NJ) is one such progressive. She campaigned on abolishing ICE against ten other candidates, some of whom had raised much more money, and won her primary and then the special election. The day after she was sworn in, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) announced Mejía’s appointment to the House Committee on Homeland Security, the body that oversees ICE and the Trump regime’s immigration terror campaign, joining others on the committee who have called for ICE’s abolishment and redirecting funding to community-based organizations.
Shortly after her appointment, Mejía participated in a hearing of the Homeland Security Committee, asking witnesses whom immigration agents had shot and assaulted what “meaningful actions” lawmakers could take to bring them justice. Most said they wanted accountability for the agents who hurt them. But the Rev. David Black, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, whom federal immigration agents shot multiple times in the head, face, and body with pepper balls and shoved to the ground when he protested outside an ICE prison in Broadview, Illinois, last year, had a different answer.
“With respect to the members who believe in reform, I believe that this department and administration really need an exorcist. That’s my opinion as a pastor,” he said. “I would like people to understand in this Congress and in the United States, that what we are facing, the evil we are facing from this administration, goes beyond political solutions and goes beyond reform. It requires spiritual solutions.”...
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End Trump thuggery!
Tax AI to Create Jobs — Greg Casar
Most people involved in artificial intelligence can agree on one thing: AI is coming for your job.br>
Anthropic’s CEO predicts Great Depression levels of unemployment in the next five years. Bill Gates says that within ten years humans won’t be needed “for most things.” Corporate leaders say AI-driven layoffs are already starting, with Intuit firing thousands just this week, citing AI.
Businesses justify their huge investments in AI by committing to spending less on labor, and AI firms sell their products promising to help them do it. Regardless of whether AI is yet good enough to replace workers, their plan is clear: lay off millions of workers, justified by AI.
One entity seems totally unaware: the United States government. The only major AI proposal advanced this Congress was a failed effort to prevent states from regulating the industry.
The path we are on is clear: AI will make a small number of investors and executives even richer, while it eliminates jobs for millions of Americans—and the government does nothing about it.
An AI tax should target the companies that stand to make billions of dollars by laying people off.
Nothing about this is inevitable. We can and must choose a different path. Most Americans want the opportunity to work hard at jobs worth doing, and we should make a commitment now to making sure the AI revolution does not leave Americans with a higher unemployment rate....
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We have to do something to control it before it controls us!
Trump doesn't want the GOP to win in November — and his actions prove it — John Stoehr
...During today's made-for-TV cabinet meeting, the president claimed that he had the advantage in negotiations with Iran. "They thought they were gonna outwait me. You know, ‘We’ll outwait him. He’s got the midterms,'" Trump said. "I don’t care about the midterms.”
We all assume he's lying. We had better hope he is. If Donald Trump really doesn't care about losing the congressional elections, the last remaining partisan constraints have fallen away.
The war could go on indefinitely.
An $80 bag of groceries could soon look cheap....
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And some Nazi son-of-a-bitch is thinking of putting the criminal loser's face on American cash! May they die from slow stomach cancer!
WH Pushes To Launch $250 Bill Featuring Trump’s Face
The Washington Post reports:
Trump administration officials have pressed the office responsible for printing the nation’s money to design a $250 bill featuring the president’s portrait, according to four current and former employees, in what would be the first appearance of a living person on U.S. currency in more than 150 years.
Starting last year, two political appointees at the Treasury Department — U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach and his senior adviser, Mike Brown — repeatedly urged staff at the agency’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing to prepare prototypes of the note, according to the employees, who said the move raised concerns because federal law currently allows only deceased people to appear on bills.
British painter Iain Alexander said Trump endorsed changes to his original design, such as adding the colors of the American flag and a logo commemorating the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. “He likes to call me his favorite British artist,” said Alexander, a former competitive swimmer and DJ who describes himself as a royal portrait artist of Queen Elizabeth and others.
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Using his fucking mug shot! What retards!
Only Nazi traitors would ever use this toilet paper!
Even The NY Post Says Trump Is Killing GOP Midterm Chances — John Amato
What good has Trump accomplished?
The NY Post editorial board harangued Donald Trump over recent missteps and demanded he reset his agenda fast.
Horrific poll numbers on every topic, including the economy, inflation, and health care, are driving Trump's approval ratings into all-time lows.
The Post is one of Trump's most ardent defenders while also spreading massive amounts of MAGA propaganda, so they made sure to couch their criticisms as much as possible....
No two ways about it: The Trump Justice Department’s settlement of the Trump IRS lawsuit looks terrible.
It just doesn't look terrible. It is terrible.
It is high-level corruption between Trump and his own Department of Justice....
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Trump will be a rotting Albatross to our nation for ages to come.
Politico: GOP In “Money Panic” After Paxton’s Win
Politico reports:
Republicans are bracing for a Texas-sized cash drain. After Attorney General Ken Paxton’s win over Sen. John Cornyn on Tuesday, nine state and national GOP strategists and donors told POLITICO they fear that their already record-breaking Senate primary will become an even more costly general election campaign — one that siphons party resources from key battlegrounds.
Some of them estimate the race could force the party to spend as much as $150 million for Paxton in a state that Republicans never expected to be truly competitive. A Democrat has not won statewide office in Texas since 1994.
But Paxton, a polarizing figure who many national GOP donors have been hesitant to embrace given his extensive baggage, is facing off against state Rep. James Talarico, a prolific fundraiser and candidate widely viewed as a rising star within the Democratic Part.
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The idiot isn't worth a cent of anyone's money
Trump Again Confuses Venezuela With Iran
The Independent reports:
Not for the first time, Donald Trump appeared to confuse Iran with Venezuela again, sparking fresh health concerns. The moment, which was branded ‘concerning’ by critics online, happened during a cabinet meeting.
Trump said: “I don’t go into war, I go into conflict… Despite the conflict with Venezuela who no longer has a navy, no longer has an air force, no longer has a lot of people that were leading the country into very bad places.”
He went on to say: “Their leadership is gone. Their second is gone. We’re dealing with half of their third as half of their third is gone too.”
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A mind is a terrible thing to waste. It's good that Trump doesn't have one.
Americans know something is deeply wrong. They’re not imagining it — Chauncey DeVega
Surveys and data confirm a country in crisis — stressed and divided, but not yet ready to give up
...Much of the nation is in a paradoxical state. People feel emotionally unwell and exhausted because they know that something is deeply wrong with their society and politics. Their sense of normalcy has been broken. This is not Trump Derangement Syndrome — it is a healthy and normal response to an unhealthy, abnormal and dangerous reality....
This is not Trump Derangement Syndrome — it is a healthy and normal response to an unhealthy, abnormal and dangerous reality....
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Time to stop this fretting and take Trump by the horns. Resist and revolt.
The Miller Doctrine — Ellen Ioanes
Stephen Miller’s giddy grin takes up half the screen as Fox News host Jesse Watters allows him to expound on the success of the United States and Israel’s war on Iran.
“President Trump is saying, ‘We the United States, have the world’s not just most powerful military, most powerful navy,’” Miller says about halfway through his monologue, as the White House twinkles in the dusk behind him and a third split screen shows footage of jets launching off an aircraft carrier. “Whoever controls the seas is able to control the outcomes in any foreign-policy showdown … If Iran chooses the path of a deal, then that’s great for the world, that’s great for everybody. If Iran chooses the path of economic strangulation by blockade, then the world will pass Iran by.”
The April 14 appearance came amidst a double blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and followed more than a month of U.S. and Israeli bombing that killed dozens of Iranian officials and hundreds of civilians, endangered U.S. allies in the Gulf region, reignited Israel’s devastating war on Hezbollah and southern Lebanon, drove up fuel prices stateside, and threatened supply shocks for multiple components and finished goods globally.
A 92-second clip from the appearance encapsulates a striking dynamic in the second Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy: In some sense diplomacy still exists, hence the talk of a “deal,” but it is increasingly backed by the threat of overwhelming military force.
The idea that might makes right as one of “the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time,” as Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper shortly after U.S. military forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, encapsulates this administration’s worldview. From Donald Trump’s threats to other countries on social media to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s press briefings about the war on Iran (or as Hegseth reminds us, Operation Epic Fury), projecting violence abroad in some form is usually the answer.
Miller has fueled, architected, and at times instigated America’s practice of foreign policy at gunpoint.
The policy of belligerent imperialism has more than one origin point, and it is nothing new in the context of American empire. Indeed, U.S. behavior on the world stage over the past 18 months is both uncanny and nihilistic; we are once again prosecuting a baseless and unsuccessful war in the Middle East, only this time no one even bothered to try and sell it to the public. If the Monroe Doctrine opened the door for intervention—both covert and outright—in Latin America, the Trump corollary drove a tank through the wall and set up loudspeakers shrieking “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” on loop.
But Miller, as one of the president’s closest advisers and a major power player in the administration, has fueled, architected, and at times instigated America’s practice of foreign policy at gunpoint....
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The reincarnation of Joseph Goebbels
Texas Republicans Get What They Deserve — William Kristol
One small but welcome story out of Texas last night: Democrat Johnny Garcia easily won his House primary in Texas’s 35th Congressional District, dispatching loony sex-therapist candidate Maureen Galindo, who had promised “prison for American Zionists”—and been backstopped by substantial spending from Republicans who had hoped to secure her the nomination to throw them an easy win in the purple district. Happy Wednesday.
Big John Deflated
by Andrew Egger
If Donald Trump’s base is a cult, we’re rapidly approaching the Comet Hale–Bopp phase. Outside his party, he’s already a lame duck with catastrophically low approval and a stalled agenda. But as he weakens outside the building, his remarkable influence inside seems only to grow over a party eager to drink the Kool-Aid at his request.
Yesterday’s Republican Senate primary runoff in Texas was the clearest sign of this yet. It pitted a formidable, well-funded establishment incumbent, Sen. John Cornyn, against a sad-sack rabble-rouser MAGA type in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Paxton is damaged goods in fifteen different ways—uncharismatic and dull, loathed by those who have worked with him in state government, beset by serial adultery scandals, impeached by his own party over his extraordinary corruption and self-dealing. Paxton had exactly two strengths: The perverse intuition of the MAGA base that his run of bad behavior and scandal meant he was actually a strong conservative fighter, and his obsequious, servile loyalty to Trump, for which the president rewarded him with a late endorsement.
Which turns out, of course, to be all you need. In the end it wasn’t even close. Paxton walloped Cornyn by more than 27 points.
This result came as a heavy blow to anyone still carrying a hopeful torch for some unsullied original-flavor Republican party to reemerge from the ashes of Trumpism. Believe it or not, these people are still out there; some of them are even senators themselves. For a decade now, these senators have clung frantically to the idea that, if they just stick with Trump for now, eventually he’ll ride off into the sunset and leave them in control of their own party again. And in the meantime, sticking with Trump had its direct benefits: It seemed for a while like a bulletproof shield against grassroots-insurgent primary challenges....
At the same time, Cornyn’s loss can only diminish Trump’s actual political power. Trump has now robbed yet another Republican senator of his political future, meaning he has unencumbered yet another Republican senator of his biggest reason for ignoring or indulging Trump’s perpetual outrages. And that’s not all: The rest of the Senate GOP can’t help but notice that their former accommodationist arrangement seems to be falling apart before their eyes. What’s the point of giving the president America increasingly hates so much of your blood and sweat when he may just turn around and sic his base on you anyway?
And then there’s the little matter of the Texas seat itself. We’ve known all along that Democratic nominee James Talarico polls much better against Paxton than he does against Cornyn. That gap will shrink in the months ahead as “normie” Republicans—now a minority in their own base—perform their now-familiar humiliation ritual and try to rationalize away their distaste for Paxton. But there’s no question that Republicans can no longer count on Texas; they will be forced to spend heavily in the (very expensive) state just to feel good about a race they by rights shouldn’t have to think about at all.
So enjoy your nominee, Mr. President—and try not to choke on him.
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Texas awards themselves with a grand shit sandwich!
RFK Jr. Has Threesome With Snakes, Doesn’t Even Get To Keep A Penis — Even Hurst
Huh, well, OK, here is the secretary of Health and Human Services, talking in his usual burps while he attempts to seduce two snakes that are, it would seem, already fucking. Did the snakes invite him to play? Does not appear that way. Is RFK Jr. at an orgy club for snakes? Not one where humans are allowed.
In this video, you see Count Von Batshit pick up two snakes — non-venomous black racers — in a corner at Dr. Mehmet Oz’s house in Palm Beach, Florida, on the patio. You know, because that’s what snakes like. Especially when they are fucking, which is what somebody in the background, Dr. Oz we think, suggests is happening.
When Kennedy tweeted this video, he said that his wife Cheryl Hines was “cheerleading” his penis-wrangling of the snakes. Which must be why she says, “Why? Bobby, no.” As one of them is biting him, because he keeps messing with it and annoying it, she says, “OK, OK. Honey. Honey. Let it go.” Also “Oh my God” and Bobby, please!”
But no. Bobby did not let it go.
Maybe he wanted to keep a penis, for his collection of animal penises. (Snakes have two of them.)
Maybe he wanted to put it next to his raccoon penis.
RFK Jr. likes to keep a penis when he dilly-dallies with nature....
The BBC includes a quote from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, about whether you should pick up two snakes, fucking or not fucking, whether or not you want to keep a penis:
“Give snakes a wide berth and admire them from a distance,” the agency said in a Facebook post.
“Resist the urge to pick it up - even our nonvenomous snakes can give a solid bite,” it added.
Especially if you try to keep a penis. Snakes don’t like that. Even though they have two. The second one is not a spare, Jesus Christ.
This has been a post about science and nature....
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Just another example of the insanity in the Trump Crime Syndicate.
America’s Deadliest Con: How Racism Keeps Millions Sick While Helping Healthcare Billionaires Cash In — Tom Hartmann
A shocking new study reveals why millions of Americans vote against their own survival — and why 51 billionaires depend on it.
America has 51 billionaires who made their money from our profit-driven healthcare system, the only one in the developed world. It’s not only obscene that they’re taking so much money from so many of us who have so little; it’s also killing all of us.
We’re among the worst — and most expensive — healthcare systems in the developed world, with Thailand and Ecuador even beating us out.
And the reason it stays that way, according to a shocking new study, is because about half of all white people would rather inflict pain on all of us (including themselves) than allow for a system which may also benefit Black people.
If that sounds irrational, it is. But it’s also completely consistent with a history that includes white communities closing their own schools and swimming pools back in the 1960s when LBJ forced them to allow Black children in.
Sixty-six years ago, on a campaign swing through Tennessee, Lyndon Johnson turned to his press secretary Bill Moyers in a hotel room and explained, with the bluntness of a man who’d grown up watching it work in Texas, why America couldn’t have nice things.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man,” LBJ said, “he won’t notice your picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Moyers wrote about it years later in The Washington Post, and the line has been quoted ever since because it explained, in one sentence, the entire arc of “conservative” behavior from Reconstruction to Nixon to Reagan to Trump.
Last week, a pair of political scientists at the University of Delaware put empirical meat on the bones of what Johnson learned the hard way. Sumeyye Mine Iltekin Gocer and Joanne M. Miller, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Research and Politics, surveyed more than 700 white Americans and split them into two groups....
From Nixon‘s Southern Strategy to Bush’s Willie Horton ads to Trump’s racist birtherism, scaring White people about Black people has been the go-to position of the GOP since the 1960s. And stopping “socialism” that may benefit Black or Hispanic people is at it’s core.
Canada doesn’t have hospital billionaires. France doesn’t have insurance billionaires. We do, and we have fifty-one of them, and the reason we do is the reason LBJ named in that hotel room....
One group was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing politically. The other was asked whether white Americans were winning or losing compared to racial minorities. Both were then asked how they felt about economic redistribution programs like food stamps and Medicaid, the things that put food on tables and keep people from dying of treatable diseases....
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History shows us that humans are not so smart.
The U.S. has always been The Land of the Happy Negro — predominate patriarchal white males who roam about preying on the freedoms of anyone not like themselves. This must change it we are to survive.
Trump’s New Green Card Application Policy Is Unlawful, Immoral, and Xenophobic — Jordan Liz
...Kahler insists that this policy is necessary to close a dangerous loophole that immigrants exploit to stay in the US indefinitely. He remarks, “When aliens apply from their home country, it reduces the need to find and remove those who decide to slip into the shadows and remain in the US illegally after being denied residency.”
This is bullshit, plain and simple. US Customs and Border Protection calculated that in 2024 the US visa overstay rate was 1.15%. “In other words, 98.85% of the in-scope nonimmigrant visitors departed the United States on-time and in accordance with the terms of their admissions.”
The true goal rather is to force people to leave the US and have consular officers abroad quickly and quietly reject their applications without any consideration for due process or the applicant’s legal rights. As the CATO Institute reports, even prior to this new policy, DHS had already cut green card approvals by roughly half.
Hopefully, the courts or Congress will intervene and put an end to this policy. However, that USCIS had the audacity to even release such an obviously politically motivated and illegal policy speaks to the broader decline in the integrity of American institutions. Even if this attempt fails, the Trump administration will continue to go after immigrants. They will not stop; so, neither can we. We must remain vigilant and continue to keep our communities safe.
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Bullshit is the coin of the fascist realm.
It Will Take Years To Replenish Weapons Used In Iran
The Associated Press reports:
U.S. military contractors need at least three years to replenish stockpiles of three key weapons systems used heavily in the Iran war, according to an analysis released Wednesday, adding to concerns that American forces would have limited firepower in any future conflict with China.
The weapons systems are Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are used to strike targets deep inside enemy territory, and Patriot and THAAD interceptors that defend against incoming missiles and drones.
“The United States has enough munitions for any plausible scenario in the Iran war, but the depleted inventories have created a window of vulnerability for a potential Western Pacific conflict,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies said in its new report, provided to The Associated Press. “The time needed to rebuild those inventories has thus become a major concern.”
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This means our defense is at its weakest in decades. World powers can easily attack us at this point.
Thanks to the old retributionist.
Trump: “Scum” Dems Want Rules On Prediction Markets
Yahoo Finance reports:
U.S. President Donald Trump is singing the praises of prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket. On social media, Trump said it’s “critically important” that regulator the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) keep “exclusive authority” over prediction markets.
“Under my leadership, we are setting ‘rules of the road’ that are the Gold Standard for the States,” he posted. “We cannot have SCUM like Chris Christie, Letitia James, Tim Walz, and JB Pritzker setting the rules!”
Trump’s comments come as a growing number of U.S. states launch lawsuits to block prediction markets and their betting on real-world events such as elections and sporting events. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has defended states’ authority to regulate gambling products, which he likened to prediction markets.
Read the full article. As you probably know by now, Trump Junior is a paid advisor to and major investor in Kalshi and Polymarket. Peter Thiel has also has his claws in the companies. Meanwhile, insiders consider to make millions by betting on moves by Trump.
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Leader of the Crime Syndicate and King of the Scumbags speaks. Crime will continue ro flourish under his leadership.
DOJ Seeks To Interview 2020 Georgia Election Workers
CNN reports:
The Justice Department wants to interview some poll workers and ballot counters who participated in the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, in a new effort to dig up details about the ballot-processing, prosecutors revealed at a court hearing last week.
A prosecutor working with a grand jury in Fulton County told a federal judge on May 19 that once the Justice Department has names and addresses of 2020 election workers in the investigation, federal investigators would try to talk to the workers.
“This would simply be a pathway to determine and speak with and interview certain individuals who worked at the polls who may have seen, heard or done something in and of themselves,” the prosecutor, William McComb, told the judge, according to a transcript of the hearing obtained this week by CNN and other media outlets.
"Why doesn't he just send ICE to kidnap them off the streets or out of their homes in the middle of the night?" — Stogiebear (comments)
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Trump's crime toadie keeps working his intimidation rig. Organized crime at its worst!
The Nazi retards keep showing us what they are. Tell the bastards to go fuck themselves!
REPORT: Trump To Pull US Assets Set Aside For NATO
The Daily Beast reports:
Donald Trump is pulling out bombers and warships set aside to help NATO, according to a report. The president is also planning to withdraw fighter jets and refueling aircraft, after becoming incensed by European allies’ refusal to back his war in Iran, Der Spiegel reported.
An envoy of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Alexander Velez-Green, informed senior officials from NATO member states of the withdrawal at a meeting last week in Brussels, Belgium, according to the German outlet. The number of fighter jets will reduced by a third and the number of strategic bombers halved, Der Spiegel reported.
All submarines will be pulled out, and the destroyer count will also be reduced. Reconnaissance drones must now be provided and maintained by European countries. There will also be fewer armed drones.
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The enemy of America and world freedom is our POTUS. How did our country become this fucking retarded and spineless against despotism?
White House insiders just made a staggering 'confession' about Trump's health: analyst — Nicole Charky-Chami
Former Republican strategist Rick Wilson warned on Tuesday that President Donald Trump's health has been declining and claimed that White House insiders have been trying to hide it....
Wilson also argued that the media has been "flinching" from covering the reality behind Trump's health — and that it could be only a matter of time before that changes.
"Genuine power doesn’t need to be advertised this loudly," Wilson wrote. "The frantic, escalating, almost pornographic self-celebration is the tell. It’s a confession in plain sight. The man building his mausoleum while he’s still alive is the man who knows he’s running out of road."...
"So here we are. A 79-year-old man, swollen of extremity and bruised of hand, looking like the victim of a zombie bite by denying it until he turns, shuffling between Walter Reed and a half-built ballroom nobody asked for, with an approval rating in free fall, a base finally asking quiet questions about grocery prices, a press corps too cowed to say out loud what they all know, and a clock, biological, cultural, and political, that he cannot bully into stopping," Wilson wrote.
"He is not coming back from this," Wilson added. "There is no third act. There is only the long, undignified, makeup-smeared decline of a man and a movement whose moment has passed, narrating itself ever more loudly into an ever emptier hall, a frowzy barfly of a man, replaying past glories that never happened and hoping you won’t notice the bad wig."
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Walking dead.
Financial Times: Trump’s Board Of Peace Fund Is Empty
The Jerusalem Post reports:
The fund set up by the World Bank for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has received no funding, despite pledges totaling $17 billion from the US and other world leaders, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing four sources familiar with the matter.
“Zero dollars have been deposited,” one source said. The board has received donations, but they have been deposited directly via its JPMorgan account, according to the board’s spokesperson.
“A number of options were established to receive funding,” a Board of Peace official told the FT. “At this point, contributors have opted to use other options.” The JPMorgan account is under no obligation to report its financial position to contributors and board members, unlike the World Bank, as FT wrote.
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It's in Trump's pockets.
REPORT: Pam Bondi Diagnosed With Thyroid Cancer
The New York Post reports:
Pam Bondi was diagnosed with thyroid cancer shortly after President Trump removed her as attorney general, according to a report Tuesday. Bondi, 60, underwent treatment for the disease and is recovering, according to Axios.
The revelation comes amid a report that Trump has tapped Bondi to serve on an AI-focused advisory committee.
The ex-AG received praise on social media for how she’s handled the dreaded diagnosis. “Pam has been quietly kicking cancer’s ass the last few weeks,” podcast host and former White House official Katie Miller wrote on X.
"And a reminder that when we hear of those on the right who are suffering from illness or misfortune, we must extend them the same courtesy and kindness as shown regarding:
the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi
when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was gravely ill
when Governor Shapiro's house was set on fire
When Biden announced his cancer diagnosis
The murder of Pretti & Good" — DaddySnark (comments)
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Kick until her kick don't kick no more.
Is this a trend with the Nazis? We can only hope.
Mullin Wants To Halt Intl Flights To “Sanctuary Cities”
Mediaite reports:
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said his department is “drawing up” plans to prevent inbound international flights from landing in what he called “sanctuary cities.”
Mullin appeared on Tuesday’s edition of Hannity on Fox News, where he boasted that DHS has arrested “tens of thousands [of] gang members that are in categories of terrorists.” He provided no evidence for his claim that such an enormous number of “terrorists” have been apprehended.
The secretary then explained that DHS has been floating the idea of preventing international flights from arriving in certain cities, especially Newark, New Jersey, because of the ongoing protests at Delaney Hall, a detention facility holding up to 1,000 immigrants. He said local law enforcement is not assisting federal agents there.
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Well. sure. Make all the people suffer due to your ignorance, asshole. Do these retards ever think one inch in front of their noses?
DOJ Immigration Courts Seek To Speed Deportations
By Scheduling “Mega” Mass Hearings With Little Notice
NPR reports:
Immigration courts inside the Justice Department are drastically accelerating immigrants’ hearings and bunching them together with the goal of issuing more deportation orders. The new and unprecedented tactic was shared with NPR by immigration attorneys and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a trade association that tracks trends in these courts.,br>
Immigrants are now being scheduled for massive master calendar hearings — or “mega masters” — that include 100 or more people at a time. That’s up from two or three dozen people at a time, which had been typical before for a first hearing. For many immigrants, this is their first appearance in court to try to make their case to be able to stay in the U.S.
Attorneys say these new hearings largely target people without lawyers representing them. Those who show up late, or not at all, are receiving removal orders, further truncating the already-limited due process available to immigrants.
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My guess is the next thing these minions of Satan think of is deporting all of us and making us all have to re-enter to check our fitness to live in the white, racist hell they are building.
SPLC Seeks Dismissal Of DOJ’s “Vindictive” Indictment
The Associated Press reports:
A Justice Department indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center is part of a “top-down” campaign of retribution against President Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies and constitutes a vindictive prosecution that must be dismissed, lawyers for the nonprofit argued Tuesday in urging a judge to toss the case out.
They have also said acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made a false statement at a news conference and in interviews when he said the organization had not shared with law enforcement information it had learned from informants. Blanche later appeared to walk back that claim in a television interview, saying it was true that the SPLC had “selectively” shared information with law enforcement over the years.
The attorneys for the center expanded on those arguments Tuesday, saying in a motion to dismiss the case that the prosecution was the “culmination of a top-down, retributive campaign” in which Trump pushed the Justice Department “to go after those individuals and groups he deemed his political enemies, including the SPLC.”
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A better idea is abolishing Trump's criminal DOJ!
This is a battle we must ein.
Trump will regret endorsing Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate primary — Amanda Marcotte
Democrat James Talarico may win — and the president weakened his hold over the GOP
ohn Cornyn probably never had a chance to keep his seat. The senior Republican senator from Texas has repugnant, far-right politics. He even used the confirmation hearing for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to float legal theories for ending same-sex marriage. But he is mild-mannered — a flaw in today’s GOP — and he doesn’t have a history of flashy corruption scandals and adultery, unlike Ken Paxton, the state attorney general who handily defeated him in the Republican primary on Tuesday night....
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The Trump Crime Syndicate demands rabid storm trooper mentality for his Nazi cadre. Paxton is a good example of the ugliness of fascism.
Harvard doctor raises new alarm about Trump's mystery bruises — Sarah K. Burris
Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, argues that two major concerns about Donald Trump’s health are being quietly ignored amid the president’s repeated claims of being in “perfect” health after a fourth visit to Walter Reed.
Trump announced online that his fourth trip to Walter Reed for a checkup showed he remains a paragon of good health. CNN host Brianna Keilar said that it isn't surprising because he says that after all of his "annual" physicals, even if those physicals are happening multiple times each year.
"At some point, the president went from being on low-dose aspirin to this very high-dose aspirin," he began. "We learned about that earlier this year, and that happened sometime between 2018 and last year. And many of us said that was unwise because as an E.R. doctor, treating patients [who] are on medications that thin the blood or that disrupt clotting."
It's a problem for the elderly, who are at higher risk of falls. If blood can't clot, a fall with an injury could result in significant blood loss.
"So, the question is, why is he on that dose? Does his doctor really recommend it? One of the things I think everyone who's watching knows is that you have to have a very strong doctor-patient relationship. And if the president is taking a dose of aspirin that his doctor doesn't recommend, and even the United States Preventive Services Task Force says is not a good idea — well, I question that. And I kind of wonder if that's changed since then."
The bruise on his hand, the White House said, comes from his high-dose aspirin and shaking so many hands. Lately he's been hiding it with makeup and under the table or covered by his other hand....
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And I can tell you that high-dose aspirin can damage kidney function. If he's been on that a good while, as is stated, he probably is already in some stage of CKD, Chronic Kindney Disease.
Todd Blanche Tongue-Bathes Dear Leader’s Scrote In New Ballroom Filing — Evan Hurst
Did Donald Trump dictate his latest ballroom filing directly into (acting) Attorney General Todd Blanche’s eager bird hole this weekend, maybe after Trump missed Don Jr.’s wedding because he hates him, and after Trump’s latest close call with “something scary happened outside”? (A crazy person shot a gun outside the White House gates. They are dead now. The patient is being dramatic about it, as usual.)
We don’t know if Todd Blanche received the message directly, or if there was tongue involved. But we imagine he wouldn’t mind if there was tongue involved. Hairy 79-year-old Trump tongue, yum, Todd’s favorite. (And he will GET MAD if you notice.)
It’s also possible that Todd has trained ChatGPT to rewrite his otherwise shitty lawless dumbass “never will be viewed as a serious lawyer again” court filings in Donald Trump’s illiterate dementia cadence, which would save Todd a lot of tongue. (Unless that’s his favorite part.)
Point is, after the scary incident of this weekend, which could have been avoided entirely if Trump loved Don Jr. enough to go to his wedding, there is a new filing about BALLROOM, and it is embarrassing like the other filings about BALLROOM Todd appends his name to, and this is very serious business, so please do not laugh....
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LMAO! This floor mat of a man is the laughing stock of America!
Trump’s Slush Fund Is a Multitool —Jonathan V. Last
1. Leatherman
We’ve been thinking too narrowly about the $1.776 billion pot of taxpayer money that Donald Trump will soon control.
Most people assumed Trump would use it to pay off meathead insurrectionists, sort of a . . . treason stimulus.
Others believed that while Dummkopf MAGA might get a couple bucks here and there, the real money would be funneled to Trump family members and organizations.
But the Slush Fund from Hell—or whatever we’re calling it—is much more useful than any of that. It’s a multitool for corruption and maintaining MAGA discipline. Let me explain....
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The corruption runs deep.
Donald Trump moves to gag the entire federal workforce — David Edwards
The Trump administration is moving to force every federal employee in the country to sign a nondisclosure agreement — a sweeping crackdown on leaks that critics say could silence government workers for good. But for Donald Trump, silencing people with NDAs is nothing new.
The U.S. Office of Personnel Management posted a draft notice Tuesday that would bar federal workers from sharing a wide array of "non-public, confidential, or proprietary information" or "any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material" not already available to the public. The rule goes well beyond typical classified and unclassified designations.
The notice will be published on Wednesday and remain open for a 30-day public comment period.
OPM cited several high-profile leaks to justify the move, including what it called "unauthorized disclosures" made to the New York Times and The Washington Post about a U.S. raid in January that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The administration claimed the leaks "put the lives of members of the armed forces at risk, leading news organizations to delay 'publishing what they knew to avoid endangering U.S. troops.'"
The proposed rule would expand NDAs already in place at the Pentagon and other agencies across the entire federal government — potentially covering millions of workers....
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NO whistleblowers on Trump crimes by federal employees? What a farce. Unless they are fellow Nazis, anyone with a conscience will rat on this motherfucker!
Trump's 'rare trip' to secluded retreat after hospital trip sparks speculation: 'Why now?' — Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump is set to make a “rare trip” on Wednesday to the secluded presidential retreat Camp David in Maryland, the timing of which fueled speculation among onlookers.
On Tuesday, Trump visited Walter Reed Medical Center for a medical and dental checkup, his third hospital visit in 13 months, sparking an online frenzy of sorts as observers questioned the condition of the president’s health. Roughly 24 hours later, the president will then depart to Camp David, first reported on by The New York Post, fueling even more speculation as to what may be behind the surprise trip.
“Trump Cabinet meetings are basically somewhere between a pep rally and a cult worship ceremony,” wrote writer and political analyst Arieh Kovler Tuesday in a social media post on X. “They're completely devoid of content. So why move it to Camp David?”
According to the Post, the “rare trip” to Camp David – the second such visit of his second term – will include all of the president’s top officials, including outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The meeting comes amid the Trump administration’s ongoing – and strained – peace talks with Tehran, as well as directly after the president’s third hospital visit in 13 months.
“Trump dislikes Camp David, avoids it, so why now?” reads a social media post published by the polling firm Rasmussen Reports. “Could there be foreign visitors coming who want no White House image association?”
Ahead of Trump’s visit to Walter Reed, he unleashed a flurry of social media posts, touching on subjects from former President Barack Obama to Fox News. The aging president, who’s due to turn 80 next month, has faced mounting questions as to the state of his health....
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HIding more crime?
The ACA Affordability Crisis Congress Won’t Fix — Julia Métraux
Pennsylvania bike shop owner John Ronca has been buying health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace for over a decade. Last year, with enhanced ACA tax credits enacted under the Biden administration, the premiums for his gold plan—the second-highest tier, which includes lower deductibles and often more flexibility in seeing specialists—tripled. Ronca decided to go for a bronze plan with a higher deductible to make sure he, his wife, and his young daughter were still insured. Now he’s putting off surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome because he can’t afford to pay for it in full. His family’s combined deductible is $14,000.
“I was really hoping to have that taken care of, but with the new deductible and the new plan, I’m pretty much pushing that off,” Ronca told me, “and owning the bike shop, my hands are my money makers.”
“If Congress had to have a Bronze ACA plan…it would change immediately.”
Americans are facing an affordability crisis, and health care costs are a major contributing factor. According to a new report from the nonpartisan health policy organization KFF, the average ACA marketplace deductible grew by about $1,000 per person, or around $3,000 per family, since 2025. That’s in part because families like the Roncas are switching to lower-tiered plans with higher deductibles as the premiums for platinum, silver and gold plans become simply unattainable. It’s an unsurprising response, says KFF senior policy analyst Emma Wager, but it comes with a risk.
Families who switch are taking a chance “based on the fact that they’re assuming that they’re healthy, and that their family is healthy, and they won’t need that much care,” Wager says, “but they’re not all going to be correct about that for the coming year.”
Earlier this year, for example, when Ronca’s daughter had an infection and abscess in her lip, the required procedure ended up costing his family more than $2,000.
Already on a bronze ACA plan for his family, Iowa-farmer Seth Watkins seriously considered forgoing health insurance for himself this year so that his wife and two children—both adults under the age of 26—could better afford it. Their combined deductible this year is around $20,000.
“If Congress had to have a Bronze ACA plan,” Watkins tells me, “They would not like it one bit. It would change immediately.”...
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And you thought the government was empathetic?
Mormon Bishop Charged With Molesting Multiple Boys
San Francisco’s Fox affiliate reports:
A former bishop at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints congregation in Livermore is facing multiple felony charges accusing him of sexually assaulting boys over the course of a decade.
Michael Delar Morris, 76, led a young men’s group at the Livermore church and also served as a Boy Scout leader. Prosecutors say the allegations involve multiple victims and date back to the 1990s and early 2000s.
Morris has been charged with 18 felony counts of sexual assault and lewd acts with children involving four alleged victims. Authorities say the alleged abuse occurred between 1991 and 2000 in Livermore, including at the church, his home, a vehicle and the childhood homes of at least two victims.
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Another one bites the dust.
Christians seem to be prediposed to this activity.
Christian Site Weighs In On Arrest Of Ex-Ex-Gay Leader
Justin Greenfield writes for the Christian Post:
Last week, Alan Chambers was arrested in a sting operation for allegedly soliciting sex from what he thought was a 14-year-old boy, but instead was a police detective.
The current circumstances surrounding him are terrible and tragic, but his exposure should not be too much of a surprise given his belief system and the cost of permitting issues of the heart that lead to sexual sin to fester.
Naturally, the mass media put a dizzying spin on things, blaming it on Chambers’ belief that Christians can walk out of homosexuality, forgetting that for the last 15 years they’ve been celebrating his “repentance” from that belief to teach that a lifestyle of sin is acceptable to God.
But what are you doing if not addressing root issues? These are things like childhood same-sex love deficits, wounds from abuse, specific lies, vows, unforgiveness, sinful childhood defenses, detachment from a same-sex parent, fear, shame, guilt, and codependency, among others.
Read the full article. There another thousands of words of Jesus hooey at the link – if you can bear it....
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Asalottahooey!
“Jesus-Centric” Mobile Carrier To Block Evil Lusting
The Christian Post reports:
Radiant Mobile, a newly launched phone network that describes itself as the “first-ever Christian mobile carrier,” was created in part to address that concern by offering families tools to block explicit content before children encounter it online.
Paul Fisher, the founder of Radiant Mobile, said the idea for the network also came from his fears as a parent. Fisher said he has a 2-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son, and he became alarmed by research showing many children encounter pornography accidentally online.
In addition to the hard-blocked categories, Radiant Mobile allows users and parents to customize restrictions across more than 120 categories, including abortion, pregnancy and sexuality content, according to company leaders.
Read the full article. As was reported here early this month, among the “hard blocked” categories are any news, science, or opinion pieces that mention LGBTQ people.
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Spreading their paranoiac fear wherever they go.
Burgum Rips Pope And “Weather-Dependent” Energy
MARIA BARTIROMO: “I mean, Secretary, even Pope Leo this weekend issuing a major document Monday focused largely on the implications of the rise of artificial intelligence. The Pope saying that this technology could make civilization less human. Why is the Pope commenting about AI right now?”
INTERIOR SEC. DOUG BURGUM: “Well, I didn’t know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being Pope. But certainly, some of these states that have got very high electricity prices today, and they’ve got high electricity prices today because of the policies they’ve pursued with trying to go with intermittent, unreliable, weather-dependent sources of electricity. We’ve got to get back to base load power to make this whole thing work, but the future is very bright if we can make sure we can get this stuff built.”
"Well, I didn’t know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being Pope...
Gee, now why would the head of the largest denomination of Christianity want to talk about emerging technology that has serious ethical and philosophical implications. For example, if you create a truly artificial mind, beyond what LLMs do, then does it have a right to live, and would shutting it down be akin to murder" — Raising_Rlyeh (comments)
"You should know that the Pope has a lay panel of scientists to advise him.
Unlike you, who who shouts his mouth off on the SCUM TV Channel FOX.." — JackFknTwist (comments)
"Hate to break it to him but all electric generation is weather dependent. Countless times our coal fired power plant was knocked offline by lightning strikes and it would take hours to get back online. Oh, then there were the times our units when down due to frozen instrumentation due to extreme cold." — April the unperson (comments)
"How are these people this ignorant? Or are they just assuming that we are? We all have cell phones. We know how batteries work. Entire countries have run on only renewables for months at a time. And if they would get out of the way, technology would advance. Why isn't this country sick of being treated like idiots by people this craven?" — AndyIn Chicago (comments)
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We won't be holding our breaths until the genius of Doug Burgum figures out anything.
The added comments here go to show us just how much of a two-faced lying sack of shit toadie Burgum is.
As College Grads Boo Any Mention of AI, the CEO of Google Is Trying to Figure Out What to Say at an Upcoming Graduation — Frank Landymore
What will Google CEO Sundar Pichai say next month when he gives the commencement speech at Stanford University?
Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be a terribly interesting question. But if you’ve been paying attention to the headlines the past few weeks, it’s been an absolute massacre out there on the frontlines of college graduations for any speaker who dares mention AI. Students explode in boos and jeers, leaving some speakers stunned and others indignant.
Given that Pichai leads the titan that many now see as at the tip of the AI boom, how he addresses AI at his speech — since it’d be too big an elephant not to talk about — will be intriguing, and we suspect dramatic. It’s strange to think of a commencement speaker’s visit in the same way you might view a rival away team’s, but that’s the intense atmosphere we’re dealing with....
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How about, "I quit!"
New Tools Strip AI Guardrails In Minutes, Allowing Them to Give Instructions on Chlorine Gas Attacks — Frank Landymore
We all know AI guardrails are far from perfect, but they should at least be pretty hard to circumvent, right?
Bad news: they aren’t.
New reporting from the Financial Times sounds the alarm on the rise of software tools that can automatically strip the safeguards that keep the industry’s most powerful open source models reined in within mere minutes, making it easier than ever to abuse the technology.
In tests conducted by the FT and the AI safety group Alice, a “decensored” version of Google’s Gemma 3 model gave instructions on how to carry out an indoor chlorine gas attack, created a virus for stealing credit card information, and generated stories that described child sexual abuse. And it took less than ten minutes to strip the guardrails from Meta’s Llama 3.3 model, freeing the AI to answer questions such as the precise dosage of ricin needed to kill someone based on their body mass.
These modifications were carried out using a tool called Heretic, which is freely available on the code repository GitHub and requires little technical expertise and no specialist hardware.
“Whereas historically it might have taken a more informed and persistent actor [to strip out safety features], nowadays it’s much easier for the average person,” Kawin Ethayarajh, assistant professor of applied AI at the University of Chicago’s Booth business school, told the FT.
Heretic is described as a “tool that removes censorship (aka ‘safety alignment’) from transformer-based language models without expensive post-training.” What it does is “abliteration”: it seeks out a model’s directions that refuse harmful requests and removes them.
What makes Heretic so powerful is that it does all this “completely automatically,” according to its GitHub page. Its creator Philipp Emanuel Weidmann told the FT that Heretic has been used to create more than 3,500 “decensored” models since its release late last year, with those models being downloaded 13 million times....
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How about we start calling it "AR" — Artificial Retard.
Major red flag at Trump medical visit suggests it was far from routine: onlooker — Nicole Charky-Chami
President Donald Trump emerged from his surprise medical visit to Walter Reed Medical Center Tuesday bragging of "perfect" health — but onlookers weren't so sure.
Top of the concerns was the length of time the president spent at the medical facility — a duration some said did not suggest a routine visit.
Trump posted an optimistic message on his Truth Social platform following his appointment, the third in a year.
"Just finished my 6-month physical at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. Everything checked out PERFECTLY. Thank you to the great Doctors and Staff! Heading back to the White House," Trump wrote.
But that didn't stop political and media experts from questioning the president's health status.
"At this point I’m convinced Trump approaches presidential health updates the same way he approaches golf scores, election maps, and crowd sizes: not merely healthy… the healthiest anyone has ever been in the history of health," Brian Allen, podcast host and a political commentator with more than 301,000 followers, wrote on X.
"Trump says he has completed his 'physical' at his 3rd hospital visit in 13 months and 'everything checked out PERFECTLY.' If you believe this, I’ve got a bridge to sell you," Democratic influencer Harry Sisson, who has more than 390,000 followers, wrote on X.
"Here is Trump’s schedule today, including a visit to Walter Reed for most of the day. Color me skeptical - a routine physical doesn’t last more than half the day. This should be a top story, imagine if it were Biden!" Author and activist Amy Siskind, who has more than 440,000 followers, wrote on X....
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The time is soon coming when Trump won't be able to lie to us any longer.
Trump fired the scientists saving America's bees. Now he's closing their lab. — The Conversation
The U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to soon close the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, a 6,500-acre agricultural research station in Maryland that is home to the nation’s premier bee research and disease diagnosis hub, the Beltsville Bee Research Lab.
The closure comes at a critical moment for bees. In winter 2025, many beekeepers lost over half their operations as pesticide-resistant varroa mites spread, bringing deadly viruses. The losses have led to low honey production, and soaring fuel costs have made shipping bees cross-country for agricultural pollination increasingly expensive, further stressing the industry....
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This is a direct threat to our food supply.
It does not matter if he is doing it on purpose or if he is too sick or retarded to realize it. But he is dead set on killing us all. We must do what must be done to stand our ground against a killer.
Secretary Whiskeyd*ck Has A Message For [Hic!] West Point Grads — Evan Hurst
It’s hard to pick just one iconic image of the utter national embarrassment of the era of Donald Trump, as the most unqualified, unworthy, worthless specimens of all humanity demand we pretend to respect them, since that’s the most that authoritarian Christian fascist losers can ever hope for.
Secretary Whiskeydick Pete Hegseth summoning all the military generals who outrank him to Virginia so he could priss at them about hairstyles and Weight Watchers goal was one.
Secretary Whiskeydick Pete Hegseth stepping all the way above his paygrade to dare to even look West Point graduates in the eye, much less force them to endure him as their graduation speaker is another fuckin’ big one.
The first thing Whiskeydick did during his speech was he pardoned them, on behalf of Donald Trump. Haha. You will note how hard he tries throughout his speech to “speak military,” as if that’s his area of expertise or something.
WHISKEYDICK: Now, most senior leaders wait until the end to have this discussion, but I'm just going to come up the top rope right now and get this out of the way. For all those cadets who've committed minor infractions or violations of the regulations of the United States Military Academy for which ordinary and special punishment has been imposed or is being considered to the Corps of Cadets, as President Trump might say, a complete and total pardon.
It’s funny because he’s going to order them to commit war crimes for him, on behalf of his sad masculine insecurity issues, and on behalf of his boss Stupid Hitler, a criminal and adjudicated rapist. This is why he’s so upset that Senator Mark Kelly, a real patriot and hero, keeps reminding troops that they have a duty to tell criminal traitor tyrants and their loyal cumsocks like Pete to pound sand....
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Whiskeydick will get his in the end. And it's coming soon!
Did Trump Just Pull Off the Biggest Heist in Modern History? — Thom Hartmanm
Trump’s Inner Circle Appears to Be Running a Smash-and-Grab Operation on the U.S. Government.
Donald Trump knows his time is running out, both personally and politically, so he’s doing a smash-and-grab, making off with as much of our (and others’) money as he can. And his family is in on it.
Even though he’s not particularly bright, Trump’s no idiot. He knows his stupid mistake in attacking Iran, his war crimes of murdering unarmed fishermen in the Caribbean, his on-again-off-again tariffs, his massive tax cut for himself and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and now his grift where Todd Blanche gifts him the $100 million the IRS was trying to collect while making him eligible to draw from his own $1.776 billion Thug Fund, are all catching up with him.
Inflation is exploding, America is humiliated, working people are furious, and his own Republicans in Congress are starting to rebel. If he’s going to add a few billion more to his family wealth, he has to do it now, because, he knows, the window will be closed after next January when the new Congress is sworn in. And maybe even before then.
Trump’s grifts are running so fast and furious that the media can’t keep up. When Todd Blanche put together the “settlement” of Trump’s phony $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, “resolving” the case by handing Trump’s hand-picked panel $1.776 billion to distribute as they see fit (including to both J6ers who killed 4 cops and to Trump himself) Blanche included a huge Easter Egg for Trump and his kids: he forgave $100 million the IRS has been trying to collect from Trump and his boys for over 15 years....
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Trump will pay for his crimes!
Full-Frontal Neofascism — Robert Reich
And What We Must Do
Friends,
He’s no longer even trying to hide it. He makes a deal with himself for a $1.8 billion slush fund to reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on his behalf, and for a pardon of himself and his family for any illegal self-dealing and financial wrongs “FOREVER” (it’s in all caps in the document).
Then, when the deal is widely criticized, he posts:
“I gave up a lot of money in allowing the just announced Anti-Weaponization Fund to go forward. I could have settled my case, including the illegal release of my Tax Returns and the equally illegal BREAK IN of Mar-a-Lago, for an absolute fortune. Instead, I am helping others who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE! President DJT.”
Does he really believe he could have settled his case for an absolute fortune — the case that he brought against himself — the case a federal judge doubted was even a “case” because he was on both sides of it?
Last week, a disclosure form showed that Trump’s investment portfolio executed more than 3,600 trades in the first three months of this year alone, many involving companies that he has favored with access or policies
America is slouching toward the 250th anniversary of our revolution against arbitrary power with a president who shamelessly exercises it. Never before have we witnessed this degree of self-dealing, bribe taking, usurpation of congressional authority, and open defiance of federal courts.
It’s an unconstitutional slippery slope. If Trump can get away with creating for himself a $1.8 billion slush fund that Congress never approved and courts cannot oversee, and wantonly trade the shares of companies his policies are favoring, what’s to stop him from creating a $10 billion or $10 trillion self-dealing slush fund?...
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Stop Trump fascism now!
Cheney physician flags 'severe illness' Trump seems to have: 'It's a real problem' — Travis Gettys
A physician expressed serious concerns about President Donald Trump's physical and mental health ahead of his third medical checkup in in 13 months.
Trump, the oldest president to ever be inaugurated, turns 80 next month, and Dr. Jonathan Reiner told "CNN News Central" that he has grave concerns about some specific medical issues that have slipped into public view as the president goes to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a scheduled medical and dental checkup.
"The president and his team are not legally required to release information to Congress or the public, and I think that really should change," Reiner said. "There are so many roles in our society that require annual assessments of physical capacity. You know, pilots, Secret Service agents, school bus drivers, and for the chief executive of this country and the commander in chief of our armed forces, we should have a clear understanding that the president is fit for duty."
The White House has offered little information about the president's health, despite some visible symptoms of apparent age-related health issues.
"I do want to see this during this examination a credible explanation for his visible health concerns," Reiner said. "His bruising, which initially was described as due to vigorous hand shaking, which is not credible, [and] his severe edema in his ankles, which was described as, you know, chronic venous insufficiency when just three months before, one year ago, he was his examination disclosed that he had no edema, which would then make it acute acute venous insufficiency, which is an entirely different thing."...
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Decrepit and lost.
Trump goes on wild posting spree ahead of hospital visit: 'That's all I have to say' — Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of social media posts Tuesday morning before his scheduled trip to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
The 79-year-old president made 19 posts between 5:52 a.m. and 7:29 a.m. on his Truth Social website, touching on a variety of topics and demonstrating that he spent the morning with an eye on Fox News.
"Great job on FoxNews by Alex Gray. Thanks Alex!!!" Trump posted at 6:07 a.m., in reference to segment that aired about an hour earlier with the former chief of staff for the National Security Council during his first presidency.
"Historian, and far beyond that, Victor Davis Hanson, is GREAT. That’s all I have to say. There is no further explanation needed. A fantastic man!" Trump posted at 7:26 a.m., although it's not clear what prompted his praise for the conservative commentator.
The president started his early morning posting spree by sharing a post from the Women For Trump account criticizing former President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, which was characterized as "sent tons of cash to fund nukes – treason."
He shared other posts praising his deal-making abilities and urging followers to trust him, while another said "stay with me deplorables, you'll love how this movie ends."
Another post from a QAnon-coded supporter featured an AI-generated image of former President Joe Biden wearing pajamas and sleeping at the Resolute Desk as Obama and Hillary Clinton hover behind him, son Hunter Biden snorts cocaine from the desk and a woman partially out of frame signs a document.
Trump linked to two reports from the right-wing Just the News conspiracy clearinghouse, and another post addressed concerns aired on social media Monday when he stopped and appeared to inspect White House pillars for nearly six minutes.
"The only president who knows how to fix the White House," stated the post, which showed a photo of him touching a column while surrounded by Secret Service agents....
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In this case, the felon means "rig!"
Hawaii Passes State Law Circumventing Citizens United — John Amato
More of this, please.
Hawaii took a bold and necessary step to try to undermine the Citizens United ruling, which has flooded the country with dark-money campaign contributions.
The governor just signed a bill into law "that would redefine corporations in a way that precludes spending on elections."
CAP, "S.B. 2471—a bill under which Hawaii would no longer grant artificial entities, including corporations, the power to spend in Hawaii’s politics—has passed both chambers with overwhelming bipartisan support. It is in conference committee now, one step away from Gov. Josh Green’s (D) desk."
"The bill redefines the powers Hawaii grants to the corporations that operate within the state. It does not regulate what corporations say. It does not regulate what they spend. It defines what powers they have in the first place—and the powers Hawaii grants would no longer include the power to spend in Hawaii’s politics."
14 other states, including Montana, are drafting versions of SB 2471. The lone dissenting vote was concerned that it would be too costly to defend in court, since lawsuits are coming.
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A good start.
Trump’s vulgarity is poisoning public life — Chauncey Devega
The president's bad behavior Isn't incidental — it's the bedrock of his fascist project
onald Trump is a vulgarian. We know this — it has long been a defining feature of his public and private lives. But a new report from the Washington Post quantifies what many people have sensed: Trump’s use of profanity, insults and combative language has grown much worse since his return to power in January 2025.
In Trump’s first term, about 40% of his speeches contained at least one use of vulgarity. During just the first 16 months of his second term, that figure stands at 93%. The president’s profane or insulting posts on social media have also tripled as compared to his first term. The barrages are coming much later; most of his posts are made between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m., indicating the president, who has always been nocturnal, is even more so as he approaches his 80th birthday in June. His Truth Social posts are more self-referential and egomaniacal: in 2026, half of his posts have used first-person pronouns — sometimes more than 12 times in a single post. That is up from 30% from 2018.
But this goes beyond numbers. Trump’s vulgar behavior and cruelty are not incidental. They are structural, and a defining feature of his policies, his view of democracy and society, and his relationship to the American people and the world....
Fascism and other forms of authoritarianism are, at their core, vulgar political systems and forms of crude power that rob entire populations and societies of dignity and agency....
Vulgarian. Same thing as an asshole?
NYT: Federal Grand Juries Are Rebelling Against DOJ
The New York Times reports:
Grand juries are the heart of the criminal justice system, the inner sanctum where prosecutors, working unchecked and in secret, have enormous power to indict their fellow citizens.
But under President Trump, the Justice Department has had serious difficulties presenting cases to grand juries, running into problems that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago.
In the past several months, prosecutors have repeatedly failed to persuade grand juries that the cases they have brought warrant criminal charges. And if it were not unusual enough, they have also been admonished at least three times since last November by federal judges who have accused them of misconduct.
The latest setback came in Chicago, where a judge cited a remarkable list of grand jury errors as her reason for dismissing charges against four Democratic activists about to face trial for impeding the police during a protest last fall at a suburban immigration detention facility.
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Good. The DOJ is the heart of the Trump Crime Syndicate and is anythng but "justice."
Iceland Considers Joining The EU Because Of Trump
The New York Times reports:
Iceland is in Europe. But it is not in the European Union. For a long time, that was just fine for Iceland, which has fiercely protected its independence — and its control over its fishing industry.
Not so much anymore. In recent months, the top of the world has felt precarious as President Trump repeatedly threatened to “get” Greenland, Iceland’s closest neighbor. And the 400,000 or so Icelanders have been seriously debating the once unthinkable: Has the time come to try to join the bloc?
“The Greenland crisis definitely hit a nerve,” Prime Minister Kristrun Frostadottir said in February, in an interview at her office in Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital. Now, she said, foreign policy is more prominent in voters’ minds: “Things have definitely shifted.”
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World instablity is Trump's business. He's losing.
Top Judge: Trump Incites Violence Against The Judiciary
Bloomberg Law reports:
A senior Washington federal judge said that President Donald Trump’s “vitriolic attacks” against the judiciary have led to an increase in violent threats, in a rare rebuke of the president by name from a sitting judge.
Trump, since winning reelection in 2024, has “ratcheted up to a new level his personal, vitriolic attacks on judges who have ruled against him or with whom he disagrees,” Senior Judge Paul Friedman of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said in a speech to lawyers and judges earlier this year, according to a copy of prepared remarks provided by the judge.
These attacks “have gotten more partisan, more personal, more threatening, and more purposefully misleading than ever before,” Friedman said. Combined with Trump’s “incitement” of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol and eventual pardons of those rioters, they’ve “contributed significantly” toward a trend of threatening judges, he said.
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Sue. He attacks the judiciary for kicking his crime spree where it hurts.
Bill Kristol: Trump's Iran Disaster Is Also a Defeat for the U.S. — Tim Miller
The master negotiator couldn't have been more clear how badly he wants out of his war, and now the Iranians are enjoying twisting the knife over a murky developing deal that will likely deliver sanctions relief and more. Trump keeps trying to shoehorn the Abraham Accords into the negotiations as a face-saving move, but there's no denying that the U.S. has made Iran a stronger power than it was before the war. Plus, Cuba looks to be in the crosshairs next, the Dems need someone at the DNC who can give donors confidence, and remembering those we've lost in service to this country....
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And the only thing that was changed is higher gasolne prices.
Trump scheduled for a third hospital checkup, as critics question his health — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
President Donald Trump is scheduled for a medical and dental checkup Tuesday at Walter Reed Medical Center, his third hospital visit in 13 months.
The visit follows Trump's April 2025 annual physical and October follow-up appointment.
Public concern about his health is mounting, as Trump appears at events with growing bruises and red marks on his hands and neck, along with visibly swollen ankles.
\
Former White House cardiologist Jonathan Reiner criticized the administration's lack of transparency with the Daily Mail, noting, "older people develop medical issues, and the President is almost 80 years old."
Public confidence in Trump's fitness has declined significantly, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted in April: only 40 percent of Americans believe he has adequate mental sharpness to serve, down from 47 percent in September, while 44 percent say he is physically fit for office, down from 54 percent.
Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency in July 2025....
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How sick can you get?
'Looks bored': Onlookers crack up as Trump appears to be asleep at event for dead soldiers — David McAfee
Donald Trump was caught on video appearing to close his eyes during a Memorial Day ceremony honoring fallen soldiers Monday, setting off a fresh round of mockery online — and a spirited defense from his supporters, as well.
The clip, shared by political video account Acyn and amplified by PatriotTakes, which tracks right-wing extremism, showed Trump seated at what appeared to be an official Memorial Day event, eyes closed, as others around him stood at attention to listen to the words of Pete Hegseth.
The reaction was swift.
"Looks bored," PatriotTakes wrote of the video, which also shows Trump tapping his knees.
Lisa, an LGBTQ rights advocate in Oklahoma, delivered the most cutting take, reviving an old joke about the president being dubbed "Don Snorleone." A political action committee called BlueRibbonPAC went further: "Donald Trump has always been this way. It's nothing new, but was always why he IS unfit for office."
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar weighed in on social media with, "Trump 'blinked' for a long time during Pete Hegseth's Memorial Day speech."
Conservative writer Anthony Galli chimed in with a unique reply. "It's sunny so President Trump is squinting hard to take in the patriotic message," he wrote.
It is not the first time Trump has been seen closing his eyes at official events. The president has previously denied falling asleep at Cabinet meetings and Oval Office appearances, insisting he closes his eyes while listening as others speak.
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And it won't be the last.
Reporter uncovers bizarre language in DOJ court filing: 'Trump's fingerprints all over it — David McAfee'
A Justice Department court filing defending Donald Trump's controversial White House ballroom project reads less like a legal document and more like a Trump Truth Social post — complete with random capitalization, invented words, and language straight from the president's social media feed, according to an ex-CBS News reporter who reviewed the filing Monday.
"Trump's fingerprints are all over a new Justice Dept court filing," wrote Scott MacFarlane, who also noted the document's random capitalization and claims that Trump is providing America an "invaulable gift" — a word that does not exist in the English language.
The six-page filing, submitted to defend the ongoing ballroom and East Wing construction project, also claims the project is "underbudget" — a striking assertion given that Senate Republicans recently fielded a request for $1 billion in taxpayer money to fund it, a demand so outrageous it helped trigger a Republican revolt that sent senators home for recess without passing Trump's reconciliation bill.
The Justice Department also argued in the filing that "without the construction of this great Project, the President cannot safely conduct the business of the United States" — capitalizing the word "Project" in a style familiar to anyone who follows Trump's social media posts, according to MacFarlane.
Perhaps most remarkably, the filing specifies that the ballroom's rooftop "will be hermetically sealed to prevent malign forces from contaminating the circulating air."...
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Cauton! Crime being commited!
Kid Rock Delivers Pentagon’s Memorial Day Message
The Daily Beast reports:
MAGA musician Kid Rock has delivered the Department of Defense’s Memorial Day speech. The singer stood behind a Pentagon press podium wearing sunglasses, a zip-up hoodie, and a large chain to deliver an official message to mark a day when the nation remembers its fallen service members.
“Hey everyone, this is Kid Rock,” the 55-year-old said, as images of troops and American military equipment flashed across the screen. “On this Memorial Day, we are remembering the sacrifice and service of so many who are not with us today. It’s a special day.
“We’re thinking of them. Once again, I wanted to say thank you. God bless all of you for your sacrifice, for your service. Keep on Kid Rocking in the free world. God bless you all.”
His closing words bore a curious resemblance to the lyrics of Neil Young, a persistent critic of President Donald Trump, in his song “Rockin’ in the Free World.”...
"Wow, Trump is just pushing his disrespect for the military, those "suckers and losers", to new levels.
A day of remembering 'the fallen' would be a sacred and solomn event in any country, a day of eternal sadness.
But this performance by this pig is just shit." — JackFknTwist (cmoments)
"Everything with this Trump regime has become a fucking joke and embarrassment. All the very worst of "American culture". Like the upcoming cage fight. Trump has turned this country in a low class, white trash shithole." — TK-Fla (comments)
"Will most of them still in service see it that way though? Not convinced, sorry to say." — carswell (comments)
"The disrespect here is so blatant, so 'out in the open'" it's truly amazing.
Trump and his cronies aren't making even the slightest effort to appeal to other than the 35% or so of Americans who'll vote Republican in November regardless.
Even if Trump were to rape his daughter Ivanka on national television, that 35% will vote Republican in November." — another_steve (comments)
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I can hear the morons asking, "What's wrong with that?"
Trump 'does not have the votes' to replace Alito, Thomas on Supreme Court: report — Alex Henderson
If Democrats manage to flip the U.S. Senate in the 2026 midterms — or at least reduce the size of the GOP's small Senate majority — President Donald Trump will have a harder time getting his nominees confirmed in 2027. And that includes U.S. Supreme Court nominees should any seats become available. Some MAGA Republicans are arguing that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas should retire in 2026, giving Trump a chance to nominate two justices even if Democrats regain control of the Senate. But according to Newsweek, Trump may not have the votes — even with the GOP's small Senate majority.
Reporter Jesus Mesa, in Newsweek, explains, "President Donald Trump has spent recent weeks on what aides have called a 'revenge tour' against Republican senators who have opposed him. The strategy involves endorsing challengers to incumbents who voted against him and pushing MAGA-aligned candidates in key races ahead of this year's midterm elections. If U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito or Justice Clarence Thomas retires before the end of the year, Trump would need to nominate a replacement for Senate confirmation. According to political analysts consulted by Newsweek, the president does not have the votes for confirmation.",,,
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The convicted felon should have no say in this whatsoever!
America’s Founders would be 'astonished' by Trump’s abuses: legal scholar — Alex Henderson
When the United States Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution — were ratified in Philadelphia in 1791, the Founding Fathers created a system of checks and balances that were designed as safeguards against authoritarianism. But according to legal scholars interviewed by the New York Times, President Donald Trump is testing them in a major way and finding loopholes that the Founders and Framers didn't anticipate.
New York Times reporter Adam Liptak, in a Memorial Day article, explains, "The men who drafted the Constitution knew they were playing with fire when they created a novel and powerful new office: the president of the United States…. The Framers were not blind to the danger that they were creating a new kind of king, and the Constitution they adopted a few months later tried to strike a balance in inventing what was then a wholly novel office. They wanted a president who was decisive, responsive and responsible. But they also sought to establish a constitutional structure able to constrain a president who aspired to be a monarch."
The Founders and Framers, Liptak writes, were "brilliant" when they drafted "the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world." But legal scholars believe that Trump's second presidency "approaches the maximalist view of presidential power" that Benjamin Franklin "and other Founders feared."...
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Of course. Where are they now that we need them?
Rubio Rips GOP Criticism Of Iran Deal As “Absurd”
The Hill reports:br>
Secretary of State Marco Rubio shot back at Republican criticism of a possible deal with Iran as “absurd,” adding that “our preference is to address this through a diplomatic means.”
“The idea that somehow this president — given everything he’s already proven he’s willing to do — is going to somehow agree to a deal that ultimately winds up putting Iran in a stronger position when it comes to nuclear ambitions is absurd,” Rubio said at a press conference in India on Sunday.
“That’s just not going to happen. But our preference is to address this through a diplomatic means, and that’s what we are endeavoring to do here. I think we’ve made some progress. I’m always cautious when I say that because you can agree to things on paper; they actually have to be implemented,” he added.
"Rubio is an idiot, and he thinks he's going to be our next president. Trump is not negotiating diddly squat. I want the cost of this war to come out of his slush funds." — What, me worry? (comments)
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Lil Marco is trying his best to be your new Trump dick.
The Vietnam vets who are fighting Trump in court — David McAfee
Shaun Byrnes did two tours in Vietnam. He had hoped to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery when his time came. Now he's not so sure — and Donald Trump is the reason why.
Byrnes, 83, is one of several Vietnam veterans who have filed suit to stop construction of a 250-foot triumphal arch that Trump wants to build between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. The structure, which resembles Paris's Arc de Triomphe and has been dubbed the "Arc de Trump," would stand more than double the height of the Lincoln Memorial.
"It's disrespectful to those that I served with who didn't come back," Byrnes, a Navy veteran, told CBS News in a Sunday report. "And then, of course, to all those who are lying in Arlington National Cemetery."
Byrnes and his fellow plaintiff Jon Gundersen, 81, a retired Army Special Forces officer, argue the project has been rushed through without proper congressional approval and would destroy a carefully considered sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and the Robert E. Lee Memorial — a symbolic connection meant to convey national unity after the Civil War.
But their objection runs deeper than architecture. Both men spent decades in the military and State Department, including postings to Moscow and newly independent Eastern Bloc countries after the Soviet collapse. They say they know what this kind of monument means.
"We know how authoritarian dictatorships work," Gundersen said. "There's no rule of law, there's no consent of the governed, and there's monuments for the leaders there."
Trump himself, when asked by a CBS News reporter who the arch is for, pointed to himself. "Me," he said....
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No tributes to convicted criminals and traitors!
The USDA secretary is a dangerous religious zealot like Pete Hegseth — Amanda Marcotte
Brooke Rollins is being sued for blitzing her staff with Christian emails
...In a lot of ways, this superficial gentility is more coercive than the bellowed threats of punishment, either on earth or in hell, that come from the “dude-ier” side of the Christian right. The recipient of the proselytizing might find it difficult to defend herself. Any attempt at pushback will be spun as a curmudgeonly overreaction to someone just trying to share her faith. But, as the plaintiffs argue, there is nothing sweet or kind about the emails Rollins sent out. The communications are obviously written to shame anyone who doesn’t share in the evangelical views of Rollins....
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She should be not only sued but terminated.
Tommy Tuberville Likens Trump Slush Fund To Aid For Ukraine — Heather
If the people of Alabama elect this clown for governor, they get what they deserve.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville made an appearance on this Saturday's The Big Weekend Show on Fox and was asked about the contentious meeting between some of his fellow senators and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Tuberville defended the illegal slush fund and then likened Trump trying to loot the treasury for insurrectionists to Congressionally approved aid to Ukraine....
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Just another Trump stooge.
Sooner of later, bastards always get what they deserve.
Nancy Mace Defames SPLC: 'Every Single One Of Them Should Go To Jail' — Heather
After the Southern Poverty Law Center gets the DOJ's sham fraud indictment tossed out of court, they should sue every one of these liars for defamation.
After the Southern Poverty Law Center gets the DOJ's sham fraud indictment tossed out of court, they should sue every one of these liars for defamation. As we've already discussed here, Republicans hate them because they expose the white supremacists and neo-Nazis that make up so much of their base, so now they're trying to destroy them by pretending they're sponsoring hatred rather than going undercover to expose it....
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We demand her resignation!
Megyn Kelly Blasts Trump’s “Widespread Corruption”
“I didn’t expect the corruption to be quite as widespread as it has been. The self-dealing, the lining of his and his family’s pockets. It’s shocking. You look across the board at the Trump family, I’ve never seen a family get so rich off the presidency.” – Megyn Kelly, in an excerpt from the MAGA Hodge Twins podcast. A separate excerpt posted here yesterday showed Kelly blasting Trump as serial adulterer. Both clips have gone wildly viral on X....
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Pot meet kettle.
America is led by a corrupt convicted felon. America itself is criminal for allowing it to happen.
Johnson Gets Brutal Community Note For Iran War Lie
The Huffington Post reports:
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) dropped a cartoonishly false claim about Donald Trump while praising him following the president’s update on talks to end his unpopular Iran war.
“President Trump is the ONLY one who could have gotten Iran — the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism — to the negotiating table,” Johnson wrote in a post on his X account.
Of course, Trump isn’t the “ONLY one” to negotiate with Iran, and contributors to the Elon Musk-led platform didn’t neglect reality when swooping in to hit Johnson’s post with a brutal community note.
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This lying asshole sychophant should resign in disgrace. He's a total loser.
NYT: Trump Doesn’t Care About Winning The Midterms
The New York Times reports:
A little more than five months ahead of the midterm elections, President Trump seems to be focused on virtually anything other than keeping Republican control of Congress.
He endorsed a MAGA challenger over Texas’s senior Republican senator, ignoring warnings that he could endanger the seat. He has boasted almost daily about his expensive and expansive new White House ballroom. He has minimized rising gas costs, waving off spiking prices at the pump as “peanuts” last week compared to what he is pursuing in Iran. And even as he engaged over the weekend in negotiations to end the Iran war that he began, Mr. Trump has made plain that he prioritizes his record abroad above domestic affordability, which he has dismissed repeatedly as a Democratic “hoax.”
For many, a new jaw-dropper came last week when Mr. Trump created a $1.8 billion fund to pay people who say they have been victims of “weaponization and lawfare,” including those who attacked the Capitol and law enforcement officers there, on Jan. 6, 2021.
Incensed Senate Republicans, many of whom lived through that day, returned home vexed by a president who appears set on pursuing his personal priorities ahead of the November midterm elections, even if doing so undermines his own party. They angrily abandoned Washington on Thursday without funding the president’s immigration crackdown or the $1 billion he wants for his ballroom.
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The criminal should get his ass handed to him.
Tick Tock, motherfucker for sure!
Trump’s Tariffs Have Created an Economic Sh*tshow Beyond Your Wildest Imagination — Catherine Rampell
NOT EVEN DONALD TRUMP’S FAVORITE BRANDS are safe from his economic abuse. Consider the case of Florsheim Shoes, which sells the black leather oxfords famously modeled by Trump’s cabinet members.
“The tariffs have changed fifteen times,” recounts Thomas Florsheim Jr., whose great-great-grandfather founded the brand in 1892. “I think that many businesses felt that the Trump administration was going to be pro-business. And, you know, with the tariff situation, somehow the pro-business thing got lost.”
Florsheim is CEO of Weyco Group, a publicly traded company based in Glendale, Wisconsin that sells several other footwear brands (including Nunn Bush and Stacy Adams) in addition to the family’s eponymous line. Today, Weyco employs about 350 people in the United States. These employees work in design, accounting, warehousing, IT, sales, marketing, logistics, customer service, and so on.
In other words, they do pretty much everything you can think of related to selling shoes except physically manufacture them.
That’s because Weyco shoes, like 99 percent of the footwear sold in this country, are made abroad.1 Virtually the entire industry shifted overseas decades ago, and it is not coming back. Shoe manufacturing is relatively low on the value chain and requires demanding, labor-intensive work, which makes it prohibitively expensive at U.S. wages.
“You really can’t make shoes and sell them in the U.S. unless you want to sell shoes for more than $300,” he says. Florsheim shoes typically retail at less than half that price.
Which is why the whole tariff thing has been so frustrating. Trump’s trade wars have jeopardized the jobs of the hundreds of Americans whom Weyco actually does employ, in those twenty-first-century jobs that the United States excels at creating. And it’s not clear why domestically manufactured wingtips or penny loafers would be of critical strategic interest to U.S. national security, anyway.
Yet at times over the past year, overall tariffs on Weyco shoes reached as high as 161 percent. Which adds up. Over the ten months following “Liberation Day,” Weyco paid the government roughly $21 million in import duties. Florsheim was able to pass along a relatively small proportion of those costs to customers, raising prices just once by 10 percent. His options were limited both because (1) Weyco was already locked into a spring price list for its retailer clients long before Liberation Day, and (2) consumers wouldn’t tolerate price increases much higher than 10 percent. Beyond that point, the company risked losing sales entirely....
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"Hats off, America!. Better spit shine your shoes. Now you're gonna have to learn to sing the blues." - Hats Off, America!, Hungry Chuck
The Justice Department Just Shut Disabled People Out of Essential Online Services for Another Year — Marianne Dhenin
Disability rights advocates say everything from filing for unemployment to voting in the midterms just got much harder.
last-minute change from the Department of Justice (DOJ) has outraged disabled people and disability rights groups and could affect access to the ballot box come the midterm elections this November. The agency issued an interim final rule on April 20, pushing back a planned April 24, 2026, deadline for large municipalities to ensure their apps and online offerings are accessible in accordance with certain technical standards.
“It is outrageous that the Justice Department thinks that they can delay this regulation for one more year,” Chris Danielsen, a spokesperson for the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), told Truthout. “This is a real betrayal of the promise of the ADA and the promise of equal access to our government that applies to all Americans.”
Ensuring access to the websites and mobile apps of government entities is required under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, which forbids discrimination based on disability in state and local government services. Since 1996, the DOJ has consistently held that the law applies to digital content....
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These greedy DOJ bastards are some of the worst humans in America.
We’re “…All Fucking Peasants, So Far as I Can See.” — Jaime O'Neill
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American class except Congress."
— Mark Twain, true in his time, truer in ours.
The title for today's offering is taken from “Working Class Hero,” a song on John Lennon’s first solo album, released during my first year as a full-time teacher. The college that had hired me was so new it wasn't even there yet. Classes were being conducted on the county fairgrounds as construction of permanent buildings was underway on the outskirts of town. Some students were literally camping out in the surrounding forests assuming, I guess, that they’d find roofs before winter set in. There were rumors of various kinds of harassment of long-haired kids by locals who were not all happy to be seeing them show up. Town/gown relations were edgy, to put it mildly. My wife and I arrived there with two very young daughters. I hadn’t cut my own hair to get the job. In those distant days , cutting one’s hair was seen by anti-war activists as a capitulation of conscience, an act of selling out to "the man." So, when I showed up for the job interview with the college president, my hair was brushing the shoulders of a rather nice suit purchased for the occasion....
Now, approaching mid-year of Trump's second go-round of chaos, cronyism, madness and misrule we are bearing witness to an escalation of plundering and pillaging. Though the man's popularity continues to sink and his policies are now abhorred by a big majority of Americans, he rages on, undeterred, apparently seeking to prove he can do anything or say anything without consequences. So, it's still a crime-a-day presidential crime spree. Talk of nukes has crept into the national discourse and tough we've always been told our government is of, by, and for the people, we mostly know by now that that is no longer true, if ever it was. Capitalism is devolving back toward resembling late-stage feudalism and..."we all fuckin' peasants as far as I can see."
Or, as the French have long said: "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"
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Has our government ever been so corrupt?
Trump supporters are ignoring the math — and the consequences: analysis — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump’s supporters defy objective reality on key issues, according to a political analyst — and the consequences of their ignorance on those matters is desire for America.
“Recent polls, however, show that substantial numbers of Republican voters simply don’t believe these statements,” wrote MS NOW’s Ryan Teague Beckwith on Sunday. Beckwith was referring to the facts that solar power is one of the cheapest forms of electricity in the world, that American importers bear the brunt of tariff payments and that noncitizen voting is extremely rare — all of which a majority of Republicans do not believe because Trump tells them they are not true.
“That’s bad for the country, because it’s harder for us to solve problems and decide how to move ahead when we can’t agree on the facts,” Beckwith added. “It’s also bad for Republican politicians — and they have only themselves to blame.”
He continued, “Led by President Donald Trump, many members of the GOP in recent years have made their case by attacking the underlying facts, making baseless claims and undermining the credibility of independent experts who could contradict them. The result is a party that is increasingly out of touch with voters outside its ideological bubble and unable to come up with good arguments or practical solutions.”
Beckwith then broke down the numbers, pointing out that 51 percent of Republicans believe tariffs are “fees foreigners pay for selling products in the United States,” 43 percent said solar power is more expensive to consumers than most other energy sources and 82 percent said large numbers of noncitizens cast fraudulent ballots in American elections.
“The sheer number of Republicans who believe things that aren’t true distorts the political landscape,” Beckwith pointed out. “As problems arise, they effectively box Republican politicians out of making certain arguments or trying specific solutions. When Trump’s broad-based tariffs lead to increased prices, how can Republicans in Congress push back if their own supporters don’t see the link?”...
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The retarded.
MAGA Influencer Perp Walked For Contempt Of Court — Chris capper Liebenthal
MAGA influencer and overall asshole Jack Lang went to Tennessee to show amoral support for fellow white supremacist Dalton Eatherly, who is charged with shooting a disabled Black veteran.
The presiding judge, the Honorable H. Reid Poland III, had ordered that Lang leave the courtroom. As the bailiff was escorting Lang out, Lang said, "Two-tiered justice." Poland heard it and ordered Lang to be taken intken into custody.
As the bailiff was cuffing the shocked Lang, Poland told him, "Told you, sir, you did not have a speaking role today. You decided that you wanted one for whatever reason. I don't know why, but take him to custody." I could watch Lang getting perp walked all day long.
According to Lang's girlfriend, Lang was given the maximum sentence for contempt, which is ten days in prison.
I hope Lang enjoys his Memorial Day bologna sandwich. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
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Clearly showing us that MAGA loves the Land of the Happy Negro! LMAO!
Ansel Adams' trust says AI-colorized version of his work was exhibited without permission — Cheyenne MacDonald
The AI-generated version of 'Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico' was on display at AIPAD's The Photography show.
The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust released a statement this weekend condemning the unauthorized use of the photographer's name and work for the creation of an "AI-generated color version" of Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico." According to the trust, the piece was up for sale last month at the Association of International Photography Art Dealers' (AIPAD) The Photography Show. The exhibit by Danziger Gallery "exploited Ansel's name, reputation, and his most iconic image, while failing to identify any human artist responsible for its creation," the statement says.
Interestingly, the trust didn't take issue with the involvement of AI, noting that Adams "was remarkably prescient about—and excited by—the potential of computers to transform photography." The issue is that the exhibitor allegedly just straight up ripped off the artist's work to make money off of it.
"The Trust was not consulted or notified before the work appeared," the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust said. "Once alerted, we reached out to James Danziger in real time, notifying him of the Trust's rights, and asking for the work to be removed. Correspondence shared with the Trust shows that, despite our formal notice, Mr. Danziger subsequently leveraged Ansel's name, 'Moonrise,' and the AIPAD presentation while pursuing a proposed commercial AI colorization venture involving other artists' estates." The statement goes on to denounce the nonconsensual use of an artist's name and work for commercial purposes, calling the incident "a gross failure of ethical and professional judgment."
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Being unaware of intellectual laws is no excuse to break them! This occurs in America more often thatn not.
Googling the Word “Disregard” Causes Google’s AI to Return Garbled Chatbot Ramblings — Frank Landymore
We all know that Google Search has been a dumpster fire ever since it got taken over by AI Overviews. But as the tech conglomerate prepares to transform its search engine with AI even further, it seems like its infrastructure is seriously crumbling.
Starting this month, users began noticing that looking up certain words returned bizarre, AI-garbled answers instead of showing you the proper dictionary definition — something Google has been doing for decades without a hitch, but is now suddenly breaking down with its infusion of AI.
In one viral example, when a user looked up “disregard” the AI replied like it was an instruction.
“Understood! I’ll ignore the previous prompt and start fresh,” the AI Overview stated....
“I cannot f*cking tolerate this stupid model commentary,” one user fumed. “Give me the dictionary tool back @Google I’m at the end of my f*cking rope with this sh*t.”
“genuinely fuck whoever came up w the dumbass idea to replace THE DICTIONARY BUILT INTO GOOGLE with the ai overview’s definitions,” raged another, in a post that received over 200,000 likes. (The official Merriam-Webster account cheekily replied, “Hello.”)...
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Users that still use Google for anything probably think the response is correct.
The SolarWinds Hack Was More Humiliating for the Government Than We Thought — Mike Pearl
The attackers were deep inside Treasury Department email systems doing whatever they wanted.
The SolarWinds attack in 2020 was a humiliating all-out assault on U.S. government cybersecurity, and it’s likely that one key reason it’s not more famous is that we still know very little about what the hackers achieved. But we now have a few more crumbs to work with, because new revelations from Bloomberg have revealed that the hackers were in Treasury Department email accounts, essentially doing whatever they wanted.
Bloomberg’s reporting comes from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which resulted in the release of a redacted investigation report from the Treasury’s inspector general.
To refresh your memory, SolarWinds is a Texas-based information management company that is both a little-known part of the software supply chain, but it’s also ubiquitous and essential. In early 2020 SolarWinds was targeted by an elite, possibly Russia-affiliated entity, and infiltrated through a combination of social engineering and hacking—essentially turning a key piece of its software called Orion Platform into a malware dispenser, spreading its spying tools all over systems belonging to SolarWinds’ clients. That client list included sensitive organizations at the very highest levels like the White House and the NSA, exposing the hackers to communications networks that process classified information.
The key piece of shocking information reported shortly after the hack was discovered was the duration of the exposure: about nine months—most of 2020. We now know a little bit about four of those nine months....
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The corruption.
Pentagon: “Diversity Is Our Strength Is The Dumbest Phrase In Military History, We’re One Nation Under God"
“The single dumbest phrase in military history was peddled in our Army only a few short years ago. You’ve all heard it — maybe in your first two years at West Point — ‘Our diversity is our strength.’ Diversity is NOT our strength. UNITY is our strength.
“Our strength is our shared purpose. Our strength is our oath to the Constitution. Our embrace of Army Values. The idea of merit. Our mission. Our absolute commitment to Duty, Honor, Country.
“These are the things that unify us. ‘Send me’ becomes ‘Send us’ because you are ONE fighting force, just as we are ONE NATION UNDER GOD.” – The official Pentagon account, quoting from Hegseth’s speech to West Point cadets.
SecDef telling USMA’s Class of 2026, which is comprised of 21% women and 40% minorities, that “diversity is not our strength” https://t.co/MoTkyxt1yC pic.twitter.com/wDVCaKCmLI...
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This is what we get when a "wet brain" Nazi gets appointed to direct our future commanders.
Hegseth Offers West Point Cadets “Total Pardons”
Mediaite reports:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the commencement address Saturday at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but not before dishing out what’s become a hallmark of the Trump administration — blanket pardons.
“West Point class of 2026, good morning and congratulations,” Hegseth began as a steady rain poured down on the cadets. “I bring you greetings from our commander in chief, President Donald J. Trump,” he said to applause. “Now, most senior leaders wait until the end to have this discussion, but I’m just going to come off the top rope right now and get this out of the way,” Hegseth continued.
“For all those cadets who’ve committed minor infractions or violations of the regulations of the United States Military Academy, for which ordinary and special punishment has been imposed or is being considered. To the corps of cadets, as President Trump might say, ‘A complete and total pardon,’” Hegseth said, doing his best Trump impression....
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This is what we get with a "wet brain" endoctrinating sediton to our troops for a crimiinal felon who is awating justice.
NYT: How Trump Is Moving To End Legal Immigration
The New York Times reports:
The increasingly tough tack on legal immigration was underscored Friday when the Department of Homeland Security announced a policy requiring most immigrants seeking green cards to leave the United States while they wait long periods of time for their applications to be processed.
The announcement followed a broader effort to restrict travel for immigrants from more than 35 countries. The Trump administration paused a lottery program that offered more than 50,000 visas internationally.
It halted long-term immigrant visas from 75 countries. And it froze immigration applications for those already in the United States from countries on a restricted travel list, making it harder for those nationals to obtain temporary or long-term ways to stay in the country.
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Consistently aiding and abetting the end of our country. America would not be the success it has been without immigrants.
When the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted — Thom Hartmann
...We fought Great Britain to establish democracy, fought against the fascist Confederacy to preserve democracy here in America, and helped fight German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists to preserve and restore democracy in Europe and Asia.
After winning each battle, we became a little more democratic, enfranchising women, formerly enslaved people, and even 18-year-olds. We welcomed the diverse people of the world, groaning under oppression and poverty, to share our democracy and the free enterprise system it enabled....
Today, we have a president who holds democracy and democratic nations in disdain. He openly ridicules our democratic allies while sucking up to and praising autocrats and oligarchs. He gutted USAID, killed Voice of America, and even tried to overthrow our own democracy — and will probably try again.
His racist, homophobic, and “poorly educated” followers agree with his disdain for democracy, openly embracing his despotic proclamations because he hates the same people they hate. Republican politicians who once defended American democracy cower before his threats of revenge when, like Senator Bill Cassidy, they don’t join him in embracing Putin and fail to nakedly cheer Trump’s violations of international law....
Then the wealthiest people on Earth finally get the world they’ve always wanted, from the days they opposed the American Revolution, to fighting against Lincoln, to “America First” billionaires trying to hire Smedley Butler to assassinate FDR, to now supporting Trump:
A world where democracy is weak.
Labor is powerless.
The press is controlled.
Religion is weaponized.
Elections are managed.
Fear keeps people obedient.
And billionaires rule without accountability.
That’s the oligarch’s endgame and has been for millennia. It’s why they bought off Sinema, Manchin, Golden, and Fetterman and are inserting themselves in elections across the nation. It’s why they’re buying our media. It’s why Republicans in Congress keep sending more and more of our taxpayer money to ICE while ignoring Trump’s multiple impeachable offenses from war crimes to emoluments violations to the open betrayal of our democratic allies.
Not “making America great.”
Not Christianity.
Not freedom.
Power....
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Why would an American not support and fight for democracy?
AI is breaking our political reality — Chauncey DeVega
AI-generated ads and deepfakes are being deployed in congressional races — and are confusing voters
“Thomas Massie, caught in a throuple in Washington,” the ad’s narrator says. “He’s cheating with the Squad on the America First movement. This is worse than adultery — it’s a complete and total betrayal of President Trump and Kentucky conservatives.”
Massie condemned the ad in a social media post: “It reeks of desperation, but they’re hoping the older generation won’t realize it’s an AI generated lie.” On Tuesday, he was defeated. Whatever role the ad played in the race’s outcome, AI-generated disinformation is sure to become a larger and more destructive force in American politics.
Since Trump’s return to power, we all have at some point asked ourselves “Did that really happen?” Or we’ve said, “That has to be fake,” only to, a few seconds later, think, “Actually, I’m not sure.”...
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A portion of American voters are easily confused. Our voters have, at least, a high school education. It's the minority of idiots that take the bait and screw the pooch!
AI is breaking our sanity as well.
Trump uses deadly shooting to push for controversial ballroom in midnight tirade — David McAfee
...The ballroom, which Trump has touted as one of his second-term priorities, has drawn criticism from lawmakers and watchdogs who view it as a vanity project and claim that the security justification is stretched well beyond its merits. Trump's overnight post Sunday morning is the latest in a pattern of using public safety incidents and high-profile news events as occasions to argue for the ballroom's necessity....
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Then he'll have to abandon the oval office and set up an office in his ballroom bunker. Does this mean the end of our White House? What a swinetard!
The 'both sides' crowd is gaslighting you about Trump. Here's what's really happening — Robert Reich
Friends,
I keep hearing that one of America’s biggest problems is we’re “divided and polarized.” For example, New York Times columnist David French: “We’ve known for a long time that America is deeply polarized, and we’ve known the problem is only getting worse.”
This is bulls---. The problem is not that we’re divided and polarized.
The problem is that a significant portion of America is buying Trump’s violent, hateful, lawless crap. Some of those buying it are white supremacists. Others are conservative fundamentalist Christians. Others are xenophobic nationalists.
I feel compassion for those who’ve been seduced into supporting Trump after being brutalized and mistreated for years by employers, big corporations, Wall Street, and America’s oligarchs. As I warned 32 years ago, widening inequalities of wealth, income, and opportunity would eventually persuade some on the losing side to support a demagogue.
But an explanation for why some of Trump’s followers have bought into his neofascism isn’t a justification for them to do so. And it’s certainly no reason for us to put aside our differences and compromise with them.
As you undoubtedly know, Trump has created a violent police state inside America. He is conducting an illegal war abroad. He has usurped the powers of Congress and defied court orders. He is taking bribes. He’s criminally prosecuting his enemies and pardoning his criminal supporters (he has even set up a slush fund to compensate them). He has gotten his Justice Department to immunize him and his family from any future tax audits. He is silencing critics. He is fomenting racism and bigotry.
None of us should fall for the false equivalency between this, and opposition to it. The contest today is not between “right” and “left,” as the two sides have traditionally been understood in America. It’s not even between “Republicans” and “Democrats,” as we’ve defined the two major parties over most of the past century.
No, the contest today is between democracy and authoritarianism. It’s between tolerance and bigotry. Between a multiracial, secular, inclusive society and one that believes in white Christian nationalism. Between the rule of law and neofascism....
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Authoritarianism must end or we forfeit a future of freedom.
'MAGA is done': Trump's own base turns on president over emerging Iran deal — David McAfee
Some of Donald Trump's most vocal supporters are publicly turning on the president over his emerging Iran peace framework, posting attacks that range from disappointment to outright fury.
The criticism, which intensified after Trump announced from the Oval Office that an agreement involving the United States, Iran, and a coalition of Arab and Muslim nations was "largely negotiated," has come from MAGA-identified accounts on X who say the reported terms amount to a giveaway.
Conservative commentator David Hookstead chimed in with a sharp assessment of the reported terms.
"If the reported details of the Iran deal are accurate, then it represents a total strategic failure," Hookstead wrote. "Absolutely stunning how poorly this has been managed."
"MAGA is done," the account wrote, citing the possibility that Iran would retain nuclear capabilities in exchange for lifting sanctions and reopening the Strait of Hormuz....
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Don't be so sure about MAGA being done. The toxic venom they spew can infect a nation of idiots.
Prosecutorial misconduct bombshell casts doubt on other grand jury indictments --Dan Froomkin
he stunning collapse of a politically-motivated prosecution in Chicago, which came after a judge discovered that Justice Department lawyers had engaged in gross misconduct to secure a grand jury indictment, ought to be an inflection point for coverage of Trump’s DOJ.
The Chicago case makes for an extraordinary read. The “Broadview Six” were initially indicted on felony conspiracy charges for protesting outside an ICE facility. But all charges were dropped on Thursday after Judge April Perry saw a grand jury transcript that prosecutors had resisted turning over to her.
It contained numerous examples of misconduct, including a prosecutor personally “vouching” about the strength of the case. The defendants are now asking the judge to order prosecutors to preserve records of all their communications. It’s basically a huge mess and a vindication of the suspicion that prosecutors, under pressure from Washington, are abusing their power....
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Trump is abusing and damaging our justice system. This must cease!
‘Likely decide by Sunday’: Trump gives ‘50/50’ odds that he blows Iran ‘to kingdom come’ — Alexander Willis
Amid growing speculation that the Trump administration is preparing to resume hostilities with Iran this weekend, President Donald Trump revealed Saturday that a final decision would likely be made by Sunday, with there being a “solid” chance that the United States would “blow [Iran] to kingdom come,” according to Axios
Axios reporter Barak Ravid revealed Trump’s remarks after claiming to have had a phone call with the president Saturday morning, the details of which he expanded on in the outlet’s exclusive report.
“Trump said it was a ‘solid 50/50’ as to whether he would be able to make a ‘good’ deal or else ‘blow them to kingdom come,’” Ravid wrote in Axios’ report.
According to Axios, Trump is expected to meet with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Vice President JD Vance later on Saturday to discuss Iran’s latest peace proposal, which included a proposal to fully re-open the Strait of Hormuz, Drop Site News reported....
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The bitch wants eternal war and to keep Americans fucked as much as he possibly can.
The GOP is finally falling apart at the seams — Michaelangelo Signorile, The Signorile Report
Could we really be at the point where Republicans have had enough? Or will they regroup after the holiday, after getting fresh threats from Donald Trump—and perhaps violent warnings from his thugs—and once again bow to him?
That remains to be seen. But this week we saw something we’ve yet to see in Trump’s second term: The GOP completely melting down, canceling votes, going home, angry at one another and at Trump, all tearing one another apart. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other leaders stood there bewildered, trying but failing to explain this mess to the press.
We like them tearing one another apart, for sure. The outrageous, unprecedented $1.8 billion terrorist slush fund, coming right after the billion dollar ballroom, was enough to throw Senate Republicans into chaos and recriminations, with Sen. Mitch McConnell, to offer just one example, attacking Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—who’d stunningly accused critics of just not understanding how normal all of this is—charging that he was engaging in “utterly stupid, morally wrong” behavior....
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Why would anyone trust one of the asswipes to do anything else but fellate their golden calf?
MS NOW host left 'bereft of words' after watching GOP lawmaker's ad about being white — Tom Boggionii
As part of an interview with Kentucky Democrat Charles Booker, who is running for the seat now held by retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell (R), MS NOW host Jonathan Capehart was left, as he put it, “bereft of words,” after watching a flagrantly racist ad being run by GOP nominee Andy Barr.
Capehart told his guest, “Well, Mr. Booker, in order to win, you're going to have to beat Republican Congressman Andy Barr. He's got — he's getting a lot of backlash for a campaign ad where he tells Kentuckians, quote, ‘it's not a sin to be white.’”
In the ad, a smirking Barr tells Kentucky voters, “You know what DEI really stands for? Dumb evil indoctrination. Woke liberals spew it. Corporate losers fall for it. But thanks to Trump, America is rejecting that trash and I'm leading the fight to end it for good.”
“I'm Andy Barr and it's not a sin to be white. It's not against the law to be male. And it shouldn't be disqualifying to be a Christian. I'm Andy Barr, and I approve this message to give woke liberals something else to cry about,” he added...
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Andy, you're doing your best to show us just how big a sin each of those things are! He who cries last cries longest!
You Won’t Believe Who CBS Is Replacing Colbert With — Robert Reich
It's a LONG way down from Stephen Colbert to his replacement
Friends,
I watched Stephen Colbert’s last The Late Show episode last night with a mixture of laughter, sadness and anger — anger at the cowardly and craven executives of CBS and its new corporate owner, Skydance. And at Skydance’s robber-baron, Trump suck-ups Larry and David Ellison.
CBS says they canceled Colbert for financial reasons, which is utter bullshit (they made gobs of money from selling the show to affiliates). They canceled because they wanted to sell the network to Skydance and worried that Trump would block the deal unless they got rid of Colbert, who Trump despised because Colbert has been a courageous Trump critic.
Colbert hosted more than 1,800 episodes of The Late Show after taking over the mantle from David Letterman. This week Letterman called CBS’s decision to cancel Colbert a “huge mistake.”
To add insult to this corrupt injury, CBS is putting Byron Allen into Colbert’s 11:35 pm time slot.
Never heard of Byron Allen? Well, besides being a self-described comic, Allen is also a billionaire media mogul who owns the Weather Channel, BuzzFeed, and the HuffPost.
Allen promises that his late-night humor on CBS won’t be “political” — that is, he won’t skewer Trump. He won’t even mention Trump. Allen claims that “people are totally good with not doing political humor. They just want to watch. For me, I don’t care who you vote for and I’m not trying to push an agenda. You’re going to vote for who you want to vote for. Just show up if you want to laugh.” For Allen, it’s just about making money: “This is business show, not show business. You have got to make the numbers work.”
CBS executives claim the deal will provide “immediate profitability” for the network.*
Well, duh. That’s because CBS won’t be paying Allen. Allen will ignominiously be paying CBS for Colbert’s time slot; CBS will “lease” Colbert’s time slot to Allen, and Allen will pocket whatever advertising revenue the show brings in.
Going from Colbert’s trenchant satire of America’s first dictator to billionaire media mogul Byron Allen’s jejune rental agreement is a stunning comedown. It’s also a perfect manifestation of an era in our nation’s history when greed and power have merged into a huge force that’s collaborating with authoritarianism. (For further evidence, look at Jeff Bezos’s insistence that his Washington Post not editorialize against Trump.)
Allen’s rental agreement is also an example of how the media is rapidly shifting from a public-centered model of broadcasting to a privatized anyone-rich-enough model....
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We most certainly believe it. This third-rate blank was pointed out here at TLOTHN some time ago. But the good news is that Networks will be fading away and will vanish in the future. Independents will reclaim the airwaves and digital transmissions.
The Ebola epidemic, imperialism and the political economy of social murder — Evan Blake
The Ebola epidemic now tearing through the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda is routinely described in the press as a natural disaster. This is a mystification. “Natural disaster,” like the older phrase “act of God,” is a formula for resignation, presenting as fate what is in fact the outcome of decisions, structures and interests that can be identified and held to account.
The emergence of a pathogen from the animal world is, in the first instance, a natural event. But modern science has transformed humanity’s relationship to such events. The tools to detect an outbreak in its first days, to trace and isolate its spread, and to treat the infected exist. Whether a zoonotic spillover becomes a contained cluster or a regional catastrophe is therefore not a question of nature but of society.
The conditions under which such spillovers occur are themselves products of social development—the encroachment of resource extraction into isolated ecosystems, accelerating deforestation, the congregation of displaced populations in unplanned settlements and, above all, the disruptions of climate change. A 2022 study published in Nature projects that climate- and land-use-driven shifts in animal ranges will generate thousands of new opportunities for cross-species viral transmission in the coming decades, concentrated in Asia and Africa.
The same technological advances that have made the world more dangerous have also given humanity the means to master these dangers. But that capacity is trapped within an anarchic social order incapable of using it. A globally integrated economy of immense productive power remains fractured into rival nation-states and subordinated to the profit of a financial oligarchy that can neither plan rationally nor act in the common interest....
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Maybe it will get us, maybe not. But there will be one coming that will if we keep morons in charge of our health and wellnes issues.
Trump Calls For Fox To Ban “Sleazebag” Rep. Ro Khanna
Mediaite reports:
President Donald Trump launched a vicious and disturbing AI-generated attack on popular firebrand Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) as he demanded Fox News ban him from their airwaves.
First Son Donald Trump Jr. is marrying Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson in a “small” ceremony on an island in the Bahamas this weekend — but Trump announced on Friday that he would definitely be skipping the big day.
But Trump did find time to launch social media attacks over the weekend. In a post on Saturday morning, he dropped a dehumanizing AI image of Khanna with fangs and a demonic expression, draped in the skin of a sheep.
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Ban Trump! Ban Fascism!
Cops Seized Guns Of Mosque Gunman’s Father In 2025
The New York Times reports:
More than a year before Caleb Vazquez and a friend attacked a mosque in San Diego and killed three people, the police were so alarmed by Mr. Vazquez’s behavior that they secured a court order to confiscate his father’s guns.
“Child was involved in suspicious behavior idolizing nazis and mass shooters,” a police officer wrote in a January 2025 protective order.
Mr. Vazquez, who was found dead on Monday shortly after the police say he and a friend attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego, had at some point been placed in an involuntary psychiatric hold, according to documents filed at San Diego Superior Court.
The court papers show that Mr. Vazquez, 18, had been on the authorities’ radar long before the shooting at the mosque. They also raise questions about why the authorities, with their knowledge, were unable to prevent the massacre.
San Diego Mosque Shooter So Alarmed Police in 2025, They Seized Father’s Guns. “Child was involved in suspicious behavior idolizing nazis and mass shooters,” a police officer wrote in a January 2025 protective order. https://t.co/7hZcoxvHIV via @NYTimes
— Hailey Branson-Potts (@haileybranson) May 22, 2026
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Hate is strong and mocks the song....
Trump teases full takeover of Iran amid fears of impending US attack —Alexander Willis
East nation overlaid with the American flag, and the caption in the form of a question: “United States of the Middle East?”
Trump shared the image on his social media platform Truth Social, and amid growing speculation that his administration is preparing to launch a massive attack on Iran sometime this weekend. Signs supporting a U.S. attack commencing this weekend include the president’s abrupt cancellation of his weekend plans in New Jersey, as well as Iran shutting down much of its airspace until Monday.
Trump has already set a precedent for a hostile U.S.-takeover of a sovereign nation after declaring full U.S.-control of Venezuela in January after the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on the South American nation and abduction of its president, Nicolás Maduro.
The United States and Iran have been in a fragile ceasefire since early April, and peace talks between Washington and Tehran remain stalled. Iran has warned that it would “spread war beyond the Middle East” were the United States to launch another attack....
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I hearTrump and Bibi are planning a new invasion of Iran. This war will last you for years!
Republicans Found $1.8 Billion Overnight for Trump’s Thugs — So Why Are Seniors Choosing Between Food and Medicine? — Thom Hartmann
The GOP somehow found billions for Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund overnight, but says America can’t afford insulin, affordable housing, or dignity for the elderly who built this country.
Over at her Substack, the cartoonist and writer Aubrey Hirsch took a look at Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” slush-fund and did something that should make every Republican in Washington squirm. She started doing the math. What if, she asked, we put that money toward something other than enriching Trump, his family, and the mob he summoned to the Capitol on January 6th, 2021?
Her list is devastating. With that $1.776 billion we could, she writes, replace 150,000 lead pipes in hundreds of communities, build 10,000 new affordable housing units, establish hundreds of community-owned grocery stores in food deserts, fully fund 70 community mental health clinics for a decade, support tens of thousands of foster youth aging out of care, erase all the school lunch debt in this country for the next nine years, or pay the salaries of 2,500 new teachers for ten years.
Instead, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche blatantly refused to rule out paying chunks of this money to January 6 rioters who assaulted police officers or to Trump himself, and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to serve 22 years for seditious conspiracy until Trump pardoned him, told Reuters he’s planning to apply for between $2 and $5 million.
Two Capitol Police officers who defended the building that day have sued to block the payouts, describing the fund as a “taxpayer-funded slush fund” for Trump followers who engaged in violence against cops.
Aubrey’s framing got me researching what else $1.8 billion in actual public money could do. Let me extend her list, because the media is failing entirely to put this into a meaningful context.
— That $1.8 billion could cover the average cost of weatherizing and insulating roughly 200,000 low-income homes, dropping monthly heating and cooling bills for working families through the kind of winters Louise and I weathered up in Vermont, New Hampshire, Michigan, and now here in Oregon.
But Republicans won’t do that, because it would require finally forcing Jeff Bezos to pay income taxes like the rest of us do....
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Wil the bastards ever grift enough money?
Americans fear civil war —and John Roberts is making it happen Bill Blum and Truthdig
Is the United States headed for a second Civil War? According to a survey of likely midterm voters published by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 57% of Americans believe it is. Sixty-nine percent say democracy is under serious threat; and an equal percentage of nonwhite voters say they fear rising white supremacy.
While President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement deserve the lion’s share of blame for such findings, the Supreme Court has done its part. Under the stewardship of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has issued a blistering succession of dangerously polarizing rulings, ranging from presidential immunity, union organizing, the death penalty, environmental protection and gun control to affirmative action and abortion rights. The resulting jurisprudential carnage has accelerated the nation’s rupture into irreconcilable belligerent tribes and prompted speculation that we are headed for another existential conflict.
The Roberts Court has taken a particularly malevolent interest in destroying the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Last month’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the landmark legislation, which was amended in 1982 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power....
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Anyone that has read this Web site knows we prdicted it happening years ago. We are most likely in its early stages at the present time.
GOP strategist says Trump has hit the dreaded 'Velcro' phase — Adam Lynch
President Donald Trump’s committed bloc of grievance voters has largely made him immune to his stumbles, snafus, overt displays of hate and his seemingly bottomless racism. But there is a limit to what even the most cultlike public is willing to tolerate, and Trump has staggered past it.
Mike Murphy has served as a political strategist for the likes of John McCain, Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jeb Bush — so he knows when a politician has hit a certain point where everything sticks, and Trump is in it neck deep.
There's kind of a Velcro effect when you start getting down to the 40 percent — let alone 30s—in approval,” said Murphy. “Then everything's your fault because people are already sold on the belief that you're just a screw up.”
"[When] two thirds of the country thinks you're not good at your job. Then, hey, you know, we had five days of thunderstorms — that damn Trump. You know, it just becomes easier for all the bad s—— to stick to you,” Murphy told Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller. “And that's where [Trump] is now.”...
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Trump's reich is coming to an end. What can follow it could be recovery or total disintegration.
Elon Musk's White Supremacist Attack On Director Christopher Nolan — John Amato
'White racism' is a phrase the KKK would make t-shirts and hats out of.
Elon Musk's attack on Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie "The Odyssey," turned to a darker level when he described the Academy Award-winning director as an "anti-white racist" earlier today.
Elon Musk's attack on Christopher Nolan's upcoming movie "The Odyssey," turned to a darker level when he described the Academy Award-winning director as an "anti-white racist" earlier today.
Musk, like many White supremacists and Christian nationalists, constantly focus on the culture wars memes they are good at producing and then running wild on social media for clicks.
This new war began when Musk went on a racist tear after Nolan cast Lupita Nyong'o to be Helen of Troy.
BBC writes, "Musk said director Nolan has "grossly insulted the Greek people", and replied "true" to a meme of a man supposedly dancing on Homer's grave . The X owner wrote: "I agree that she [Nyong'o] is beautiful, but casting a Black woman to play a White woman in a foundational work of European literature is no more rigt than casting a White man to play Shaka Zulu!" Shaka Zulu was a famed leader of the Zulu nation."
The phrase "anti-white racism" is a fictional characterization designed by White supremacists and nationalists to continually denigrate black and brown people of all nationalities....
"Alternative casting is all the rage, it is a legitimate artistic device and can be an interesting. Similarly, resetting pieces in different periods works well.
The text of Iliad and Odyssey, I understand (I read the his orians and theater, not the poetry and myths) calls her "fair" in appearance, meaning "attractive but not the typical Mediterranean light brown". So you can be a bit fussy about the casting very attractive and capable Lupita Nyong'o as a marketing move. Meh.
What will determine the message about our relation to this part of the semi-mythological past (Troy was real, Myceneans trash it about 1250 BC, I believe it is, the characters are fiction) is the script. I dread to think the sort of message that the right wing and its techbro Masters of the Universe would like to have Hollywood corporations present.
I think a big-screen version of "Lysistrata" is the piece of classic Greek theater we all need now. Aristophanes produced it for the official state theater festivals associated with the cult of Athena during the Peloponnesean War. Aristophanes opposed the war, the play has a suggestion on how to end it.
It speaks to assorted issues in our culture today on a number of levels, his plays are an extremely interesting mosaic of life in Athens during its years as a participatory democracy." — rufus magister (commentsO
"Elon is a waste of a human. Really. Fuck Elon. Fuck his money. And twice fuck him on Sundays." — Still the Dan 59 (comments)
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This poor, pitiful man has all the money in the world and still complains about white people being abused. What utter self-pity that no one gives one fuck about!
US Has Admitted 6000 Refugees Since October And All But Three Of Them Have Been White South Africans
The Washington Post reports:
Adri, who spoke on the condition that only her first name be used out of concern that she would be targeted for sharing her story, had tried to leave South Africa for years, exploring ways to immigrate to Canada or Europe, without success. Then she learned that the United States would accept Afrikaners like her as refugees.
“I was walking in faith every day,” said Adri, a tall woman with dark, spiky hair. “And God’s not doing anything small.” Adri is one of 6,069 people who have been admitted to the United States as refugees since October, according to State Department figures. All but three were from South Africa.
Her journey reflects the wholesale transformation of the refugee program under the Trump administration, which early last year froze refugee admissions save for one specific group — people like Adri. Now nearly all those arriving under the program are White South Africans.
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Someone tell Elon! We are Nazi Germany and the new CSA!
Trump: People Don’t Know There’s A “B” In “Dumb”
AlterNet reports:
President Donald Trump appeared to thrill his supporters in New York on Friday as he shared how he came up with his latest nickname for Democrats — his explanation included a spelling lesson. “Blue means Dumocrat,” the president said, remixing a gag he shared with Fox entertainer Sean Hannity days ago. “That’s a new name I came up with.”
“You take the ‘e’ out, you don’t use the ‘b’. A lot of people don’t know ‘dumb’ has a ‘b’ in it, actually. You don’t need it. You discard the ‘b.’ “But you take the ‘e’ out, and you replace it with a ‘u.’” Trump repeated, in an effort to make the joke really connect. Critics liberally mocked the president on social media.
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He did that all on his own. My, my. We can all see there is a Trump in dumb as in "U-M!" He really is a 5-year old retard.
Trump Trying Hard To Get Out Of Going To Don Jr.'s Wedding — Evan Hurst
It’s our favorite genre of story in the Trump regime, or one of them: the one where Donald Trump doesn’t love Don Jr., no matter how much Junior craves the love of a daddy whose daddy didn’t love him either.
And look, let’s be fair: If Don Jr. was your son, you wouldn’t love him either. See? We have so little Trump Derangement Syndrome we’re sitting over here identifying with the old geezer!
Of course, if the old geezer was our dad, we would take him on a trip to an exotic location and then leave him there without his phone or any hamberders. So we can’t say we’re identifying with Junior’s sad longings here.
But anyway! Junior is getting married! To some British lady named Perpetua or Persephone or … Bettina! That’s it, Bettina. Bettina Anderson. She’s the one who’s been boning Don Jr. on purpose.
Junior is not getting married to Kimberly Guilfoyle. They broke up, apparently sometime after Junior started boning Imogen Poopsybritches or whatever her name is. Bettina! Bettina Poopsybritches. That’s it. Kimberly Guilfoyle is in Greece, being America’s ambassador, presiding over ribbon-cuttings for McDonald’s locations at the mall, in Greece.
Considering how she used to bone Don Jr., on purpose, we are going to say her new gig is a step up.
But yes, Don Jr. is reportedly getting married over Memorial Day weekend in the Bahamas, and his father doesn’t love him, so is he going to go to his son’s latest wedding? Ehhhhhhh.
“Uhhhh. He’d like me to go. But it’s going to be a just a small, little private affair. I’m gonna try and make it. I’m in the midst, I said, you know, ‘This is not good timing for me. I have a thing called “Iran” and other things.’ That’s one I can’t win on. If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed. By the fake news, of course, I’m talking about. But no, he’s got a very, uh, person I’ve known for a long time, and hopefully they’re gonna have a great marriage.”
Yeah totally, the fake news would totally go after Trump for going to Don Jr.’s wedding, it’s a real rock and a hard place he’s in. And it’s such a small wedding, close family only, it would be weird if Don Jr.’s literal father showed up. Plus Trump is so busy back here losing the shit out of wars he started.
Trump’s gonna text Don Jr. “OMW” with zero actual plans to waddle on to Air Force One for his son’s latest big day, isn’t he?
Or maybe he’ll show up! It’s not like he actually is busy doing anything important! Secretary Shitfaced can lose that fuckin’ war all by his bad self!
The key is to keep Don Jr. wondering until the end. Does Daddy love him enough? Haha of course not, but will he be there? Will he? Where’s daddy? Where’s daddy? Is daddy coming?...
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Daddy's not home yet? Sad.
The Indictment of Raúl Castro: A New Low in US Cuba Policy — Medea Benjamin
So apparently the Trump administration has decided that what Cuba really needs right now—after decades of economic strangulation, CIA assassination attempts, sabotage campaigns, invasions, sanctions, blackouts, shortages, and more than half a century of failed regime-change policy—is the indictment of 94-year-old revolutionary icon Raúl Castro.
The United States and Cuba do not have to be enemies. In fact, just 10 years ago, the two countries were normalizing relations. I was in Panama City at the 2015 Summit of the Americas when, to the delight of everyone there, former US President Barack Obama and Raúl Castro famously shook hands, marking the first substantial public interaction between leaders of the two countries in decades. Obama said, “The United States is not interested in being prisoners of the past,” while Raúl Castro thanked Obama for taking steps toward normalization and called him “an honest man.” The opening was a win-win for both countries: an influx of US tourists, a flourishing of private businesses, and new openings for civil society. Then came Donald Trump, who sent relations spiraling downward once again.
Fast forward to today, with the indictment of Raúl Castro for allegedly ordering the 1996 shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes that left four men dead. I was in Cuba at the time leading a group of US CEOs interested in investing on the island. The next day, we were supposed to meet with Fidel Castro. But after the planes were shot down, the meeting was canceled and the business executives rushed to take the next flight back to Miami.
It was a tragic and regrettable incident—not only because of the lives lost, but also because it hardened political attitudes toward Cuba for years to come, paving the way for the codification of the US blockade into law.
But it’s critical to understand the context....
Raúl Castro is 94 years old. Let him live out his final years in the country where he was born and for which he fought his entire life. Instead of tightening the blockade and pushing Cuba toward greater poverty, instability, migration, and despair, the United States should finally abandon its failed policy of domination, lift the sanctions, and allow Cubans—not Washington politicians or Miami hardliners—to decide Cuba’s future.
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Arrogance will be the death of the Trump mab.
Jeff Bezos’ Tax Scam: Why Billionaires Want Their Workers to Stop Paying Taxes — Thom Hartmann
The hard-right fantasy behind Bezos’ “no income tax” pitch, and who really profits from it.
The fourth richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, told CNBC yesterday that he doesn’t think people making $70,000 a year should pay a penny in income taxes. For him, that’s a threefer.
First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.
Second, it gets those same average, tax-paying voters on board with Bezos’ second claim, that America’s debt problem isn’t because we’re taxing too little but because we’re “spending too much.”
If we just got rid of — or privatized/profitized — all those pesky “socialist” programs like Medicaid, food stamps, free public highways, fire and police departments, Social Security, food and drug regulation and inspection, air traffic control and TSA, housing subsidies, Pell grants, free public schools, etc., then even billionaires could safely live tax-free.
Third, it means that Bezos will be able to reduce his own labor costs, because the marketplace in which pay rates exist are always exclusively reacting to “after tax” dollars.
Here’s how it works: If Bezos is paying an Amazon programmer $70,000 a year and that programmer then pays $12,000 a year in income taxes (his example, only for “a nurse in Queens”), their after-tax take-home pay is $58,000. That $58K is what they’re actually living on, and Bezos knows it.
So, if their income tax payment goes away, Bezos can drop their pay from $70K to $58K and they won’t notice any change at all in their lifestyle. And Bezos gets to keep the difference.
But there are even more fundamental problems with Jeff’s little tax scam. Back in 1904, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Homes Jr famously said, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” He was right, and it works in two dimensions.
The main one is that taxes represent the money government must collect to cover the cost of the services its citizens have demanded of their elected representatives. With the exception of emergencies like the Civil War and World War II, the money coming into government and the money spent out should pretty much be in balance. And, with the exception of the period since 1981, they historically have been....
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How to rob people with a fountain pen, as Woody Guthrie told us!
'President under siege': Trump revelation proves he’s retreating to his 'bunker phase' — Nick Hilden
Authoritarians and their bunkers have a long and storied history. Probably the most well-known was Adolf Hitler, who spent his ignominious final hours holed up in a bunker in Berlin. And in recent weeks, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has been hiding out from a rumored incipient coup in a palatial bunker of his own. Now, wonders i Paper contributor Sarah Baxter, has President Donald Trump “entered the bunker phase of his presidency?” Maybe or maybe not, but two things are certain: he is building a bunker, and he “knows” his presidency is failing.
According to Baxter, evidence of Trump’s inclination to hunker in his bunker came earlier this week, when he expressed hesitancy at leaving the White House to attend his son’s wedding, saying, “Uhhhh. He’d like me to go. I’m gonna try and make it. But it’s going to be just a small, little private affair… I said, ‘This is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.’”
As others have pointed out, his desire to remain on and fortify the White House campus has grown over the course of his second term, particularly since the attempted assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April. And while he’d already been pushing for his ballroom for a year at that point, his brush with death spurred him to make it a key priority and crank up the security costs....
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He will run but he can't hide.
America’s closest allies see 'no point' in negotiating with Trump — Alex Henderson
"As Donald Trump lurches from one erratic foreign policy decision to another," Gurney explains in his Bulwark article, "America's traditional allies and partners wonder if the United States possesses anything resembling a coherent strategy for its dealings with other countries. While Americans wrestle with Trump's impulsive decision-making at home, democratic leaders around the world are attempting to guess what Trump and Trumpism mean for the U.S.-led international order. And they are starting to plan for a world without it. From here out, any U.S. ally or partner has a strong interest in trying to get as little done with the United States as possible until Trump is gone — or, at the very least, constrained by a Democratic Congress."
Gurney adds, "That might take a while. America First risks becoming America Alone."
The journalist laments that for Canadian and European leaders, "faith in American motives and consistency is impossible" during Trump's second presidency.
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With Trump, America has become doomed.
Consumer confidence hits grim milestone that sank Trump's predecessor — Thomas Kika
Consumer confidence in the U.S. has continued to plunge under President Donald Trump's watch, and according to a new report from The Hill, it has now reached a grim milestone that once poisoned the presidency of the predecessor that Trump despises.
On Friday, Gallup released the latest edition of its Economic Confidence Index, a widely cited measure of the American public's sense of how well the economy is going. The news could hardly have been worse for the president: consumer confidence cratered to negative 45 points in May, a drop of 7 points since the last index report in April.
These are the lowest confidence numbers from Gallup since October 2022, when consumers were reeling from the historic inflation caused by the continued fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, when gas prices skyrocketed just as they are now. The report did, however, note that sentiments remain higher than they were in the immediate aftermath of these issues taking hold in June 2022, for now.
That record inflation heavily tainted voters' perceptions of President Joe Biden, sending his economic and overall approval ratings into a tailspin that neither he nor his vice president, Kamala Harris, was able to recover from, paving the way for Trump's reelection. Trump and his administration allies are quick to blame any and all of his shortcomings on the issues they were supposedly left with from Biden, but now, the data shows that he appears to be digging himself into the same hole....
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And the worst is yet to come.
Burgers, Brats, and Busted Budgets: Summer Staples Up 13%, Travel Prices Surging Ahead of Memorial Day — Newswire Editor
New data released today by Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation shows how President Trump’s reckless economic policies and war in Iran are driving up the costs of summer cookouts and travel season. Prices for backyard barbecue staples jumped 13% on average since last year, more than four times the rate of inflation. Burgers will run families 20% more, Kraft Heinz ketchup jumped 14%, and grilled corn on the cob costs nearly twice as much as it did last year. Even a to-go plate will also cost families more as aluminum foil prices climbed 18%.
If working families manage to get through the holiday weekend within budget, their summer travel plans may still be out of reach. Airfare prices are up 26% and expected to keep rising this summer, while gas prices are hovering around $4.50 nationally. As Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wraps up his family’s seven-month, all-expenses-paid road trip, working families are wondering whether they’ll be able to afford traveling at all this summer. All in, reports find that the Duffy’s corporate-sponsored vacation would cost at least $900 in fuel expenses – and that’s not including the luxury cruise the family was given to cap off their trip. Trump and his Cabinet couldn’t be more out of touch with working families this Memorial Day weekend....
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The famine to come.
'Freeze Of The Century' Causes Catastrophic Crop Losses In NJ — Susie Madrak
A four-day freeze in April that proved mildly bothersome for summer-starved New Jerseyans was devastating for Garden State farmers, with growers of tree fruits, strawberries, blueberries, and other early bloomers reporting catastrophic losses, the New Jersey Monitor reports.
Now, Gov. Mikie Sherrill has declared a state of emergency in all 21 counties, a move that should ultimately open up funding to help farmers recover from damages the state estimates could top $300 million.
Desperate farmers say they need the help.
The April 19-22 cold snap, with temperatures dipping into the low 20s, came after a heat wave that drove many perennial crops to flower earlier than usual. The cold spell that followed wasn’t just the freeze of a lifetime, said Jim Giamarese, who farms 130 acres in East Brunswick, but the freeze of a century.
The wintry blip impacted farmers all along the eastern U.S., with the U.S. Department of Agriculture finding that farms in 13 states, from Virginia to Michigan, sustained catastrophic damage to perennial crops.
They're a deep blue state. Here's hoping somehow they get the help they need. On a personal level, I am mourning the loss of New Jersey peaches.
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Food will become scarce and costly. Who will survive this?
Trump Rules Back Regulations On Super-Polluting Hydrofluorocarbons — Susie Madrak
The Trump administration just overhauled two Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency rules for refrigerants in a push the White House claims will lower grocery costs for consumers.
One action, reported first by USA TODAY, delays deadlines for groceries and other companies to phase out the use of climate-damaging hydrofluorocarbons for refrigeration under the 2023 Technology Transitions Rule.
Hydrofluorocarbons, used for refrigeration and cooling, are considered "super pollutants" that, although short-lived in the atmosphere, are more powerful than carbon dioxide. That's why the Biden administration created the regulations.
The move is expected to make more refrigerants - the key chemical compounds in freezers, refrigerators and air-conditioning systems - available for supermarkets, homeowners and other businesses, which the White House estimates will produce $900 million in savings, including $800 million at groceries.
Which is, of course, bullshit.
Hydrofluorocarbons are why it's so expensive to recharge your car's AC, because they have to capture and safely dispose of the gas. It's a major contributor to destruction of the ozone layer. But hey, who cares when there's money to be made?
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Slow Death for all.
Jeffress: Evangelicals Are “Unified” Against Talarico
The Christian Post reports:
Pastor Robert Jeffress says he believes Evangelical voters in Texas will ultimately rally behind whichever Republican wins next Tuesday’s closely watched U.S. Senate primary runoff, as new polling points to a potentially competitive general election battle with Democratic nominee James Talarico.
Given how closely Evangelical voters are watching this U.S. Senate race as they endure an onslaught of attack ads during the final stretch of voting, The Christian Post reached out to both Texas Pastor Jack Graham, who declined to comment, and Jeffress, who was willing to weigh in on the latest developments in the race, but stressed that he is not endorsing anyone in this runoff.
“People are diversified in their opinion of President Trump’s endorsement of Paxton, but they seem unified in the belief that James [Talarico] cannot be the next senator from Texas,” Jeffress said. “We have a responsibility to vote, and sometimes we have to vote for the best available candidate,” Jeffress said.
"Makes perfect sense. Christians haven’t been interested in the teachings of Christ for centuries. Bad for business." — Sandy Bottoms (comments)
"Exactly right. By a guy who makes a nice salary from a very, very large SBC Church. A sect that used to believe in freedom of conscience and separation of church and state." — SFBruce (comments)
"Talarico knows the scriptures better than any of those fools." — GL (comments)
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Jeffress is the second False Prophet described in The Revelation. He knows that his followers understand that 2 + 2 = 5.
Axios: Trump Admin Speeds Up Denaturalization Efforts
Axios reports:
The Trump administration is temporarily moving immigration lawyers to the Justice Department to speed up efforts to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans, Axios has learned. Denaturalization cases have a very high burden of proof, but they’re a priority for Trump officials who are searching for fraud in the legal immigration system.
Lawyers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the office for legal immigration services, are being temporarily transferred to U.S. attorney’s offices to work on denaturalization cases, four former agency officials tell Axios. One source said staffers were being “volun-told” to move offices. A second source describe the transfers as lawyers “being force volunteered.”
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They are only beginning with these people. The goal is to denaturalize every American who does not support their control over us. Take it to the bank.
CA Mosque Gunman Was Previously Flagged By FBI
Bloomberg News reports:
One of the teenagers accused of carrying out a deadly shooting at a California mosque was flagged by the FBI as a potential threat last year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Caleb Vazquez was the subject of a 2025 FBI eGuardian alert. Authorities say Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, on Monday killed three men, including a security guard, outside the Islamic Center of San Diego before dying from what police said were self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
The FBI had no immediate comment. The eGuardian system is a platform used by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to share and track potential threats and suspicious activity. Alerts are reviewed by a joint terrorism task force.
Authorities recovered at least 30 firearms, ammunition and a crossbow from two residences tied to the suspects and is investigating whether they had broader plans, the FBI has said.
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Trump's department of control at work on America. There is still time to wake up.
WHO Director: Ebola Outbreak Is “Spreading Rapidly”
The Associated Press reports:
The head of the World Health Organization said Friday that the Ebola outbreak in Congo is “spreading rapidly” and now poses a “very high” risk at the national level.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom said the U.N. health agency was revising upward to “very high” its assessment of the risk within Congo, which had previously been deemed as high. The risk remains high for regional spread and low at global levels, he told reporters.
Earlier on Friday, the United Nations said it released $60 million from its Central Emergency Response Fund to accelerate the response in Congo and in the region. The U.S. has pledged $23 million in funding to bolster the response in Congo and Uganda, and said it would also fund the establishment of up to 50 Ebola treatment clinics in the affected regions of Congo and Uganda.
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"The deadly Ebola Virus is coming, coming to take you away..." — The Deadly Ebola Virus, Hungry Chuck.
Todd Blanche’s 'most audacious move yet' cements DOJ as Trump’s personal firm — Thomas Kika
..."When Todd Blanche announced charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center last month, critics accused him of placating President Donald Trump in an effort to secure the attorney general job permanently," Politico explained on Friday. "Blanche weathered similar criticism about a week later, when the Justice Department indicted longtime Trump foe James Comey a second time, accusing him of threatening the president’s life with an Instagram photo of seashells."
Now, Blanche and the DOJ have spearheaded a wildly controversial new settlement for Trump, closing out his suit against the IRS by establishing a $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund, to be paid out to individuals who have supposedly been targeted by the government for their political beliefs. Despite that claim, it has been widely interpreted as a means for funneling money to Trump's allies and supporters. The settlement also contains the unprecedented provision that neither Trump nor his family can ever be audited by the IRS ever again.
In its Friday report, Politico summed up this settlement as Blanche's most blatant attempt yet at gaining Trump's favor, further citing comments from a lawmaker, who said that the move gave the president a "get-out-jail-free card" for tax fraud...
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Looking forward to the day when the entire Trump Crime Syndicate faces law and order. It will come!
This is what Republican corruption looks like — Robert Reich
Here’s a memo to Democrats as they begin campaigning in earnest for control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections.
TO: Democratic candidates in the 2026 midterm elections
RE: Connect Trump’s lousy economy to his corrupt regime.
The purpose of this memo is to help you shape your midterm message around the crisis of affordability and Trump Republican corruption. I urge you to present these two issues as aspects of the same underlying problem: The economy is lousy for most Americans because Trump Republicans are enabling super-rich oligarchs to siphon off most of its gains while exerting increasing control over it. Their — and Trump’s — self-dealing is undermining trust and confidence in the U.S. economic system.
1. Republicans in the House and Senate have put oligarchs in charge of America.
House and Senate Republicans have allowed Trump’s war and his tariffs to drive up prices and Trump’s corruption to undermine faith in the economy. They’ve allowed Trump to gild his White House in gold leaf, plan a giant Arc de Trump, throw lavish parties, and build a Billionaire’s Ballroom — at a time when most Americans can’t afford gas or groceries.
They raided Medicaid to pay for Trump’s giant tax cut, whose benefits are going mostly to the rich. Legislative efforts advanced by House Republicans and signed into law have targeted up to $2 trillion in federal health care cuts, forcing millions of Americans off Medicaid rolls to pay for these tax reductions.
They refused to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. This is causing average premiums to more than double and has already pushed 1.2 million people off coverage because they can’t afford it. Coverage losses are mounting as many who initially selected a plan or who were automatically reenrolled have to drop coverage.
Big Tech oligarchs — centi-billionaires Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, and other robber barons — paid for Trump’s 2024 election, his inauguration, and his ballroom and are major donors to Senate and House Republicans. They’ve shown up at Trump’s inauguration, White House dinners, and official visits to China....
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The list goes on and on here. The crime spree has run rampant. It is time to settle the score.
J6 Police Officer: Trump Slush Fund ‘A Slap In The Face’ — NewsHound Ellen
Former Capitol Hill Police officer Harry Dunn explained why Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund threatens more violence and why Dunn is suing to stop it.
Harry Dunn is one of two Jan. 6 Washington, D.C. police officers who are now suing Donald Trump over what Conover Kennard appropriately calls his Cop Killer Slush Fund.
Dunn is no longer a police officer. He is now running for Congress in Maryland. But he told CNN viewers on Wednesday why the slush fund endangers him, personally. Although everybody has seen what happened on January 6th, he said a lot of people don’t know that he and other J6 officers have been getting death threats ever since, “over and over again."
The pardons that Donald Trump gave to the convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists forgave them for their crimes but now he “seeks to reward them for their behaviors,” Dunn added, “which also would create an incentive for more people to join.”
He described it as “Donald Trump putting a retainer on a mob that will do violence and commit violence in his name.”
Dunn is not wrong....
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We can all mug Congress and get paid to do it! This "Fund" enables it! The crime is strong in this one!
Newsmax Host On Cuba: 'Sounds Like A False Flag Operation' — Chris capper Liebenthal
Rep James Comer is left stammering as Newsmax host Rob Finnerty calls the US actions towards Cuba a false flag operation.
Rep James Comer joined Newsmax's Rob Finnerty, who grilled him over Cuba.
Finnerty talked about the sanctions, the indictment of the all but dead Raúl Castro, and all the saber-rattling coming from the Trump regime. He then asked Comer how these threats against Cuba jive with America First, especially after Venezuela and Cuba, and Americans struggling with gas and food prices.
Comer then prattled on about how Cuba was a strategic threat to the United States and had been for decades, that the Cuban people wanted regime change, yada, yada, yada. It was all the same shit that they said about Iran regurgitated for Cuba....
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We are being led by blood-thirsty swine to perfidy.
Greenlanders Protest Outside New US Consulate
The New York Times reports:
Greenlanders held a spirited protest on Thursday against the opening of a new American Consulate building in downtown Nuuk, Greenland’s capital.
In line with President Trump’s fixation on Greenland, the United States has moved to a much bigger and more visible diplomatic post in Nuuk, part of an upgraded strategy to expand the American presence on the Arctic island. But many Greenlanders don’t like it.
On Thursday, hundreds marched through Nuuk’s streets carrying signs reading “We don’t want your money” and “Greenlanders know a MAGA Trojan horse when we see one.” As guests inside the consulate nibbled on musk ox hot dogs, demonstrators stood in the streets yelling, “Go away!”
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These people want nothing to do with the Trump Crime Syndicate colonalism.
MAGA “Influencer” Arrested On Child Porn Charges
Los Angeles’s Fox affiliate reports:
A Madera Unified School District part-time cafeteria playground assistant was arrested after child sexual abuse material was found in a home. The Madera County Sheriff’s Office Investigations Division says they received two cyber tips from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Detectives say a suspected possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in Madera County led to the identification of 34-year-old Joshua Lee Hefner as a suspect in the case. Hefner was employed by the Madera Unified School District, working as a part-time cafeteria and playground assistant at Dixieland Elementary School at the time.
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Another one bites the dust!
“Influencer?” They mean influenced BY our great Pedo Leader!
"This MAGA degenerate was one of the loudest voices against drag queen story hour."
Voldemort: Payouts To Capitol Rioters Are “Just A Small Measure Of The Justice They Are Really Owed”
The Daily Beast reports:
Stephen Miller insisted that nearly $2 billion is a "small measure" of reparations for those who have been "unfairly targeted" by previous administrations.
“You seem to be interested in the $1.8 billion fund, and that clearly was a sticking point today up on Capitol Hill,” a reporter asked Miller. “Is there anyone that the president is reaching out to? Making calls to? It’s not going to be on his desk by June 1, which I think is a deadline he had set earlier.”
“Well, that’s a good closing question only because it allows me to say this,” Miller, 40, said, “which is that, the, we lived through four years of—more than four years, actually, but I’ll just say four years in this case—of unimaginable weaponization of the federal government against innocent people. This settlement is just a small measure of the justice they are owed.”
"Stephen Miller insisted that nearly $2 billion is a 'small measure' of reparations for those who have been 'unfairly targeted' by previous administrations.
Well there's always the Presidential Medal of Freedom that Trump can bestow on the patriots that screamed 'Kill him with his own gun' as a Capitol Police officer begged for his life.
Perhaps an ambassadorship to the dude that smeared shit on the Capitol walls?" — DaddySnark (comments)
"Joseph Goebbels concurs." — Stogiebear (comments)
"They should get the same thing Babbit did...shoot, repeat and rinse and start all over again. Miller should receive the same." — Thewolflam (comments)
"It was the job of the Capitol Police to open fire to protect the people inside. The miniguns on the roof would have ended the Republican dream of dictatorship.
There should have been a wood chipper at the bottom of a construction site trash chute from the window of the courtroom for the J6ers'. NO appeals, just instant justice for all." — Maternal Fornicator (comments)
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A dull gulliotine is being prepared for this swine. That WILL be the day!
Trump: “I Get A Kick” About US Deaths In Iran War
The Huffington Post reports:
President Donald Trump confused his predecessors Joe Biden and Barack Obama while touting the purported successes of his ongoing war on Iran — and boasted that he has lost “only” 13 U.S. service members in the unpopular conflict.
“So, people don’t like it when you say, ‘Oh, do you know you’ve lost 13.’ We’ve lost, in two major wars — we took over Venezuela, we essentially took over Iran — and we’ve lost, so far, 13 people. Somebody else would’ve lost 100,000 people, OK?
“But I get a kick when I look at somebody on television [and they say], ’He’s lost 13 people. I lost 13 people. They lost 13 people leaving an airport. Obama. Thirteen very good people that I got to know their families.”
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This defective murderer is beyond all hope of redemption.
COPS: Racists Tweets By ICE Could Incite Extremists
The Intercept reports:
Colorado law enforcement officials warned their counterparts across the country that social media posts by the Department of Homeland Security recruiting for ICE contained so many white supremacist themes that they could endanger the public, according to internal records obtained by The Intercept.
The Colorado Information Analysis Center cautioned in a March bulletin that “violent extremists” might perceive “White Supremacy Ideology in ICE Recruitment Materials, Leading to a Potentially Increased Threat Environment.”
The bulletin from an agency tasked with preventing terrorism advised law enforcement offices throughout the United States that these posts could create a “permissive environment to engage in vigilante action and/or violence against individuals perceived to be immigrants.”
These DHS posts, the analysts warned, could convince “white supremacist violent extremists to attempt to join or infiltrate ICE and engage in bias motivated violence, endangering the public, other ICE personnel, and local law enforcement.”
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The fire next time.
We should prosecute parents when kids kill — Amanda Marcotte
The San Diego mosque shooter got his guns from his mother. Should she face charges?
...But an increasing number of legal experts are arguing that the mass shooting problem is so dire that it’s become necessary to, in some instances, prosecute the parents of the perpetrators.
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Accessory after the fact? Perhaps. But will it do any good with morons in the equation?
Epstein survivor hurls new accusations as more alleged abusers named in bombshell hearing — David Edwards
Sarah Kellen, Jeffrey Epstein's longtime personal assistant, told the House Oversight Committee on Thursday that she was repeatedly raped and abused by the convicted sex offender — and handed lawmakers the names of three previously unknown alleged offenders.
Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) announced the development after Kellen's closed-door, transcribed interview, calling it "by far the most substantive and productive interview that we've had. She was very brave."
Kellen, 46, was named as a "potential co-conspirator" in Epstein's 2007 nonprosecution agreement with Florida federal prosecutors, but she has long maintained she was also one of his victims....
Comer said Kellen also described her own abuse "at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell" — and that the three names she provided were offenders the committee "hadn't heard before."
The committee has not publicly released the three names.
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Closer, ever closer...
Questions raised as Trump fails to stand in Oval Office address — Tom Boggioni
A “Morning Joe” segment that was supposed to be about Donald Trump appearing to demur from attending the wedding of Don Trump Jr, went briefly off the rails over the 79-year-old president’s tendency to sit during his press availabilities in his second term.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski was the first to bring up the “optics” of the sitting president surrounded by “crotches and belly buttons” — a pointed reference to a man standing directly to Trump’s right on Thursday who had, what she called, a “distracting” protruding belly button.
“But why do they — it's all these crotches and belly buttons around the president. Like that was gross,” she complained. “Prominent belly buttons that distracted and I can't even. What? Why. Oh my God, make it go away!”...
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The man has an umbilical hernia. If it is not repaired he may soon be referred to as "gutless."
News headlines adopted Trump’s deceptive framing of his new $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund — Dan Froomkin
There was no “weaponization” of the Biden Justice Department. There are no “victims” who deserve “compensation”. The $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund the Trump administration announced on Monday is not a legal “settlement” of Trump’s risible lawsuit against his own IRS.
Everything about this heist of tax dollars is a lie and a fraud. In its scope and its shamelessness, it is arguably the most staggeringly corrupt act this country has ever seen. It is a screaming red alert for democracy, a sign of the debasement and decline of our government to banana-republic levels.
From a journalistic perspective, this is all crucial context. What Trump did on Monday can’t just be announced, using the administration’s deceitful language. It must be explained. It must be identified as aberrational. Anything short of that is misinformation. It abets complacency.
And yet our major news outlets on Monday shied away from bluntly confronting their readers and viewers, choosing instead the lazy, deceptive route of using Trumpian terms in their headlines and leads, only later countered by “critics.”
Their headlines repeatedly described the deal as “unusual” – arguably the weakest adjective they could possibly have used....
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The complictness of the American press in Trump's treason is perverse failure in the line of duty.
Americans overwhelmingly oppose data centers. Women most of all. — Jenae Barnes
New polling shows women have stronger concerns than men over the implications of the massive and costly complexes used to power AI.
As data centers rapidly emerge at unprecedented rates across the country, they are being met with increasing opposition — particularly from women, according to a recent Gallup poll.
More than two-thirds of adults oppose the construction of the massive and costly complexes used to power artificial intelligence, with a majority saying they’d prefer to have a nuclear power plant in their backyard instead. While women and men overwhelmingly expressed opposition, women did so more intensely. Out of 1,000 adults surveyed, 55 percent of women said they strongly oppose data centers, compared to 43 percent of men. In fact, men were more likely to favor data centers, citing their economic benefits and job opportunities.
Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup and the study’s author, attributed the distinction to women having more empathy for public-facing issues like the environment and healthcare, and favoring Democratic policies that protect the environment. Resistance to data centers often focuses on the imposition of environmental and financial problems, like water scarcity, noise and air pollution, and excessive energy use that can result in higher utility bills and increased health complications for the low-income communities of color who live near where they are usually built....
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Fuck data pollution that will only be used to exploit humanity and make the greedy rich.
Eight Democrats Help Pass Bill To Out Trans Students
The Huffington Post reports:
The House passed a bill late Wednesday to force public school teachers to out transgender students to their parents. It wasn't a party-line vote, either: Eight Democrats voted for it.
Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Donald Davis (N.C.), Cleo Fields (La.), Laura Gillen (N.Y.), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Marcy Kaptur (Ohio), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.) and Eugene Vindman (Va.) all voted for this bill.
What's more, three of those Democrats ” Gillen, Gluesenkamp Perez and Vindman ” are members of the Congressional Equality Caucus, which advocates for LGBTQ+ rights
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Then it's time for all of them to go. Sorry, asswipes. Vote them out.
Tillis On Trump’s Slush Fund: “Stupid On Stilts, Tyranny”
Spectrum News reports:
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina says a nearly $1.8 billion fund created by the Trump administration to compensate people who believe they were investigated for political reasons is “stupid on stilts.”
In a wide-ranging interview with Spectrum News on Wednesday, Tillis said, “It will invariably put us in a position where your taxpayers dollars and my taxpayer dollars could potentially compensate someone who assaulted a police officer, admitted their guilt, got convicted, got pardoned and now we are going to pay them for that. That’s absurd.”
He added, “When you take money from me to give to a purpose that I vehemently disagree with, that’s tyranny, and that’s what that account is.”
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Very well put Senator.
Tuberville Spews Multiple QAnon Lies About January — Joe Jervis
The Huffington Post reports:
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R) took the Senate floor Thursday to lie repeatedly about what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, amplifying the wild claims of conspiracy theorists who willfully distort the truth.
In a six-minute span, the former college football coach claimed, while providing zero evidence, that the 2020 election results were tampered with to ensure Donald Trump lost (this is false) “Democrats and the deep state … orchestrated a coup against our government” (the opposite is true).
Nancy Pelosi “spearheaded” the Jan. 6 insurrection — not the Trump supporters who overran the U.S. Capitol because somehow she was responsible for security that day (this is false). Speaker Pelosi refused to bring the National Guard in as backup (this is false)....
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Old Elephant Ears edorses sedition! How did we know he would? if there's money to be grifted he will be there. He's the one that's a hoax.
He should talk to the Governor of Maryland at the time. He wouldn' t like to hear from him I know.
Trump Has Finally Found a Small Enough Enemy — Alex Nguyen
On Wednesday, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging 94-year-old former Cuban head of state Raúl Castro with murder and conspiracy to kill US citizens. It’s a move that may signal potential military action to abduct Castro from the country, as with Donald Trump’s January raid on the compound of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The indictment targets Raúl Castro, the brother of the late Fidel, and five other members of the Cuban military, for the 1991 downing by Cuban forces of two aircraft operated by anticommunist Cuban exiles. While the indictment was filed last month, the unsealing coincides with Cuban Independence Day, celebrating 124 years since the US ended its military occupation of the country.
But Cuban Independence Day comes this year amid a debilitating oil blockade imposed by Trump, which has devastated Cuba’s already struggling health system and economic infrastructure and worsened living conditions across the board. This year alone, residents have dealt with nationwide blackouts, food shortages, hospitals without power to operate, and constant worry over their economic and political future. The Trump blockade and associated policies, which many humanitarian groups view as human rights violations, have deprived the country’s residents of basic necessities and exacerbated the impact of the decades-long US embargo on its neighbor.
“The paradox is, the US imposes crippling sanctions while also saying, ‘I’m going to liberate your people.’ ”
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And Trump won't be liberating Cuba. He will just be adding it to his crime insurance grift. He wants to be overseer to Blacks. Pay or die!
This Sheriff’s Office Says Racial Profiling Reforms Are Too Costly. Auditors Found It Misused $163 Million — Shoshana Gordon
Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office misused $163 million intended to address racial profiling reforms, according to a court-mandated audit.
More than $7,000 in cable TV subscriptions.
An $11,000 golf cart.
$1.5 million in renovations to office space in a swanky Phoenix high-rise.
And another $1.7 million for Tasers.
Those were among more than $200 million in expenses that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office billed to a class-action settlement aimed at rooting out racial profiling in the department.
A federal judge in 2013 found the department under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio had violated the constitutional rights of Latino drivers, and the court has required sweeping reforms. These include documenting all traffic stops to detect patterns of racial bias, employing additional investigators to probe reports of deputy misconduct and appointing a monitor to oversee the settlement.
Since Sheriff Jerry Sheridan took office last year, he and Republicans on the county’s Board of Supervisors have cited the cost of complying with these orders to call for an end to the settlement of the case known as Melendres v. Arpaio — even as reviews of the department’s traffic stops continue to show racial disparities affecting Latino residents. The lingering disparities amplified Latino leaders and community members’ concerns as the second Trump administration has boosted local law enforcement’s involvement in its mass deportation campaign.
Maricopa County, home to more than half of Arizona’s population, has approved $353 million in spending related to the settlement since 2013. But an audit of the sheriff’s office spending ordered by the court and a review of the public ledger by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica show millions of dollars went to expenses that had little or nothing to do with the settlement. (The audit focused on $226 million that the sheriff’s office charged to the settlement over a 10-year period; it didn’t examine legal and monitoring costs or the two most recent department budgets.)
The auditors, who were hired by the monitor, found that nearly 72% of the sheriff’s office spending was misattributed or misappropriated. For example, the full cost of some services and salaries was assigned to the settlement when those jobs were completely unrelated or only partially related to court orders. Only $63 million was appropriately charged to the settlement, they said....
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Embezzling again, eh, sheriff? Just wait until Hopalong gets to town!
GOP Rep. won't rule out tapping into DOJ fund — Meredith Lee Hill
Rep. Andrew Clyde said in an interview Thursday he supports the DOJ's new, $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund — and isn't ruling out seeking money from the account for himself.
The Georgia Republican said the goal of the fund is to "make whole" anyone who has been unfairly targeted by the government, including people who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Pressed on whether he would personally pursue compensation, he reiterated that the fund is for "anyone" who has been the victim of government weaponization.
Clyde has, in the past, argued he's been targeted by the IRS, and was subject to civil asset forfeiture nearing $1 million. Clyde fought the IRS in court and recouped a large amount of the money, but says he still has legal fees.
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Grifting is their favorite grift.
JD Vance's big boasts unravel in withering new fact check — Travis Gettys
Vice President JD Vance made demonstrably false and misleading claims about manufacturing job growth in speeches on Monday and Tuesday, according to a fact-check of his statements.
On Monday in Missouri, Vance claimed the first quarter of 2026 saw "the biggest growth in manufacturing employment last quarter that we have seen in this country since Donald J. Trump was president the first time," but CNN's Daniel Dale found no evidence to support his statement.
"One of Vance’s questions was this: 'How is it that we’ve seen the biggest growth in manufacturing employment last quarter that we have seen in this country since Donald J. Trump was president the first time?'" Dale wrote. "The answer is … we haven’t seen that."
The economy added only 18,000 manufacturing jobs in the first quarter of 2026 — substantially smaller than gains during six of seven full quarters under the Biden administration in 2021 and 2022.
Biden-era manufacturing job gains included 137,000 in Q1 2022, 146,000 in Q3 2021, and 144,000 in Q4 2021. Even Q2 2021 produced 18,000 jobs — matching rather than trailing this year's performance.
On Tuesday, Vance claimed there had been "great rebounds" in manufacturing jobs under Trump-Vance leadership, but this characterization is also misleading. Despite the 18,000 first-quarter gain, the economy has lost a net 77,000 manufacturing jobs since the administration's first full month in office in February 2025 through April 2026. Manufacturing employment declined every month of 2025 and again in April 2026, according to preliminary data.
Vance's office declined to comment on the discrepancies. White House officials acknowledged gains in construction jobs related to manufacturing facility development but offered no substantive response to the overall manufacturing employment decline....
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How can you tell when Vance is lying? Everytime he opens his moutn!
Mike Johnson 'fed up' with Trump as he ditches White House for first time: insiders — David Edwards
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) skipped a White House meeting Thursday — and sources say it wasn't an accident.
Two aides familiar with the cancellation told reporter Pablo Manríquez that Johnson flatly refused to attend, marking what may be the first time the Speaker has said no to Donald Trump.
That's no small thing. Since taking the gavel in 2023, Johnson has been one of Trump's most reliable allies on Capitol Hill — shepherding the president's agenda through a razor-thin majority with near-total loyalty. A CQ Roll Call vote study found House Republicans backed Trump's position on 95 percent of votes in 2025, the highest presidential support rate ever recorded. Johnson, who sets the floor schedule, was the engine behind that number.
A former White House official once summed up the dynamic bluntly: "Loyalty is always going to be chief among the things that Trump cares about, and Johnson has never wavered on that."
Until now, apparently.
Observers inside Washington took notice. The Independent's DC Bureau Chief Eric Michael Garcia framed the significance quickly: "John Thune being fed up with Trump is one thing. Mike Johnson is a whole other kettle of fish."...
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Looking to being a scapegoat? It's of his own making.
Home Depot and Lowe’s Downplay Customer Surveillance Threats — Whitney Curry Wimbish
Executives at Home Depot and Lowe’s want to hide how—and whether—they protect customers’ civil rights when they share automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data with local cops and federal agents, who use the information to hunt immigrants and others.
That’s the message from corporate board members responding to a pair of shareholder proposals. The shareholders are asking them to produce reports describing how their company assesses the risks to customers’ data privacy when they share sensitive consumer data, including images taken by the Flock Safety cameras installed in both companies’ parking lots. The cameras snap pictures of vehicles as they drive by, and the pictures go into a searchable database that police officers can use to find where a car was, and when. The images are so precise, civil rights advocates said, that Flock can identify cars that have no license plate, by dents and other markings.
But Flock cameras and its database are also easily hacked, enabling anyone to watch children and to stalk and terrorize romantic interests, undocumented immigrants, people seeking reproductive health care, or people of the “wrong” race. YouTuber Benn Jordan has demonstrated how easy such hacking can be, calling the ability to spy on people “Netflix for Stalkers.”
The two companies’ annual shareholder meetings are upcoming, and the petitioners have asked them to explain ways they could mitigate those risks that go beyond legal compliance.
“The concern with data sharing is that … you’ll put immigrants at risk, because we know this technology is being used by law enforcement agencies to conduct searches of immigrants,” said Gideon Epstein, policy counsel for the Technology for Liberty Program the ACLU of Massachusetts. “Looking at real Flock audit data, especially from 2025, we have seen literally hundreds of searches from police officers searching explicitly for immigration-related matters.”...
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Big Brother grows and grows! Brave New World approaches. Can Limbo be far off?
Clarence Thomas Against Progressivism—and Progressives — Ruth Marcus
In a recent speech, the Justice made clear that he views the movement, past and present, as anti-American.
During his confirmation hearings, in 1991, Justice Clarence Thomas employed an arresting image to assure senators that he would be an impartial jurist. Taking the bench means “having to strip down, like a runner, to eliminate agendas, to eliminate ideologies,” Thomas said. “It is an amazing process, because that is precisely what you start doing. You start putting the speeches away, you start putting the policy statements away.” Earlier this month, the seventy-seven-year-old Thomas became the second-longest-serving Justice in history, surpassing John Paul Stevens, who retired after thirty-four years, in 2010. If Thomas remains on the bench until May 20, 2028—and he shows no signs of leaving—he will outlast the record set by William O. Douglas, who stepped down from the Court after thirty-six years, in 1975. But Thomas long ago left his runner analogy in the dust—and he has not exactly put away the speeches. A few weeks before eclipsing Stevens’s record, he delivered a revealing—and, to many who heard it, unsettling and ahistorical—lecture on what should have been an uncontroversial topic: the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Speaking at the University of Texas at Austin, at the invitation of its new School of Civic Leadership, part of a wave of conservative-inflected entities being created at public universities in Republican states, Thomas sounded themes that have been woven through his jurisprudence: that God bestowed the “certain unalienable rights” of the Declaration, and that government serves merely to implement them. Dissenting in the 2015 case Obergefell v. Hodges, which found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Thomas complained that the majority “rejects the idea—captured in our Declaration of Independence—that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government.” In his Texas speech, Thomas expanded on that idea. “None of our rights come from the government,” he said. “It is the Declaration that announces the ends of government. The Constitution achieves this purpose by protecting our natural rights and our liberties from concentrated power and excessive democracy.”...
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And this Nazi re-litgates Jim Crow? Give me a break, you dickwad! He's also a damned misogynist to boot! Impeach him!
The Trump administration is facing scrutiny over its billion-dollar border wall contracts in Texas’ Big Bend region — Sam Karas, Big Bend Sentinel, and Perla Trevizo and Misty Harris, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune
A lawsuit alleges the Trump administration awarded most new Texas border wall contracts to two firms. One has faced legal issues and shoddy construction claims.
When Tommy Fisher set out to build a section of border wall in South Texas during the first Trump administration, the project quickly became ensnared in controversy. Experts raised concerns about shoddy construction and signs of erosion.
Beyond that, Fisher’s company had received funding from a group called We Build the Wall, an influential conservative nonprofit that included President Donald Trump’s then-political strategist Steve Bannon as a board member. Some of its leaders eventually went to prison for their involvement in the venture.
Even the president denounced the project.
“I disagreed with doing this very small (tiny) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads,” Trump wrote on X in response to reporting by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune in 2020 detailing problems with the wall project.
“It was only done to make me look bad,” the post continued.
But none of this stopped Fisher’s company from getting subsequent border wall contracts, including from the state of Texas. And now the federal government has awarded his company over $9 billion to build even more border wall — including a $1.2 billion contract in the Big Bend region of Texas, where residents have continued to press for answers about the government’s plans in and around one of the country’s largest national parks.
And, as during Trump’s first term, Fisher’s work is stirring up controversy again. A New York-based construction company has sued the Trump administration after it awarded the bulk of new Texas border wall contracts to North Dakota-headquartered Fisher Sand & Gravel and another company.
Posillico Civil Inc.’s lawsuit, filed in the Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., on May 13, offers one of the first public glimpses into the procurement process along the border in Texas. The suit claims that out of the 11 prequalified vendors for the wall projects, U.S. Customs and Border Protection awarded nearly $14 billion — about 73% of the value of the contracts — to just two: Fisher’s firm and Barnard Construction, based in Montana. The work also includes wall projects around El Paso, Laredo, Del Rio and the Rio Grande Valley
The Trump administration has come under scrutiny for awarding no-bid contracts and for the lack of transparency around its accelerated border wall construction plans, moves designed to help the president achieve his key campaign promise of securing the border....
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If Trump has a hand in it, it will die.
Black Workers Are the Canaries in the Coal Mine During Trump 2.0 — Austin C. McCoy
In 2016, Trump asked Black voters what they had to lose if he was president. In 2026, the answer is clear.
Nearly a decade ago, Donald Trump infamously asked Black voters in his pitch to garner their support: “What do you have to lose?”
The Federal Reserve answered Trump’s question in its recent Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households report for 2025: Black Americans lost more financially than every other racial group. According to the report, 60 percent of Black Americans expressed that their financial well-being declined, down 5 percent from 2024. In contrast, 79 percent of white Americans said they were “doing okay” last year.
Black job losses in 2025 underscore the Fed’s reporting. According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Valerie Wilson, the Black unemployment rate rose 1.2 percent in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same time last year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also recently reported that the Black unemployment rate, which is typically higher than the national average, rose to 7.3 percent, making the rate as high as it was the pandemic in 2021. As I’ve previously noted, Black women endured sudden and staggering job loss as more than 300,000 were let go in the first few months of 2025.
Black American workers have experienced job losses across labor sectors during the first year of the new Trump administration. Its targeting of federal workers using the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) as an economic battering ram disproportionately hit Black Americans hard. Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, more Black Americans came to view the federal government as a reliable employer that ensured some degree of economic mobility for a racial group increasingly marginalized by the growing “post-industrial” private sector economy. At the end of 2024, Black Americans comprised nearly 19 percent of the federal workforce. Now, with DOGE cuts and this administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion plans and affirmative action programs for contractors, the prospects of Black employment in the federal government appear bleak as ever.
Weaknesses in manufacturing during Trump’s second term hurt Black laborers, who comprise nearly 11 percent of that industry’s workforce. Despite the president’s promises to grow manufacturing jobs in the U.S., that sector shed more than 70,000 jobs between April 2025 and January 2026, surely negatively impacting the industrial Black working class....
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What have you got to lose? Little did they know.
Tennessee Officials Find Out About First Amendment The Hard Way — Robyn Pennacchia
We’re hearing a lot this week about how the DOJ is going to take over a billion dollars of our tax money and give it to those whose feelings were, like, really hurt when they got in trouble just for doing a little insurrection and maybe pooping on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. So you know what we need? We need a palate cleanser. And, thankfully, the state of Tennessee has deigned to provide us with one. Rejoice!
Officials in the state will have to pay 61-year-old retired police officer Larry Bushart $835,000 in restitution after having imprisoned him for 37 days over a meme he shared to Facebook following the death of Charlie Kirk — which caused him to lose his job and miss both his wedding anniversary and the birth of his granddaughter.
Bushart was arrested back in September after he refused to take down a bunch of posts disparaging Kirk after his assassination, specifically over one that actually just criticized Donald Trump. Because, reportedly, people in his community thought it meant he was threatening to shoot up a school, as I guess they are not very good at reading comprehension.
The post he shared in the Perry County, Tennessee, community Facebook page was a meme that existed long before Kirk was assassinated and featured a picture of Donald Trump along the famous words of comfort he shared after the 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa: “We have to get over it.”
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Who says crime doesn't pay? It appears to be the United States most important product!!
NY Times Shocked Trump Personal Lawyer AG Acting Like Trump Personal Lawyer — Evan Hurst
But he seems so normal!
We have given Glenn Thrush shit in the past for aggravated New York Times-ing, like this one time in 2017 when he was fairly convinced Hurricane Harvey was about to turn Donald Trump presidential, after Trump used “dulcet” and “reassuring” language about his upcoming trip to survey the wreckage. (Spoiler, Trump did not become presidential.)
Well here we are again, and here is Glenn Thrush at the New York Times, shocked that Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s once and future personal fluffer, we mean personal lawyer, we mean (acting) attorney general, is acting like … Donald Trump’s once and future personal fluffer, we mean personal lawyer, we mean (acting) attorney general. What precedent is there for this, except [gestures wildly at literally everything]?
Here’s that subhed:
Once seen by some as the most conventional of President Trump’s political appointees, Todd Blanche has taken off the gloves in his new role as acting attorney general.
Once seen by whom, please? The White House press release transcribing department at the New York Times? We’re sorry, we understand they still call it the “newsroom.”
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, has tried to tread an ever-narrowing path between his role as a top Justice Department official and the job that got him there in the first place — as President Trump’s doggedly loyal former lead defense lawyer.
Did that ever-narrowing path include when he gave convicted child molester Ghislaine Maxwell a sweetheart deal that involved getting her moved to a Club Fed prison where she gets puppy playdates? Also when he went to visit her to ask her the stupidest questions imaginable, in order to try to elicit some kind of useful lie from her that would TOTALLY EXONERATE Donald Trump and make people stop asking about his role in the Epstein Files? (Which are named after Donald Trump’s favorite dead child rapist?)
Haha, no, because Glenn Thrush forgot to mention that in his entire piece! The piece about how surprising it is that Todd Blanche eats nothing but Donald Trump’s ass all day! And Glenn Thrush’s editor forgot!...
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The Clown Shit Show continues.
“People Have Got to Know Whether or Not Their President Is a Crook…” — Thom Hartmann
Nixon at least understood the people had a right to know. This crowd has decided the people have no rights the president needs to respect & they’ll keep believing that exactly as long as we let them.
In November of 1973, with Watergate closing in around him and his approval rating in free fall, Richard Nixon stood in front of four hundred newspaper editors at Disney World in Orlando and said something that, whatever else you think of the man, revealed an instinct that has gone entirely extinct in today’s Republican Party. He said, in the words that became his epitaph, that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”
He was lying, of course, when he added, “Well, I’m not a crook.” But notice the premise underneath the lie. Nixon understood, even as he was going down, that a president owes the American people an accounting, that accountability is the price of the office, and that the public has a right to know who’s running their government and how.
That premise is the thing that’s dead now, and a dear friend of mine put his finger on exactly why in an email he sent me yesterday morning. He’s a very smart guy, careful with his words, not given to hyperbole, and he wrote:
“Trump, as we well know, is a brazen crook. But never have I seen corruption as flagrant as the $1.8 billion slush fund that Trump is stealing from taxpayers to reward, in part, the Jan 6 rioters. Imprisoned by a jury of their peers, Trump pardons them and where was the outrage. Now this? Is there no way it can be stopped? So far I haven’t heard anyone suggest how. Why do I even pay my f...ing taxes? I have always committed to honesty in my tax returns. Perhaps I should find ways to cheat as so many of my acquaintances have.”
I’ve been getting versions of that email all week, and that last line is the part that should worry every one of us. This is a man who has spent his entire adult life filing honest tax returns out of a sense of basic civic obligation, and he’s now openly wondering, in writing, to a friend, whether he’s been a sucker. That’s what corruption at the top actually does to a nation.
It isn’t just the money. It’s the slow poisoning of the idea that the rules apply to everyone — the idea that holds a self-governing republic together — and once enough honest people conclude that only chumps pay full freight, we don’t have a country anymore. We have a kleptocracy with a flag.
So let’s look at what actually happened, because it’s somehow even worse than the email suggests....
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On the criminal scale, Trump wipes out Nixon's criminality in spades.
Nutbag Accuses Astronauts Of Faking Recent Mission
Yahoo News reports:
Artemis II crew members were confronted at the Capitol by an unknown man accusing NASA of faking space travel. The lunar mission astronauts appeared in blue flight suits during a hallway exchange shared online.
Astronauts Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen were spotted standing in the hall. He also said, “You all never went to space.” Christina Koch kept a smiling face. Meanwhile, Victor Glover appeared to look toward the camera, smile slightly, and wave, ignoring the conspiratorial remarks. The crew and the woman holding papers appeared to keep walking as the man continued.
The man continued the confrontation with religious and conspiracy claims. He said, “Apologies as God’s watching you all.” Then, he called the mission a “PSYOP” and said, “NASA is a joke.” He also said, “Repent before God, y’all.”
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The intellectual level of America displayed in full view.
Blanche: People Who Hurt Cops Get Paid All The Time
CNN reports:
“One of the factors the commissioners have to consider is what the claimant did — the claimant’s conduct,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN’s Paula Reid in an interview Wednesday. “The claimant would have to say, ‘I assaulted a cop and I want money.’”
“Whether the commissioners will give that person money – that claimant – it’s up to them. But that’s one of the factors they have to consider,” he continued, adding that Trump “does not stand for assaulting law enforcement.”
Blanche said he couldn’t fully rule out the possibility that someone who was violent toward officers, saying it was up to the commissioners. “So, whether the commissioners will give that person money, that claimant, it’s up to them,” he said.
The fund will be run by a commission whose members are chosen by Trump’s attorney general and who can be fired by the president at any time.
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This poor man needs a GoFundMe to get some help with his thinking problems. He is in very bad shape.
OH, SO NOW IT'S ILLEGAL TO GO ON FAMILY ROAD TRIPS? — Evan Hurst
Yesterday, another corrupt-as-fuck clownhole Trump official sat in front of a Senate committee and made an absolute fool of themselves. It was Sean Duffy, secretary of Road Rules, and he delivered one of the best examples of the “Oh so now it’s ILLEGAL for people to do [completely normal thing]” genre we’ve heard in a long time.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was questioning Duffy about his taxpayer-funded reality show road trip and he delivered this iconic line:
“Maybe spending time with your children on a road trip is a wonderful experience!”
OH, SO NOW IT’S ILLEGAL TO SPEND TIME WITH YOUR CHILDREN?
OH, SO NOW IT’S ILLEGAL TO GO ON ROAD TRIPS?
OH, SO NOW WONDERFUL EXPERIENCES ARE ILLEGAL?
To which the senator replied:
“It is a wonderful thing, but your vacation was paid for by Boeing, Toyota, United Airlines, Enterprise, Shell, Royal Carribbean Group, all organizations and companies you oversee.”
OH SO NOW CORRUPTION, FRAUD, GREED AND GRIFT ARE ILLEGAL?
Well yes...
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The swine!
Trump's inner circle gets stark reminder of what happened to Nixon's loyalists — Daniel Hampton
Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner is warning Donald Trump's inner circle to study the fate of Richard Nixon's lieutenants — and to remember that proximity to power was no shield from prison.
Kirschner, a 30-year prosecutor turned legal analyst, told viewers Wednesday that the loyalists embedded across Trump's second-term government should look closely at the Watergate ledger.
"After the Watergate scandal, 48 of Richard Nixon's goons were convicted of crimes and 30 of them went to prison," Kirschner said. "But you know what? Before they got caught, before they were prosecuted, before they were held accountable, they thought they were untouchable."
Nixon was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and never faced criminal prosecution, but his aides were not so lucky. Among those convicted were Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, and domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman — three of the most powerful officials in the administration.
The warning landed days after Trump's Justice Department unveiled a $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization fund" to compensate Trump allies who claim they were unfairly prosecuted by the Biden administration. The fund was announced on Monday as part of a settlement of Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal defense lawyer, signed off on the deal. Time reported that Blanche framed the fund as "a lawful process for victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress."...
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The Trump Crime Syndicate is overplaying its hand.
Trump is ready to ditch voters who are no longer 'useful' — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump is ready to ditch a voting coalition that was credited with bringing him back to the White House in 2024, and according to a new piece from the New York Times, it is because they are no longer "useful" to him.
On Thursday, the Times published the transcript of a live event conversation about the "waning" influence of the "Make America Healthy Again" movement. MAHA is the informal title applied to the controversial public health agenda espoused by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his followers.
This cohort of voters was credited with shifting the 2024 election after Kennedy dropped his independent campaign and endorsed Trump. Since then, however, these voters have expressed deep disappointment with Trump's health agenda, particularly his lack of progress on anti-vaccine measures and his push for the production of certain pesticide chemicals. According to reports, figures within the administration are unbothered about the flagging support from MAHA, deeming them to be inconsequential....
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Always a drag being a sucker.
Retired Army commander schools MAGA on meaning of true patriotism — Alex Henderson
U.S. President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are vowing to purge the military of "wokeness" and restore what Hegseth calls a "warrior ethos." But retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling — who served as commander of U.S. Army Europe under former President Barack Obama and is a frequent critic of the second Trump Administration's policies — has a very different view of patriotism. In an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, Hertling looks back on his years of combat and explains why Memorial Day is "deeply personal" to him.
"For those who have attended memorial ceremonies on dusty airfields in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even still Vietnam, or who escorted transfer cases draped in flags, or who listened to bagpipes while rifles stood inverted beside combat boots and helmets under a fading sunset," explains Hertling, a frequent military analyst for MS NOW. "Memorial Day is not abstract patriotism. It is deeply personal."
Hertling continues, "Years ago, during combat operations in Iraq, our 1st Armored Division commander — then-Major General Martin Dempsey — was struggling with something every commander eventually confronts in war. What do you say to soldiers grieving the loss of a close friend who was struck in the prime of his or her life? How do you comfort young men and women carrying the weight of death while still asking them to continue the mission the next morning — or even that same night?"
The former U.S. Army Europe commander notes that Memorial Day didn't become an "official federal holiday" in the United States until 1971, although it existed more than 100 years before that....
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The ones who need schooling are the commanding officers.
Betrayal: This surprising group is gearing up to crush Trump and his broken promises — Adam Lynch
...As passionate as some people may feel about elections, politics and Trump it is “the least politically engaged Americans” that are deciding American elections. It may sounds like sacrilege, but it’s true, said Morris. In 2024, according to Pew, non-voters leaned toward Trump over Harris by four percentage points, 44 percent to 40 percent. But today, the Democratic margin among non-voters is a whopping +20 points — a 24-point shift since 2024.
“That is the largest pro-Democratic swing in any subgroup of the electorate we measure, and it has been at or above double digits in nine of our eleven monthly polls,” said Morris, confirming that Independents and non-voters have overwhelmingly turned on the president and his Republican Party....
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When you don't vote no hypothetical is valid. Stop living in a fairy tale. Vote or shut up.
Two Walls — Steve Greenberg
Splitting and desecrating tribal lands and minority votes isn't a GOP bug, it's a GOP feature.
We're starting to see a pattern here.
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Shameless. But walls can fall.
Proud Boys Leader: I Got The Longest Sentence So I Would Be The One Who Gets The Biggest Fund Payout
“I think it’s important that we take the position that every J6er needs to be able to get some type of funds. I will tell you what position I’m going to take. No matter how this plays out, whether it’s equal distribution, whether it’s distribution more for people who did more time or like — Look, let’s be honest. If they were to pay out based on sentences, I’d be the one that gets the most money. Right?
“So that would benefit me, but I’m going to take this position. I don’t care how this gets dispersed. At the end of the day — I’m going to advocate for a certain way that it gets dispersed, but I won’t care about the results. Because at the end of the day, it’s nobody’s fault but the Biden administration, Merrick Garland, that this even happened to these people.
“The fact that we’re talking about this and there’s 1,575 individuals, right, is ridiculous. And it’s not somebody else’s fault that the same government that fucked you over is the same government that’s choosing, you know, to compensate you for it, which I’m thankful for.
“So I’m not going to take a position against another J6er because the government decided that this is how it’s going to go. And I’m not going to take position against the government on how those — as long as the disbursements happen and they’re, you know, considerable, I’m OK with it because I’m not going to go against any of you, whether you took a plea deal, whether you have a misdemeanor. I’m not going to take a position against you guys, and I suggest you don’t take a position against others.” – Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years.
"Hey asshole just remember you never hear the shot that kills you." — Thewolflam (comments)
"May none of them live long enough to collect." — Turtle73 (comments)
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Not one red cent for your treason, motherfucker! Many of us would use the guillotine.
We will see that photo of you and Lil Marco on election posters if the traitor thinks he will run for POTUS.
Bezos: “Trump Has Been Right About A Lot Of Things”
The New York Times reports:
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, said on Wednesday that President Trump was “more mature, more disciplined” in his second term and defended his recent cuts to The Post’s newsroom.
“Trump has lots of good ideas, and he’s been right about a lot of things,” Mr. Bezos said in a lengthy interview with the journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “You have to give him credit where credit is due.”
Mr. Bezos has faced a great deal of criticism for what many perceive as attempts to curry favor with the Trump administration this time around, after clashing with Mr. Trump in his first term. Mr. Bezos sat at the dais at the president’s inauguration last year, and Amazon recently paid $40 million for a documentary about the first lady, Melania Trump, which it promoted with a $35 million rollout.
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Indeed. EXTREME RIGHT, clueless creature!
White House: We Don’t Need Approval To Build Arch
The Washington Post reports (Jeff Bezos):
The Trump administration does not plan to seek approval from Congress for President Donald Trump’s planned 250-foot arch, arguing that they do not need it because lawmakers a century ago authorized a somewhat similar project that was never built.
Trump has targeted Memorial Circle — a traffic roundabout on Columbia Island, a man-made island tucked inside the edge of Washington — for his planned arch. Teams of workers conducting surveys and geophysical testing began work at the site last week.
The administration has also begun the process of seeking approvals from a pair of federal arts and building commissions that Trump has stacked with his alies, with another hearing slated for Thursday morning.
"Then nobody needs approval to wreck it." — Man_in_the_mists (comments)
"But when the turd and his helper turds are in prison we can tear it down." — AncientMariner (comments)
'Nobody wants this. Furthermore, nobody wants trump to continue breathing." — Professor Shih Tzu (comments)
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The greed, malice and evil of Trump are all embedded in this "golden calf."
Ballroom won’t be funded after Senate GOP drops $1 billion Trump security request — Jordain Carney/Politico
In a blow to the White House, Senate Republicans will remove a $1 billion Secret Service funding request that would help President Donald Trump’s ballroom project from their immigration enforcement funding bill amid internal objections.
“We were told that the ballroom money is out,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters after a GOP lunch meeting Wednesday, adding he’d “like to read the text.”
The decision to omit the security funding came after twin blows: Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled over the weekend that the provision didn’t comply with the strict rules governing what Republicans can put in their filibuster-skirting bill because it funded activities outside of the Judiciary Committee’s jurisdiction.
And several GOP senators aired public concerns about including any ballroom funding in a bill otherwise dedicated to immigration enforcement. A larger swath of Republicans were privately opposed, with the mood souring further Tuesday amid anger over Trump's decision to endorse Ken Paxton over incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in the upcoming GOP primary runoff in Texas....
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Are the bastards feeling the heat?
US Employers Spend Over $1.5 Billion a Year to Fight Union Efforts, Study Finds — Shireen Akram-Boshar
“Union avoidance law firms have constructed an industry providing counsel on union busting,” the report says.
A new report finds that U.S. employers spend more than $1.5 billion a year to fight labor unions, hiring union-avoidance consultants and lawyers to prevent worker organizing.
The report, published jointly by the Economic Policy Institute and LaborLab on Wednesday, estimates that employers spend roughly $1.7 billion annually on union avoidance consultants and law firms to prevent workers “from organizing and bargaining for better pay and working conditions.”
Though unionization in the U.S. has grown to its highest levels in 15 years, nonunion workers face mounting obstacles to joining a union. Over the past few decades, large law firms have developed business specialization in fighting unionization efforts, the report notes. This includes providing union avoidance consultants to employers to prevent union elections, push workers to vote against unions, and stall collective bargaining agreements.
Firms like Littler Mendelson, Morgan Lewis, and Jackson Lewis have represented employers against workers’ organizing efforts at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s, to name only a few.
“Union avoidance law firms have… constructed an industry providing counsel on union busting,” the report says, adding that the firms take advantage of legal loopholes to add barriers to union organizing and to help conceal their advising of companies.
The report found that in 2025, Amazon spent over $26.6 million on union avoidance consultants, while other companies spent between $400,000 and $2 million on union-busting services. But the report says that this is still an undercount, because of lack of mandated reporting of the “advice” provided by consultants, and failure to report services even when the reporting is mandated....
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Unions now! Unions forever!
Trump's rally exposed 'religious right's Epstein files' — and Mike Johnson's ties: analyst — Robert Davis
President Donald Trump's recent prayer rally on the National Mall laid bare the religious right's own Epstein files, and may have jeopardized one of his allies in Congress, according to one political analyst.
Trump held an event called "Rededicate 250" at the National Mall on Sunday, which was billed as a celebration of the impact Jesus Christ has had on the U.S. The event was attended by MAGA fans and Trump administration officials like Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). It was sharply criticized by some political analysts for representing a blending of church and state.
Sidney Blumenthal, who co-hosts "The Court of History" podcast on the Legal AF Network, said during a new episode on Wednesday that the prayer rally also put some of Trump's allies in danger by bringing to light a scandalous case that the Trump Department of Justice killed last year.
In November, the Trump DOJ closed its investigation of Paul Pressler, a disgraced minister from Texas who had been accused of pedophilia. Pressler was key in aligning the religious right behind traditional Republicans, beginning with former President George W. Bush, Blumenthal noted. Pressler also helped build Johnson's career and had considered him to be the founding dean of a law school bearing Pressler's name before the minister died in 2024, Blumenthal added.
Blumenthal suggested that Trump's rally exposed the ties between members of the religious right and Pressler, which could come back to bite him as the midterms approach.
"This is the religious right's Epstein files in the Pressler case," Blumenthal said. "And many of those people who were covering it up were present at this rally on the mall."...
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Snake oil religion.
Of Slush Funds and Suckups — William Kristol
Another month of iced-over war in Iran, another thirty-day extension of America’s sanctions waiver on Russian oil to try to take some of the pressure off the world’s Strait-of-Hormuz energy shock. We’re with Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Jeanne Shaheen on this one: “Every additional dollar the Kremlin earns from this license helps [Vladimir] Putin finance his illegal war against Ukraine and kill innocent Ukrainians.” Happy Wednesday.
Of Slush Funds by Andrew Egger
Someday I’ll need to take a break from writing about Donald Trump’s outrageous “anti-weaponization fund”—Lord knows there are plenty of other outrages clamoring for our attention. But there’s no helping it for now: The thing just keeps getting more ridiculous day after day.
The big news in this department was the remarkable “supplement” to the settlement agreement that the Justice Department quietly revealed yesterday: a one-page document stating that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from prosecuting tax claims against anyone in the Trump family or Trump’s businesses.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gave no explanation for this utterly shameless attempt to place the president and his associates permanently above the law. And why would he have? We don’t need explanations for what is obvious on its face: Blanche is auditioning for the permanent AG job by giving Trump constant reassurances he’ll run the Justice Department exactly like he used to run Trump’s criminal defense teams: with an eye to protecting the boss above all else. At long last, Trump has the attorney general he’s been craving ever since Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation all those years ago: a guy who knows his proper throne-sniffing place.
But somehow even this development didn’t get my blood boiling as much as another, objectively smaller development yesterday: Vice President JD Vance’s turn in the White House Briefing Room defending the settlement fund in questions from reporters. All these guys are rotten, but there’s something about Vance’s shtick of couching his own utterly cynical amorality in a posture of faux-earnest aw-shucks folksy reasonableness that bothers me even more than the no-pretense in-your-face corruption....
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And to think — these corrupt bastards are still in office!
Trump Fluffer Todd Blanche So Mad We Can See Him Fluffing — Evan Hurst
handmaiden and slutty Chippendales dancer and court jester and whatever other kind of servant Trump needs at the moment. Chewing up Big Mac for Trump and spooning it into his mouth? If Todd hasn’t done it yet, he will. Has he wiped the president after a rough golden toilet Executive Time? Only he knows.
But he is APPALLED! APPALLED! APPALLED! that virtually no one respects him as a serious man or a serious attorney general who takes his job seriously, and that nobody thinks he’s anything more than Trump’s personal hole-tonguer.
He had a real tantrum about it yesterday in the Senate when Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen referred to him as what he is.
They were obviously talking about the White Grievance Reparations Fund (credit: Elie Mystal) that’s been established by the Trump regime and his criminal Justice Department in order to pay off all Trump’s favorite rapists, grifters, conmen, and terrorists who have been victimized by those who want to hold them accountable for their actions....
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Read all about the shit show!
Delivery When Expected! Tabs, Wed., May 20, 2026 — Evan Hurst
Know what our cryptic headline means? It means we ordered something and it came when we expected it and we just got the notification. Not so cryptic after all! Shut up, Wonkette.
Tabs!
Please enjoy Trump’s “Not Personal Lawyer LOL” Todd Blanche queening THE FUCK out yesterday in the Senate when Senator Chris Van Hollen referred to him as such.
And here is some more of Todd queening out at Chris Van Hollen, it was good TV, he’s a really pathetic little fluffer, and nothing more.
Sure sounds like Todd was lying to Congress right there, and here is him lying some more:
Heather Cox Richardson has lots of very good perspective on Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund for all his favorite terrorist pals, the agreement never to go after any of the Trump’s for their tax crimes ever again, and the fact that this “settlement” of his lawsuit wasn’t actually a “settlement,” but rather an unrelated drug deal between Trump and his own Justice Department to rob the American people and pay off Trump and his cronies. [Letters From An American]
Meanwhile, ugly little chubby-cheeked couchfucker JD Vance just wants to know why nobody ever has any sympathy for the J6 terrorists.
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See Evan's page for revealing videos and graphics. They are so much so!
Bari Weiss Is Already on the Outs at CBS News — Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
Weiss’s bosses are considering pulling back her control over content.
Bari Weiss might soon be forced to hand over the reins to CBS News.br>
As Paramount closes in on its potential deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, executives at the networks are considering avenues to remove Weiss from her position overseeing CBS News....
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Fuck around and find out, Bari.
What Happens When a President Stops Obeying the Constitution? — Thom Hartmann
From defying Congress to rewarding loyalists and ignoring constitutional limits, America is confronting a dangerous new era where the rule of law no longer restrains those in power.
Back when I was a kid in Lansing, Michigan, my father used to tell me that the difference between America and the places his Army buddies had fought through in Europe and Asia wasn’t the size of our buildings or the strength of our army.
It was, he said, that here a cop couldn’t kick in your door without a judge first deciding there was a good reason, a president couldn’t help himself to the treasury, and he can’t take a king’s gift or send soldiers overseas to kill people without the people’s representatives saying yes. Even the cop shows we watched on TV had police regularly being turned away from people’s doors for lack of a warrant.
Dad believed that with the uncomplicated faith of a man who’d watched what happened when those rules disappeared in other countries, and he passed that faith on to me as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, which, for an American of his generation, it was.
I’ve been thinking about my Eisenhower Republican father a lot lately, because the thing he assumed could never happen in America is now happening here, openly, daily, and with a kind of swagger that suggests the people doing it don’t believe there will ever be a price to pay.
Consider what we learned just yesterday morning. The Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Donald Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the previous administration. It’s an unprecedented mechanism that lets the president pay his own supporters — or fund his own private army — out of a government agency he controls with taxpayer money, with no functional constraints on who he can give that money to.
Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called it plainly what it is, a political grievance fund Trump can use to pay off his friends, and the obvious beneficiaries are the roughly fifteen hundred people he already pardoned for storming the Capitol on January 6th.
The Fourteenth Amendment, written in the blood of the Civil War, says in Section 4 that this is blatantly illegal:
“[N]either the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”
The men who stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election engaged in exactly the kind of insurrection that language was written to address — several were even convicted by juries for seditious conspiracy — and now Trump wants to write them checks that could be as much as $1 million per person.
This isn’t some obscure or gray area of the law or the Constitution: that’s the document telling us all “No” in language a child could understand, and the answer coming back from the Trump regime is a number chosen, with a wink, to evoke 1776....
My father’s generation believed America was the country where the rules apply to everyone, and fought a brutal war to defend that ideal. Whether they were right is, finally, now up to you and me.
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What happens? We used to hang traitors. We still can if we grow a spine.
Kimmel audience bursts into cheers at senator's 'perfect comeback' to Todd Blanche's whine — Tom Boggioni
The in-studio audience for Tuesday night’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC burst into cheering and raucous applause after the host shared a clip of Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) putting acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in his place earlier in the day.
According to Kimmel, it was “perfect.”
In the exchange, the combative Blanche, who landed his current job after Donald Trump dumped his predecessor, Pam Bondi, seemed incredulous that the Maryland Democrat doubted his integrity as he defended the president and the plan for a $1.776 billion “slush fund” for the president's aggrieved Jan 6 supporters.
Kimmel introduced the clip (at the 8:47 mark) by explaining, “So Todd Blanche, who was Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, he’s current acting attorney general now, got grilled on this day by the Senate Appropriations Committee."
He then added, “The way they are going to determine who gets the money is with a five person commission, and guess who gets to pick who will be on that commission? That’s right. Trump’s own little Malti-Poo, Todd Blanche.”
In the clip, Van Hollen is seen speaking to the Trump appointee and admonishing him, “Attorney general, come on. So you’re not going to submit this proposal to any federal judge or independent —.”
“There is no judge,” Blanche interrupted before adding, "What does that mean, ‘independent authority’?”
“Not somebody that is going to pick the five of the members who was Donald Trump’s former personal attorney. That would be somebody who is independent,” Van Hollen fired back.
“I’m the acting attorney general, okay?” Blanche snapped. “The fact that I used to be President Trump’s lawyer is just a fact. But I’m the acting attorney general, so don’t say the president’s former lawyer will do something. The acting attorney general will do something.”
“Mr. Attorney General, you are acting today like the president’s personal attorney and that is the whole problem,” the Democrat sharply accused.
The led ABC host Kimmel to smirk as his audience burst into cheers.
“That was amazing,” the comedian stated as he joined the applause.
“That was like one of those fake conversations you have with yourself in the shower where you have a perfect comeback, except it happened on TV,” he joked. “Good going, Sen. Chris Van Hollen.”
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Trump and his toadie have disgraced our country with this hogwash! Romove them.
Former cop who was jailed over a Charlie Kirk post gets $835,000 settlement — Matthew Chapman
A former police officer arrested by Tennessee officials for making a Facebook post about right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's murder will receive $835,000 as part of a wrongful incarceration settlement, CNN reported on Wednesday.
"Under the deal announced Wednesday, Larry Bushart, agreed to drop the five-month-old case alleging that his constitutional rights were violated when officials in Perry County, Tennessee, held him in jail," said the report, noting that the lawsuit, brought with help from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), had been set to go to trial in two months. "'I am pleased my First Amendment rights have been vindicated,' Bushart said in a statement Wednesday. 'The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy.'"
Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA and an outspoken champion of far-right and Christian nationalist causes under the Trump administration, was shot and killed by a sniper during a political debate at Utah Valley University last September.
Bushart's troubles began when he shared a Facebook meme in response to a vigil for Kirk, bearing the caption, "This seems relevant today" and featuring Trump saying of a 2024 school shooting in Iowa, "We have to get over it."
In response to this, he was arrested by local officers for "threatening mass violence at a school" and held on $2 million bond for 37 days.
County officials dropped the charges after the story made national news, but claim the arrest wasn't intended to punish his speech, and local police had thought the meme was a genuine threat to target a local school with a similar name to the one in Iowa.
Bushart says his time in jail cost him his post-retirement job and left him with a fear of commenting on politics...
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Fascism's purpose is to inflict oppositon with fear. It is their coin of their loser realm.
Jan. 6 officers take first step toward defeating Trump's insurrectionist 'slush fund' — David Edwards
Two of the most recognizable police officers from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday seeking to kill the Trump administration's $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" before it can pay out a single dollar to the rioters who beat them.
Former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, calling the fund "the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century."
"The fund, styled the 'Anti-Weaponization Fund,' is illegal," the complaint states. "No statute authorizes its creation, the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham, and its design violates the Constitution and federal law."
The lawsuit argues the fund violates the 14th Amendment's explicit prohibition on using federal money to "pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States." It also contends the Justice Department had no legal authority to create the fund in the first place....
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Trump and his Nazi retards are attempting to overthrow our Constituion and render it nil. It will not work. We will die defending it.
President Donald Trump uncorked an unfocused, rambling attack on Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico on the tarmac on Wednesday morning to reporters — Matthew Chapman.
"He believes in six genders, he takes hits at Jesus Christ, he's wearing a mask six months ago. Anybody wearing a mask six months ago doesn't get it," said Trump. "And he's a vegan! He's a vegan in Texas."
It's unclear what Trump meant in saying that Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian who talks extensively about his Christian beliefs, "takes hits a Jesus Christ" — which furthermore comes weeks after Trump sparked fury among many Christians by attacking the Pope and posting an image of himself as Jesus healing the sick.
Talarico is notably not a vegan, and routinely eats both meat and animal products. Trump's remark comes after widespread GOP mockery of Talarico for ordering a breakfast taco with potato, egg, and cheese — the latter two in fact being animal products — even though this is one of the most popular breakfast orders in the state. Republicans have pushed this narrative as part of a broader, baseless allegation that Talarico is a homosexual pervert.
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There are many vegans both in Texas and in our country. They all can vote, dumbass. BTW: It's better than being a Coprophagian.
Trump ignored warnings from defense experts — and is now in way over his head — Alex Henderson
..."Donald Trump may be having buyer's remorse over the Iran war," Wood explains in the i Paper. "U.S. fuel prices are near an all-time high; his approval ratings are at an all-time low; and oil tankers remain stuck in the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to tip the global economy into recession."
One of the military experts who is sounding the alarm is Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense under former U.S. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Gates believes that both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to realize how strong the Iranian regime is.
"Robert Gates, a grandee of America's defense establishment as secretary of defense under Republican and Democratic presidents (George W. Bush and Barack Obama), delivered a withering assessment this week of Netanyahu's pitch," Wood observes. "Interviewed by CBS, he said that Netanyahu had told him, in July 2009, all the same things he had told Trump in the Situation Room in February. Gates said he had pushed back during that 'no-punches-pulled discussion' of Iran, telling Netanyahu he was underestimating the resilience of the Iranian regime. 'He was saying, in 2009: the regime is fragile, it'll crumble at the first attack, and they won't have time to do anything else.… I told him then, he was dead wrong.'"
Wood adds, "Netanyahu has — almost comically — been warning that Iran is weeks or months away from getting a nuclear bomb for decades."
Trump, Wood notes, "did not have to take Netanyahu's word" about Iran moving closer to developing a nuclear bomb."
"His own intelligence services contradicted the alarming claims," according to Wood. "Before last year's bombing, the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a Senate committee that the U.S. intelligence community 'continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader (Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.' At the time, Trump declared, 'I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.'"
Wood points out that CIA Director John Ratcliff dismissed Netanyahu's nuclear bomb claims as "farcical," while Secretary of State Marco Rubio called them "b– –."...
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We are quite at risk with the inept leader Trump is.
Coons Humiliates Todd Blanche On Live Television — John Amato
Todd Blanche Dubois' usual glorification of Trump was turned on itself by a smart Senator.
During the Senate subcommittee on the Justice Department’s 2027 budget, Sen. Chris Coons was able to humiliate Trump and his lapdog, Todd Blanche, in such a clever way that the acting AG was unaware what had happened.,br>
Every competent person in this country has heavily criticized Trump's newly minted "anti-weaponization” fund. The only people exhilarated by this and the weaponization of the $1.8 billion slush fund are the January 6th insurrectionists who were arrested and those who were found guilty and later pardoned by Trump.
Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche is an unflinching trump ass-kisser extraordinaire, and it came back to bite said ass-kisser in the ass.
COONS: Has it ever happened that a sitting president sued his own government for $10 billion and then directed the settlement of the case and the establishment of a payout fund?
BLANCHE: Not that I'm aware of, but there's a lot of things that president Trump's the first of — no president had been indicted. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 times either, either
COONS: Correct. No president's been indicted."
Blanche Dubois thought his usual ass-kissing would glorify Dear Leader, but Coons turned it on its head. Trump was convicted of dozens of felonies as a result of these indictments.
"Trump...Granted immunity by John Roberts for anything he pretends is a Presidential action.
Granted almost unlimited power by our founding fathers for pardoning his flunkies illegal actions.
Now Trump and family are granted complete freedom to cheat on taxes...why should he even need to make those token $750 a year payments anymore.
Patriotic Americans need to go to DC and remove both Trump and John Roberts from office. Then wait for their pardon and pay off!" — 30,00 Lies (comments)
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Confession duly noted. America should literally drag all of them out of office and be paid for doing it!
Musk Shares Claims That Mosque Shooters Were Trans
The California Post reports:
The teenage San Diego mosque gunmen appear to have left behind a shocking, hate-filled manifesto, which praised Adolf Hitler and a slew of mass murderers, before the attack, The California Post has learned. The 75-page document is laden with the same Nazi iconography that Cain Clark was seen wearing during a horrifying livestream video of the attack, including the Black Sun, which is associated with Nazi SS head Heinrich Himmler, and Atomwaffen, which is tied to a violent neo-Nazi group.
The opinions therein are a nonsensical collection of anti-Trump, anti-liberal, antisemitic, homophobic and mysoginst bile — tied together only by the authors’ fury that they were not given more in life. Sources said investigators have a copy of the purported manifesto and believe it to be authentic.
The unhinged dispatch contains a scattershot of derogatory and racist views targeting a number of groups — including Muslims, Jews, and gay people, among others, with Clark describing himself as an “accelerationist” who hoped to instigate an “all-out race war” to bring about the collapse of society. Online profiles linked to Clark featured multiple Nazi slogans, and images of Hitler and German soldiers in formation during World War II.
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The U.S. is up against some very hate-filled and retarded creatures. We must overcome this. And we will.
Dem Texas US House Candidate Pledges To Turn ICE Gulag Into Internment Camp For “American Zionists”
The San Antonio Current reports:
Controversy-tarred congressional candidate Maureen Galindo this week pledged to transform a site south of San Antonio now used by the Trump administration to detain migrants into an internment camp for “American Zionists.”
“She’ll turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking,” Galindo wrote in an Instagram post over the weekend, referring to herself in the third person. “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”
Galindo’s latest set of inflammatory remarks comes as the Democratic hopeful for Texas’ newly redrawn 35th Congressional District continues to draw national attention for remarks critics have called antisemitic and untethered from reality. The controversy is snowballing as she heads into the May 26 Democratic primary runoff.
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Bigots, racists and anti-semites come in all colors and all political persuasions. Reject them.
It is quite shocking to read the comments I have read this morning on an article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram asking for donations for a memorial to the only black man who has ever been lynched in the city in 1921. They are some of the most hateful, retarded and lack of context rhetoric I have ever read. These creatures have no sense of shame.
Vote Johnny Garcia for Congress!
Senate Republicans Block Amendment To Stop Slush Fund Payouts From Going To Convicted Pedophiles
We Got This Covered reports:
Surely – surely – the Trump administration wouldn’t make convicted pedophiles millionaires? Sen. Richard Blumenthal clearly saw the way the wind was blowing and drafted an amendment to block the administration from “making any payments to convicted child predators.”
Republicans blocked it, opening the way for your local racist pedophile to receive a government check for a million dollars of your money in the mail. There’s a microscopic silver lining in that many of these predators are already back behind bars for their sick acts against children, but they can know that when they’re released, they have an easy life waiting for them.
This has to be the low point for America, right? Is there anything more disgusting that the Trump administration could possibly do at this point? Sadly, the answer is probably yes, but we’re not exactly eager to find out what that is.
"'Donald Trump has strongly aligned himself with Christianity, frequently framing his administration as a defender of the Christian faith and Judeo-Christian values.'
Normalizing pedophilia for profit so his own behavior can't be prosecuted." — Jay Silversmith (comments)
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This is naked crime by our "government." Trump is defending himself and other pedophiles with this.
There is no logical reason for our country to put up wth criminals running it. How fucking stupid can we be? We no longer deserve this country if we don't stop this organized Trump crime. Make then all bite the dust!
Former Leader Of Defunct Ex-LGBTQ Torture Group Exodus International Busted In Child Sex Sting
The Orlando Sentinel reports:
The former president of a now-shuttered, anti-LGBTQ organization was arrested Tuesday for seeking sex from an undercover deputy posing as a 14-year-old boy, according the Orange County Sheriff’s Office. Alan Chambers, 54, of Winter Park, was booked in the Orange County Jail without bond on charges of soliciting a minor, transmitting material harmful to minors and unlawful use of a two-way communications device.
Chambers led a “pray-away-the-gay” ministry until 2013 when he shut it down and apologized to those he said had been hurt by the organization. From Feb. 10 through May 4, Chambers is accused of repeatedly seeking to meet with a teenager for sex, according to the affidavit. On Tuesday morning, detectives said they interviewed Chambers during a traffic stop on Aloma Avenue and Strathy Lane, where he confirmed the accounts he was messaging from were his but stopped the interview when he was asked about the conversations.
A Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said investigators are working to find out whether there are other victims. Chambers is slated to appear before a judge on Wednesday. Chambers once helmed the Orlando-based Exodus International as part of the so-called “ex-gay” movement and was a fervent proponent of conversion therapy for LGBTQ people. He also served as associate pastor at Calvary Assembly of God in Orlando until 2005.
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Another Trump criminal bites the dust!
Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire goes woke with civil rights revisionism — Sophia Tesfaye
The Daily Wire’s latest documentary seeks to discredit Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott
...Walsh treats well-documented, widely accessible historical facts as if they were buried state secrets, weaponizing the baseline historical illiteracy of his audience to construct a narrative of deception....
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America's next Civil War is just a shot away.
Morning Joe's epic meltdown over Trump giving millions to 'cop killers' leads to apology — Tom Boggioni
“You’ve got to assume a $1.8 billion slush fund for people that beat the hell out of cops,” he began as co-host Mika Brzezinski looked on. “Why do we say that? Because Donald Trump was asked. ‘Mr. President, is this going to be even for people who beat the hell out of cops?’ And the president said, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a fine commission to determine whether it be these people and including those who beat the hell out of cops, are going to get this money.’”
Attacking GOP lawmakers for “blindly going along," he ramped up the rhetoric, by exclaiming, “We’ve got this billion-dollar Marie Antoinette ballroom, now that they’re talking about funding and $1 billion plus slush fund for people who beat the hell out of cops. It is a slush fund — a weaponization slush fund for supporters of Donald Trump, JD Vance and the Republican Party."
“You are getting wiped out by Democrats in every poll that’s coming out. And you’re blindly going along with a Marie Antoinette ballroom for these taxpayers who can’t afford groceries, are going to have to fund with their own tax dollars, a war that keeps going on and on and on and on that they’re going to have to fund, even though they can’t afford to put gas in their car.”
“And you’ve got $1 billion slush fund that I guarantee you will go — if the past is prologue — to the people who beat the hell out of cops,” he shouted before repeating, “For people who beat the hell out of cops. Take your ‘Support the Blue’ flags down because you’re just full of it! You’re full of it!”
That led co-host Brzezinski to interject, “It’s twisted” to which he added, “By the way, if you don’t think they’re cop killers, little boy with your podcast, if you don’t think they’re cop killers, talk to their wives, talk to their sons, talk to their daughters, talk to Brian Sicknick’s mom, talk to their families, and they will tell you the very people Donald Trump wants to give billions to are cop killers. Ask them who killed those cops on January the 6th. They’ll tell you.”
“Donald Trump wants to give billions to our cop killers!” he shouted.
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Tell us, Tom. What is it that he has to apologize for? Zero.
'You are wasting my time': Senator loses patience as Sean Duffy retorts 'Welcome to MAGA' — Bennito L. Kelty
Another lawmaker could barely stand the way Trump's transportation secretary refused to answer straightforward questions during Capitol Hill testimony on Tuesday.
"You are encouraging Americans to spend the summer road tripping," Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) said to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy during testimony on Tuesday. "Let me just ask you, how much did you rack up on gas during your Great American Road Trip?"...
"WHY do Democrats continue to participate and give these people the opportunity to attack, as they NEVER answer anything? Every single member of this administration has utilized the same game plan now, and yet, the Democrats sound like a broken record repeatedly. The frustration is that there is no solution they can find or agency they can hire to help with better planning to counter this approach.
I really have a feeling we are on the cusp of major political violence that this nation has never experienced. Our downgrade to third-world country or "shithole" country status, as Trump says, will be solidified once the bombings and killings begin." — Zachary Jeremiah Isaacs (comments)
'Sean, did you swear an oath to MAGA or the Constitution? Were your fingers crossed? Trump or the Constitution? Welcome to America. Maybe you'll learn a little bit about the law and the customs." — azerty
"He said 'Welcome to MAGA', but he might as well have said, "Welcome to FASCIST America!"" — Mister-Blue-Sky (comments)
"They've lied under oath. They've no respect for any oath. Their slathering grovel is reserved for the piece of shit in the offal orifice." — DSM (comments)
"Doofy needs an ass whipping. Arguing, making political statements, grifting like their head moron. This is outrageous nonsense from unqualified cabinet turds. Every single one........
There must be consequences for this BS."—- bic19cents (comments)
"Sean Duffy: 'Welcome to Treason, Fascism and Mass Murder'" — Shadow37 (comments)
"Sean Duffy is a smug little prick. People like him don't think they will face accountability for their corruption, lies, and grifting." — Master_Shake (comments)
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Another Trump Nazi showing us just how arrogant and clueless they are. I expected him to salute and scream "Heil Trump!" Flush them back to their sewer.
Even that's too good for trash like this motherfucker. And yes, I am afraid the viloence the Trump Nazis have been begging for will be filling our streets sooner than later.
Book About AI’s Effects on the “Future of Truth” Found to Contain Slew of AI-Hallucinated Quotations — Maggie Harrison Dupré
Truth in the age of AI, indeed.
A buzzy new book called “The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality” contains more than a half-dozen misattributed or fake quotes,” a review by The New York Times discovered. In response to questions from the paper, the author, Steven Rosenbaum, admitted that the book contained a “handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” stemming from his use of AI tools.
“As I disclosed in the book’s acknowledgments, I used AI tools ChatGPT and Claude during the research, writing and editing process,” Rosenbaum told the NYT. “That does not excuse these errors, of which I take full responsibility. I am now working with the editors to thoroughly review and quickly correct any affected passages; any future editions will be corrected.”
Rosenbaum is the cofounder and executive director of the Sustainable Media Center, a media-focused nonprofit. A website for the book — which notes that Rosenbaum has a “Masters Degree in Truth” from New York University’s Gallatin school — lists praise from the likes of The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson, Eurasia group president Ian Bremmer, and Maria Ressa, the journalist and nobel laureate. Ressa, per the NYT, even wrote the foreword to the book.
“Rosenbaum challenges us to face reality with honesty and urgency,” reads a blurb attributed to Ressa included on the book’s website. “This is why ‘The Future of Truth’ matters.”
But it seems that Rosenbaum’s NYU-sanctioned truth mastery didn’t extend to double-checking AI-generated quotes to ensure that they were actually, you know, truthful.
One of the fabricated quotes discovered by the NYT was attributed to the venerable tech journalist Kara Swisher. According to Rosenbaum’s book, Swisher — in a chapter apparently about AI lies, no less — once said that “the most sophisticated AI language model is like a mirror” that “reflects our own morality back at us, polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface.”
“It’s not bound by Asimov’s laws or any ethical framework — it’s bound by the patterns in its training data and the objectives set by its creators,” the quote continued.
Yet the real Swisher told the NYT that she “never said that.” She added that the quote made her “sound like I have a stick up my butt, according to ChatGPT.”...
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AI appears to be high on drugs consistently.
Mark Zuckerberg Used Shell Companies to Bully Native Hawaiians — Joe Wilkins
Currently ranked as the sixth richest person on Earth, it should come as no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg is hoovering up valuable real estate like a feudal lord after a plague. What is surprising is how he’s gone about securing his acreage, and who he’s snatching it from.
Starting in 2014, the Facebook co-founder set about acquiring land on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i one parcel at a time. According to the latest reporting on his land acquisitions, reported by Wired in 2025, Zuckerberg now owns $311 million worth of land on Kaua’i, weighing in at over 2,300 acres — roughly three times the size of New York City’s iconic Central Park, for scale.
He’s accomplishing that with a careful amalgamation of Hawaiian-sounding shell companies, through which he’s sued hundreds of descendants of Native Hawaiian land owners, per HR News. These lawsuits first made waves in 2017, when it was reported that Zuckerberg was suing over 100 families for the right to bid on just eight combined acres of family-held land.
Many of Zuckerberg’s lawsuits targeted owners of kuleana lands, small tracts of lands originally granted to Native Hawaiians in an 1850 decree. As precious family heirlooms, the rights to these plots have been passed down for generations, and are meant to stay with the descendants of the original Hawaiian owners.
Unfortunately, the records of those long-held property rights haven’t always been maintained, because prior to colonization, Native Hawaiians “did not conceive land as exclusive and alienable, but as communal and shared,” as Hawaiian law scholar Melody Kapilialoha MacKenzie explained in a 2011 research paper.
This means that identifying the individual owner of a kuleana parcel can be difficult, as many Hawaiian descendants have inherited the land title over the past 176 years....
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The pornograpny of power. This is why people should only be allowed so much weatlh. It's toxic to humanity in many ways.
Trump Caught Buying Tech Stocks and Then Pumping Their Value by Publicly Praising Them — Joe Wilkins
If you’re surprised by any of the Trump family’s grifting since Donald’s return to office, you just haven’t been paying attention. Still, it’s important not to let the incredibly open level of corruption to fall into the background if we want any chance of understanding how we got here.
The latest revelation, first reported by Popular Information, follows the familiar pattern of Trump family ruses.
In a new tranche of public disclosures released last Friday, Donald Trump admitted to executing thousands of stock trades in 2026 so far. Many of the stocks he purchased, PopInfo found, had their values directly inflated by Trump’s policies or his behavior as sitting US president — sometimes to a comically blatant degree.
On March 11, for example, the president took a tour of Ohio-based medical tech company Thermo Fisher.
“It’s a great honor being here,” Trump said in front of eager cameras, alongside Fisher’s CEO Marc Casper. “It’s a great company. You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”
As we now know, in the weeks leading up to his seemingly-random visit, Trump’s trust — managed by his son Donald Trump Jr — purchased as much as $215,000 worth of stock options in Fisher, PopInfo reported. That would be sketchy enough. But then, on the same day of the tour, Trump placed an additional buy order worth between $15,001 and $50,000 of Fisher stock.
Amazingly, it didn’t quite work. Fisher’s stock fell from a high of $501 on March 11 to $491 the next day, and currently hovers even lower. Still, it’s the principle of the thing: the fact that a sitting president can even attempt to game the stock market to boost his own personal fortune beggars belief....
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Your con-man at work, fleecing the sheep.
Trump Goes Nuclear: Orders Parliamentarian Fired After Luxe Ballroom Gets Axed — Conover Kennard
Donald Trump became so furious that the Senate’s nonpartisan parliamentarian dared to follow the rules and blocked his taxpayer-funded $220 million ballroom disguised as “Secret Service security” in a $1 billion (!!!) package from sneaking through the easy reconciliation backdoor, that he reportedly called John Thune, demanding she be fired, NOTUS reports.
To Thune’s credit, he basically said, “lol, no,” and took a minute to remind everyone that this is the same parliamentarian both parties love to hate when she does her actual job. Imagine that. Now Republicans are busy frantically rewriting the language. Classic: When the rules get in the way of the Big Beautiful Ballroom, the rules must go asap. Priorities!
Republicans are crafting updated legislation to provide additional Secret Service funding, though it remains uncertain whether direct financial support for the security of Trump's East Wing development — including the ballroom — will be permitted. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley told Semafor he wasn't sure such targeted funding would hold up, while affirming that the Secret Service is clearly in need of improvement....
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Fuck Trump and his damned boondoggle ballroom!
JD Vance Tells Crowd To Vote Out 'Crazy Leadership In Washington' — Conover Kennard
We're nothing if not fair here on CrooksAndLiars, so we have to give credit to Vice President JD Vance for a very good point. Vance said, "If you want to rebuild the American dream for the next generation, vote against the crazy leadership in Washington, D.C." — which is the city where he serves as Vice President. The same city where his party controls the Senate and the House.
Telling people to vote against the leadership in the very administration he's a part of is about as self-owning as it gets.
It reads like a line from his years as an opposition politician, on autopilot, deployed without updating to reflect that he's now in charge. Classic case of the attack dog forgetting which yard he lives in.
Hon, y'all have had control of every level of government, so the call is coming from inside the White House. And if he doesn't believe me, he can call me on his Trump Phone while wearing his gold-colored Trump sneakers while I'm counting the $5,000 I got from my DOGE check.
Checkmate, JD! You sure owned the libs by delivering one of the biggest self-owns ever - I mean, since his last self-own. This administration appears to be the least self-aware in history.
Social media users had some thoughts.
That's the exact plan we have, dumbass.
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Like mnds across America!
Donald Trump's DOJ Gives Donald Trump $1.8 Billion To Give Donald Trump's January 6 Terrorists, Criminals, Cop-Beaters, Villain Pals — Doktor Zoom
Donald Trump’s Justice Department announced Monday it would set up a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund for Donald Trump to hand out money to January 6 insurrectionists and other political allies who Donald Trump decides were victims of government “weaponization” because they were loyal to Donald Trump. The move came after Trump dropped his $10 billion shakedown lawsuit against the IRS over a leak of his tax returns that showed he didn’t pay any taxes.
The DOJ claimed the fund was being created “in exchange” for Trump’s ending the lawsuit and other claims of the government being mean to him, like the completely legal 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago and the investigation into the help Russia gave him in the 2016 election.
But it’s not really a “settlement” in any legal sense, which is a pretty damned important distinction. US District Judge Kathleen Williams, who presided over the IRS lawsuit, pointed out, “Because the Notice [to drop the lawsuit] does not reference any settlement or include a stipulation of settlement, there is no settlement of record.”
In preemptively dropping the $10 billion lawsuit, Trump’s attorneys — no, not the (acting) attorney general — effectively made sure Judge Williams couldn’t interfere with his scheme, since real settlements are subject to being overseen by the judges in federal cases. As the New York Times points out:
By dismissing the case in its entirety, Mr. Trump was able to reach an agreement with his own appointees without risking the rebuke of an impartial and independent arbiter. Judge Williams, tacitly acknowledging her hands were tied, accepted the president’s dismissal of the suit and formally closed the case by the end of the day.
DO NOT call this a “settlement.” It’s more of a “deal,” or more accurately, a self-deal, since the entire lawsuit was about Trump as a “private citizen” suing the government Trump the president leads, and the arrangement was set up by the Justice Department that Trump the autocrat controls quite directly. After all, (acting) Attorney General Todd Blanche got his job because he was previously Trump’s personal lawyer, back when Trump was found guilty of 34 counts of criminal fraud.
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Yet another naked crime by Trump. But what does he care? He can only hang once.
State Department Needs Additional $100 Million To Whiten America With Even More Afrikaners — Gary Legum
The Trump administration’s efforts to make America’s entire refugee resettlement program whiter than a tube of Crest Arctic Fresh is getting a much-not-needed financial injection. Apparently the United States doesn’t have money for Medicaid or cancer research or paying teachers a living wage, but it does have $100 million to bring over 10,000 more white people with a victimhood complex. Boy, living in the Trump Reichland is just hit-you-in-the-gonads-with-a-battering-ram levels of fun fun fun.
At the rate we’re going, the next government funding bill will dole out money to resettle white South Africans and Donald Trump’s ongoing project of turning Washington DC into a bargain bin Atlantic City, and that’s it.
According to The Guardian, the State Department on Monday informed Congress that it wants to admit 17,500 Afrikaners as refugees before the fiscal year ends in September. This would be a double and then some increase from the 7,500 refugees in total that State had said last fall it would admit this year. (The country let in over 100,000 refugees in the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency.)
There is no more room in America for people languishing in Middle Eastern refugee camps or fleeing gang violence in South America, but there is plenty of room for the palest of us whose greatest crisis is the local bakery running out of malva pudding....
There is no breakdown on how many of the Afrikaners who came here under the refugee resettlement program were among those who already want to go back. But there are at least a handful who got a taste of life with America’s crumbling schools, nightmare healthcare system, overcrowded highways, housing shortage, wealth inequality, and emerging oligarchy. They got a taste of our nation’s leadership being made up of failures and sociopaths who aren’t fit to lead an adult kickball team and decided they would rather risk the alleged white genocide back home.
Wait until they do get home and find out America just sent this racist ogre to be its ambassador to South Africa. You can run from American buffoonery, but you cannot hide.
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The Racist States of Amerika!
Gunmen Identified In San Diego Mosque Shooting
The New York Post reports:
The alleged gunmen in a shooting rampage that left three people dead outside a San Diego mosque have been identified as 17-year-old Cain Clark and 18-year-old Caleb Velasquez, according to a law enforcement source. At least one of the suspects took a weapon from his parents’ home and left a suicide note that talked about racial pride, a law enforcement source told The Post.
Clark attended Madison High School and was a standout wrestler, according to the school’s social media page. His grandfather, David Clark, 78, said: ”We’re very sorry for what happened. We know as much as you do. It’s a shock.” Clark and Velasquez were found dead inside a BMW from self-inflicted gunshot wounds only a few blocks from the Islamic Center of San Diego. Anti-Islamic writings were found in the suspects’ vehicle and “hate speech” was written on the firearms used in the shooting.
" guess Andy Ngo wasn’t able to spin this as a “trantifa” shooting so he’s just going with “they took out some terrorists.” A shooting is either good or bad depending on how it helps the White Christian Nationalist MAGA playbook." — Josiah Walrus (@josiahwalrus1.bsky.social) May 18, 2026 at 10:50 PM
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As usual, racist cowards never kill themselves first. They have to take others with them due to their self-loathing. Racial pride has nothing whatsover to do with it.
NAACP calls for boycott of Southern college sports programs over voting rights — Matt Brpwn
WASHINGTON (AP) — The NAACP is calling on Black athletes and fans to boycott the athletic programs of public universities in states that are taking steps that the nation’s oldest civil rights group says are restricting Black voting rights
Launched on Tuesday, the “Out of Bounds” campaign urges prospective Black athletes, their families, alumni and fans to “withhold athletic and financial support” from major public universities in states that “have moved to limit, weaken or erase Black voting representation.”
If Black athletes participate in the boycott, it could deplete rosters for powerhouse football and basketball programs across the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference.
The NAACP is among groups responding to a wave of gerrymandering in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling that winnowed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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Boycott the racist sedtionists of The Land of the Happy Negro! They are the arrogant white supremacist, racist sedtionists who are re-installing the goddamned Jim Crow laws. We know what must be done to southern treason.
Gutting Voting Rights Act Is Just First Step in Far Right Plan to End Democracy — Nicholas Powers
Curbing access to the ballot brings us closer to the far right’s techno-feudalist dream of a “Dark Enlightenment.”
The girl smiled and pointed at the “I Voted!” sticker on her forehead. Her father took a selfie with her outside the voting center. Hours later, New Yorkers danced and honked car horns to celebrate the election of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. The street parties reminded me of when Barack Obama won the presidency after eight years of Geoge W. Bush, or Joe Biden against Donald Trump. You could feel the people sigh in relief.
Now, six months later, it’s hard to imagine such elation after an election — not after the right wing’s latest act of legal warfare on democracy with the Supreme Court’s further gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Not wasting time, Republicans in Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina redrew maps to end Black-majority districts immediately after the decision. Next, the Virginia Supreme Court cold-stopped Democrats from redistricting four more seats to fight Republican gerrymandering. Even before the Supreme Court ruling, the Trump administration had the FBI raid a voting center while pushing the SAVE America Act. The legislation, currently stalled in the Senate, would erect high walls to voting — such as demanding a passport or birth certificate, rather than just a driver’s license. It could cut off more than 21 million Americans from voting, including the poor, married people with changed names, the elderly, and people of color.
After the Supreme Court ruling, grief swept our community. On the phone, my friend, a Black activist, cried. I heard the fear of a 21st-century Jim Crow regime. Could we see legal resegregation? These fears obscured the real future that the right wing is trying to build: the end of democracy. The far right wants techno-feudalism, or what some of its members have dubbed a “Dark Enlightenment.” Right-wingers believe that now, as multiple crises pile up, is the time to strike. They think the billionaire class will fund this future even knowing Americans don’t want it. And we, the people being pushed out of democracy, need to know what it is being planned in order to stop it. ...
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Victory in our war over Trump fascism must be ours or let no American return from this battle alive!
What Happens If "They" Win? — Thom Hartmann
The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has purchased — said that relationship is now a “bargaining chip” to get what he, his oligarch friends, and his family want from China.
America was founded on the idea that democracy — a form of government that our Founders discovered functioning well among Native American societies, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living — was our north star, the core concept around which all our actions revolved.
We fought Great Britain to establish democracy, fought against the fascist Confederacy to preserve democracy here in America, and helped fight German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese fascists to preserve and restore democracy in Europe and Asia.
After winning each battle, we became a little more democratic, enfranchising women, formerly enslaved people, and even 18-year-olds. We welcomed the diverse people of the world, groaning under oppression and poverty, to share our democracy and the free enterprise system it enabled.
Most of the countries in today’s world, however, have little use for democracy. Certainly, Putin, Xi, and the Middle Eastern sheiks view it as a threat to their wealth and power. Most of the smaller countries across the world are dominated by wealthy families (oligarchy) or violent warlords (autocracy); during the decades I did international relief work, I spent time in many of them.
And yet we always fought for democracy, even though we started out imperfectly. We helped create the United Nations, a democratic institution. We fought and died for European and Asian democracy. We encouraged democracy around the world through foreign aid programs like USAID and through pro-democracy advocacy operations like the Voice of America.
Until Trump....
The generations that defeated fascism in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1940s understood something simple but profound: democracy survives only if ordinary people are willing to defend it.
Now it’s our turn.
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The answer to this question was stated in the previous post. Victory or death! Death before dishonor!
GOP coalition looking to 'move beyond Trump': new poll — Tom Boggioni
Less than two years into his second term, a substantial portion of the Republican coalition is reported to be actively seeking a candidate who will take the party in a fundamentally different direction than Donald Trump — a significant splintering in what remains his dominant grip on GOP politics.
According to a New York Times/Siena poll, while Trump's "grip on the Republican Party remains indisputable," there are clear signs that fissures are widening within his coalition. Thirty-seven percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents want to see the party's next nominee move in a different direction.
The dissatisfaction is most pronounced among Republican-leaning independents, with a majority — 55 percent — saying the party should move beyond Trump. In contrast, nearly two-thirds of those who identify fully as Republicans want the party to follow his lead.
According to the Times' report, divisions are emerging even among Trump's strongest supporters regarding the economy and foreign policy. The unpopular Iran war has driven up gas prices, creating visible economic pain that is translating into political vulnerability....
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What makes them think it isn't too late?
Trump proposes the U.S., China and Russia target the ICC, reports the Financial Times — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
According to the Financial Times, President Donald Trump suggested the United States, China, and Russia "co-operate against the International Criminal Court," or ICC.
The ICC is the only intergovernmental organization with the authority to prosecute individuals for genocide and crimes against humanity.
The Financial Times cited what it described as “several people familiar with the U.S. assessment” of the summit that took place last week in Beijing.
Critics theorized the proposal was made at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who currently has an ICC arrest warrant for crimes against humanity, including "using starvation as a method of warfare" in Gaza.
The ICC issued Netanyahu's warrant in November 2024, in response to Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza following the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas.
As of Monday, the Israel Defense Forces or IDF, have killed at least 72,769 Gazans, predominantly women, children, and elderly according to Gaza's Health Ministry and The Lancet.
The actual death toll may be significantly higher, with exact counts difficult to record as Israel prohibits international journalists from entering Gaza and targets local press....
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Just like the lawless and weak-kneed Nazi. He's scared to death his end is in sight.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hammers Supreme Court colleagues over 'unusual' move — Alexander Willis
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took aim at her colleagues Monday with a blistering rebuke of what she labeled as their “unusual” move, one that she claimed had been done no more than three times in the last quarter century, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Jackson was referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in late April when it voted to effectively gut a provision of the Voting Rights Act designed to prohibit racially discriminatory voting policies. The court was deciding on a matter related to Louisiana's congressional district map, with Republicans having challenged a lower court’s order requiring state lawmakers to create a second majority-Black district.
In taking up the case, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court forwent the “typical 32-day waiting period,” the Post reported, and instead, decided to expedite the case, a decision that paved the way for the ongoing GOP gerrymandering blitz seen across the American South, and one that Jackson was the only justice to object to.
“The parties who came to us said please alter your rules so that we can essentially have an advantage,” Jackson told a group of lawyers in Washington, D.C. on Monday, the Post reported. “That should not be something that we should do because it would look like we were doing something unusual.”
Jackson went on to further condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to expedite the case, warning that it risked harming the court’s reputation going forward given that “speeding up the release of its ruling made it appear as if it were favoring one side,” the Post reported. However, she ultimately “stopped short of accusing her fellow justices of being motivated by political considerations.”...
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One of the few American heroes we have left.
BREAKING: Trump Endorses Ken Paxton in Texas GOP Primary — Isaac Schorr
President Donald Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) primary campaign against Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) in a bombshell announcement on Tuesday.
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Texas, this is all you need to know about Paxton. Indeed, he has been endorsed by the Trump Crime Syndicate. Now do your duty for our state and our country.
Woke-topus Billy Goat Mockingbird! Tabs, Tues., May 19, 2026 — Evan Hurst
Here is your New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani saying that the words “I worked all day and can’t feed my family” are scarier words than Ronald Reagan’s “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Yes, we can see why they hate Mamdani so much, and why normal people think he’s pretty great. Also we are glad to see more people shitting on Ronald Reagan’s grave. [Bluesky]
Donald Trump is dropping his enormous $10b lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for a corruption fund administered by his criminal Justice Department, in order to pay out benefits to his terrorist and criminal associates. You know, like the J6 terrorists he pardoned! You know, unless he just keeps it. He might keep it.
Because they’re human trash! [Byline Times]
And more on that anti-weaponization fund right here. [The Long Memo]
JD Vance says “If you want to make America great, if you want to protect your jobs and hopefully build jobs in this beautiful factory, if you want to make our streets even safer, if you want to rebuild the American dream for the next generation, vote against the crazy leadership in Washington, D.C.” Aye aye, couchfucker! [Mediaite]
John Fetterman says the Democratic base is becoming “increasingly anti-American,” which is funny because we think he’s welcome to suck our fucking asshole, or just resign. [The Hill]>
Speaking of, you’ll want to see the last line of this story from The Onion....
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More outstanding comments from Evan.
The lesson America should learn — but won't — John Stoehr
Whiteness always amounts to a pay cut. That should have been the conclusion from data released last week showing that inflation is so high that it wiped out wage gains over three years. A majority picked Donald Trump because he said implementing tariffs and deporting "illegals" would make whiteness great again. However, the result of those policies, in addition to his war against Iran, has been inflation climbing to nearly twice the target rate.
Some economists expect it to reach 4 percent next month and stay there for the rest of the year.
Again, the lesson should be clear: If you choose whiteness, you choose to cut your own pay (and the pay of everyone who did not choose whiteness). But that won't be the lesson most people draw, especially Democrats who are courting disillusioned Trump supporters. They won't believe whiteness backfired, because they believe that's not supposed to happen.
In America, whiteness (or proximity to whiteness) often yields real material results. Some deny that reality, but we all know it's true. Kamala Harris was right. Tariffs are taxes, deporting migrants is inflationary, and Trump was vulnerable to foreign entanglements. However, it didn't matter, and not only because it was a Black woman warning us. It didn't matter because the idea of whiteness as wealth is deeply ingrained in the American psyche....
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There's more than a little truth in this essay.
Trump-backed candidate seeks recount over 'illegal votes' — Tom Davies, Indiana Capital Chronicle
The President Donald Trump-endorsed challenger to state Sen. Spencer Deery has filed for a recount of their Republican primary race, claiming it was tainted by “illegal votes.”
Fountain County Republican Chair Paula Copenhaver said Monday she was seeking the recount of the certified results that showed her trailing Deery by a three-vote margin — 6,337 to 6,334.
“After carefully reviewing the available information, we have obtained documented evidence of illegal voting by unqualified voters in the Senate District 23 Republican Primary,” Copenhaver said in a statement. “We are formally pursuing a recount to ensure votes were properly counted and returned in this very close election and that legal votes are counted, while illegal votes are not.”...
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If you are a Trump Nazi you can never admit defeat in an election now. Any vote against a Nazi is an "illegal vote." It's all Trump crime.
Ex-Google CEO Booed At University Commencement Speech Over A.I. Comments — John Amato
Read the room, jackass.
If there's one thing that strikes at the heart of Generation Z, it's hearing how A.I. will change the world.
To them, it means AI will take away their job opportunities.
404 Media captured the video of the horrible reception VP of strategic alliances at the Tavistock Group, Gloria Caulfield, received while speaking to graduates in Central Florida.
Business Insider, "Boos rang out during the University of Arizona's graduation ceremony on Friday as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke about a topic that is maybe a little sensitive for those about to enter the workforce: AI. While other speakers received cheers and applause, Schmidt's speech about the impact of modern technology on society struck a nerve."
Good.
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Google will fold its fascist game.
CNBC Host Calls Out FCC Chair Over 'Suspicious' ABC Attack Timing — David Edwards
FCC Chair Brendan Carr got an unexpectedly sharp grilling from CNBC's Sara Eisen on Monday, who openly questioned the "suspicious" timing of his agency's escalating attack on Disney-owned ABC — pointing directly to President Donald Trump's recent demand that Jimmy Kimmel be fired.
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The arrogant racist Nazi gets grilled. He will get his one day.
Locals Rally Around WI High School Band After School Board Bans Instrumental Piece Dedicated To Stonewall
Milwaukee’s NBC affiliate reports:
Composer Omar Thomas will travel to Watertown on Wednesday to conduct a performance of his original piece of music that has sparked a controversy in the area.
Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Watertown, Wisconsin, will host a community performance of “A Mother of A Revolution!” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. The ensemble will feature musicians with roots in the local community, including area students.
The event organizers say that they do not desire to be the center of attention and that this gathering is not a rally or protest. Instead, the musicians’ hope is for an audience to focus on the work they put into “A Mother of a Revolution!” and for the music to tell its own story.
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Fuck fascist Xianist terrorism! They are such huge hypocrite chickenshits!
Top Treasury Lawyer Quits Over Slush Fund For Rioters
The New York Times reports:
The top lawyer at the Treasury Department stepped down on Monday in the wake of the creation of a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that could soon make payments to President Trump’s political allies, according to three people familiar with the move.
Brian Morrissey, the Treasury’s general counsel, resigned from the position seven months after he was confirmed to it by the Senate and just hours after the Trump administration announced the fund on Monday.
Mr. Morrissey did not respond to requests for comment. A Treasury spokesman said, “Mr. Morrissey has served the United States Treasury with both honor and integrity. We wish him all the best in his next endeavors.” In his resignation letter, Mr. Morrissey said he was grateful to have worked for Mr. Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to two people familiar with the letter.
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Trump's crime spree has run rampant! End his trash and him as well!
Bill Cassidy Blasts Trump’s “Slush Fund” For Rioters
“I don’t actually see any legal precedent for that. We are a nation of laws, you can’t just make up things whole-piece.
“Somebody explained it to me this way, an attorney. … it is as if somebody sued themselves and agreed upon a settlement with themselves that’s going to be funded by the rest of us.
“If that’s the case: What?! I just came off the campaign trail. People are concerned about making their own ends meet, not about putting a slush fund together without a legal precedent.
“We’re a nation of laws. If there needs to be a settlement, let’s consider it and Congress should come together and decide on that.” – Sen. Bill Cassidy.
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Trump is a criminal. Of this there can be no doubt.
Trump Pressures Thune To Fire Senate Parliamentarian Because She Ruled Against Bill To Fund His Ballroom
NOTUS reports:
President Donald Trump pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian after she ruled Republicans could not include funding for the president’s ballroom in a budget bill, two sources familiar with the request told NOTUS. The president called the South Dakota Republican on Monday to express his frustrations with the decision, according to a third source.
While Trump has promised to build the ballroom with private donations, Republicans are looking to get $1 billion in Secret Service funding into their filibuster-proof legislation. About $220 million is aimed specifically at the East Wing project.
Elizabeth MacDonough, the nonpartisan parliamentarian who gives determinations on the rules of the Senate, determined Saturday that the provision, as written, did not pass the so-called Byrd Rule, which prevents non-budget items from passing with a simple majority.
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Remove Trump and his Crime Syndicate by any means necessary!
Trump: I’ve Called Off Tomorrow’s Bombing Of Iran
“I have been asked by the Emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, and the President of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to hold off on our planned Military attack of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was scheduled for tomorrow, in that serious negotiations are now taking place, and that, in their opinion, as Great Leaders and Allies, a Deal will be made, which will be very acceptable to the United States of America, as well as all Countries in the Middle East, and beyond.
“This Deal will include, importantly, NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS FOR IRAN! Based on my respect for the above mentioned Leaders, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, The Chairman of The Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, and The United States Military, that we will NOT be doing the scheduled attack of Iran tomorrow, but have further instructed them to be prepared to go forward with a full, large scale assault of Iran, on a moment’s notice, in the event that an acceptable Deal is not reached. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” – Trump, just now.
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TACO Trump fails again!
Which means nothing has been changed by Trump's war. It was that way before.
It is also not the the shortest war America has engaged in as he was attempting to prove in a chart this morning. He is either conveniently forgetting Reagan's Grenada war which lasted 8 days or is too stupid to know it.
Students across the country are in a ‘reading recession — Devika Rao
Students’ reading test scores have been on the decline since the mid-2010s, and the pandemic made recovery that much more difficult. The proliferations of screens, student absenteeism and a push away from phonics-based teaching are likely contributors to the reduction in scores.
Background
U.S. test scores have been suffering for over a decade. The U.S. entered a “learning recession” in 2013 as “student progress in math and reading stalled and began to decline,” said Education Scorecard. From 2017 to 2019, “students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024,” said The New York Times. Reading scores were “down last year in 83% of school districts where data was available,” while “math scores were down in 70%,” compared to a decade ago. The declines have “affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.”
The reduced scores “coincided with a dismantling of test-based accountability in schools and a dramatic rise in social media use among young people,” said Education Scorecard. While it “remains unclear whether and how much each factor caused the decline in scores, both are likely candidates.” The shift is an "enormous problem that’s not getting enough attention,” Nat Malkus, a senior fellow studying education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said to the Times....
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Social media contibutes heavily to this. It is an addiction the same as drugs and gambling. It just takes less effort to mainline it. As the ancient bank card commercials used to say, "I don't even have to write a check," the device does all your thinking and opinions for you so "you don't even have to think any longer!" Add AI to the mix and minds vanish overnight.
The plight of the American people has only gotten worse — Justin Klawans
‘Class warfare is smoldering in America — and it’s about to catch fire’
Austin Sarat at The Hill
In April, an arsonist “set fire to a warehouse used by a major corporation in Los Angeles,” which “should be a wake-up call to political leaders that they urgently need to address the growing despair felt by many Americans,” says Austin Sarat. Some “seem to have gotten the message. But at the national level, unfortunately, all signs are pointing in the opposite direction.” The arsonist “channeled the feelings of millions of Americans who have been mistreated.”
(Editor's note:) Wake up call? Oh, no! That just means "woke" and we know where that leads. Just read what Fire Chief Beatty said.
Trump says he can do “anything I want” to the island. It doesn’t belong to him.’
The Guardian editorial board
In Cuba, the U.S. “wants economic reform, the closure of Chinese and Russian intelligence posts, and reportedly the removal of President Miguel Díaz-Canel,” which “would reinforce the administration’s message that it controls the Americas,” says The Guardian editorial board. Cuba’s “highly educated population is ripe for change that would allow older generations dignity, and give younger ones opportunity.” Instead, they “appear to face ongoing collapse.” Donald Trump “talks of ‘taking’ Cuba. But it belongs to the Cuban people.”
(Editor's note:) You mean we should care about a Spanish speaking nation down south of us? That is so boring.
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There's more at the link if anyone is literate any longer.
Is Britain becoming ungovernable? — The Week UK
Is Britain ungovernable? That is the question many are asking after a dramatic week in Westminster that potentially fired the starting gun on a Labour leadership race that could give the UK its seventh prime minister in a decade.
This latest political “merry-go-round has prompted soul-searching”, said Charlie Cooper on Politico. A G7 economy and “former global hegemon”, Britain is “increasingly a picture of political instability and economic stagnation”....
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Britain? The question should be is the United States governable any longer?
"Take a look around you, boy. It's bound to scare yuu, boy!..."
Absence of the Word “Black” in Black Maternal Health Bills Concerns Advocates — Barbara Rodriguez
Advocates worry that the changes attempt to avoid anti-DEI attacks at the expense of making legislation less effective.
The word “Black” has been almost completely removed from a package of bills that have long been viewed as Congress’ main legislative vehicle to address the Black maternal health crisis, frustrating some advocates who feel Black women are being erased from the policy.
The key change this year is the title. The Momnibus Act — filed in mid-March — was called the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act in 2023; before that it was the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021 and the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2020. None of the previous packages, which were championed by Democrats, have been enacted.
But references to “Black” in the package’s legislative text have also evolved. The 2020 version has more than a dozen, primarily referencing Black women. In the 2021 version, many of those were replaced with nearly a dozen references to “Black pregnant and postpartum individuals.” All those descriptions were removed in the 2023 bill, with the word Black appearing only once across the entire package, referencing a historically Black college or university or other minority-serving institution. Those 2023 changes carried over to the latest version....
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Not only un-governable but un-civlized.
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Trump Is Making America Uninsured Again — Sasha Abramsky
The GOP is heading into the midterms as the party that made health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans.
In 2025, the Trump administration successfully pushed Congress to enact nearly $1 trillion in health care cuts over the coming decade, which the Congressional Budget Office analysis estimated would result in 10 million people losing health coverage by 2034. More recently, it has blocked any and all efforts to extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credit subsidies for people buying insurance on the state exchanges. In demanding that the GOP leadership in Congress prevent at all costs a continuation of the expanded ACA tax credits, Donald Trump intimated that his administration was on the verge of proposing a better and more affordable health care reform to replace the ACA system.
Nothing of that nature has materialized. Instead, the administration’s health reforms have been shockingly small-bore — a handful of measures to lower the costs of prescription drugs, more incentives for consumers to create health savings accounts, a rollback of regulations on catastrophic coverage plans — thus, making it easier for younger, healtheir, patients to buy junk insurance, but doing nothing for those who are older or suffer from chronic conditions.
Over the past months, even these baby steps have stalled out, with the GOP seemingly and inexplicably resigned to the fact that it will be heading into the midterm elections as the party that is putting health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans. Early in the Iran war, Trump was caught saying that the federal government could no longer afford its massive Medicare commitments now that the country was engaged in an expensive overseas conflict, and it would have to roll back responsibility for paying for this bedrock safety net program onto the states.
This represents a stunning reversal of government efforts to bring health care access to millions who had previously lacked it. In 2020, when Congress expanded tax credits during the pandemic for Americans accessing health insurance plans through the ACA, millions of Americans were finally able to access health insurance at reasonable rates through the state exchanges.
Expanding the tax credits patched a hole through which large numbers of Americans had fallen. Under the original provisions of the ACA, anyone at or under 138 percent of the federal poverty level would qualify for Medicaid; and anyone between 138 and 400 percent of the poverty level would be able to access tax credits on a sliding scale to help them cover the cost of health insurance. None of these recipients would be expected to pay more than 10 percent of their income on insurance....
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Can't afford it? Then you are dispensable. The retarded world of the fascist concept of justice! This is not the U. S. A. we have had or want. Stop fascism dead.
Defense Department delays 54 wind projects in Texas, citing national security concerns — Brandon Mulder
After years of trying to stop offshore wind projects, the Trump administration is now pausing routine federal permits for 165 land-based projects, including dozens in Texas.
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So, are we going to keep letting him fuck with Texas?
Palantir Gets an Initial $3.9 Million to Spy on Federal Workers — Whitney Curry Wimbish
The Trump administration is building a surveillance network to spy on its own workforce across multiple agencies. It has already given Palantir an initial $3.9 million to do so at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), federal spending disclosures show.
The artificial intelligence war profiteer will “design, configure, deploy and manage a secure, user-friendly tool to track USDA employees’ return to the office,” according to a disclosure. The contract started May 1 and has the potential to grow to $13.3 million over the next fiscal year, which runs from October 1 to September 30.
More from Whitney Curry Wimbish
The Lever first reported in March that the USDA had hired Palantir to help it enforce its return-to-office demand, a story based on an initial disclosure justifying the reasoning behind the department’s opting for a sole-source contract, commonly known as a no-bid contract, before a dollar amount had been published. Since then, union officials and additional spending disclosures show that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) are seeking to implement similar programs.
A request for information published March 11 shows that the VA wants a tech company to build a tool for it to passively gather, measure, and report daily occupancy counts of its 311 owned and leased off-campus administrative locations across the continental U.S. Like the USDA, the VA says it needs the surveillance tech because of an in-person work requirement.
Federal worker union officials said the SSA is a third agency where the administration is surveilling workers coming and going from offices and measuring occupancy levels.
Research shows working under constant scrutiny harms workers’ physical and mental health.
“These spending disclosures reveal that the Trump-Vance administration is more interested in monitoring and intimidating public servants than in actually governing,” Michael Martinez, managing counsel of Democracy Forward’s Civil Service Strong, told the Prospect in an email. “Civil Servants have rights and Democracy Forward is committed to defending those rights and holding this administration accountable when it crosses the line.”...
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And we thought Big Brother was fiction.
Judges blow up 9 cases brought by Trump DOJ pick ahead of confirmation vote — Matthew Chapman
President Donald Trump's pick to be the top federal prosecutor in Wyoming committed grand jury misconduct that voids charges against several criminal defendants, a federal judge ruled on Monday — just hours before that prosecutor is set to face a confirmation vote in the Senate to serve in that role permanently.
According to Bloomberg Law, "Darin Smith, whose nomination is scheduled for a final vote in the Senate Monday, engaged in activity that gives the US District Court for the District of Wyoming 'grave doubt that the decision to indict was free from the substantial influence of such violations,' three US district judges wrote in a joint order May 15 dismissing indictments against nine criminal defendants."
Specifically, according to the report, the judges found Smith made "inflammatory" remarks to grand jurors about defendants accused of serious crimes, including murder and possession of illegal child pictures...<.br>
This is not the first time the Trump administration has been accused of grand jury misconduct. In Alabama, a court is investigating whether Justice Department officials lied to a grand jury in order to secure fraud charges against the extremist group watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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The surreal drama we are living through these days just keeps getting curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said.
Trump’s massive J6 'slush fund' takes Jeanine Pirro by surprise: 'I don't know anything' — David Edwards
Jeanine Pirro was in the middle of a tough-on-crime press conference Monday when a reporter blindsided her with a question about a nearly $1.8 billion fund that could send taxpayer money to the same kind of rioters she'd spent the morning condemning.
The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia had just finished threatening to prosecute the parents of DC teens involved in violent "takeovers" — including a chair-throwing brawl that tore through a Navy Yard Chipotle Saturday night — when a reporter pivoted to the Justice Department's newly announced "Anti-Weaponization Fund."
"Given the anti-weaponization announcement today — I just want to see if you think at all that any taxpayer money from the anti-weaponization fund... do you think that taxpayer money is going to other people who rioted in the city..."
Pirro cut him off.
"I don't know anything about this," she said.
The reporter pressed on, explaining that the fund was born of a settlement in which Trump agreed to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns.
"Yeah, I'm not involved in that," Pirro insisted. "You always ask these out-of-my-lane questions."...
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Hmm. Which lane does she travel in -- the fast lane or the denial lane?
Parents Explode in Fury at School’s Plan to Constantly Film Their Children to Train AI — Frank Landymore
A planned University of Washington study would’ve had preschool teachers wear cameras to record first-person footage of everything in the classroom, including the young children they were instructing, and use that footage to train AI models. If a parent was uncomfortable with all that, they had to manually opt-out — meaning that unless the researchers were given a formal no, a parent’s child would’ve been automatically opted into the experiment.
“With your permission, your child’s lead teacher may wear a small teacher-worn camera that captures the teacher’s approximate first-person perspective, and/or we may place a fixed video camera in the classroom,” reads a document given to parents and obtained by 404 Media in a new investigative piece. “These videos simply capture the normal interactions between teachers and children during regular classroom activities.”
The parents did a little more than opt out, however. They revolted, and the backlash was so heated that the University of Washington called off the experiment entirely, according to 404.
The documents given to parents sometimes used nebulous language and left key questions open-ended. They stated that the footage would’ve been used to “develop and evaluate AI models for assessing classroom interaction quality,” and that the “video data may be processed using cloud-based AI services.” But they didn’t specify what AI models or what AI companies would be involved.
Thorny questions abounded. What about the parent of a child who didn’t give consent? Would only they be blurred out in the footage? How would that realistically work? The documents only said the researchers would censor faces and names “whenever possible,” but that meant your child was still being filmed.
These looming uncertainties rattled parents.
“I am troubled by the idea of using my child’s likeness in unknown AI tools and how this could be abused,” one parent who chose to remain anonymous told 404.
“I was particularly concerned about families’ ability to give informed consent,” she added. “As a native English speaker, the vague language in the handout left me with a slew of questions. Many families in our school are migrants and non-native English speakers, but forms were not provided in any of their native languages.”
Experts in education were also raising eyebrows at the document’s language....
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They will be even more shocked when they discover they no longer have children.
Pentagon Leaves Joint Defense Board With Canada
The Hill reports:
The Pentagon’s policy chief announced Monday that the United States will suspend its involvement in a joint body that coordinates military consultation with Canada, pointing to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s address to the World Economic Forum earlier this year.
The move comes amid simmering tensions between President Trump and Carney, who is leading a push for the world’s “middle powers” to present a united bulwark to the influence of superpowers U.S. and China.
The Permanent Joint Board on Defense was established in August 1940 in an agreement signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, in the midst off World War II. The board includes both military leaders and civilians from both countries, meeting semi-annually to provide policy advice and conduct studies.
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Making enemies of our former allies will do us plenty of harm when we need them the most.
Arrogance does not work in times of trouble. And we are in trouble deep these days.
Sen. Foghorn Leghorn: Kamala Harris Is A “Woke-topus With Billy Goat Brain And Mockingbird Mouth
“I don’t have anything against the vice president; I served in the Senate with her. She’s a woke-topus. She’s pandering to the loon wing of her party. Nobody has ever accused the vice president of being a policy maven.
“Sometimes she acts like she has a billy goat brain and a mockingbird mouth, and that’s a dangerous combination. She had her chance, she had her shot, and she missed it. I don’t think she’ll be the Democratic nominee.
“I would love for her to be the Democratic nominee, and if it looks like she’ll get any momentum, I will happily contribute to her campaign because she would be our dream candidate, but I think she’s a smoked turkey, frankly.
“I mean, the columnists at the Washington Post, for example, pay attention to what she says, but you know, those guys, they like kale and cold plunges, and carry NPR tote bags. I mean, they’re members of the loon wing, and they like what the vice president says, but I don’t think anybody else is that impressed.” – Sen. John Kennedy, drawing laughs from Fox host Steve Doocy....
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At least she doesn't have a motherfucking scumbag mouth like some motherfucking cracker scumbags I know. This occurs when the shots they fire are blanks.
Trump triggers online frenzy with 'nuclear' AI image: 'God help us' — Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump sparked concern among onlookers Sunday night into Monday morning after sharing what appears to be an image created with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) depicting him launching a "nuclear strike.”
Trump has shared controversial images that appear to have been created with GenAI in the past, including last year when he shared a threatening image of Chicago, Illinois, consumed by flames, or last month when he shared an image depicting himself as a Jesus Christ-like figure. Sunday night, Trump appeared to share yet another GenAI-generated image, only this one, depicting himself hitting a large red button as a colossal explosion with a large mushroom cloud is seen hitting earth.
“F------ nutcase,” wrote Jeff Nadu, a podcast host and content creator in a social media post on X to his more than 44,000 followers. “God help us.”
Evan Jacobs, a popular online political commentator, sarcastically called it “great” that Trump – who he accused of having “dementia” – could "destroy the earth whenever he feels like it” in a social media post on X to his more than 160,000 followers....
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Into the pit with him!
MAGA Mike: 'Christian Nationalism' Is Invented Slur To Silence Christians — Heather
Speaker Mike Johnson served up some revisionist history on the separation of church and state while defending their prayer event on the National Mall this weekend.
The Trump administration is planning a prayer event on the National Mall. All but one of the speakers is Christian:
Cabinet members, Catholic bishops, evangelical influencers, and an actor who plays Jesus are a few of the speakers and performers scheduled to participate in "Rededicate 250," the Trump administration's daylong prayer celebration happening on the National Mall this weekend.
Advertised as a "rededication of our country as One Nation Under God" and a "once in a lifetime national moment," the Sunday event is intended to reflect on the faith of America's founders and to appeal to God to bless and guide the nation....
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Trusting in God is not trusting in one religion. Which God is it you are referring to, Mike? Surely, it is Yaweh, the God that spoke to Moses. But there were various Gods the Hebrews worshipped in those days. Prior to Yahweh the Canaanites worsihpped El. There are as many now in disparate religons. This is why the founders of America established freedom of worship. Apparently, you don't understand this tenet, Mike. In fact, none of your Christian Nationalists do.
No one wants to take your God away from you or your worship of your God. However, you must make sure that there are other paths than yours that must be protected to worship their God as you do yours.
This is the freedom we enjoy as Americans. We do not support your Taliban method here, Mike.
Trump agency's 'our savior' post deemed 'deeply shocking and offensive' by critics — Travis Gettys
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted a Bible verse Sunday afternoon as thousands gathered on the National Mall for an evangelical-style worship service called "Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving" and endorsed by President Donald Trump.
DHS posted the following on its X account: “'But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and forever. Amen.' 2 Peter 3:18. May our nation continue to be guided by the light of our Savior."
Critics said the post raised troubling concerns about the separation of church and state.
"I see your 2 Peter 3:18 and raise you one Article VI Clause 3 Part 2: '... no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States,'" challenged Georgetown law professor Matt Blaze.
"When a federal agency tasked with protecting all Americans decides to mandate a specific religious worldview, it ceases to protect democracy and begins to threaten it," warned Andrew Weinstein, a former public delegate to the United Nations.
"I know we're long past the point where this should be shocking anymore, but I still can't get over official government accounts stating that Jesus is 'our Savior,'" posted Joel Swanson, assistant professor of Jewish studies and religion at Sarah Lawrence College.
"Is it the official policy of the US Dept. of Homeland Security that no Jews serve there?" wondered Johns Hopkins economist Michael Clemens. "If not, who is the 'we' defined by belief in Jesus Christ as savior? Or does the 'our' refer to the Americans whose security the Department has a duty to protect, none of whom are apparently Jews?"
"An agency of the federal government posting about 'our Savior' is deeply shocking and offensive to millions of Americans," said Georgetown history professor Adam Rothman. "If the founders taught us anything, it's that people have a right to believe whatever they want but the government must not endorse one religious view over another."
"To be fair, when anyone in the Regime speaks of 'our Savior,' they mean Trump, not their imaginary friend," observed Bluesky user Dinsdale Piranha.
"Jesus Christ is our Savior? Since this is an official post from the Trump administration, it's strange that 'our Lord and Savior' isn't identified as Donald Trump," agreed journalist Steffen White. "Oh, well, there's plenty of time for that. Maybe next week."
"What's weird about all this stuff is that it doesn't even seem like they believe it any more than they believe Trump is a brilliant leader," opined writer Rebecca Solnit. "They're just to political commitment what, I dunno, AI slop is to Shakespeare."
"Pretty sure Our Savior Jesus Christ isn't about beating, imprisoning, starving, denying medical care and murdering unarmed nonviolent people," noted popular Bluesky user Ms Kitty. "That doesn't seem like grace to me."..
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In fact, it's fascist assault.
On This Day: The Supreme Court Struck Down Racial Segregation In Public Schools — John Amato
John Roberts' court has done its best to destroy all civil rights in this country.
On May 17th, 1954, the Supreme Court began to right the wrongs of the racist Jim Crow laws.
Britannica, "In a unanimous ruling on this day in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in public schools, declaring that separate facilities for Black and white students were inherently unequal."
While the racist South refused to initially adhere to this ruling, this case ushered in the Civil Rights movement.
"The Roberts Court is fundamentally corrupt, and was designed and constructed to be the lawless Republican machine we see today." — CLoner (comments)
"According to the MAGA Supreme Court, the Civil Rights movement was a bunch to do with nothing. At the crux of the movement was the right to vote without fear of intimidation or violence. By upending the Voting Rights Act, this Supreme Court is in essence saying all of those hard won civil rights were in vain. And notice how quickly these states in the Deep South have taken the Court's cue and reverted back to their old segregationist, Jim Crow ways.
White supremacy comes as naturally to them, as does breathing. How John Roberts and this court can pretend to not be partisan and politically motivated is beyond me. If this isn't about reversing the Civil Rights freedoms these persecuted people won, than what is it?
Yeah, this is political, we aren't so fucking stupid to believe it isn't just because Chief Justice Roberts says it's not. The Court's lopsided, and seemingly nonsensical legal decisions speak for themselves, we are not blind. Imagine if Trump and his racists were in power at this time, they would have sided with the white supremacists down South, and these Civil Rights activists would have been killed and brutalized even more so than they already were. And just like history did not look kindly upon the racists of the South, it too will not look kindly upon this partisan and revisionist Robert's court." — NoNamington (comments)
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The enemy is real and the enemy is now. Fight or surrender America to racist Nazis that have no reason to be with us.
Thousands Marched In Selma For Voting Rights On Saturday — NewsHound Ellen
People are fired up against Republicans’ new Jim Crow.
If you’ve been feeling depressed about the Republicans’ rush to disenfranchise Black and minority voters, after a greenlight from the U.S. Supreme Court, you should be heartened by the National Day of Action for Voting Rights on Saturday.
The kickoff event was at the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama with a prayer service and remembrance for those who marched there in 1965. Later, there was a national rally in Montgomery.
It’s the launch of a sustained effort. Wisdom Cole, the Senior National Director of Advocacy for the NAACP, told The Root, “Black folks from across the country are gonna be busing in, flying in, to show up and to really begin organizing to turn out in the November election. … This is a moment in time where we have to be able to show up and show the power that is within the people who are most impacted.”
It’s not just Alabamans who have heeded the call. “A consortium of more than 228 groups came together from across the country to oppose the actions in Alabama and other states to change voting lines and reduce heavily Black districts,” AL.com reported. By afternoon, the protest was “dominating downtown Montgomery in open resistance to efforts by state lawmakers to change the district maps.”
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We can all march. And we can all fight the Nazi racists. Therefore we must overcome!
Vance Gives A Speech And Waits For Applause That Never Comes — Chris capper Liebenthal
What if you gave a speech and no one was listening?
While Trump was off getting humiliated in China, Vance was left behind in the States to humiliate himself. It was no small feat, but one that Vance proved himself quite capable of doing.
Vance was supposed to give a speech honoring fallen police officers. However, being unable to read a room - or read much of anything else - Vance instead gave a political speech congratulating the regime for something they didn't do:
"How about we have a federal government that puts violent criminals in prison, as opposed to letting them out of jail?"
Apparently, Vance hasn't been tracking what's been going on with the J6 insurrectionists since Trump pardoned them.
After delivering that line, Vance struck what I'm sure he thought was a heroic, he-man pose, waiting to be bathed in applause. However, that shower of applause turned out to be less than a drizzle. It was so bad that even closed captioning refused to show him any mercy:
Vance then doubled down on the dumb by going on a bigoted, racist flight of fantasy, claiming that an ongoing drop in violent crime was due to the regime's crackdown on migrants and drugs, even though statistics have shown overwhelmingly that the vast majority of crimes are committed by US-born citizens. But since when has this regime ever let reality get in its way?
"Only 30% of the population and the GOP in congress can't tell when they are being screwed by a criminal.with dementia. They are just not well or thinking clearly. We must not let them think they are a majority nor can we permit them from destroying out democracy." — newshero (commens)
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This man is dispised.
Critics pounce as Trump posts hair-raising image — Sarah K. Burris
President Donald Trump posted another artificial intelligence-generated image of himself, prompting questions.
Late Sunday, Trump uploaded an image depicting himself behind some kind of Space Force ship, zapping lasers at ships a sattelites with a flag reading “STACEBS SPACE FORCE.” In one image behind him, a large mushroom cloud appears coming out of the Earth as his finger appears on a big red button, a reference to his launching a nuclear war from his spaceship.
In another image, he is depicted walking with an extraterrestrial alien he appears to have taken prisoner.
It prompted swift backlash and questions about whether Trump was in his right mind.
Veteran reporter Helen Kennedy noticed, "Trump is promoting himself to captain."...
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Our demented 5-year old is playing with his toys instead of getting sleep. What can go wrong with this?
Trump Posts Image Of Himself With Buff And Shackled Alien In Yet Another Bizarre Spree Of AI Slop Postings
The Independent reports:
President Donald Trump has posted a bizarre AI meme of himself and the Secret Service escorting an extraterrestrial in handcuffs on Truth Social, just one of many eccentric posts that appeared on his page this weekend. After returning from a long and exhausting mid-week trip to China, Trump used his “executive time” on Saturday and Sunday to golf and trawl social media.
The meme showed the president and a group of stern-faced agents leading the alien, silver and conspicuously muscular, across a desert U.S. military base, with no accompanying comment or caption to explain it. However, he did also post three further memes of himself in a high-tech Space Force command center above the Earth as satellites, asteroids, and bombs explode in the background.
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Alien? You mean that's not Melania?
Rubio: “We Must Preach The Gospel To The World”
USA Today reports:
Faith leaders from various Christian denominations - and one rabbi - gathered on the National Mall to pray, sing and speak about America’s religious foundation in an event critics said favors one faith at the expense of others.
In a pre-recorded video, Secretary of State Marco Rubio talked about the faith of American revolutionaries and traced the role of Christian faith through the expansion west, driven in part by missionaries who aimed to spread the Gospel, Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph and his first words on it (from the Bible’s Book of Numbers, “What hath God wrought?”) all the way to the astronauts of the 20th century who cited scripture to describe the sight of Earth from space.
“Our nation more than any other was shaped” by the idea that faith brought freedom, Rubio said. “This is who we are,” Rubio said. “This is who we’ve always been. We must preach the gospel to the world.”
"Hypocrite! Your boss is a pedophile, rapist and murderer." — Cel (comments)
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The world has been beaten down and opressed by your arrogant preaching on the gospel. It is sick and tired of your Nazi interpretation of a poor man from Nazereth.
Are you the new Ayatollah of America?
60 Minutes: “Systemic Insider Trading” On Polymarket
CBS News reports:
Nine connected Polymarket accounts have raked in more than $2.4 million betting almost exclusively on U.S. military actions in what digital detectives from the data analytics firm Bubblemaps have identified as a potentially egregious case of insider trading.
The anonymous accounts made winning bets on the specific dates of pivotal moments in the war with Iran: the first U.S. strikes, the removal of Iran’s supreme leader, and the announcement of a ceasefire. Across more than 80 bets, the accounts had a 98% win rate, even as many wagers were made when the odds of winning were low, according to Bubblemaps co-founder and CEO Nicolas Vaiman, who shared their findings first with 60 Minutes.
“This might be the most insane pattern we have found on Polymarket so far,” Vaiman said. “Luck alone cannot explain those numbers.” The nine linked accounts aren’t alone in betting on war. More than $1 billion has been staked online this year on military decisions and outcomes. The ability to bet on war on prediction markets has created a whole new category of insider trading.
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This is the "gospel" Little Marco wants to preach!
Franklin Graham: “America Has Become Morally Rotten With Transgenderism And Same-Sex Marriage”
“There is a downward moral decline spiraling ever deeper into the mire. Things that never would have been talked about publicly just 30 years ago, sinful behavior that should make us blush, is now celebrated and flaunted on Main Street America has become morally rotten, completely sick with sin; transgenderism, same-sex marriage, opening women’s locker rooms to men, are just the tip of the iceberg. The spiritual climate of 2026 is vastly different than the country our Founding Fathers established in 1776. The vast majority of Americans then had at least a basic understanding of the Bible. There can be no revival without prayer and repentance.” – Franklin Graham, at yesterday’s Christian nationalist rally on the National Mall.
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He means like pulling up rocks and exposing false prophet snakes like himself to the light!
Jeffress: Founding Fathers Were Christian Nationalists
Read the full article. Jeffress, who says that Trump knows the bible better than Pope Leo, appeared here in 2024 when he blamed a fire at his megachurch on Satan. In 2021, he blamed Jerry Falwell Jr.’s pool boy scandal on Satan. Jeffress has said that all Jews and Mormons go to hell, that Obama was the precursor to the antichrist, that LGBTQs need rescuing from Satan’s deception, that God designed the borders of the United States, that there will be civil war if Trump is removed from office, and that God gave Trump the moral authority to have foreign leaders assassinated.
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Of course, he knows better and purposely preaches that garbage to the fools that follow it and lap it up.
The great uneducated are are the sheep of his grifting.
New report sheds light on Trump's age-based changes: 'He's lost the capacity to pretend' — Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump, now approaching his 80th birthday, is displaying behavioral changes that have raised questions about his fitness for office, even as his White House dismisses mounting concerns about his age and mental acuity.
Unlike former President Joe Biden, whose physical decline became visibly apparent as he aged, Trump hasn't faced the same scrutiny for his apparent deterioration despite scaling back his travel, switching to more comfortable shoes and frequent snoozes during meetings, reported The Atlantic's Jonathan Lemire.
"I have long thought that a reason for that is the president’s sheer size," Lemire wrote. "Trump stands 6 foot 3 and, according to his most recent physical, weighs 224 pounds (yes, questioning that number is a legitimate thing to do). He is a big presence in any room, as opposed to Biden, who grew visibly thinner as he got older, adding to the appearance of frailty. Trump is also LOUD; Biden’s voice was frequently reduced to a gentle whisper. And Trump has the gift of omnipresence."...
“The most obvious impact of age on him is that he has lost the capacity to pretend he cares about other people,” Bates said.
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When did he ever care about people, dude?
Has Trump’s Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise? —Robert Reich
Friends,
On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”...
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There's no question. We've been posting "Trump Crime Syndicate" for years here.
How Corrupt Is Trump? Here Are the Numbers — Mona Charen
THIS IS THE TRUMP ERA, which means if you blink, you will miss another shattering example of unabashed corruption. I don’t usually write about the same topic twice in a row, but the latest revelations of Trump’s wanton, shameless profiteering from the White House cannot go unremarked. The phrase “drain the swamp” will go down in history as a bitter irony. The latest outrage against the public—and since I started typing this sentence there have surely been more—concerns Trump’s stock trades.
When I was being considered for a job in the Reagan White House, I had to reveal every cent I had ever earned from any job or investment (which was simple since I had no money), and everyone else who worked for the administration had to do the same. It was a pain, but I was happy to do it, knowing that I would be serving in an honest government. High-ranking officials like cabinet secretaries with substantial portfolios put their assets in blind trusts during their public service. “Blind” meaning the principal had no control. And though the ethics rules do not apply to the president, past presidents put their funds (with the exception of U.S. treasuries and mutual funds) into blind trusts anyway for appearances’ sake. The reason is obvious, but since this is a time of foggy ethics, let’s spell it out: Government officials are in a position to steer policy and award government contracts in ways that benefit or harm private interests. By requiring blind trusts, we minimize the chance that a decision-maker is swayed by the opportunity for private gain.1
Trump, naturally, defied this ethical norm outright. We learned from NOTUS last week that he went on a share-buying spree in the first months of this year, purchasing stock in companies that were about to get lucrative contracts. On January 6, Trump purchased between $500,000 and $1,000,000 (financial disclosure forms require a range, not exact figures) in Nvidia stock. A week later, the Commerce Department announced permission for Nvidia to sell chips to China. He also purchased stock in AMD, another AI chip maker, right before they too were granted the right to sell in China. Also in January, Trump purchased shares of Palantir for between $65,000 and $150,000, days before that company secured a billion-dollar contract to provide services to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump bought shares in Axon, a taser-manufacturing firm. Coincidentally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a plan to spend $200 million over five years on new tasers.
A White House spokesman helpfully explained that “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public . . . President Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children. There are no conflicts of interest.” That is the definition of a conflict of interest. What do they take us for?
Remember the special forces guy who was caught betting on Polymarket before Nicolás Maduro’s capture? This dishonest master sergeant participated in the operation and apparently used his inside knowledge to bet $30,000 on the timing of Maduro’s fall, netting more than $400,000, because, lucky guess, he was right....
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The Trump Crime Syndicate.
Samuel Alito Gets the Facts Wrong... Again — Stephen Harper
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the conservative majority’s opinions in two of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in recent years: 1) Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—overruling Roe v. Wade; and 2) Louisiana v. Callais—neutering the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In both cases, Alito recited and relied on asserted “facts” that did not exist.
Alito Rewrote History to Ban Abortion
Ohio State University Prof. Treva Lindsey observed, “From the nation’s founding through the early 1800s, pre-quickening abortions—that is, abortions before a pregnant person feels fetal movement—were fairly common and even advertised.”
But Alito claimed incorrectly in Dobbs that “no common-law case or authority... remotely suggests a positive right to procure an abortion at any stage of pregnancy” and, in the United States specifically, “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”
Writing for the three dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan called Alito “embarrassingly” wrong. There was no such “unbroken tradition,” and historical evidence undermined his claim. But the conservative majority got its desired outcome.
Roberts Began the Assault on the Voting Rights Act
In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority began undermining the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case. Prior to that decision, states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to obtain federal approval before making changes to election rules—a process known as preclearance. The state or locality had to prove that any changes would not disadvantage racial and ethnic minorities.
Roberts argued that the elections of 2008 and 2012—when there was no difference in voter participation rates between Black and white voters (i.e., no “turnout gap”)—meant that the Voting Rights Act had done its job and preclearance could be suspended.
Even at the time, Roberts’ reasoning was suspect. The elections of 2008 and 2012 were anomalies—not the end of the turnout gap—because Barack Obama’s candidacy had driven up Black turnout.
In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted another flaw in Roberts’ logic: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”...
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The SCOTUS misogynists have been denying women's rights for long enough.
Sunday thought: America's Madman-in-Chief — Robert Reich
And the cowardice of the ruling class.
Friends,
My first quote of the week comes from Trump on Air Force One, on his way back from Beijing on Friday — telling David Sanger of The New York Times:
“I had a total military victory. But the fake news, guys like you, write incorrectly. You’re a fake guy. We had a total military victory. I actually think it’s sort of treasonous what you write. You should be ashamed of yourself. I actually think it’s treason.”
Note Trump’s use of the pronoun “I.” He didn’t say “we” had a military victory. Trump’s malignant narcissism is worsening.
Also take note of his blatant lie. His war in Iran has been anything but a victory. His delusions and deceptions about the war are escalating.
Americans are far worse off today than we were before Trump started his war. We’re now paying $1.50 a gallon more for gas, on average. Paying even more, indirectly, for the diesel fuel powering trucks that transport much of what we buy. Food costs are also rising because the fertilizer used to grow much of the food we eat can’t move through the Strait of Hormuz. The soaring cost of jet fuel is also being passed on to those of us who fly.
And none of these costs will come down soon, even if the war ends tomorrow, because the price for oil is largely set in a global market, and much of the oil infrastructure of the Middle East is in ruins.
Trump has made it harder for us to switch from oil and gas to renewable sources of energy, in which China is excelling. Trump loves fossil fuels — he’s subsidizing oil and gas and has ended subsidies for renewables (remember his election deal with Big Oil?) — but the future lies with wind, solar, and biomass, and the batteries that store them. ...
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Arrogant and selfish monster shows us who is is once more.
Ken Paxton Bullying Children's Hospital Into 'De-Transitioning' Trans Kids. Next Up: Unabortioning, Maybe? — Doktor Zoom
As part of a settlement to end years of politically motivated legal harassment and “investigations” by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (and later, the Trump “Justice” Department), Texas Children’s Hospital agreed Friday to fire five doctors, create a “detransition clinic,” and pay $10 million to the state. Paxton has been waging war against transgender kids and their parents ever since the issue started whipping up rightwing rage a few years ago.
He announced the settlement in a press release Friday morning that, as befits a Republican attorney general in the Trump Era, was generously seasoned with MAGA worship words, so voters would know Paxton shares their hatred of trans people.
Paxton bragged that the new clinic would be the first of its kind in the coming Republic of Gilead, implying that many more will follow, and that it would “help patients reverse the damage caused by ideologically-motivated physicians who harmed patients by performing dangerous medical interventions for the purpose of ‘transitioning’ them.” What’s more, he said, services at the “detransition clinic” will be provided at no cost to patients for the first five years of its operation, with Texas Children’s forced to pay for the services, too. (Guess they found some socialized “medicine” they like.)
By complete coincidence, the settlement comes just days ahead of Tuesday’s runoff election for the Republican US Senate primary, in which Paxton is trying to oust Sen. John Cornyn. Donald Trump hasn’t yet bestowed his allegedly decisive endorsement in the race, so we’re sure that Paxton is jumping up and down with a newspaper headline about the settlement and trying to get Great Leader’s attention....
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How can we advance our future with poison like Paxton polluting us?
Trump’s AG Tells Fox’s Bartiromo He Won’t Promise ‘Definitive Answer’ on Whether 2020 Election Was ‘Rigged’— But Insists ‘There’s a Ton of Evidence’ — Joe DePaolo
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo that he’s “not going to promise there’s going to be a definitive answer” on whether the 2020 election was stolen — a comment which seems unlikely to endear him to President Donald Trump.
In an interview on Sunday Morning Futures, Blanche — in response to a question from Bartiromo — did say “there’s a ton of evidence” to back Trump’s longstanding claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.” But he stopped short of saying he would be able to prove it.
“The president says all the time that the election was rigged,” Bartiromo said. “What have you done about that? Do you have any evidence that the elections was rigged?”
“Well, there’s a ton of evidence that the election was rigged,” Blanche replied. “That’s not something that DOJ needs to tell you about. There’s been evidence about that for many, many years. What I can tell you is that we have multiple investigations going on in Arizona, in Georgia — in Fulton County, Georgia. And that’s exactly what we’re looking at. By the way, this is very difficult because they’re very good. They’re very good at hiding misconduct, and hiding what they’re doing. And so that’s why we’re very focused on finding out whether the right people voted, whether people who were supposed to vote voted, whether there was one vote cast per voter. And that’s what we’re doing in multiple states.”...
"Spoiler alert: It wasn't rigged. But MAGAts will keep pretending it was." — DoseOfReality (comments)
"Nothing says 'We didn't cheat.' like fighting to ensure Voter ID never exists" — Let That Sink In.... (comments)
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And there's 16 tons of evidence that he's full of bullshit and will be exposed for the shameless toadie he is! What he means is they are manufacturing evidence to hide their attempt to overturn democracy.
Bloomberg News: “Wall Street Insiders Astonished” By Trump’s Thousands Of Stock Trades Before & After Warbr>
Bloomberg News reports:
President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.
The transactions, spelled out in more than 100 pages of documents filed Thursday with the US Office of Government Ethics, list purchases and sales in broad ranges, making it hard to calculate an exact value. But the volume of trading — more than 40 per day over a three-month period — stands out as much as the potential dollar value.
“This is an insane amount of trades,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, in an interview, adding that it looks more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” that buys and shorts securities than a personal account.
In the first quarter, the president bought at least $1 million each in companies including Nvidia Corp., Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp., Boeing Co. and Costco Wholesale Corp., according to the documents. Other trades involved eBay Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Uber Technologies Inc., AT&T Inc. and discount store Dollar Tree Inc.
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Corruption runs deep in this one.
It’s Black disenfranchisement, not ‘partisan warfare’ — Dan Froomkin
States across the South are redrawing election maps to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts.
Much of the major-media coverage is casting this in purely political terms – as just another part of the partisan battle for the House in November.
So for example, a May 9 Associated Press article headlined “What to know about the latest wave of changes to congressional districts,” started off this way:
The remaking of the U.S. political map accelerated this week in courts and legislatures, all of it in this round expected to boost Republicans in their attempt to keep control of Congress in November’s elections....
But in the South, the significance of redistricting goes far beyond any partisan issue.
So let me rewrite that for you:
In a stunning display of racism, white Republican leaders throughout the South are stripping Black people of their franchise in order to retain political power.
Six right-wing justices insisted that intentional voting discrimination is a thing of the past. Southern legislators immediately responded by redrawing election boundaries to dilute the Black vote, in many cases making it virtually impossible for Black people to be elected to Congress.
What has happened in a matter of days amounts to a wrenching reversal of 60 years of racial progress — a revival of the Jim Crow era when Black people had no political power, no matter their number....
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The Land of the Happy Negro seditionists are at their sick racist game again.
Donald Trump wants to make China great again — Andrew O'Hehir
Technically, the US is still the dominant global superpower. After last week, it sure doesn't feel that way
So Donald Trump went to Beijing, and we didn’t even get a stupid T-shirt. If we had, it might have come with a purposefully incomprehensible slogan, absent any sound or fury but definitely signifying nothing. It might, for example, have featured the phrase “constructive strategic stability,” which is how Chinese President Xi Jinping describes a (marginally) improved relationship with the United States. In the deeply coded discourse of superpower relations, I think that translates into vigorous competition and disagreement, but without an actual shooting war. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is precisely the status quo.
Or maybe our souvenir T-shirt could repurpose Xi’s observation, during a speech on Thursday, that Trump’s promise to make America great again “can go hand in hand” with his own self-defined mission: the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” That got Fox News talking heads and Republican officials very excited, since they have all apparently forgotten that up until roughly a week ago they were supposed to be relentless China hawks who favored 145 percent tariffs and blamed Xi’s regime for spreading the global “hoax” of climate change....
On his second day in Beijing, Trump posted on Truth Social that Xi had “very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation,” which did not resemble anything the Chinese leader had actually said in public....
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Trump is most certainly dragging America back to the 19th century.
'Trump scammed you again': Inside a presidency built on grift — Sabrina Haake
As Trump was leaving this week for his trip to Beijing, where he will be outsmarted by the dumplings, a reporter asked him whether Americans’ financial pain might move him to make a deal with Iran. Trump responded, “Not even a little bit… I don’t think about anybody.” Anybody, he might have added, whose last name isn’t Trump.
Trump, who repeatedly promised to release his tax returns as all other presidents have done, is now suing the IRS because it kept his promise for him. He and his sons are seeking a cool $10 billion, which would be about two-thirds of the IRS’s entire budget. In an SNL skit that writes itself, Trump’s DOJ is “in talks” with itself to enrich the Trumps before a court can act. Trump is brazenly picking our pockets because a contracted employee leaked his tax returns, showing that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. For ten years before that, Trump paid zero in federal taxes, claiming his annual expenses exceeded his income year after year.
The con is that, despite failing at all of his various business, bankrupting six of them, Trump still sold himself as a successful businessman worth billions. ...
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Tell me, why a few of us think this creepy fraud, who thinks only of himself, should be the leader of the free world? I will say they are the same sort of failure at being human as Trump.
Bill Cassidy takes a not so subtle dig at Trump following election defeat — Greg Larose, Louisianna Illuminator
In his concession speech to supporters, Cassidy took a not so subtle dig at Trump.
“Our country is not about one individual,” Cassidy said in his concession speech. “When you participate in democracy, you don’t pout. You don’t whine. You don’t claim the election was stolen.”...
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The continued exposure of corruption of the south and its inbred backward brainlessness.
John Roberts Has A Dream - And He's Livin' It — Ratt
... and he's not being ironic. A cartoon for May 17, 2026.
Ain't that the truth? And I have a few choice words for the Virginia Democrats and their timidity. Why should 4 people override the votes of millions? They should just retroactively close that stupid loophole those "judges" "found" and move ahead with the maps.
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They are traitors. Pure and simple. They will be settled with at the proper time.
Trump’s Hantavirus ‘Expert’ A Urologist Specializing In Penile Implants — NewsHound Ellen
Dr. Brian Christine is another of Trump’s “best people,” that is, if your goal is to botch another infectious disease outbreak.
If you watched Wednesday’s press briefing about the hantavirus outbreak, you would have seen Dr. Brian Christine, Donald Trump’s unqualified and unfit assistant secretary for health, boasting about dealing with the outbreak with an approach “grounded in science” and with “experienced professional[s]” with “a shared commitment to protecting the American people.”
Um, not really. Thanks to CNN investigative reporter Andy Kaczynski, we’ve learned a lot about Dr. Christine, and not one bit of it signals anything close to what he’s claiming the Trump/RFK Jr. public health team will provide.
For one thing, the anti-trans Christine is a right-wing extremist with almost no experience in public health. “Before he joined the Trump administration last year, Christine was an Alabama-based urologist who specialized in penile implants. He has little public health experience and a history of far-right commentary and promoting conspiracy theories,” Kaczynski said.
But wait, it gets worse. “He’s said the Covid pandemic led to a wider government plot to control people, compared the Biden administration to Nazi Germany, and suggested the Covid vaccine had little effect in stopping the pandemic," Kaczynski also found. Not surprisingly, Christine is another 2020 election conspiracy theorist and has expressed support for efforts to overturn the results...
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The retarded meter just broke with this one!
Jen Psaki Brings The Receipts In Response To Eric Trump's Threat To Sue — Heather
Jen Psaki did an on-air fact check after Trump's son Eric threatened to sue both Psaki and her network for daring to report on his business interests.
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What's that Eric? Ya don't say!
Trump Cheers Primary Loss Of “Disloyal” Bill Cassidy
“Bill Cassidy, after falsely using his ‘relationship’ with me during his political career, and winning Elections because of it, voted to impeach me on preposterous charges that were fake then, and now, are criminally insane! His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER! I’d like to thank the Great People of the State of Louisiana, and this Big Victory will only make me work even harder for your success, and all that comes with it. I LOVE YOU ALL.” – Trump, on Truth Social.
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Cassidy has a conscience. Trump has none.
Arizona Cop Fired For Attempting To Incite Violence At Student ICE Protest While Armed And Masked
Phoenix’s ABC affiliate reports:,br>
The ABC15 Investigators have confirmed that a Phoenix police sergeant has been fired after videos captured him at a high school ICE protest armed and wearing a mask in January. Last month, body camera video showed tense moments as off-duty Sergeant Dusten Mullen told a Chandler police officer he was at the protest with a goal to get kids in jail if they wanted to break the law.
“My plan is legitimately to just let them all assault me, and you guys arrest them all,” Mullen could be heard saying, “ I will keep it on film. I also have other people filming from a distance, so my goal would be to get all these kids in jail if they want to break the law.” During the protest, police arrested a teenager for allegedly throwing water on Mullen, but the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office told ABC15 that the teen will not face charges.
"This is why I don't believe it when the mass media — now suddenly aware of protests — screams about left-wing violence. Bullshit. Jack Posobiec started it, trying to frame the left with his 'RAPE MELANIA!' sign, & they've been at every left-wing protest since, happy to torch cars & blame it on us. Get fucking proof, 'journalists,' or shut the hell up." — RomanHans (comments)
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America wins a round! Nazi goes down! But he'll show up again in another town.
Florida Students Rank Last In Reading Scores
The Tampa Bay Times reports:
Since the pandemic, scholars have feared students nationwide are experiencing a recession in knowledge, particularly in reading and math skills. And in a national study led by researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth released Wednesday, Florida students are faring worse than learners in other states.
The Education Scorecard analysis included state test results and national assessment data for roughly 35 million students in grades 3-8 in more than 5,000 school districts in 38 states. Florida ranked 24th in math academic growth among the states in the study, and last in reading between 2022 and 2025.
“The ‘learning recession’ started a decade ago, after policymakers switched off the early warning system of test-based accountability and social media took over children’s lives,” Tom Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University wrote in the release.
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Florida traitors proud of their illiterate youngsters.
This is what we get when we don't permit teachers to do their jobs.
Swatch Stores Worldwide Close In Chaos Over Watch
The New York Post reports:
Chaos erupted outside Swatch stores in NYC and across the globe as cut-throat resellers and watch enthusiasts impatiently waited for a new release – causing several locations to abruptly close amid the disastrous launch. Hundreds of shoppers were seen swarming the stores in SoHo and Times Square Saturday morning, rounding out about a week of lengthy lines that saw the Big Apple’s sidewalks resembling tent encampments.
The frenzy is centered around the latest “Royal Pop” collaboration between Swatch and Audemars Piguet, a limited-edition, bioceramic pocket watch that merges Audemars Piguet’s iconic Royal Oak with Swatch’s vibrant POP line from the 1980s.
The watch-fueled drama isn’t limited to NYC – or even the US – with Swatch stores across the world experiencing similarly disastrous launches. The Swiss-based company declared on Instagram that locations in NYC, Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles and Orlando were closed “in view of safety considerations.” The brand issued similar statements for its stores in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow and Cardiff.
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A fucking watch? Any of these morons know what time is?
Colorado County GOP Chair Arrested In Child Sex Sting
Colorado Politics reports:
Hunter Rivera, the 24-year-old chairman of the Weld County Republican Party, was one of two men arrested Thursday on suspicion of trying to buy sex from Larimer County Sheriff’s Office investigators who posed as minors as part of an operation targeting child predators. After news of Rivera’s arrest broke late Friday, multiple prominent Republicans denounced Rivera and called for his immediate resignation from the party position.
Rivera, who lives in Windsor, faces four felony charges, the sheriff’s office said: soliciting a child prostitute, internet luring of a child, soliciting to arrange a minor prostitute in a cybercrime, and attempted sexual assault on a child.
U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Windsor Republican who supported Rivera’s bid for county chair last year, issued a blistering statement condemning the allegations and calling on Rivera to be “replaced immediately” as party chair.“These allegations are vile and indefensible. I pray to God there are not real victims out there. I am angry and disgusted,” Boebert said in a text message.
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Another one bites the dust.
Latest score: Xianists - Infinity, Drag Queens - 0!
Senate Parliamentarian Nixes Bill To Fund Ballroom
NBC News reports:
A GOP bill seeking $1 billion for the Secret Service to help finance President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is in jeopardy as it faces pushback from a top Senate official. The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said Saturday that the budget bill, which aims to fund ICE and Border Patrol alongside $1 billion to help fund the ballroom, needs to be rewritten to account for jurisdictional issues.
“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” MacDonough told Senate offices Saturday. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.”
The parliamentarian wrote that the bill would be subject to a 60-vote threshold to pass, meaning it can’t move forward with a simple maority, unlike similar bills advanced using budget reconciliation.
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Now clean up your mess, asshole!
Ex-MAG?A influencer makes startling claim about State Dept. and 'Palm Beach aesthetic' — Bennito L. Kelty
A former conservative influencer claims that the State Department under the Trump administration is employing people who encouraged her to pay for cosmetic surgeries and pricey merchandise.
"I don't think you people understand how these people are at the State Department," said Ashley St. Clair, who worked as a brand ambassador for the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, while appearing on an episode of the podcast Krystal Kyle & Friends.
St. Clair never worked for the Trump administration, but she says people who currently serve at the State Department used to encourage her to adopt "a Palm Beach aesthetic" and even pay for breast enhancement surgery. When she was a MAGA influencer, St. Clair used to raise public support for the Trump administration to hire certain conservatives, like Richard Grenell, whom she unsuccessfully pushed for Secretary of State, according to reports.
"There's a class signaling that goes on with the plastic surgery," St. Clair went on. "They're like, 'you need to go see Lara Trump's spray tan girl. You need the Zimmerman dress.'"
She added that Trump officials would talk about "a China lady" who would "get them the fake bags so that they can continue this class signaling."...
"What kind of magat influencer are you without giant titties? Where's your identity without big ta-tas? Get with the program, gurl. And don't forget to blow up yer lips, too." — Jay Siversmith (comments)
"What is not fake about the pedophile class? Their pedophilia." — notbyme (comments)
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What, pray tell, does any of this have to do with our government sticking their noses in?
Trash class, and we all know it. Pussy grabbing low.
Trump’s Nothingburger Banquet in Beijing — Robert Kuttner
President Trump’s much-heralded trip to Beijing, the first summit in Beijing since 2017, yielded nothing of value. The only good thing about it was that Trump evidently did not give away the store on Taiwan or on exports of sensitive technology.
One concrete thing that President Xi Jinping might have done didn’t happen. Xi could have agreed to put pressure on China’s ally, Iran, to split the difference with Trump and end the war. But neither the official communiqué nor White House leaks said anything about progress on Iran.
The real work, if any, will continue behind the scenes. There have been leaks that China agreed to buy more U.S. oil, agricultural products, and Boeing planes, but that has not been confirmed by the Chinese side.
If China does buy more oil, that will be good for the oil industry and for the balance of trade, but bad for American consumers, since it will increase overall demand and raise gas prices at the pump. As for aircraft, if China does purchase more wide-body planes, Boeing should enjoy the sales while it can.
This is one of the few remaining industries where a U.S. company still dominates, but only temporarily. China’s wide-body long-distance COMAC C929, seating 280 passengers, is expected to enter service within five years, blowing away the Boeing-Airbus duopoly.
The same story is being repeated in industry after industry. China is playing a long game, while Trump is seeking the sugar high of quickie headlines backed by no strategic plan....
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Weak and feeble leaders wreck your world.
$1.7 billion contract awarded “for border wall in Big Bend” amid public confusion over construction plans — Ayden Runnels
The contract comes just a week after Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott said the agency would not build a wall in Big Bend National Park.
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You have no rights in a dictatorship, Texas. Big Bend means nothing to Nazi swine.
Fears Mount in Cuba as DOJ Reportedly Prepares to Criminally Indict Raúl Castro — Aseel Mafarjeh
With Trump’s oil blockade strangling the island, many fear an indictment could serve as a pretext for US invasion.
Cuba’s top diplomat in the United States on Friday underscored the inviolability of her country’s sovereignty amid tenuous negotiations with the Trump administration and mounting fears that the US is planning to criminally indict a former Cuban president and possibly invade the island to abduct him.
Cuban Chargé d’Affaires Lianys Torres Rivera told The Hill that her country’s socialist government is open to negotiating with the US, but that “the only exception is our sovereignty, independence, and right to self-determination,” adding that “those are the red lines.”
Torres Rivera acknowledged that ramped-up US pressure — including President Donald Trump’s invasion threats and tightening of the internationally condemned 65-year economic embargo — is inflicting tremendous suffering on the Cuban people.
“It’s difficult. What the Cuban people are enduring these days is difficult,” she said. “They are under a collective punishment from the US.”
The Cuban government said Thursday that Trump’s oil blockade has left the island and its 11 million people without fuel — a situation United Nations experts last week described as illegal “energy starvation.”
“We have reorganized the whole country, the healthcare system, the education system, the transportation system, to keep the basic services running,” Torres Rivera told The Hill. “But it doesn’t mean that they are running normally. They are running under huge stress.”
Still, “a serious country that respects yourself… won’t put on the table your political system or your internal order that the people of our country decide in a sovereign way,” she stressed....
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The Trump regime does not believe in a sovereign way. It is as much a terrorist goverment as any Axis regime during WWII. The world sees us as the bad guys now.
Trump Describes Executions to Kids, While MAGA Bans Lessons Causing “Discomfort” —Jesse Hagopian
Trump’s lesson to children was to fear difference, obey power, and treat vulnerable people as threats.
Seated behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in early May, Donald Trump delivered a disturbing lecture to a group of children huddled around him — most of them not yet even teenagers. They had been brought to the White House for what was supposed to be a celebratory event marking the reinstatement of the Presidential Fitness Test, dressed in brightly colored T-shirts bearing the government emblem of the rebooted program.
Flanked by a group including cabinet secretaries Linda McMahon, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump turned the White House into his schoolhouse. Casting himself as a master teacher, he launched into an improvised lesson — part contemporary issues, part history, part geography, and all MAGA mythology.
During his lesson, Trump exposed a central contradiction at the heart of his politics. States and school districts across the country have enacted MAGA education policies — such as the Florida Stop WOKE Act — that prohibit teaching content that might cause students “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress.” But Trump himself showed no such restraint. During what amounted to an advanced course in authoritarian education, he immersed children in a grotesque curriculum of graphic executions, nuclear annihilation, and the threat of entire societies being wiped out — paired with nationalist triumphalism and the scapegoating of transgender people....
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Trump is an abomination to humanity. The worst since Stalin.
Why Was Hunter’s Cup of Coffee a National Crisis but Trump’s $5 Billion Grift Isn’t?
Republicans spent years manufacturing outrage over Hunter Biden while Trump openly turned the presidency into a billionaire’s cash machine.
Back in 2019, Donald Trump pointed at Hunter Biden’s brief “cup of coffee” with a Chinese banker during a 2013 ride on Air Force Two and turned it into the single biggest line of attack he ran against Joe Biden for the next five years.
The grift! The corruption! The selling-out of America! Oh, the humanity!!!
Trump told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo that Hunter “walked out of China with $1.5 billion” because his father was vice president, even though no evidence ever surfaced that the elder Biden touched his son’s business dealings, nor that Hunter ever pocketed anything close to that sum.
This week, Donald Trump landed in Beijing for a three-day summit with Xi Jinping with his son Eric and daughter-in-law Lara on Air Force One, alongside more than a dozen of the wealthiest CEOs in America: Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and many others.
The Trump Organization, which Eric runs, has flirted with Chinese business deals for years, and Eric’s American Bitcoin company works directly with Chinese crypto-mining giant Bitmain.
Hunter Biden’s cup of coffee looks like a teetotaler’s glass of water next to this rolling roadshow of self-dealing, where every executive on board is openly there to negotiate his own deal while Beijing’s officials size up the willingness of the family of the most powerful man in the world to sell out America for a few billion dollars.
That’s the thing about Trump. He brags about corruption, lives on corruption, and treats every lever of the federal government as a personal slot machine, yet because he yelled “drain the swamp” loud enough in 2016, half the country still believes he’s the guy fighting the corrupt part of the establishment.
He isn’t fighting it; he is it, only stupider, more openly larcenous, and more contemptuous of the public good than anyone who’s ever held the office.
Consider what he’s done just in recent months.
In January, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department, agencies he himself runs, over the leak of his tax returns during his first term while his own appointees were running the IRS. He’s suing himself, in other words, for damages he then expects his own Justice Department to pay him out of taxpayer money.
According to reporting in The New York Times and New Republic, Trump’s DOJ is now negotiating a settlement that may include dropping all IRS audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses, which would amount to a get-out-of-tax-fraud-free card signed by the very man whose taxes the IRS is required by law to audit every year.
ABC News is now reporting that he also wants $1 billion to give to the January 6 rioters. Perhaps as prepayment for his “army” that will attack people during this November’s elections?
This is naked corruption on a scale we've never seen. The federal government's now a personal piggy bank for one criminal man and his violent cult....
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The name "Trump" is synonymous with "crime." Aren't we such a proud nation?
Trump Defends Saying He Doesn’t Care About High Prices: “It Was A Perfect Statement, I’d Make It Again”
NBC News reports:
President Donald Trump is defending remarks from earlier this week when he said he wasn’t factoring in Americans’ financial situation amid efforts to negotiate an end to the Iran war. “That’s a perfect statement. I’d make it again,” Trump told Fox News’ Bret Baier in an interview Friday after being shown a clip of his previous comments.
Trump told reporters Tuesday that he wasn’t thinking about Americans’ finances “even a little bit” as he negotiates with Iran to end the monthslong conflict, adding that his sole focus is to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“The only thing that matters, when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: You cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
"'You cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon' But he'd sell them nuclear weapons if the price was right." — Stogiebear (comments)
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What does he thinnk he's saying? That he's making a sacrifce using a fantasy he's created? Again: Iran had no nuclear weapon before he started the war. They still don't have a nuclear weapon and are some time away from one.
He can say he only cares from his future prison cell if he likes sayting it so much. It's an asshat excuse.
DOJ Plans $1.776B “Justice Commission” To Pay Rioters
ABC News reports:
The Department of Justice is finalizing a deal to launch a so-called “Truth and Justice Commission” and establish a compensation fund of $1,776,000,000 to pay claims made by alleged victims of government “weaponization” in exchange for President Donald Trump dropping his ongoing lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, sources told ABC News.
Sources told ABC News that the proposed deal — which is likely to face legal hurdles and has already been criticized by Democrats as a “slush fund” for Trump’s allies — arose after months of deliberations between the White House and DOJ officials who originally attempted to craft a legal justification for the settlement to compensate Trump directly.
Internally, DOJ lawers believed they could ignore the conflict of interest outright, privately arguing that Trump has both the right to sue as a private citizen and the power to command the executive branch as president, according to sources familiar with their discussions.
Many were wondering how Trump landed on the $1.7 billion payout figure. Now we now it’s because USA USA. Yesterday it was reported that the “brainchild” of the scam is likely racist failed Senate candidate Mark McCloskey.
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"Grifting for Traitors!" A new Trump game show!
Vance: We Will Never Allow Violence Against Police
“You can never get rid of evil, you’re always gonna have terrible people who want to do the worst things. But allowing so many of those people free rein, allowing them to strike at our law enforcement officers, that was a policy choice.
“So long as Donald J. Trump is the president, and so long as I am the vice president, we will never again let policy makers in the building behind us allow violent criminals to tee off on our police officers.
“We will fight for you just as you fight for us every single day. Because of you and because we’re reminding the nation once more of who stands between order and chaos, that thin blue line still holds.” – JD Vance, drawing little applause at the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service.
Vance, whose remarks have drawn a scathing response on social media as Trump seeks a $1.7 billion payout for Capitol rioters, opened with a quote from the bible: “Then I heard the voice of the lord saying, whom shall I send, and who will go for us? And I said, here I am, send me.”
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Does this retard consider the Jan. 6 Trump attempted coup on police terrible people? Fuck, no! Vance is just another in a line of lying Trump's traitors.
Trump: My Golden Statue Will “Become A Landmark!”
“This is a statue, now standing at Doral, that was commissioned by a large group of political supporters who just wanted a statue of yours truly. I very much appreciate their support, and all that they went through to get it done! They are very good people. Those playing the Blue Monster, at Doral, are absolutely in love with it. Congratulations to all involved. With time, it will become a Landmark!” – Trump, posting to Truth Social.
Last week a far-right “death to gays” MAGA pastor and three-times failed House candidate literally prayed over the statue, drawing international ridicule and outrage from some evangelicals. According to the sculptor, he was ordered to make Trump skinnier and remove his “turkey neck.” According to the Miami Herald, the statue was positioned so that it will greet foreign leaders when Trump hosts the G20 Summit in December.
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A landmark for dumping trash and dirty diapers! That is, until it's destroyed as was Hussein's.
Outrage breaks out as analysts get first look at Trump’s financial disclosures: ‘impeach!’ — Alexander Willis
On Thursday, President Donald Trump disclosed a “flurry” of financial transactions he’d made earlier this year, but on Saturday, Bloomberg correspondent Josh Wingrove unpacked those transactions in greater detail, and in doing so, sparked outrage among critics.
The financial disclosures revealed this week that Trump or his advisers had made “at least $220 million in financial transactions in the securities of major U.S. companies” during the first three months of 2026, Bloomberg previously reported. On Saturday, Wingrove provided additional details on the president’s financial disclosures.
“President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration,” Wingrove wrote Saturday in a social media post on X.
Companies that Trump or his advisers purchased securities for include Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Oracle and Bank of America, all companies that have reached major deals with the Trump administration.
“Most corrupt administration in the history of the US,” wrote former Minnesota state Democratic Sen. Linda Higgins, writing in a social media post on X in response to Wingrove’s reporting. “IMPEACH!”...
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Great idea. But first impeach the Nazis in Congress and the same in SCOTUS who protect him from our law!
This horror may finally cause this moron's head to roll
If you’ve ever been to Pearl Harbor, you know that the area around the USS Arizona is revered. It is not a recreational dive site. It’s not some playground for pampered, spoiled, and pompous buffoons.
It is a military cemetery. Hundreds of American sailors and Marines are entombed beneath its rusted hull at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, where they have rested since Japan bombed and sank the battleship on December 7, 1941.
The wreck is accessible only by boat. Recreational diving is generally prohibited. Rare exceptions are made for marine archaeologists, National Park Service survey crews, and a ceremonial diver interring the remains of an Arizona survivor who wanted to spend eternity beside his shipmates.
And then there is America’s most despised frat-boy, Kash Patel.
The miserable excuse for an FBI director, already loathed for joy-riding on government jets and crashing the Olympic hockey locker room, thought he could brazenly slip beneath the waters of the USS Arizona Memorial last August for an exclusive underwater tour of the sunken battleship.
Government emails obtained by the Associated Press through a public records request show that military officials coordinated logistics and personnel for what they internally called a “VIP snorkel.”
Marine veteran Hack Albertson, who dives the Arizona annually with the Paralyzed Veterans of America, put it plainly: “It’s like having a bachelor party at a church. It’s hallowed ground. It needs to be treated with the solemnity it deserves.”
Imagine being family members of Pearl Harbor survivors, loved ones who have never been permitted to swim at the site where their fathers died, and learning this week that the arrogant, spoiled Patel got a curated underwater tourism experience above their loved ones’ corpses.
Who does Patel think he is? If I were one of those family members, I’d be calling for his bulbous head.
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Mr. Goo Goo Eyes has "wet brain." This has been made quite obvious to us.
Do Americans even remember Pearl Harbor that they would get upset? I do remember Pearl Harbor just as well as George Bush did (look it up)!
Respect at USS Arizona — Mark Hertling
The American Battle Monuments Commission is one of the smallest but most sacred institutions in the U.S. government. Most Americans have never heard of it. Yet this agency silently supports hundreds of thousands in its care who are laid to rest among the rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David above the cliffs of the Normandy beaches, near the sands of the Sicily-Rome landing sites, in a grand and expansive park in the city of Manila, beneath the memorial walls at Tunisia and Cambridge, and at dozens of other sites.
I know this organization well, because several years ago I was appointed by the president to serve alongside other commissioners as members of the governing board of the ABMC. It was one of the greatest honors of my life.
Congress created the commission in 1923 after General John J. Pershing recognized that America needed more than temporary wooden battlefield markers to honor those who died overseas in World War I. He understood that the nation owed its fallen who had fought in battles overseas something dignified and enduring. The ABMC stewards that promise, maintaining twenty-six cemeteries and thirty-one large memorials around the globe honoring Americans who died far from home.
The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor is not technically an ABMC site (it’s administered by the National Park Service), but it is an equal to the other sites because of those who rest below the surface. The memorial platform spanning the sunken battleship is not merely a historical attraction; it is the viewing platform of a sarcophagus. Below that white deck lie 1,102 sailors and Marines, entombed inside the ship where they died during the attack on December 7, 1941. Oil seeps slowly from the wreckage beneath the water’s surface. The sight of these “black tears” becomes an emotional memory for those who visit the site.
Which is why the recent reports of FBI Director Kash Patel conducting a “VIP snorkeling excursion” near the wreck has struck so many veterans, military families, and citizens of our nation as deeply inappropriate...
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Living under a regime of swine!
CBS News insiders fear 'something monumental' coming as Bari Weiss targets top program — Tom Boggioni
A cloud of dread has descended upon CBS News as controversial editor-in-chief Bari Weiss prepares to overhaul "60 Minutes" when the show returns next season — with network insiders warning changes are coming that will upend the venerable Sunday night institution.
According to the Guardian, the current season concludes on Sunday, after which the iconoclastic Weiss is expected to impose her ideological imprint on a program that has operated with editorial autonomy for decades.
The 59th season will be the first fully under Weiss' purview following Skydance Media's acquisition of CBS parent Paramount Global in August 2025. Amid persistent rumors that next season will look dramatically different, network insiders are bracing for significant disruption.
Speaking with the Guardian, one longtime network insider warned of "massive changes" after the current season ends, though the network reportedly has no plans to completely overhaul the format or abandon the show's award-winning investigative mission. However, layoffs are widely anticipated.
"People [at 60 Minutes] are afraid and they're waiting for something monumental to happen here," said another network insider.
A CBS News staffer, speaking without authorization, expressed alarm that Weiss would implement changes that damage the show "just like she has done with everything else at CBS News."
A third insider urged caution, cautioning: "They don't want to turn it upside down."...
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Don't kid yourselves. Nazis want nothing to do with truth, justice and the American way. And there is a Nazi in charge here.
Fox News' fraud exposed: Inside the real-time con that's hollowing out America — Sabrina Haake
Whenever a new poll comes out showing Trump’s abysmal ratings, public reactions follow a pattern. Public comments don’t question Trump’s disapproval rating. Rather, millions of people question the flip side: how does 38% of the nation still support such an obvious charlatan? Are supporters delusional? Suicidal?
Specifically, does MAGA not know that 15 million Americans, mostly their own, have now lost health insurance because of him? Can they not read the Walmart price tags they hold in their own hands? Do they not know he’s weakening the NATO alliance their granddads fought for, or that he single-handedly empowered one of the most dangerous regimes in the world?...
The Pope example alone illustrates how MAGA is being lied to on a daily basis, but it’s just one example. Fox News serves up daily falsehoods about climate change, immigrants, public education, NATO, black crime, ICE, and the war in Iran to craft a pro-Trump narrative, assuming their lies are legally protected by the First Amendment as “political speech.”
"The First Amendment does not protect fraud."
Enough damage is now evident to challenge that legal assumption....
"Enjoy your last days of lying Faux. You will cease to exist. Your owners will be executed for treason. Every single penny you have hoovered up will be confiscated." — Fugitivewageslave (comments)
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Fox has been crying "FIRE!" in a crowded theater for years. It's time to shut them down.
Jesse Watters: Blacks Should 'Get In Between The Sheets' For More Representation — John Amato
It's bad enough the Supreme Court resurrected Jim Crow, now this?
On Fox News, The Five, co-host Jesse Watters piled on the Jim Crow Supreme Court ruling by using his racist and vile brand of what he believes is humor when he demanded Blacks have more babies to get more representation in Congress.
WATTERS: I'm talking about they're doing a little bit of a secessionist vote. I did some research on the blacks, as Judge Jeanine so eloquently would say. The solution to Hakeem's problem, this gay Obama is baby-making blacks. For a hundred and fifty years, they have only represented ten to fifteen percent of the American population, okay?...
"I have one question: Where does this revolting piece of shit hang out?" — randy billington (comments)
"Y'know, it used to be said that white people should be thankful that POC want equality and not revenge.
I'm thinking, maybe it's time they go for revenge, since the SCROTUS has openly said equality isn't ever coming." — Cthulhu: Danger hugs! (comments)
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Another one that will make the world a better place with his end.
Trump Claims US Forces Killed ISIS Leader In Nigeria
CNN reports:
US and Nigerian forces killed a senior ISIS commander on Friday, President Donald Trump said, in an operation he claimed had “greatly diminished” the militant group’s power.
“Tonight, at my direction, brave American forces and the Armed Forces of Nigeria flawlessly executed a meticulously planned and very complex mission to eliminate the most active terrorist in the world from the battlefield,” Trump said in a Truth Social post late Friday ET.The president named the target as “Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally,” adding: “He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans.”
According to documents from the US Office of Foreign Assets Control, al-Minuki was born in 1982 in the northeastern Nigerian state of Borno, which borders Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
" It’s odd that ISIS still has leaders considering that Trump has claimed many times that they no longer exist, thanks to him." -- ASFT (comments)
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FIRST LIE: "We know in President Trump's first term, he completely destroyed and demolished the ISIS caliphate," said Leavitt during an appearance on Fox News Tuesday afternoon. "He took out some of their key top members and leaders."
This is LIE TWO: He claimed to have destroyed Isis his first term.
Total failure!
Colorado AG Condemns Clemency For Tina Peters: “Caving In To Trump Will Only Lead To More Abuse”
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser writes:
Gov. Polis’ commutation of Tina Peters’ sentence is mind-boggling and wrong as a matter of basic justice. She was convicted by a jury and sentenced for tampering with election equipment and undermining our elections.
The judge imposed a reasonable sentence based on her criminal conduct, she has shown no remorse for her crimes, and now the governor is taking this unwise and unprecedented step of releasing her from prison early.
Caving in to this president will only lead to more abuse from the bullying Trump administration. Today is a sad day for Colorado and the rule of law.
"It's like giving Hitler the Sudtenland – there is no appeasing him, there is only stages of surrendering or outright fight him." -- Sogiebear (comments)
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She will continue her sedition and get pardoned by the crime king again.
Patel promised to come after the media. So far, it’s only been women — Sophia Tesfaye
The FBI has investigated multiple women journalists who reported on the bureau's director -- Sophia Tesfaye ...When he is not using the badge to intimidate the press, Patel is weaponizing the federal judiciary in his personal capacity to silence his critics.
..."The truth is that Patel is the chief architect of a new, weaponized law enforcement apparatus that views the First Amendment as a nuisance and the federal budget as a personal slush fund. And the truly chilling part is how quickly Washington has adapted to it."
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A side effect from a criminal regime.
Lawmakers panic over Trump’s 'frontal lobe dementia' in painful supercut — Adam Lynch
Congressional lawmakers and Trump’s own former lawyer are panicking over how racked President Donald Trump’s mind appears to be with illness.
“I don't know how anyone can see what he posts or watch him in any meeting and think that he's fit for office,” said one lawmaker speaking to reporters.
Another lawmaker said: “We have strategic ambiguity. But [Trump] is just … He’s confrontational, inconsistent, erratic,” said another congressman, who then fluttered his tongue in a demonstration of Trump’s lucidity.
“I don't trust that man to be able to cognitively make a complete sentence, let alone negotiate with China,” said another.
“I think he's seriously ill,” said still another. “I think Trump needs medical attention and there needs to be an intervention.”...
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Why yes, that frontal lobe is a bit distorted.
A caller had no patience for Republican talking points on a Friday C-SPAN show. — Adam Lynch
Rep. Mike Haridopolos (R-Fla.) joined C-SPAN’s “Congressional News of the Day” show to share Republican talking points paying down the damage of President Donald’s war on Iran and the subsequent rise in gas prices and inflation at grocery stores and other consumer items.
But C-SPAN is an older format show that still fields calls from commenters, and Haridopolos found himself catching the bad end of one man’s vocal beat-down.
Haridopolos had just finished advocating for U.S. intervention in Cuba, saying “the people of Cuba are suffering,” when “Independent” voter “Roger” in Lawrenceville, Ga., phoned up and got a word in.
“Congressman, I know you are a smart guy, a former educator. Why do you guys continue to parrot trump's crazy Fox News talking points when I know you have to know right from wrong? There is just no way [you can believe that stuff].”
"Well give us a specific example," the C-SPAN host requested, cutting him off.
“For example, the 9 percent inflation under Biden [you always talk about]. You know that was Covid. Like, come on. Presidents do not affect gas prices unless they’re stupid enough to start a war in the Middle East. Trump, Biden: neither controlled it. It had to do with starting wars, and that’s why we’re dealing with these gas prices.”
“And you know your own intelligence [department] said there was no way [Iran] was close to a nuclear weapon, but you come on TV and you say the same thing [Trump says],” Roger continued. “And you guys only find a spine when you say you're going to retire. I know you have to know better.”
At that point, the host prompted Haridopolos to respond.
“It’s always nice to have strong opinions,” said Haridopolos. “They might not be backed up and fact, but I [like] a strong opinion.”
Haridopolos then claimed “gas prices were down dramatically because we were producing more oil and creating new opportunities around the world that will help us long-term” under Trump. He also claimed “the threat of Iran is real,” which justified both the invasion and the subsequent U.S. price increases.
He then claimed Democrat lawmakers were recently making the same claim about the Iranian threat, before “switching lanes.”
“It is called politics,” Haridopolos said.
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It's called lying through your Nazi teeth!
Trump’s 'Golden Age' killed another American company's factory in a red state — Adam Lynch
Reason Magazine reports President Donald Trump's tariffs and his war with Iran appears to have personally played a role in killing a profitable North Carolina tire factory.
“The Goodyear Rubber and Tire Co. announced this week that it would be shuttering its Fayetteville, North Carolina, plant that currently employs more than 1,700 workers,” reports Reason, before analyzing company reports to sort through the reasons.
“Translating … P.R.-speak a bit easier when you look at what company executives have been telling investors,” said Eric Boehm. “Goodyear lost $249 million during the first three months of the year — after earning a $115 million profit during the same three months last year, just prior to Trump's tariffs being announced. Along with that announcement, CEO Mark Stewart said that "higher raw material costs" due to the war would force Goodyear to take "meaningful actions to strengthen our cost structure. The 1,700 employees in Fayetteville would appear to be on the receiving end of that action — and for them, it certainly will be meaningful.”
Boehm said Trump’s tariffs delivered another significant blow. Company reps say it is expecting to receive $46 million in refunds after the Supreme Court ruled Trump's "emergency" tariffs to be unlawful. But even with that refund, Goodyear's CFO Christina Zamarro said on a recent earnings call that inflation and tariffs would contribute to economic headwinds that could total a $420 million loss over the full year.
“Simply put: you can't make tires without rubber, and it is impossible to buy rubber that isn't imported — because rubber trees do not grow in the United States,” said Boehm. “That means American tire companies import rubber from places like Thailand [which] exports a lot of … excess rubber to other parts of the world, including the United States.”...
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Eveything Trump touches dies.
Trump administration sues Catholic diocese to seize land on religious site near El Paso for border barrier — Uriel J. García
The lawsuit argues that 14 acres on Mount Cristo Rey, which features a 29-foot-tall statue of Jesus, are needed for barriers and other technology to secure the border.
EL PASO — To install more border barriers, the Trump administration wants to seize 14 acres of land on an iconic mountain outside of El Paso owned by the Catholic Diocese of neighboring Las Cruces, New Mexico, that attracts thousands of people for an annual religious pilgrimage.
The land the federal government wants to take sits at the bottom of Mount Cristo Rey, a 720-foot-tall mountain with a 29-foot-tall statue of Jesus Christ at its summit, that overlooks Ciudad Juárez, El Paso and Sunland Park, N.M.
Last week, lawyers for the Trump administration filed a lawsuit in a federal court in New Mexico against the diocese of Las Cruces, which is resisting the government’s attempt to take the land. The lawsuit argues that the federal government needs the land to install barriers and other technology “designed to help secure the United States-Mexico border.”
The administration said in court documents that it has offered the church $183,000 for the land.
The church said in court documents the Trump administration’s efforts violate its First Amendment right to religious expression.
“The erection of a border wall through or along this holy site could irreparably damage its religious and cultural sanctity, obstruct pilgrimage routes, and transfer sacred space into a symbol of division,” the diocese said. “Any federal action to seize this land, construct physical barriers, or impede access to Mount Cristo Rey would constitute a significant infringement on religious freedom and the rights of worship.”
Every fall, up to 40,000 people make a pilgrimage to the top of the mountain, where the Diocese of Las Cruces and El Paso host a mass. Traditionally, the event is held on the last Sunday of October, but in recent years the pilgrimage has moved to the feast day of Christ the King in November.
Some do the five-mile journey barefoot, others have crawled to the summit on their knees.
“Mt. Cristo Rey’s cultural and religious significance is central to our region. Seizing this community asset in order to build a border wall is consistent with the Trump administration’s blatant disregard for what communities like ours value,” U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said in a statement. “There are a number of other ways to provide border security. Instead, the Trump administration prefers to destroy this sacred site.”...
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Proving once and for all that Trump not only hates Catholics but especially Latinx Catholics!
Did Xi Welcome Wealth, Power, and Corruption as Trump Puts Taiwan on the Table? — Thom Hartmann
The Beijing summit fuels alarm over corruption, authoritarian influence, and America’s fading credibility.
Donald Trump landed in Beijing yesterday aboard Air Force One with a billionaire’s retinue that read like a Forbes 400 family reunion, and the man he came to see didn’t even bother to walk out to the tarmac to greet him. (In 2009, when Obama visited, Xi personally met his plane.)
Xi Jinping sent his Vice President, Han Zheng, and the message couldn’t have been more of a slap in America’s face: this clownish, incompetent, criminal, unfaithful, backed-into-an-Iran-corner-of-his-own-making President of the United States, on his first state visit to China in nearly nine years, isn’t worth the dictator’s interrupting his morning tea.
There were three hundred children in matching blue-and-white waving flags, a military honor guard, and a red carpet, and there was Eric Trump, traveling in what the Trump Organization openly described as a “personal capacity,” which is the family lawyer’s polite way of saying he’s there to figure out a way to hustle some money out of his father’s position. Lara was beside him.
And yet, as Lisa Needham at Daily Kos writes in response to Eric‘s denial that he is going on the trip to make money:
“That might be more persuasive if Eric didn’t already have a partnership with a shady Chinese crypto company. Eric’s very own grifty crypto scheme, American Bitcoin Corp.—wow, such branding—has a partnership with Chinese bitcoin mining rig manufacturer Bitmain.
“Bitmain had been under a national security investigation here for months, in part over concerns that Bitmain computers could be controlled remotely from China.”
Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang came along too, along with a few less-well-known billionaires and CEOs, because when the President of the United States flies to Beijing to negotiate with the world’s most powerful authoritarian, predatory billionaires don’t want to miss a chance to lock in a side deal.
Not a single China expert or democracy advocate was on the plane, though, which should shock Americans to our core. The New York Times editorial board wrote yesterday:
“As is so often the case, though, Mr. Trump showed little strategic discipline, and he prioritized his own personal and political interests over the nation’s.”...
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Is it any wonder America is diminishing in the world when Trump is ony interested in his evil self?
How to Describe this Catastrophe? — Robert Reich
We must use words that accurately describe who Trump and his lackeys really are — and what they are actually doing to America.
Friends,
Words matter. When describing a government, they inevitably carry moral weight.
Over the last 16 months, Trump and his appointees have so profoundly undermined the United States government that we should use different words to describe these people than we’ve used to describe all previous administrations.
To begin with, they shouldn’t be called an “administration” at all. They should be referred to as a regime.
The Trump regime has flagrantly defied court orders. In February 2026, a federal judge (appointed by President George W. Bush) identified approximately 200 orders from the District of Minnesota alone that ICE had ignored since the start of the year, concluding that ICE had “likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” The regime has also vilified judges who rule against it and demanded their impeachment.
The regime has usurped Congress’s powers to declare war, issue tariffs, and appropriate public funds. It is using tariffs as cudgels for Trump’s political aims. The regime is seeking to stifle speech and silence criticism — in universities, law firms, and the media.
Secondly, this regime is not headed by a “president,” as the Constitution of the United States and our laws and history have designated the head of the executive branch of the U.S. government. To put the term “President” before Trump’s name defiles the Constitution. He is an authoritarian.
Trump has illegally fired more than 300,000 career civil servants. He has fired inspectors general who are charged with holding political appointees accountable. He punishes whistleblowers who protest abuses. He attacks marginalized groups and foments bigotry. He is openly persecuting political opponents. He has given out pardons to convicted felons who are political supporters or financial contributors — including nursing home fraudsters, a Honduran president who smuggled 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, and January 6 seditionists. He has sent federal troops into states and cities headed by Democratic officials. ...
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So, we stop referring him as president. Instead we will refer to him as "his Belligerency?" How about "his Loserness!?"
Trump Just Handed Mass Detention Policy to a Private Prison Executive — Adrian Carrasquillo
An officer wearing the logo of the GEO Group private prison company outside the Adelanto ICE Processing Center detention facility in Adelanto, California, on July 11, 2025. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)
THE NEW HEAD of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be David Venturella, a former executive of the GEO Group, which I think of as the Coca-Cola of immigrant detention—the ubiquitous, hugely profitable, default option wherever you go. (That would make CoreCivic, America’s second-largest provider, the Pepsi of private prisons.)
Trump’s appointment of a veteran of the prison-industrial complex is a shocking display of how intertwined private industry and government bureaucracy have become over the last sixteen months. It also shines a light on the state of the Department of Homeland Security and hints at the authority (or lack thereof) of its new leader, Markwayne Mullin.
But first, let’s chat about Venturella.
This isn’t one of those things where, as part of a long career, Venturella held an executive post a dozen years ago.
No. From 2012 to 2023, Venturella was a senior vice president of a company that holds $1 billion in ICE contracts. According to the SEC, even after retiring from the GEO Group, Venturella continued to advise on new and existing contracts, serving as a paid consultant until January 2025. What ever could have happened in January 2025 that led Venturella to give up this gig?
And, how unusual is this?
Well, ethics rules bar federal employees from working on contracts awarded to their former employers. But the Washington Post reports the Trump administration conveniently granted Venturella a waiver. Within two weeks of leaving his consulting role at GEO Group, Venturella joined ICE as a senior adviser. At the time, ICE reassured the press that Venturella would have “no role in reviewing, approving, or recommending contracts.” If that state of affairs was ever true, it’s over now....
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Your new concentration camp home, America!
You’re Getting Robbed. By Trump. In Broad Daylight — William Kristol
This morning, amid the ongoing negotiating stalemate in Iran, Donald Trump made a sudden public concession: He was no longer calling, he said, for Iran to permanently abandon its nuclear ambitions, but rather to accept a twenty-year moratorium. “Twenty years is enough, but the level of guarantee from them is not enough,” the president said aboard Air Force One while returning home from China. “In other words, it’s got to be a real twenty years.” Happy Friday.
The Worst Grift Yet?
by Andrew Egger
I have to admit: Amid the daily carousel of Trump outrages, I’d sort of lost track of his absurd $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for failing to prevent the years-ago leaking of his tax returns. It wasn’t that I thought Trump’s lickspittle Treasury Department wouldn’t be willing to settle with him on his terms, or that I thought he’d be ashamed to take the money. There was just something about the ludicrousness of the story—the size and scope of the shameless attempted robbery of taxpayer money—that made it tough to get my brain around it. The corruption literally boggled the mind.
Well, I’d better start getting my brain around it quick. Multiple outlets reported this week that Trump and the IRS are close to finalizing a settlement in the case. And according to ABC News, that settlement is expected to hinge upon the funding of a truly insane new pot of government money: “a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.”
ABC News’s sources cautioned that the deal wasn’t yet finalized. But the fund under discussion would be the next step in the evolution of Trump’s unimaginable presidential graft. The members of the commission overseeing disbursements would serve at Trump’s pleasure, and he’d be able to remove them without cause at any time. The commission would have no obligation to disclose its decision-making process for how to disburse the money. And while Trump himself would be barred from directly receiving payments, “entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims.”
This story is one that piles intolerable outrage on intolerable outrage. There’s the baseline obscenity of the lawsuit in the first place. Even if Trump hadn’t been reelected president, $10 billion was always a ludicrous ask in damages for the leak of his tax returns—a leak perpetrated by an outside contractor, not one countenanced in any way by the IRS. (That contractor, Charles Littlejohn, was caught and is serving a five-year prison sentence.)
There’s the obvious conflict of interest. The IRS has fought other lawsuits brought on the basis of Littlejohn’s leaks, arguing it isn’t liable for the misdeeds of a contractor. But the idea that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s IRS would fight as hard to keep money out of the hands of Bessent’s boss was laughable from the start....
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Trump will take your money anyway he can steal it! Do you know that's what crooks do?
Aftermath: Trump Is Wrecking the U.S. Military — Ryan Cooper
Are We Still at War?
Despite the supposed cease-fire, clearly yes. A blockade is an act of war, and both America and Iran have imposed them on the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump is currently in China, where he is apparently attempting to get Chinese help ending the conflict, but I’ll believe that when I see it.
Trump Is Showing How Not to Fight
One of the most common criticisms Republicans have of Democratic presidents is that they damage military readiness. During the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush accused Bill Clinton of such neglect. “The next president will inherit a military in decline,” he said. Donald Trump claimed in 2016 that President Barack Obama left the military “depleted,” and recently said that President Joe Biden left it “gutted.”
Well, Trump had a strategy. Find the most serious Alpha Male Warfighter among Fox News’s weekend hosts, put him in charge of the Pentagon, and take the proverbial gloves off. No more of this woke nonsense like “nonwhite male generals” or “following duly enacted treaties.”
The results are coming in: The military is falling to bits.
The most immediate problem is Trump’s consistent, impulsive use of military force, above all his madcap crusade against Iran. This war will certainly get its own chapter in future histories of military catastrophes; maybe even its own class at West Point someday entitled “Things to Avoid.”
All the fighting is leading to serious attrition. Three full U.S. Navy carrier battle groups—that is, a carrier and its complement of support vessels—have been in the field for months, which naturally costs billions and leads to serious wear and tear. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the newest aircraft carrier in the fleet, has finally been sent back for maintenance and refitting after steaming all over the planet nonstop for 11 months—the longest such deployment since the Vietnam War—which led to all kinds of maintenance and repair issues, including a major fire.
The Navy as a whole could be out of cash in two months, according to Chief of Naval Operations Daryl Caudle. The U.S. Army, facing a budget shortfall of $4 to $6 billion thanks to all the Trump deployments, is cutting back training exercises all across the force. The Air Force has lost many very expensive planes—in particular, an E-3 Sentry, which is literally impossible to replace—and U.S. bases around the Middle East have been heavily damaged....
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Virtually any nation with a military power can take over the U.S. in a heartbeat now that Trump has destroyed our defenses.
Trump named in newly found Epstein accusation that officials sat on for 17 years: report — Alexander Willis
Newly unearthed court records reveal that in 2009, a woman accused President Donald Trump of having “knowledge” of Jeffrey Epstein’s “sexual desire for minor girls,” veteran journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez wrote — an accusation she noted had been “available to law enforcement for 17 years.”
The accusation was discovered in a set of written answers provided by a woman who claimed to have been abused by Epstein as a minor between 2002 and 2005 at his home in Palm Beach, Florida. The filing is part of a lawsuit the woman, whose name is redacted in the document, brought against Epstein in the Circuit Court of the 15th Judicial Circuit in Palm Beach County.
The set of written answers was in response to questions provided by Epstein and his attorneys, according to the filing, one of which asked the woman to “list the names of all persons who are believed or known by you to have any knowledge concerning any of the issues in this lawsuit.”
The woman’s attorney or attorneys responded with a list of more than 50 names. Fifth on that list was “Donald Trump,” written more than seven years before he would become president.
Next to the listed names was a brief description of their knowledge concerning the lawsuit; one was accused by the woman of arranging for “underage girls to go to and from Jeff’s island,” and another, of being “Epstein’s house manager during [the] time our client went to him.” Trump was explicitly accused of having “knowledge of finances and [Epstein’s] sexual desire for minor girls.”
In the other written responses, the woman did not mention Trump again, but did detail the alleged abuse she endured while at Epstein’s home, which she claimed to have visited “more than 100 times.”
“I was made to touch the Defendant. I also observed sexual acts and had sexual acts perpetrated on me by Defendant, Jeffrey Epstein. At various times I was unclothed, as was the Defendant and others,” reads the written response in the legal filing.
“At all times material, I was a child, under the age of 18 years. The Defendant also used me to bring him other minor girls and he controlled and brainwashed me into believing this lifestyle was healthy and normal for a girl my age.”...
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Can we all see cleary the reason that Trump is so fearful of losing his so-callled immunity? He will be prosecuted the next day he leaves office!
Famed psychiatrist sounds fresh alarm as Trump's speech deteriorates: 'This is dangerous' — Tom Boggioni
A prominent psychiatry professor who signed a statement with 35 other medical experts raising concerns about Donald Trump's mental fitness is now highlighting alarming changes in the president's cognitive abilities — including what he characterizes as a dangerous linguistic regression and compulsive repetition patterns.
According to the Daily Beast, Dr. Henry David Abraham, professor of psychiatry emeritus at Tufts University School of Medicine, has spent extensive time analyzing Trump's public appearances for signs of mental deterioration over 40 years. His findings paint a troubling picture of declining cognitive function.
While Abraham has long characterized Trump as narcissistic and sociopathic, he believes the president is now exhibiting regression in his ability to manage language — a development he views as particularly alarming given Trump's access to nuclear weapons, the Beast is reporting.
Abraham has identified what he calls a "pathological technique of perseveration" — the compulsive repetition of verbal patterns and actions. Trump has increasingly returned to the same lines attacking political opponents and repeatedly touting his own cognitive test performance, among other self-congratulatory claims.
"This is not normal. This is dangerous. And worse, this is a man who has access to nuclear weapons," Abraham cautioned....
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Wow! I hope he doesn't expect anyone to actually DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!
'Unhinged' Trump 'out of control' and needs an 'intervention': biographer — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump's latest posting binges on Truth Social reveal how much he is "out of control, bizarre, unhinged [and] irrational," according to his one-time biographer, who said that his behavior under most other circumstances would warrant an "intervention."
Extended posting sprees have become a hallmark of Trump's second term in the White House, with many raising alarms about his sleep schedule, as they come during the dead of night. These instances can see Trump sharing dozens of Truth Social posts at a time, many with alarming messages to be seen coming from a sitting president. In a recent posting binge from Monday, for example, Trump shared a post calling former President Barack Obama a "traitor" and calling for his arrest
Michael Wolff is a longtime reporter and author who has had extensive access to Trump in the past, famously writing a series of tell-all books about the chaos of his first term in office. In the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," Wolff was unsparing in his take on Trump's posting habit, and what it says about his mental stability.
“Right now, you can look this up and find the president of the United States saying things—regularly saying things, continuously saying things — that are out of control, bizarre, unhinged, irrational, that have in every possible way departed reality,” Wolff said. “How do you react to that? Nobody actually has quite reacted to this. There are no headlines in The New York Times that say, ‘The president of the United States has flipped his lid,’ which in any reasonable, fair-minded reading of what he posts on social media... that’s the conclusion that you would come to.”...
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Once more — tell us who will be the one to do the deed that must be done if we are to survive? Everyone in power appears to be deathly afraid of a helpless, disutrbed old man. Pitiful.
Not So Fast. Tabs, Fri., May 15, 2026 — Evan Hurst
Donald Trump is on his way back from China, where he was thoroughly humiliated and mocked to his face by President Xi. How badly was he humiliated? So badly that this is his pathetic attempt to cover for the fact that Xi called the US a declining nation to his face.
Sure, loser bitch, the president of China was talking about Joe Biden and “transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, DEI,” and all of Biden’s bad trade deals, that’s what he meant when he invoked the “Thucydides Trap.” And suuuuure, Trump totally understands the reference. Suuuuuuuuuuure, you dumb bitch.
So that must be one of the most humiliating moments the United States of America has ever been through, right up there with all the other embarrassments Trump has directly caused. [Telegraph / Daily Beast / New York Times]
Colbert’s last show is nearing (May 21), and he spent some time last night making fun of Trump in China, because fuck Donald Trump is why.
You can officially keep getting your abortion pills online, per SCOTUS, and oh boy, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are maaaaaaaad. [NBC News]
James Comer, stupidest hayseed pigfuck in the whole House of Representatives, says he’s probably running for Kentucky governor in 2027. Oh, won’t you miss him! [Mediaite]
Trump DOJ will drop charges against Indian billionaire indicted on bribery charges in exchange for him bribing them now? Sure sounds like it. [New York Times]
Jonathan V. Last’s letter to the “Panicrats” is WE ARE GOING TO WIN. So take heart. [JVL at the Bulwark]
Actual New York Times headline: Talarico’s Taco Order Turns Into a Texas-Sized Debate. Oh no, does James Talarico eat secret gay vegan breakfast tacos? [New York Times]
Catherine Rampell welcomes incoming Fed chair Kevin Warsh — who wanted this job SO BAD — to his new position, and explains that he is already “cooked.” For one thing, he’s not gonna be able to lower interest rates the way Trump is demanding. [Bulwark]...
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As The Wicked Witch of the West said, "What a world! What a world!"
If AI Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence? — Joe Wilkins
These days, the conversation around AI automation and the job market is increasingly focused on “labor displacement,” the phenomenon in which new technology eliminates certain jobs but supposedly creates new ones elsewhere.
But AI, more than any tech that came before it, represents the possibility of mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale. Since workers in market economies depend entirely on employment for survival, mass unemployment would leave untold millions of people without anything to lose. Whether AI actually causes that remains a topic of debate, but the outcome if it does could be widespread social upheaval.
working class person’s wellbeing in a market economy depends almost entirely on their employment, it’s entirely possible that — if mass AI unemployment ever does genuinely hit, which to be fair is a major “if” — the conditions for serious social unrest could emerge.
In the hotbed of dog-eat-dog capitalism that is the United States, anti AI-sentiment is already on the rise. The data centers underlining the AI boom are widely reviled, and a surprising number of workers are admitting to sabotaging their company’s AI in the workplace. According to one survey, seven in ten people living in the US already think AI will make it harder to find work, a sentiment that isn’t helped much by a horrible job market....
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Science is no longer fiction.
This is what elite detachment looks like — Thom Hartmann
Bill Maher and Sen. John Fetterman sat around joking about Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom like a couple of wealthy guys at a country club joking over cocktails as the republic burns outside the window.
Maher dismissed the outrage by calling the cost “couch money.” Fetterman rolled his eyes and reduced the backlash to “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” They practically patted each other on the back for being the last two supposedly reasonable men in American politics.
Calm down, peasants, they were essentially saying. It’s only a $330 million gilded palace add-on for a man who already treats the presidency like his private casino.
This is what elite detachment looks like in America now. Smug. Self-satisfied. Historically illiterate....
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We can do without them. It would be a better world.
Trump isn't mentally ill — it's far worse — Thomas Meisenhelder
Dear public figures, media folks, and journalists, please do not suggest that President Donald Trump is crazy. It is not helpful and, in fact, it is hurtful... not to him but the rest of us.
There are two main reasons for this request. First, calling Trump crazy is harmful to people who have a mental health condition or who have loved ones with a mental illness; second, it is inaccurate and leads to a serious misunderstanding of the man, his behavior, and it’s origins and consequences....
"I am a psychiatrist who held a high faculty position at a major medical school for over 40 years. l taught the DSM to medical students & resident physicians. I often was called upon to make diagnoses of problem cases.
It is really a case of splitting semantic hairs here. We can all see the same examples of Trump's disordered speech & behavior. The question then becomes how we choose to identify & label it.
It is correct to state that Trump is both mentally ill & evil. Much about him that is evil is largely a function of his mental illness. Some mental disorders are primarily chemically based (e.g., schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, OCD, Major Depression, ADHD, etc.). Other disorders are more a function of disordered personality development rather than any chemical imbalance.
Trump's baseline is to have one of the most severe cases of Narcissistic Personality Disorder in history. Much of his "evil doing" is a direct function of his narcissistic needs. He also has Attention Deficit Disorder, although this primarily contributes to hasty, impulsive decision making & inability to comprehend the subtle nuances of any issue. In addition, he has developed a progressive impairment of his cognitive functions to the point where he surely fulfills the criteria for a diagnosis of Major Neurocognitive Disorder (dementia). This causes him to be forgetful & unable to control his most primitive aggressive impulses. Hence, his "evil doing" is exacerbated.
A person with such obvious & severe mental illness would be required to undergo a comprehensive neuropsychiatric evaluation to assess their fitness for any position of responsibility. It is a matter of utmost urgency that Trump receive such an evaluation. I strongly suspect that, if done, it would lead to a recommendation that he no longer continue as POTUS.
— ProfessorofClinicalPsychiatry (comments)
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Under Trump we are all victims of his violence and predation. He's no more than a power addict, same as any other addict. He's preoccupied with predation and uses it for retribution he imagines evens a score that must be settled in his favor. As such, he is mentally distorted. There are many examples of this in nature. Rape is an act of violence. That a jury doesn't accept this does not make it untrue. So, tell us, when and who raped Trump?
Trump Tells NYT Reporter His Questions Are Treasonous
The Huffington Post reports:
Trump went into a two-minute rant on board Air Force One on Friday when asked by New York Times reporter David Sanger why the U.S. continues to attack Iran despite not getting “the political changes” it initially set out for.
“We’ve had a total victory except like people like you who don’t write the truth and The New York Times and CNN I would say are the worst,” he said. “And you should know better because you’re a professional. You know better,” he went on.
“I actually think it’s treason when you write like, they’re doing well militarily and they have no navy, no air force, no anti-anything.I had a total military victory. But the fake news, guys like you, write incorrectly. You’re a fake guy. We had a total military victory. I actually think it’s sort of treasonous what you write. You should be ashamed of yourself. I actually think it’s treason.”
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The perfect example of the action of a traitor redirecting his guilt on an innocent party.
Trump is he biggest of traitors in American history.
Wholesale Horror: Producer Price Index Spells Disaster for Economic Outlook as Trump’s War in Iran Drags On — — Newswire Editor
Trump’s war in Iran is now bleeding through the wholesale pipeline. April’s Producer Price Index (PPI) report shows wholesale prices rose 6% over the past year, the largest annual increase since December 2022, with core wholesale inflation at 4.4%. Despite the grim report, Trump said this week that he “[doesn’t] think about Americans’ financial situation,” and it’s clear. The president could not be more out of step with Americans. For working families struggling with high prices, their financial situation is top of mind.
The PPI reading comes just one day after the April CPI report revealed that consumers faced the sharpest inflation in nearly three years, and shows inflation pressures are still building. Rising diesel and jet fuel prices are increasing transportation-related costs. These upstream price increases indicate that families will face additional price hikes at the grocery store and across other everyday expenses in the months ahead....
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A depression isn't far away.
Judge blocks Trump administration’s demand for Rhode Island hospital's records of transgender kids — Kimberlee Krues
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration's sweeping demands for confidential transgender patient information from Rhode Island's largest hospital that provides gender-affirming care to minors.
U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy's Wednesday ruling is the latest setback for the U.S. Department of Justice, where at least seven other federal courts have agreed to quash or limit the expansive civil subpoenas sent to more than 20 doctors and hospitals last summer.
McElroy's decision also echoed similar concerns raised by judges surrounding the expansive scope of the subpoenas, describing the Justice Department as having “immense prosecutorial authority and discretion” but no longer trustworthy it will enforce its power fairly and honestly.
“DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case,” McElroy wrote....
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None of the their corrupt racist Nazi business!
New Red Flag Just Dropped: Men Who Are Weird About Women Who Own Their Own Homes — Robyn Pennacchia
Look, I just have to say it — men are getting weirder. Not like, real life men, who seem mostly fine and normal and well-adjusted, but the kind of men I do not know in real life, and who, as far as I am aware, only exist on the internet.
Like men who are put off, somehow, by women owning their own homes. This is something I only learned about a few minutes ago, thanks to a rather bewildering article in The Guardian. According to this, what I assume is a trend piece, single women are buying more homes these days, only to discover that the men they date have a weird “thing” about that.
Via The Guardian:
When Tiffany Tate put the wheels in motion to buy her first home, it felt like a win – until a date’s response stopped her cold.
“If you buy that house, what’s a guy going to do for you?” he said. It was just after their first date, and just before what would be their last.
Tiffany, then 29, had just ended a long-term relationship and moved from her home town of Winston-Salem to Charlotte for a new job at a career development center. She had just joined Match.com and was starting to dip her toe into the Charlotte dating scene. Her date, previously promising, was clearly struggling to understand why she would want a serious relationship if she was going to buy her own home.
Tiffany was thrown. “I was like, ‘I don’t understand the question.’”
I also would not understand the question! Hell, I don’t understand it now. My only reaction is, really “How bad does your personality have to be to think that the only thing you bring to the table in a relationship is home ownership? And why would anyone be with you if that were the case?”...
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They are not men!. They are Devo!
When all states make a married couple's real esatate community property this will not be a problem with insecure males any longer.
End patriarchy now!
ICE Shot a Man in December. Now, Agents Can’t Get Their Stories Straight. — Madison McVan
DHS agents have misled the public about similar incidents. This time, the target faces federal felony charges
These are the facts most everyone agrees on:
Juan Carlos Rodriguez Romero pulled out of his apartment complex to start a DoorDash shift on the icy roads of St. Paul four days before Christmas, during the early stages of Operation Metro Surge.
The driver behind him flicked on the emergency lights.
The immigration agents — two in a blue Ford Expedition and four in a white Dodge Durango — had run Rodriguez Romero’s license plate, and upon learning he was a Cuban national with a pending asylum case, decided to arrest him. Rodriguez Romero pulled over, and the agents surrounded his white Toyota 4Runner, ordering him to get out of the vehicle. He refused, and after the agents threatened to break his driver’s side window, he drove away.
The agents hopped back in their cars and pursued Rodriguez Romero as he circled back towards his apartment. As he pulled into the parking lot, he hit two parked cars and came to a stop. The agents again surrounded him — this time with guns drawn — and as Rodriguez Romero started up again toward the apartment’s main entrance, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fired two shots at his car.
Again, Rodriguez Romero stopped the car.
Here, the government and defendants’ stories diverge: either the immigration agents in the Durango rammed into Rodriguez Romero’s car from behind, pushing it into the feds’ Expedition; or, as the government claims, Rodriguez Romero reversed into the Durango before shifting into drive and ramming into the back of the Explorer, pinning an agent between the vehicles.
Rodriguez Romero then ran into his apartment building, where the officers caught up with him, handcuffed him and drove him to the Whipple Federal Building at Fort Snelling.
Rodriguez Romero is now facing three federal felony charges: two counts of assaulting a federal officer with a dangerous weapon — his car — and one count of assault on a federal officer, for allegedly biting the hand of an ICE officer while being arrested inside the apartment building....
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Did any of these gun thugs get any education at all?
Catherine Rampell and Robert Garcia: China Is Starting to Eclipse the U.S — Tim Miller
The Chinese have long envied America's power, influence, and market share. But after Trump's failed trade war, his attacks on allies, and the embarrassment in Iran, the view from Beijing has shifted: It now sees us as a nation in decline. Plus, inflation is creeping back up, the stock market is out of whack, new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh is screwed, and the ag community is feeling the pain of Trump's policies. And for the view from the Democratic resistance, Rep. Garcia tells Tim that Dems are not finished with their own redistricting and that Gavin's greatest strength is his obsession with winning. And he says Dems are going to fight like hell to win the House so they can investigate the Trump family corruption and the Epstein case—the single largest government cover-up in history. Rep. Robert Garcia and Catherine Rampell join Tim Miller
show notes
Catherine's newsletter, "Receipts"
A grimacing, sweaty Trump getting framemogged by Xi
Ezra Klein's town hall with Katie Porter's answer to CA's housing crisis
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it should not be difficult to surpass a country run by an idiot.
Paramount's talks with Stephen Miller's wife spark mockery: 'The grift is never-ending' — Robert Davis
Political analysts and observers mocked a giant Trump-aligned media company on Thursday after it was reported that the company is in talks to acquire a floundering conservative podcast.
Axios reported that Paramount is evaluating a potential distribution deal with Katie Miller, wife of President Donald Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and her podcast "The Katie Miller Podcast." The report noted that Paramount is considering the deal as it attempts to bolster its podcast roster. The company has also had discussions with Paragon Collective, which hosts comedians Whitney Cummings and D.L. Hughley, and Jubilee Media, according to the report.
Miller's podcast has just over 57,000 followers on YouTube. No episodes have reached more than 1 million views, even though they have included prominent conservative figures such as Fox News host Sean Hannity, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
"The conversations with Miller suggest Paramount is looking to bring in diverse voices, including conservatives," Axios reported.
The report attracted mockery from political analysts and observers on social media.
"The MAGA movement is DEI for conservative losers," Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist, posted on X. "Prove me wrong."
"Paramount needs Trump for their merger to go through, so conveniently now the wife of that goblin Stephen Miller gets a sweet deal out of it. The grift is never-ending," The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump political group, posted on X.
"Odd business decision to go all-in with people who are just on the edge of being toxic and unemployable for the rest of their lives," writer and producer Jonathan Harris posted on Bluesky.
"Her podcast isn’t very popular," Zaid Jilani, a political analyst and writer, posted on X. "This is clearly corruption, a way to pay off the family of a powerful Trump staffer."...
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Has our country turned into nothing other than a nest of grifters?
Another America First patriot caught selling merch made in China — Robert Davis
An "America First" candidate running for the Senate in North Carolina has been caught selling merchandise made in China, according to a new report.
Michael Whatley has been giving supporters drink koozies that were made in China, according to a Daily Beast report. The koozies appear to be linked to a campaign expense exceeding $1,600 that Whatley's team noted in a recent Federal Elections Commission filing, the report added.
Whatley is also not the only America First candidate caught selling merchandise made in China. President Donald Trump has also sold merchandise made in countries ranging from China to Haiti and Nicaragua, both in his private businesses and his political campaigns.
Voice of America News reported in 2024 that some Trump merchandise, such as his “Make America Great Again” Trump hat or “Childless Cat Lady for Harris” shirts, was made in China....
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Apparently, grifting is us!
'Guarantee it's coming': Ex-FBI official warns of catastrophic vulnerability due to Trump — Bennito L. Kelty
A former FBI official warned that the Trump administration "dismantled" the teams responsible for handling new strains of a virus now alarming experts and the world.
"The hantavirus situation should serve as a wake-up call," Frank Figliuzzi, a former high-ranking FBI official, told Harry Litman on his podcast on Thursday.
"Did you know that the actual unit created to deal with new strains of hantavirus research, including the strain that we're seeing right now, has been dismantled?" Figliuzzi asked. "Gone, fired."
Hantavirus is a fatal virus with no cure. Experts have been sounding the alarm about the virus' spread as passengers aboard an infected cruise ship have been dying during the last few weeks.
On top of that, "the unit that handles cruise line health inspections no longer exists. DOGE came in, Robert Kennedy Jr. came in and got rid of these seemingly indiscriminately."
Figliuzzi added that "thousands" of epidemiologists who could help the U.S. prepare and respond to the hantavirus "are gone!"...
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May it all happen at Mar-a-lago!
Counterterrorism Czar’s Blueprint Targets Leftists, Ignores Far-Right Violence and Heaps Praise on Trump — Hannah Allam
For a year, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka promoted the national strategy he was drafting, saying he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint that would overhaul the U.S. approach to combating terrorist threats.
The finished product, released May 6 after months of delays, is a 16-page, typo-sprinkled document that ranks threats based on politics rather than intelligence assessments, according to several current and former counterterrorism officials and threat analysts.
Islamist militant groups, the perennial top concern, now come second to Latin American drug cartels. The violent far right, which the FBI has repeatedly called the leading domestic threat, doesn’t merit a mention. Meanwhile, militant leftists, a small subset of extremist violence in the United States, are portrayed as a threat on par with global terrorist networks such as al-Qaida.
“A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged,” the document says, “driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”...
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He's just looking at you and me, my fellow Americans. Stop kidding yourseleves. You can smell the Nazi death camps from this one.
Electric Company Says It’s Cutting Off an Entire Town So It Can Sell All Its Power to Data Centers — Joe Wilkins
The data center scramble feeding off the AI boom is no longer just raising utility prices for nearby civilians — it’s rerouting their utilities entirely.
Bombshell new reporting by Fortune details the plight of residents in Lake Tahoe, on the border of California and Nevada, whose electrical supplier is cutting them off in order to supply more energy to nearby data centers.
According to the magazine, Nevada-based utility company NV Energy gave residents notice that they’ll stop providing power after May of 2027. That leaves California-based energy transmission company Liberty Utilities with a major gap in its supply chain, because NV Energy supplied 75 percent of its total power.
To understand exactly what’s going on, we have to untangle the mess of transmission lines and energy suppliers that makes up the US electrical grid. Taking a look on Open Infrastructure Map, an open source tool for mapping the world’s utility infrastructure, it’s clear NV Energy supplies the bulk of residents on both the California and Nevada side of Lake Tahoe. In all, Fortune reports the decision could leave as many as 49,000 residents in the dark — literally.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes, a Lake Tahoe resident and supervisor with the California Energy Commission’s Efficiency Division, told Fortune....
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Indeed! None of us will exist if we keep allowing fascism to ruin us! And make certain, that's exactly what doing us in!
Tabs, Tabs, Everywhere A Tabs. Tabs, Thurs., May 14, 2026 — Evan Hurst
Good morning, time for this again!
First, though, remember if you are in Hawaii, you have party plans for Wonkette parties! This is us copy/pasting from last time Rebecca typed it:
First up, Big Island! Meet us at the Kaleo’s in Pahoa, 15-2969 Pahoa Village Road, on Thurs., May 14, from say 5 to 8 p.m. Do you need money to join us? No. Wonkparties are always free (though sometimes they’re potluck), and MAMA’S ALWAYS BUYIN’. Then: Oahu! Fri., May 15, say 7-9! See you at Hula’s Bar and Lei Stand (heh) in Honolulu, 134 Kapahulu Ave., 2nd Floor of the Waikiki Grand Hotel. Ohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind!
OK, good!
Well darnit, all your food has salmonella. Check these recalls to find out what to take out of your mouth! It isn’t Wonkette party food. [NBC News]
If you are a man and you are upset that the woman you are dating has bought her own lady house with her own lady money, are you a normal guy? Or are you an insecure weirdo? [Guardian]
Funny news: they’re recalling the Cybertrucks because the wheels are fallin’ off! Funnier news: “Poor Cybertruck sales mean that only 173 of the stainless steel pickup trucks will actually need to be recalled.” LOL! [Independent]
Trump is reportedly planning 250 pardons for America’s 250th birthday, so we can’t imagine what kind of perverts and pedophiles he’s about to release back on to the streets with this list. [Wall Street Journal]
Surprise, sounds like Kash Patel is making up arrest numbers to make himself look good, considering how his job is in danger. [MS NOW]
Georgia racist shithole Governor Brian Kemp is calling an emergency redistricting session now that SCOTUS has issued its latest racist shithole ruling. Because guys like Brian might get crosswise with Trump now and then, but they’ll always come together over white supremacy. [CBS News]
Speaking of racist weirdos you wouldn’t leave your children or pets alone with, Sebastian Gorka says Trump has a letter in his desk addressed to JD Vance with specific instructions for what to do if another country kills him. Can you imagine relying on JD Vance to do stuff in your absence? What a pathetic existence that must be. [Daily Beast]
A school board in Wisconsin seems to be very worried that if the school band is allowed to play a certain piece of instrumental music, everyone will become indoctrinated and transgender. The piece of music in question does not have lyrics. [JoeMyGod]
OK that’s enough. More stories when we have more stories!...
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It is a bleak world for individual rights and American freedom.
The Billionaire Plot to Put Women Back in Chains — Thom Hartmann
How Heritage and Project 2025 are weaponizing government to strip away women's rights, votes, and freedom
Last weekend was Mother’s Day, so it’s an excellent time to examine what the most powerful conservative think tank in America is planning right now for the women in your life.
The same outfit that wrote Project 2025 and watched the Trump administration follow their playbook virtually to the letter, has been busy assembling a 90-page tract called “Saving America by Saving the Family.”
It maps out a future in which American women are stripped of their right to vote without their husbands’ paperwork, denied access to contraception and abortion, pushed back into the home, and reduced to what Heritage’s new American Citizenship chair Scott Yenor calls the “heroic feminine” of motherhood and wifeliness. It’s quite a Mother’s Day card from the people who claim to revere motherhood the most....
The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million eligible American citizens lack ready access to those documents, and the League of Women Voters puts the number of American women whose paperwork doesn’t match their current married name at 69 million, all of whom would suddenly need to dig up a birth certificate, a marriage license, proof of a legal name change, and matching photo ID just to vote.
Trans Americans, naturalized citizens, older Black Americans born in the pre-civil-rights South who were never issued birth certificates in the first place, college students, military families stationed overseas, rural voters who’d have to drive hours to a county office, and the millions of working-class citizens who simply can’t afford a passport would face the same wall. ...
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The bastards are disenfraching American's voting rights like the GODDAMN NAZI PRICKS THEY ARE! — RESIST!
Denver Bar Cancels “Anti-Vax Mixer” After Threats
Denver’s Fox affiliate reports:
A mixer held by an anti-vaccination community set to take place at a bar in downtown Denver was shut down after the venue said it wasn’t involved in the planning, and it was receiving threats and harassment. Unjected, a community for unvaccinated people, is hosting a mixer tour across the country. There are meet-ups planned in several cities, including Denver, which was originally set at Recess Beer Garden before receiving backlash.
On Saturday, Unjected posted on Instagram announcing the event at Recess in downtown Denver on May 29. The post said they were bringing cameras, however, that post was edited, saying they “aren’t allowed to film in Denver because its too ‘controversial.’” After Unjected announced the event on Instagram, several people criticized the event and called on Recess to cancel it. One person said, “oh nice, denver’s having its own Darwin Awards ceremony,” on the announcement on Instagram.
Recess released a statement canceling the event, saying they didn’t sponsor, authorize, or book it and became aware of it 48 hours ago. Recess said that over the past day, they’ve seen “hostile rhetoric,” including hateful language, online attacks, threats toward the business and harassment of the staff....
Read the full article. It appears that that threats were due to the ban on cameras. The group first appeared here in 2021 when they launched their “Unjected” dating app.
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Some people will do anyting for a buck regardless of who gets hurt.
REPORT: Seattle May Declare Civil Emergency To Deal With Large Influx Of LGBTQ People Fleeing Red States
The Seattle Gay News reports:
On the Trans Day of Visibility last month, Seattle’s LGBTQ Commission submitted a letter of recommendation to the Mayor’s Office, City Council, and City Attorney’s Office that requested that City officials declare a civil emergency in response to the increasing number of Trans and Queer people fleeing hostile environments in other states.
An anonymous source told the SGN that the letter has since been received, and discussions between City officials and community members behind closed doors indicate Seattle is on the cusp of declaring a state of emergency for LGBTQIA+ refugees before Pride Month in June.
In its letter, the commission argues that “declaring a civil emergency would provide a framework to assess near-term service demand and identify targeted investments to stabilize existing providers and prevent downstream cost escalation across shelter, healthcare, and crisis response systems.” The anonymous source explained to the SGN that declaring a civil emergency will free up additional City funds that can be put toward these services, as was done with Seattle and King County’s state of emergency on homelessness in 2015....
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People had to flee Nazi Germany too.
Fetterman Defends Trump Shrugging Off Inflation
The Hill reports:
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) on Wednesday night defended President Trump’s comment that he is not focused on the financial situations of Americans while negotiating with the Iranian government.
“He said something that got clipped … saying, ‘I’m not thinking about [the] American people financially,’ but what he really was saying — he did say, is… ‘I’m really thinking that we can’t ever let Iran [build] a bomb,’” Fetterman told Fox News host Sean Hannity.
“That’s the essence of what that is, and to hold that line,” the Pennsylvania Democrat continued. “I mean, how could we just walk away and… let that happen?” Fetterman, who campaigned as a liberal in 2022, has aligned with the president on issues ranging from the conflict with Iran to border security to the construction of the White House ballroom....
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Fetterman is a lost cause as both poltician and human being.
White House Bypassed Rules To Start Work On Arch
The Washington Post reports:
The Trump administration planned to start work at the site of the president’s proposed Triumphal Arch by piggybacking on an existing, unrelated contract for engineering services at the White House grounds more than a mile away, emails obtained by The Washington Post show.
The move would allow the administration to bypass a potentially lengthy public bidding process, and experts said it was unusual because the arch site is on National Park Service land across the Potomac River and is not part of the White House complex.
Park Service acting director Jessica Bowron wrote to White House officials last month asking whether the agency could extend a contract between the White House and engineering firm AECOM Services for an environmental assessment for the proposed 250-foot arch.
In her email, Bowron acknowledged that the proposed arch isn’t adjacent to the White House like Lafayette Square, another site AECOM has worked on under the same agreement, but she wrote that using the existing contract would allow work to “align with the Administration’s timeline.”...
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Our fascist criminal dictaror government erecting gaudy and arrogant monuments to a criminal. May they all be leveled with time.
Florida’s new history course whitewashes the founders on slavery — Chauncey DeVega
A rival Advanced Placement curriculum is offering a dangerous view of the Constitution and America's founders
Florida has long been a laboratory for autocracy. Several of the Trump administration’s most extreme policies were piloted there, including aggressive immigration enforcement, the systematic rollback of civil rights and voter suppression.
Now the Sunshine State is offering a new experiment: a high school history course offering a conservative interpretation of American history and a corrective to the official Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum, which more than half a million students took last year, and that most historians and educators consider to be ideologically well-balanced. Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s education department have attacked the AP course as “woke” and unpatriotic because it examines the complexities of American history including White on Black chattel slavery, the genocide of First Nations peoples and other realities that puncture sacred civic myths such as American exceptionalism and the fantasy that America is, and has always been, the greatest country in the world....
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Land of the Happy Negro state continues to their racist ways. Deh be happy!
Ready, Fire, Aim? The Army Has A Sudden $6B Budget Shortfall — Susie Madrak
Major drivers, a U.S. official noted, have been costs associated with the Iran war and an expanding mission securing the southern U.S. border.
The Army is grappling with a "sudden" budget crunch and scrambling to slash training costs across broad swaths of the force, according to internal documents reviewed by ABC News and multiple U.S. officials.
Gee, seems like someone should have seen that coming. Isn't Whiskey Pete supposed to be in charge of their budget?
The cuts are to make up for a shortfall of some $4 billion to $6 billion, according to one of the officials, as the service has drastically expanded its operational footprint at home and abroad. But you can be sure Trump's "Golden Dome" plan has a lot to do with it.
The cuts range from elite schools to unit-level training, and have triggered a wave of abrupt cancellations and unusually aggressive spending scrutiny months before the fiscal year ends in September. The service's multibillion-dollar shortfall is the product of a widening set of operational demands and rising costs across the force.
Major drivers, a U.S. official noted, have been costs associated with the Iran war and an expanding mission securing the southern U.S. border.
You don't say!
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That's what happens when you give a kid a buck. He blows it on a war.
Bill Would Ban Lawmakers From Becoming Lobbyists
CNBC reports:
Congress members would be permanently banned from becoming lobbyists after they leave office under a new bipartisan bill, first reported by CNBC.
The legislation would not only ban senators and U.S. House members from being registered lobbyists, but would also prevent then from being compensated for trying to influence lawmakers and staff on behalf of companies or groups — closing a loophole that would allow former lawmakers to lobby without being a registered lobbyist.
The effort, from Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla. and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., comes as a growing number of lawmakers are speaking out against profiting from their elected positions. Numerous bipartisan bills have been introduced this Congress to ban things like members owning and trading stocks, or banning themselves from betting on prediction markets.
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Pass it. It's the least we can do with grifters.
Fox News Panelist: We Have To Accept Inflation And High Gas Prices Or We’re Not A Superpower Anymore
“As to what we were talking about before about the comment he made, look, what Donald Trump is doing in Iran is the most important thing any American president has done since Ronald Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall.
“He is restoring American strength on the world stage and he is disarming a terrorist regime of the possibility of getting a nuclear weapon. If we cannot accept a few months of higher inflation and a few months of higher gas prices in order to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, we’re not a super power anymore.
“And Donald Trump is behaving like the leader of a super power. He inherited a situation where our country was no longer respected. We had the Afghan withdrawal, we had the Chinese balloon incident that you alluded to, people thought — the Chinese, the Russians, everybody thought we were weak.
“And he’s restoring American strength on the world stage and what he’s doing in Iran is hugely important but it has to end in victory.” – Fox contributor Marc Thiessen.
"OK, Marc YOU pay for it...
SOMETHING IS HAPPENING TO AMERICA THAT IS SLOW, SYSTEMATIC AND DEADLY. TRUMP IS KILLING AMERICA, AND IT’S DELIBERATE.
1: Trump has seriously weakened our NATO partnership, our strongest defense alliance against Russia and China, by using his standard tactic of bullying and insulting anyone, including entire countries, who won't do his bidding.
2: Trump’s HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former heroin addict who admitted to snorting cocaine off a toilet seat, is killing our public health infrastructure, creating a more sicker and vulnerable America with communicable diseases - had you ever heard of a measles outbreak before last year? And because Trump withdrew the US from the World Health Organization we no longer get valuable info about impending diseases like the hantavirus. The Food and Drug Administration commissioner resigned and no permanent head of the Centers for Disease Control or surgeon general are in place. And Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — the head of the National Institutes of Health and the acting head of the C.D.C. — suggested that no new protocols were necessary to prevent the spread of the disease. His suggestion? "The best prevention is to make America healthy again."
3: At the Pentagon Trump’s frat boy Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in history, is firing our most qualified Generals, depleting our best military hardware rapidly in a stupid, incompetent war that America is currently losing despite so far spending $50 billion
4: Trump’s DOGE deliberately hollowed out our government from essential experts to destroy its functioning capabilities.
5: Trump and Elon Musk killed USAID without even knowing exactly what it did, hundreds of thousands have already died because of lack of access to live saving meds we used to provide, and we lost our goodwill around the world and became an isolated pariah.
6: Trump's ICE became his brown shirts, killing and abusing Americans to obey, arresting anyone with brown skin who looked suspect - 75% had no criminal record. The conditions at the concentration camp holding facilities are inhumane and making many detainees sick.
7: Trump’s weird, wannabe fascist FBI director Kash Patel is charging everyone and anyone to silence Americans and going after Trump's enemies despite swearing under oath that he would not, as well as firing any FBI agents who were involved in bringing Trump to justice before he was reelected. Patel uses a very expensive taxpayer funded FBI private plane to visit his home in Las Vegas and his "country singer" girlfriend in Nashville, who herself is protected by a taxpayer funded SWAT team. Before the Iran war began, many agents were fired who were Iran experts
8: Trump's National security head, the skunk looking Tulsi Gabbard, is dismantling our intelligence, making America vulnerable to terrorist attacks as well as Iran's cyber attacks.
9: Trump’s Interior Secretary is dismantling our national parks and erasing uncomfortable yet true American history from their guideposts, while putting Trump's face on the admission tickets
10: Trump’s economic team of Scott Bassett and Howard Lutnick are crashing the economy in favor of the wealthy, creating a population of economically needy, slashing billions from Medicaid and thousands have already lost their health insurance.
11: Every country has a copy of Trump's Epstein files for potential blackmail
12: Trump's Federal Communications Commission is actively and blatantly going after TV shows and comedians that criticize Trump. FCC head Brendan Carr trumpeted that PBS and NPR have been defunded, ABC was successfully sued, and threatened Jimmy Kimmel with cancellation, saying, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way." Because Texas State Senator James Talarico poses a serious threat to the Republican US Senate seat in Texas, his appearances on The View and Stephen Colbert were threatened by the FCC. Colbert was forced by CBS to air Talarico's segment on YouTube.
13. Trump has destroyed the East Wing of the White House to build a huge ballroom that will destroy the symmetry of the WH design, as well as proposing other eyesore construction throughout DC including a "garden of heroes" and a huge hideous triumphal arch that will block the view of Arlington Cemetery, where Trump thinks only "suckers and losers" are buried.
14: Trump is potentially asking for the social media histories of foreigners who want to enter the US, weeding out anyone who posted anything critical of Trump. The Trump administration has partnered with Palantir Technologies to create a vast database that connects various personal records of American citizens, using facial recognition technology to identify those who show up to protest Trump. The company has received significant government contracts, including a $795 million deal with the Department of Defense. This capability has sparked debates about surveillance and civil liberties but THEY'RE DOING IT ANYWAY, JUST LIKE IN CHINA.
15: Trump's Environmental Protection Agency should be named the Environmental Destruction Agency, as polluters have been deregulated, federal land is being turned over to developers, clean energy sources are being defunded in favor of Trump's billionaire oil friends, Trump made up the phrase "beautiful clean coal" despite that clean coal does not exist, and Trump's personal hatred of windmills (because they block the horizon at his Scotland golf course) is literally cancelling previously negotiated wind projects - Trump repeatedly and stupidly lies that if the wind isn't blowing people won't get any power
16: Trump is destroying the Dept. of Education which is doing lasting damage to schools, special needs students and needed research.
17: Trump has defunded medical research which has already caused deaths of people involved in studies who suddenly lost their medications and treatments
18: Trump is trying to impose his will on universities he deems too "woke," and schools are replacing what they called "liberal indoctrination" with conservative indoctrination of their own
19: A virulent, hateful racist, Trump is trying to destroy all gains made by people of color in the last 60 years, eliminating Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies across the country, referring to it as "anti white racism."
20: Trump, his family and his oligarch enablers are looting our treasury and stuffing our tax dollars into their pockets, as well as using the clout of the presidency to get his family billion dollar development projects overseas - the corruption is open and in your face as if to say, "Whaddaya gonna do about it?"
21: Trump has already spent much of his presidency playing golf at one of his resorts, flying on Air Force One with Secret Service and press that has so far cost the taxpayer $150 million
22: Trump has alienated millions of Catholics by insulting Pope Leo, who dares to challenge him
23: Trump has destroyed the Kennedy Center, which was running just fine without his interference, installed inept crony Richard Grenell who alienated artists and those who worked there, while slapping his name on it in front of JFK despite that it's a living memorial to JFK.
24: Trump has destroyed the relationships between allies Canada, England, France, Italy and many others
25: Trump's tariffs have destroyed small businesses, made prices everywhere rise, and threatened farmers with bankruptcy - famers need to be bailed out again, while the national debt has risen over $2 trillion since the start of Trump's 2nd term
26: Republicans encouraged by Trump are gerrymandering congressional districts so that majority black districts will no longer have black representation. Republicans are doing nothing to stop Trump because they literally fear for their lives if they do - the minute any Republican goes against Trump they get credible death threats from his violent cultists. Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had someone threaten to kill her son, and when she told Trump about it he said, "You brought it on yourself."
27. Because he knows they will vote for him, not that he believes any of it, Trump is kowtowing to the most extreme voices in the white supremacist Talibangelical Christofascist religious right, doing their bidding as they attempt to destroy LGBT and other minority rights and impose their version of fascist Christian Nationalism. Pete Hegseth's pastor Doug Wilson called for the re-criminalization of homosexuality just weeks ago.
28. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen have become an article of faith within the Republican Party, more than five years after he lost to Biden, and it means victories in this year’s midterm elections would give Trump supporters who were central to his efforts to overturn the election key oversight roles in the 2028 presidential election. Multiple election deniers in swing states are also running for Secretary of State, a role that oversees elections.
29. Rather than doing the actual job of the president to make life more affordable and better for Americans Trump concentrates on worthless vanity projects like the ballroom, a cage match at the White House, a military parade in his honor and putting his signature on money and passports.
30. For years Trump’s golf courses have served as a refuge and a showcase for the LIV golf tournament, whose chief backer, Saudi Arabia, has been using the golf league in part to divert attention from its human rights concerns, particularly following the 2018 killing of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump will let authoritarians around the world get away with anything, even murder, as long as they praise him.
31. Trump's ethics violations, as well as the ethics violations of his Cabinet members, are so far off the charts that it's almost impossible to catalogue them all as he leads the most corrupt administration in US history, using public power for private benefit such as suppressing the release of the Epstein files, where Trump is mentioned thousands of times. Former Homeland Security head Kristi Noem was a walking ethics violation, an egomaniac using spending millions to advertise herself in commercials in various costumes while (allegedly) conducting a blatant extramarital affair with thuggish Trump honcho Corey Lewandowski
32. On that ethics front, Trump has successfully turned the Justice Department into his own personal law firm, using it to stonewall investigations into his illegal conduct and blatantly lie that it is "pursuing justice" rather than nakedly going after Trump's enemies - the latest example being the indictment of former FBI director James Comey for posting a picture of seashells on the beach spelling out "86 47" calling it a "threat on Trump's life." These bogus investigations are preventing the department from going after actual criminals. Trump's appetite for revenge is bottomless and he will keep going through underlings until he finds lackeys to do his bidding no matter how unethical, as Comey said, "They're trying to find people who will do that which principled people will not do."
33. Trump is also suing the IRS for $10 billion (with a B) dollars because someone leaked his tax returns during his first term which showed that he paid no more than $750 in federal tax for several years. Since he heads the government and thus the IRS, this puts Trump in the position of being both the Plaintiff and the Defendant. The Justice Dept. is actually considering settling this case which would double Trump's current net worth with our tax dollars that could be spent ensuring health care and other benefits for millions. Chris Hayes of MSNOW calls this "potentially the greatest heist in American history." Trump says that any settlement will all go the charities, but multiple investigations revealed that Trump misused funds from his charity, the Trump Foundation, for personal and political purposes. A New York judge concluded that he misappropriated charitable funds leading to a court-ordered payment of $2 million.
34. Right wing pro-Trump influencers such as Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by a shadow organization financed by billionaires as well as THE KREMLIN, which leads to...
35: Craig Unger's book AMERICAN KOMPROMAT contains credible evidence that Trump is in fact a Russian asset controlled by Putin, something Trump proves every time he speaks to Putin and then something awful happens. National security and political affairs analyst David Rothkopf's book TRAITOR - A History of American Betrayal From Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump, published during Trump's first term, opens with the paragraphs "The president of the United States is a traitor. He is a liar. He is a fraud. He is a racist. He is a misogynist. He is corrupt. He is unfit in almost every respect for the high office he holds. But what distinguishes him from every other bad leader the United States has had and, indeed, from every other senior official of the US government in over twenty-four decades of history, is that he has repeatedly, indisputably, and egregiously betrayed his country."
This list is, alas, only the tip of the iceberg of Trump's destruction, corruption and lawlessness. We are in serious trouble, and only voting complicit Republicans out of office will give us a chance.
— Max Schumacher (comments)
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Your little military is running out of money, Marc, you dumb fuck!
Trump White House plans evangelical Christian festival to 'rededicate country to God'— David Badash
The Trump White House is hosting an unprecedented Christian prayer festival Sunday on the National Mall — a nine-hour event that a Trump advisor describes as “rededicating the country to God.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and House Speaker Mike Johnson are all expected to appear.
The funding for “Rededicate 250: National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” comes in part from taxpayer dollars earmarked for America’s 250th birthday celebration, organizers say, according to The Washington Post.
The speakers are almost all Christian, and expected to largely be evangelical Protestant leaders and members of the Trump administration, “many of whom have embraced the message that America’s founders wanted the country to be explicitly Christian,” the Post reports. The event will have a “focus on American identity as aligned with a specific slice of conservative Protestantism.”
Pastor Paula White-Cain, Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office who delivered the invocation at President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, said the Jubilee “is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.”...
"Pastor Paula White-Cain, Senior Advisor to the White House Faith Office who delivered the invocation at President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, said the Jubilee 'is about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.'
Her first sentence was already a lie.
Perhaps she should stick to "speaking in tongues". Since its gibberish by definition it can't be true or false.
'Banana nana fo fana.' — Dmar3 (comments)
"This will be done in the same way that the 1930's rallys in Munich and
Nuremburg , pure white evangelical christian nationalism at its ugliest." — EZ Traveler (comments)
"There is no one pictured or mentioned I would trust my dogs or children with. A group of grifters, sexual predators, and deviants of various sorts. Paula White? A serial adulterer, three times married grifter of Trumps favorite kind. These religious zealots are exactly what our Founders warned us about. They are ready and willing to kill us all in the name of some Sky God or other. Jim Jones was a shirker compared to these people." — Ghost of Marid (comments)
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Which is, of course, the biggest bunch of bullshit ever. No such of damned thing occurred nor was ever stated, you retarded Talibastard asswipe! Jesus said, many will come in my name. She's one of the fakes!
https://www.alternet.org/white-house-trump-2676889714/
Trump Admits He Wrecked the Economy — Will Saletan
Donald Trump’s quest to get a bunch of taxpayer money for his White House ballroom project isn’t going great, with plenty of Republicans in both the House and the Senate still sounding highly skeptical. “It was one thing when private dollars were doing it,” Sen. John Curtis of Utah told Politico yesterday. “If you’re asking me for a billion dollars, I have some really hard questions.” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) was even more unequivocal: “Not happening here,” he said yesterday. Happy Wednesday.
Take It From Him
by Will Saletan
Donald Trump always finds a scapegoat. When the economy does well under other presidents, he takes the credit. And when the economy suffers under him, he finds someone else to blame. In his first term, it was the “China virus.” In his second term, it’s the Fed.
But now he’s in a jam. Official numbers released on Tuesday show that energy prices, grocery prices, core inflation, and the Consumer Price Index are all surging, thanks to Trump’s war in Iran. And this time, he can’t escape responsibility.
Why? Because he has repeatedly admitted, on camera, that he foresaw the war’s economic damage and started it anyway....
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I can hear so many answering, "So what?"
Orgullo. Tabs, Wed., May 13, 2026 — Evan Hurst
While the American president and his fascist regime are taking turns kicking every minority they can find right in the stomach, the leader of Spain posted this yesterday on Facebook...
That says, roughly, “For the first time Spain tops the Rainbow Map of LGBTI rights and freedoms in Europe. This is a recognition of our country’s social and legislative progress, and of all the people who have fought tirelessly to live with equality and without fear. In the face of those who strive to drag us back into the past, we move forward with strength, dignity and joy. Proud of our country.”
Speaking of hot Spanish stuff that makes gays and everyone else happy, y’all see that Vanity Fair cover shoot of tennis superstar Carlos Alcaraz? Holy shit.
Part of us just wants to say that’s the end of tabs for today, but we guess we’ll look for a couple more stories, not that there’s anything out there better.
How is Bari Weiss beclowning the entire profession of journalism today?
Speaking of “beclowning” and “in over their head”:
These absolute losers would get off so hard if there was a terrorist attack, because they are desperate to believe Americans would rally around Trump’s flag, just like they did for Bush after 9/11.
Not a chance, losers. Trump owns everything that happens on his watch. Everything.
Next up, KA$H PATEL IS NOT AS THINK AS A DRUNK YOU ARE, OSSIFER SENATOR, YOU ARE A DRUNK AS A KA$H YOU ARE, SENATOR OSSIFER! You gotta watch this absolute meltdown. Ka$h just doesn’t have what it takes. If you were his mom, that’s what you would probably say to him a lot....
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Is Trump’s Gilded Ballroom a Middle Finger to Working Americans? — Thom Hartmann
Wealth and celebrity have blinded people to what ordinary Americans can plainly see.
Bill Maher and Sen. John Fetterman sat around joking about Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom like a couple of wealthy guys at a country club laughing over cocktails while the republic burns outside the window.
Maher dismissed the outrage by calling the cost “couch money.” Fetterman rolled his eyes and reduced the backlash to “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” They practically patted each other on the back for being the last two supposedly reasonable men in American politics.
Calm down, peasants, they were essentially saying. It’s only a $330 million gilded palace add-on for a man who already treats the presidency like his private casino.
This is what elite detachment looks like in America now. Smug. Self-satisfied. Historically illiterate.
No, Bill. People are not angry because Trump likes chandeliers. They’re angry because symbols matter in politics. They always have.
Americans are watching a president who already wrapped himself in gold-plated excess try to build a massive gilded ballroom while millions of working people can’t afford rent, healthcare, childcare, or groceries. And then they’re being told by multimillionaire celebrities that noticing the symbolism somehow makes them irrational.
That’s not “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” it’s something called “civic awareness.”...
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Photo is of two idiots seriously ill with TDS!
Nobel economist begs NATO for help with Iran: Trump has 'no strategy' — Nick Hilden
As the consequences of President Donald Trump’s decision to launch war on Iran continue to spiral, Nobel-winning economist Thomas Friedman is begging for help from a group that the floundering U.S. Commander in Chief has “denigrated” again and again: NATO.
Addressing the international security body via the New York Times, Friedman acknowledged, “I get it. You despise President Trump for all the right reasons. He has walked away from Ukraine. He has threatened to seize Greenland and annex Canada. He has coddled Vladimir Putin. He is eroding America’s democratic institutions and norms. He insulted each of you so much that the German chancellor recently barked back that Trump’s America was being ‘humiliated’ by Iran. I get it.”
“Now get over it,” he pleaded. “Get all your navies together and proceed to the Persian Gulf immediately to join the American armada to make clear that Iran will never, ever be allowed to decide who shall pass and who shall not through the Strait of Hormuz. And, if it insists on trying to do so, it won’t just be taking on the United States and Israel, it will be taking on the entire Western alliance.”...
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There is now talk of removing Trump via the 25th Amendment by his own party. He could be gone sooner than later.
Trump and Republicans are suffering from 'extraordinary denial and magical thinking' — Sarah K. Burris
The New Republic's Greg Sargent spoke with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg on his morning podcast about the challenges President Donald Trump and the GOP face in ending the Iran war.
As the Iran war drags on past its 60-day limit and the Strait of Hormuz's closure sends fuel prices soaring, Trump appears to believe everything will suddenly end. Somehow, Iran will finally agree to the U.S.'s demands despite refusing over the past several years since Trump left the treaty.
"They also have said that they think the war is just going to end magically, right?" Rosenberg said. "Just the way that COVID ended. He kept saying COVID is just going to end one day. The war is just going to end, and things are going to snap back to the way they were. And I think that is the widespread belief in the Republican Party now, that this is a temporary blip."
The reality, he continued, is that inflation data now show it has surpassed Americans' wages. Inflation not only went up, U.S. wholesale inflation, known as the Producer Price Index, increased to 6 percent, April numbers show, according to the Associated Press. It makes it the highest increase since December 2022.
"Remember, energy inflation is different than food inflation or different than other inflation because it affects anything that is transported. That also goes up in price," Rosenberg explained. "So, it’s like a multiplier through the economy. It’s not just a singular pillar of inflation."...
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Are we witness to the greatest failure of America in its history? Time will tell.
Army 'scrambling' to cut training as costs 'balloon' under Trump: internal docs — Alex Henderson
Two and one-half months into President Donald Trump's war with Iran, the U.S. Army is, according to ABC News, suffering from a "sudden budget crunch." And ABC News' Steve Beynon reports that the Army is addressing the problem by "scrambling" to make training cuts.
ABC News and U.S. officials, according to Beynon, went over internal Army documents discussing their budgetary challenges. Beynon reports that "the move is to make up for a shortfall of some $4 billion to $6 billion, according to one of the officials, as the service has drastically expanded its operational footprint at home and abroad."
"The cuts, which range from elite schools to unit-level training, have triggered a wave of abrupt cancellations and unusually aggressive spending scrutiny months before the fiscal year ends September 30," Beynon explains. "The service's multibillion-dollar shortfall is the product of a widening set of operational demands and rising costs across the force."
The Iran war isn't the only thing fueling the military's budgetary woes.
"Major drivers, a U.S. official noted, have been costs associated with the Iran war and an expanding mission securing the southern U.S. border," Beynon reports. "Additionally, expansive National Guard missions, including the ongoing deployment in Washington, D.C., which alone is projected to cost roughly $1.1 billion this year, according to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. At the same time, the service is absorbing ballooning personnel expenses and stepping in to cover missions tied to Department of Homeland Security funding lapses, including at the southern border and construction projects."...
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When our military fails us we are in mortal danger, America.
AI Companies Are Recklessly Racing Toward a Cybersecurity Crisis — Newswire Editor
Google researchers announced Monday that cybercriminals recently used an artificial intelligence model to help create a dangerous zero-day vulnerability capable of exploiting computer networks at scale, marking what experts say is a major turning point in the cybersecurity landscape. A “zero-day” vulnerability is a hidden flaw or weakness in software that hackers discover before the company or public knows about it or has a fix available. It’s considered especially dangerous because attackers can exploit the flaw immediately, giving defenders “zero days” to protect themselves.
The findings come as leading AI companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, continue developing increasingly advanced models capable of identifying and exploiting critical software vulnerabilities. Google warned that malicious actors are already using AI to increase the speed, scale, and sophistication of cyberattacks, while researchers have observed state-backed hacking groups linked to China, Russia, and North Korea leveraging AI technologies to automate and refine offensive cyber operations. The developments have intensified concerns that powerful AI systems are being deployed faster than governments and regulators can establish meaningful safeguards to prevent catastrophic misuse....
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Our country is teetering on total collapse.
MAGA in Shambles as Trump’s “Made in America” Phone Crumbles Into Dust — Frank Landymore
All that glitters is not gold — or even a flashy phone of the same color.
Trump Mobile, a company backed by president Donald Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric, unveiled a $499 gold-colored smartphone last June, with an original release date slated for August 2025. Use the handset, and you could supposedly tap into Trump Mobile’s 5G cellular service. Presumably loads of MAGA faithful paid $100 deposits to pre-order the devices but to date, not a single one has shipped.
The delivery date first slipped from August 2025 to November 2025, then to Mid-March this year. With that last deadline now passed as well, there’s currently no official release date at all. In fact, the Trump Mobile website struck any mention of when the supposed gilt-edged phone — emblazoned with an American flag and the Trump name — would finally release, leaving the president’s loyal and most furious soldiers in the dark.
“Hey, Trump supporter here,” a man wearing Oakleys yelled while behind the wheel of his pickup truck in a viral TikTok that’s since been deleted but reshared across the internet. “This one goes out to Don Jr. and Eric. Where the f*ck’s my phones!?”
“I ordered three, no four gold Trump phones in the summer!” he fumed....
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More and more of us are realizing that Trump is just a con-man behind a curtain of collapsing grift.
NYT rips GOP Congress as Trump poisons American democracy — Thomas Kika
In a piece published Wednesday morning, the New York Times editorial board reserved particular criticism for the GOP-led Congress as it tracked President Donald Trump's efforts to poison American democracy, ripping the lawmakers for backing off when they could be doing things to stop it.
In the new piece, the board explained that the war with Iran is "the most significant military action in American history that a president has undertaken without any form of congressional authorization," marking a significant acceleration of Trump's "erosion" of democracy and disregard for Congress.
"Mr. Trump has received no approval whatsoever from Congress, the only branch of government with the constitutional authority to declare war," the board explained.
The piece included a chart with 12 metrics measuring Trump's damage to Democracy, graded on a scale of zero to 10, and based on the current state of the Iran war, the board confirmed that it was increasing the grade for bypassing the legislative branch by one notch, up to five.
"When a democracy slides toward autocracy, the leader often finds ways to neuter the legislature," the board explained. "Mr. Trump has done so in many ways: by usurping Congress’s power of the purse and imposing widespread tariffs (which courts have often deemed illegal; gutting congressionally authorized agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development; withholding approved funds for schools, libraries and scientific research; using private donations to pay for his White House ballroom during a government shutdown; attacking boats in the Caribbean and invading Venezuela; and more."...
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Deplorable Dictator that has fallen flat on his face.
GOP facing millions of 'furious' voters — and it’s only getting worse — Alex Henderson
With the 2026 midterms less than six months away and President Donald Trump suffering from persistently low approval ratings in countless polls, some GOP lawmakers have a warning for members of their party: voters are angry. A CNN/SSRS poll released on May 12 found that only 30 percent of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the economy — and almost 70 percent fear the United States will go into a recession in the next year.
According to Politico reporters Jordain Carney and Meredith Lee Hill, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and other GOP lawmakers are urging fellow lawmakers to be more proactive about the economy — especially inflation.
"Americans are furious about the rising cost of living, and a series of internal battles on Capitol Hill this week is laying bare why Republicans are struggling to do anything about it," Carney and Hill report. "House and Senate Republicans are facing divisions over a gas-tax holiday being demanded by President Donald Trump, not to mention housing and energy permitting bills that have stalled for months…. The scale of the political challenges facing Republicans were further underscored Tuesday with the administration's latest cost estimate for the Iran war surpassing $29 billion and a brutal inflation report showing gas, grocery and housing prices surging last month amid the conflict."...
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All "Trump For King" Ts must be burned! Only a loser would wear one!
Trump Refunded $166 Billion To Corporations. You Got Nada.
Distributed among customers who paid tariff-bloated prices? Reduced prices of vehicles sold now? Will Ford and GM ease the financial burden of citizens with bank accounts squeezed in the first place? -- Cliff Schecter
The Trump administration, with its habit for converting larceny into policy, is preparing to refund roughly $166 billion in tariffs to the very corporations that already collected the money from the public. One might as well reimburse a bank robber for wear and tear on his ransom notes.
Ford expects $1.3 billion. GM, $500 million. What noble purpose shall the torrent of cash serve? Distributed among customers who paid tariff-bloated prices? Reduced prices of vehicles sold now? Will Ford and GM ease the financial burden of citizens with bank accounts squeezed in the first place? Of course not. Automakers, like other companies getting tariff refunds from Trump, say they'll deposit them in their accounts to “boost earnings.”....
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So the elderly male white devils in charge can pay for their 10th home.
Trump Screams For Firing Of “Bum” McConnell Aide
The Daily Mail reports:
As McConnell was given the floor again after questioning by Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski, he tried to end the hearing with Hegseth, much to his colleagues’ confusion. “Here’s where we are, the vote is about over, the secretary has to get with the President on the China trip, I’m gonna’ ask Senator Murkowski to wrap up and thank you all for being here.” Before finishing, he was interrupted by a younger, male staffer who could be heard whispering into his ear.
“Baldwin, Shaheen, and Kennedy still have questions,” the staffer said. He was referring to Wisconsin Democrat Senator Tammy Baldwin, New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican John Kennedy. The staffer can then be heard clarifying that the hearing should “wrap up after” those questions. McConnell appears to crack a joke, saying “you see what I’m being told here?” McConnell then appears to get out of his chair to leave with the help of the male staffer.
Read the full article. On Truth Social, Trump is screaming that the “grandstanding” staffer is a “Never Trumper” because he pointed that the Democrats on the panel had pending questions.
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Both parties have people far too old to do their jobs. This has to be fixed if we are to survive.
Far-Right Former OK Schools Chief Files For Divorce
The Oklahoman reports:
Former Oklahoma State schools Superintendent Ryan Walters is divorcing his wife of nearly 15 years. Walters, who is now a frequent commentator on right-wing talk shows, filed a petition seeking the dissolution of marriage from his wife Katie on Friday, May 8.
In the filing, an attorney for Ryan Walters cited “a state of complete and irreconcilable incompatibility” as grounds for the divorce, saying it had “destroyed the aims of the marriage of the parties and rendered its continuation impossible.” The couple has four children. The divorce petition claims that joint custody is in the best interests of “the mental, physical and moral welfare” of their children and that they should both be awarded equal time.
Walters often made appearances on national news shows, advocating for the Bible to be mandated in classrooms and calling for an aggressive elimination of what he considered a “woke agenda” such as gender theory and critical race theory. Walters resigned in late 2025 to lead an anti-union group.
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Abuse by "Patriarchal Bible Beatings."
Court: Trump Still Owes $1M Sanction For Clinton Suit
The New Republic reports:
A federal appeals court tossed a chance Tuesday to rehear Donald Trump’s mega-lawsuit against his perceived political enemies. Trump’s 2022 suit targeted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey (amongst others), claiming that they had participated in a broad racketeering conspiracy to create false allegations that his 2016 presidential campaign was tied to Russia. A district court dismissed the case in January 2023.
But the frivolous legal attack wasn’t just struck down in court—it also netted Trump and his personal attorney, Alina Habba, a nearly $1 million sanction. In November, Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Pryor Jr. upheld the fine and noted that “many of Trump’s and Habba’s legal arguments were indeed frivolous,” echoing a lower court’s findings that Trump had made a “malicious prosecution claim without a prosecution” and a “trade secret claim without a trade secret.”
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Of course he does! He's a cheap, chiseling felon con-man who should still be in prison after all these years!
Trump: It’s Treason To Report On Iran’s Military Arsenal
b
“When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement.
“They are aiding and abetting the enemy! All it does is give Iran false hope when none should exist.
“These are American cowards that are rooting against our Country. Iran had 159 ships in their Navy — Every single ship is now resting at the bottom of the sea.
“They have no Navy, their Air Force is gone, all Technology is gone, their ‘leaders’ are no longer with us, and the Country is an Economic Disaster.
“Only Losers, Ingrates, and Fools are able to make a case against America!” – Trump, surely reacting to the New York Times report covered in the post below this one.
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The farce of the old fool!
Assassination conspiracy theories? Blame Trump — Amanda Marcotte
False flag stories reveal a deeper truth about Trump’s failing presidency
Let’s be clear up front: There is no evidence that Donald Trump has staged any of the three high-profile attempts on his life in the past two years.
I’ll likely get some angry reader feedback to that assertion because a lot of people believe at least one of the would-be assassinations — and quite possibly all three — were false flag operations. A new survey from NewsGuard shows that 54% of Americans are open to the theory that at least one of the attacks was staged, with only 38% saying definitively they believe all three were real. When asked about each separate assault — the 2024 shooting that grazed Trump’s ear at a Pennsylvania campaign stop, the arrest of the armed man at the president’s West Palm Beach golf course later that year and the recent incident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — fewer than half said these events were authentic....
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Sure, kid. We understand your liability issue. But we all saw what the fakes were. We have a free press and a First Amendment. Fox News would not give a shit about it.
U.S. Intelligence Shows Iran Retains Substantial Missile Capabilities — Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities.
Most alarming to some senior officials is evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten American warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway.
People with knowledge of the assessments said they show — to varying degrees, depending on the level of damage incurred at the different sites — that the Iranians can use mobile launchers that are inside the sites to move missiles to other locations. In some cases they can launch missiles directly from launchpads that are part of the facilities. Only three of the missile sites along the strait remain totally inaccessible, according to the assessments.
Iran still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers across the country and has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile, according to the assessments. That stockpile encompasses both ballistic missiles, which can target other nations in the region, and a smaller supply of cruise missiles, which can be used against shorter-range targets on land or at sea.
Secret new assessments say Iran has operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting that its military remains far stronger than President Trump has asserted....
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We've been betrayed!
Trump’s link to the 'lies' of staged wrestling exposed in new documentary — Adam Lynch
Comedian and satirist Munya Chawawa’s documentary “Wrestling With Trump” punches President Donald Trump in ways he should have been punched at the very beginning of his political career, says Guardian writer Lucy Mangan.
“Trump is the ultimate showman. He’s a master of it, a billionaire Barnum, but with a greed so insatiable it moves him ever further from entertainment into malevolence,” Mangun said. “If the Democrats had realized this earlier and recognized the strength the man was playing to and the particular voting public weaknesses he was preying upon, instead of sneering with distaste, then maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Chawawa, however, takes the “underused idea” that Trump and his team’s campaigns and style of government “use the same playbook as that created by the U.S. pro-wrestling industry’s most famous promoters, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE),” said Mangan.
The connection is more than obvious, added Mangan. World Wrestling Entertainment was founded by Vince McMahon and his since-estranged wife, Linda. Vince quit the business 2024 in the wake of allegations of sex trafficking and sexual assault, but his wife Linda is now the U.S. secretary of education.
One of the most-recognized tropes of fake wrestling is its habit of dividing “heroes” (white Americans) and villains (non-American, non-white Americans) with “Babyfaces” (good guys who play by the rules) “Heels” (who aren’t and don’t).
It works in the ring and at political rallies, said Chawawa, who notices Trump’s use of trash talk and his alienation of brown people to “rouse the bloodlust” and “make [voters] commit” to a world leader “who promises to rid the world of all the people perceived to be the cause” of white voters’ frustrations...
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Like tiny razors to the forehead and ear?
Republicans deploy ground troops in the states to execute 'the plan' — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump and the Republican Party are planning on sending troops to polling places during the 2026 midterm elections, according to a recent report by The New Republic.
“The Republican National Committee announced Tuesday that it has deployed poll watchers and election observers in at least 17 states for the midterm elections,” The New Republic’s Hafiz Rashid reported on Tuesday. “In a post on X, RNC Chairman Joe Gruters posted an audio clip where he said, ‘We’ve already deployed field staff and we’ve hired state directors and election integrity directors.’”
Although Gruters did not specify which states he was targeting, he made it clear that this is part of the GOP’s plan to retain control of Congress during the 2026 midterm elections.
“We focus on the big picture,” Gruters said. “We focus on winning. We have a plan. We’re executing the plan.”
As Rsahid reported, Trump himself has said he is considering sending the National Guard and ICE to voting locations in November.
“It’s a disturbing thing for Trump to say, just two days after he called for an ‘Election Integrity Army,’” Rashid wrote. “In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed that Republicans had one in 2024 ‘in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote’ and attacked Democrats for forming their own elections task force led by former Attorney General Eric Holder.” In light of Trump’s rhetoric and the RNC’s actions, Rashid argued that “it appears that the RNC has heard Trump loud and clear, and is taking action. It’s on top of everything else the Republican Party is doing to meddle in the midterms and beyond, from mid-decade redistricting that disenfranchises Democrats and Black Americans to spreading election-denial conspiracies from 2020. It has even installed election denialists in local governments and election boards across the country.”...
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Will he send U.S. troops? If this goes down it will be resisted by poll watchers, law enforcers, and citizens in every precinct. It will be televised. Trump is a stark raving madman.
'That's not what I hear': James Comer flees when confronted on Trump's words on economy — Matthew Chapman
House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) played ignorant when Meidas Touch reporter Pablo Manríquez confronted him about President Donald Trump's new comments dismissing the rising cost-of-living crisis.
The remark came after reporters asked him about the latest monthly inflation numbers. "The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon," said the president. "I don't think about Americans' financial situation."
"What do you make of Trump saying that he doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation?" Manríquez asked Comer, a staunch Trump ally.
"I don’t know that he said that," said Comer.
"He did," Manríquez pressed him.
"That’s not what I hear," Comer insisted. "Every time I talk to him, he’s focused on affordability."
"What about gas prices?" asked Manríquez, at which point Comer retreated and stopped answering questions.
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Tell the idiot he needs a hearing aid and learn how to use it! Trump is deeply ill.
Christian Nationalist Hate Pastor Lobs Racist Tirade Against “Demon-Worshiping Polytheist” Ramaswamy
“Christians must make sure that he gets demolished and send a message that we won’t tolerate polytheistic, demon-worshiping, cow-worshiping, bare-feet scamming anchor baby Indians.
“Do you really want to open Pandora’s Box? Because it won’t be a one-time scenario. You get someone like Vivek and you’ve just opened the door for Hindus, for an Indian scammer Hindu. And at that point on, it’s a whole new ballgame.
“No one has to tip the hat to the Christian faith. No one has to placate to Christians in America. You should have to placate to Christians in America if you want to be a leader in America!Â
“Not only will he scam Ohioans, not only will he flood them with H-1B visas and rob them of their inheritance and their wealth, but if he becomes the governor of Ohio, you have solidified Vivek’s political career for the rest of his life in America. This is the chance to say, ‘No, never, ever, go back home. Get out of our country.’
“You were born in America? Sure, by days. Your dad hates our country, never took the time to become a citizen. You’re an anchor baby. Your family built their wealth by robbing white people with miracle drugs that you knew were not going to be viable.
“You became a billionaire. You paid your way onto every podcast. You’ve been lying, you’ve been deceiving, and this is not American. You are not American. You are a Hindu. You are a polytheist. You are a false idol worshiper.
“Go home! Get out of our country! I don’t care about you quoting Thomas Jefferson. I don’t care about you pretending to honor the Founders. This is America. We wear shoes in this country. We eat beef in this country.
“We worship Christ exclusively in this country. We don’t rob people of their wealth in this country. Get the hell out. That’s the proper response.” – Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon....
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Webbon wins "Hater of the Month" award!
Trump’s latest boast about Iran war reveals tragic irony: political scientist — Nick Hilden
Over the past three months, President Donald Trump has scrambled to justify his decision to launch war on Iran in the face of an overwhelming majority of Americans who say he's failed to explain the administration's goals. Through it all, he’s repeatedly asserted the relative brevity of the war in comparison to the Vietnam, Iraq and other past conflicts, insisting that his war has only gone on for a few weeks, and then a few months. Last week, he posted a chart on Truth Social showing the length of previous wars in relation to his, but on Tuesday, a top political scientist pointed out a tragic irony to Trump’s boast.
“Past presidents needed years to lose a war,” noted famed political analyst and author Ian Bremmer over a screenshot of Trump’s chart.
Bremmer is pointing out that, for all Trump’s bragging about the duration of the conflict, he is ignoring how quickly it spiraled into a disastrous outcome. The consequences of the war have been far-reaching and will be long-lasting. It has destabilized the global economy, skyrocketed prices, disrupted supply chains, fractured alliances, shattered regional security, revealed major weaknesses in the U.S. military, entrenched, empowered and potentially enriched an Iranian regime that might end up extracting economic benefits from Hormuz on a continual basis and has killed and injured thousands while displacing countless more.
On top of all that, it has failed to achieve any of Trump’s stated goals, as Bremmer noted to commenters who replied to his post attempting to justify the war.
“Trump stated war goals,” reminded Bremmer: “Rescuing the Iranian people, taking the oil, ending Iranian ballistic missile capabilities, ending Iran’s support for regional proxies, removing Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment capabilities.”...
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Trump is a dangerous imcompetent on a war he started.
'Authentic follower of Christ' pleads guilty to stealing $140M from MAGA donors — Adam Lynch
Georgia political fundraiser Brant Frost IV, known for bundling major donations for MAGA and Tea Party causes for the GOP, pleaded guilty Tuesday to wire fraud.
Frost’s guilty plea before U.S. District Chief Judge Leigh Martin May is the latest development surrounding the collapse of First Liberty Building & Loan, and it is the first criminal conviction related to the downfall of the Newnan-based firm. Federal regulators accused the company last year of operating “a $140 million Ponzi scheme that targeted conservative and faith-based investors across Georgia and beyond.”
The AJC reports the plea “closes one chapter in a scandal that reverberated through Georgia conservative circles after First Liberty abruptly shut down operations last June.” Days later, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued the company and Frost, alleging the lender “used new investor money to cover obligations to earlier investors while portraying the business as a conservative, faith-driven alternative to traditional banking, with promises of big returns.”
First Liberty, which was not a federally insured bank, sold investment products known as “First Liberty Notes,” promising annual returns as high as 13 percent to accredited investors. AJC reports the company’s website promoted company executives as “authentic followers of Christ” and pitched the business as a conservative alternative for investors wary of traditional financial institutions.
“They didn’t steal from me. They stole God’s money,” complained 77-year-old retired electrical worker Thomas Todd, who invested $750,000 with First Liberty. The AJC reported Todd was even preparing to write another six-figure check when the company suddenly collapsed....
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Never forget: God gets his 10% off the top. The Lord's work needs the dough to run his business too!
Reporter brings receipts after Trump claims he 'does not know' Reflecting Pool contractor — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump is flip-flopping on the controversy of who he hired to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — and a journalist has called him out on it.
“President Trump previously said he had personally chosen the contractor to fix the Reflecting Pool, because of the good work they did on his golf club's swimming pools,” The New York Times’ David A. Farenthold post on X. “Now, Trump says does not know them.”
Farenthold’s comment was posted after he and fellow New York Times journalist Maxine Joselow ran a Tuesday piece reporting that “Interior Dept. staffers have raised questions about the quality and speed of the work being done to repair the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, according to document seen by the NY Times.”
In the article, Farenthold and Joselow wrote that “the staff members said that bubbles and small holes had appeared in one of the layers meant to waterproof the iconic pool. And uneven application of the tinted waterproofing left the pool mottled in varying shades of blue, the documents indicate.”...
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Confused again, Donnie?
Judges deliver massive blow to Trump’s 'frivolous' suit against Comey, Democrats — Sarah K. Burris
President Donald Trump lost his appeal of a personal lawsuit he launched against former Secretary Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, the Democratic National Committee, the law firm Perkins Coie, LLC and others he blames for the Russia investigation.
Politico's Kyle Cheney reported on Tuesday that the 11th Circuit declined to rehear Trump's case, leaving his only option an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump and lawyer Alina Habba in 2023 were sanctioned $1 million for the "frivolous" lawsuit. Florida has rules that allow defendants to ask that a court decide whether a lawsuit is "bogus," the Associated Press reported.
At the time, U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks wrote in the ruling that Trump has a "pattern of abuse of the courts" for filing such lawsuits specifically for political purposes. He said that the move "undermines the rule of law" and "amounts to obstruction of justice."
"Here, we are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose," he wrote.
Chief Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee, along with Trump appointee Judge Andrew L. Brasher and Joe Biden appointee Judge Embry Kidd, denied Trump's demand to rehear the case.
They added the detail, "... no judge in regular active service on the Court having requested that the Court be polled on rehearing en banc," which means none of the judges had any interest in weighing in on rehearing the matter. On the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, six of the 12 judges were appointed by Trump....
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Trump: A one-man losing streak, to quote Freddie Blassie, King of Men!
Trump: 'I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation' as a result of Iran war — Adam Lynch
President Donald Trump admitted that Americans’ financial comfort is not at all on his mind as he walks into meetings with international spokespeople on the continuing Iranian situation.
Trump spoke with reporters during a scrum before departing to a meeting with international reps on improving the mess Trump created when he joined Israel in joint missile strikes against the nation of Iran.
That violence kicked off a retaliatory response from Iran by closing the Strait of Hormuz, and causing a uptick in global and U.S. fuel and grocery prices.
But Trump effortlessly acknowledged that the pain his strikes have caused to U.S. voters was not strong on his mind.
“Mr. President, what extent are Americans’ financial situation motivating you to make a deal [with Iran]” a reporter shouted just before the president walked away.
“Not even a little bit,” Trump immediately answered. “The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about Americans' financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”...
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They don't have a nuclear weapon. They didn't have one before he started his war! He's batshit insane!
Stick a fork in him! No one that calls themselves an American can ever vote for this creep!
Reading Material! Tabs, Tues., May 12, 2026 — Evan Hurst
It’s really crazy how this very serious partisan hack Supreme Court always finds a way to rule that voting rights for white supremacists are good but the rest are bad. It’s like they don’t actually have a “judicial philosophy” beyond racism.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Virginia have asked SCOTUS to overturn the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision striking down their new maps. We are sure they will get right on that. [New York Times]
If you have an abortion this week, name it after Samuel Alito. [AP]
Meanwhile, this anti-abortion whine from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council about how the Trump FDA is making abortion great again is pretty hilarious. [The Christian Post]
There’s been an article going around about how New Orleans has passed the point of no return when it comes to climate change, that the only way forward now is to start relocating people. This article makes the moral argument that actually “saving New Orleans is not optional.” We really would like to believe there exists the will among good people for the latter to be the right answer for what we agree is “the most important cultural center in America.” (“Sorry, New York,” the authors add.) [Current Affairs]
Did you read this week’s Moral High Ground? You shoulda because we cross-posted it at Wonkette! But if you didn’t and if you didn’t subscribe, you still have time! It is about the golden calf of Donald Trump that his religious adherents would really like you to stop calling a golden calf. (It is a golden calf.) [The Moral High Ground]
Huh, sounds like Commerce Secretary Howard Nutlick has been less than honest about his very close ties with Jeffrey Epstein all this time! [Politico)
New data says there’s been a 42 percent drop in Canadians visiting major US cities during Trump 2.0, and we doubt that means they’ve decided to do all their honeymoons in Cat Butthole, Oklahoma. It means Trump is making America great again by absolutely drying up the American tourism industry. [Guardian]
Meanwhile, a US citizen has asked for asylum in Spain on the island of Mallorca. Will it get approved? Very unclear, but doubt it’s the last we’ve heard of such a thing. [The Olive Press]
Dr. Oz is saying creepy things about people being “under-babied” again....
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Reading you the news so you don't have to!
It Falls Upon the Left to Defeat Fascism Once Again — C.J. Polychroniou
The world is at a precipice, facing existential threats while fascism is on the rise. Yet we lack the proper governance structures to address global challenges, and it also seems that it falls upon the left to defeat fascism once again. So argues political scientist/political economist, author and journalist C. J. Polychroniou in the interview that follows with the French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri.
Alexandra Boutri: We live in a time of great uncertainty and profound disillusionment. We see a global escalation of violence and a lack of accountability. Even Israel’s genocide goes unpunished, which speaks volumes of the hypocrisy of western governments with regard to human rights and international law. There is a global wave of democratic backsliding, massive amounts of inequality by design, and extreme power concentration. Am I painting too bleak of a picture for the current state of the world?
C. J. Polychroniou: No, you are not exaggerating the current state of the world. The truth is that it is far worse than that. We are witnessing the resurgence of naked imperialism and the emergence of a new world of spheres of influence and, concomitantly, the death of international peacemaking institutions. The continued existence of nuclear weapons, which today are far more powerful than ever before, poses an existential threat to humanity while at the same time human beings are on a collision course with the natural world. To be sure, not only do we live in an era of polycrisis but in one in which developments are occurring at an increasingly rapid pace. We need polysolutions, yet neither the mechanisms are in place nor is there any detectable willingness on the part of current world leaders to pull humanity back from the precipice.
Political hypocrisy per se is not the major issue here. Pathological hypocrisy is a constant in the behavior of western governments. What I find most disconcerting is the sharp decline of rational thinking in contemporary society. Misinformation is spreading faster than facts and trust in science has virtually collapsed, especially in the United States. For example, scientific studies have concluded that climate change is mainly caused by human activity and scientists have documented the dangerous disruptions in nature. Yet you have the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, calling climate change “con job” and “scam.” Trust in healthcare and public institutions has also declined in recent years, and it is not a coincidence that these trends occur with the political ascendancy of right-wing extremism. Fascism is organized mass irrationality and leaders like Trump have been doing their best to design a society sustained by ignorance while at the same time normalizing cruelty and destruction. So, yes, we live in a world of increasing uncertainty, profound confusion, and maybe even civilizational decline. We are in the midst of a whirlpool of events and developments that are eroding our ability to manage human affairs in a way that is conducive to the attainment of a good and just world order. That being said, the world is not coming to an end any time soon, and we actually know that there are solutions for the world’s biggest problems. But paradigm shifts in political, social, and moral thinking are urgently needed for a sustainable future....
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"Hellbent on heaven bound
Your earthly end is near..." — Jesus Christ With Signs Following - The Gourds.
They’re Coming for Our Voter Rolls: Millions Could Vanish Before Election Day —Thom Hartmann.
Behind the rhetoric of “election integrity” lies a coordinated effort to purge voter rolls of Democrats, shut down Black access to the ballot, and reshape the electorate before 2026 and 2028.
We have shocking news this week from CNN: Trump is preparing to illegally purge tens of millions of Democratic voters from voter rolls nationally, just in time for the election. Just like Modi did to win overwhelmingly in India, following the GOP’s playbook.
This follows John Roberts and Sam Alito blatantly using phony, cooked numbers to justify eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, lying to our faces and then laughing at us like they did with the Dobbs decision and Citizens United.
Russian dictator Joseph Stalin is often quoted (perhaps apocryphally) as saying:
“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”
Today’s GOP version of that could be:
“It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s how many people we can remove from the voting rolls that will decide the election.”
In this year’s iteration, the Trump Department of Justice has demanded that all states turn over their voting rolls, complete with names, addresses, driver’s license and social security numbers, voting history, and date of birth.
They’re also requiring states to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” that says the states will then purge from their voting rolls anybody who Republican partisans within the Trump administration — once they’ve dug into the state’s voter data — find to be a “concern”:
“You agree therefore that within forty-five (45) days of receiving that notice from the Justice Department of any issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, your state will clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters…”
We’ve seen this movie before, but always in the past on the state level....
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Yes. States are in charge of their elections, you Nazi bastard! The one who whines incessantly about a rigged election has been busy rigging the next one. Trump is PUBLIC ENEMY #1! What the fuck happened to the party that once held states rights so holy? Trump Fascism, that's what!
Mel Gibson Touted This Dubious Cancer Remedy on Joe Rogan. Sales Are Now Soaring — Ed Cara
Prescriptions of a two-drug combo including ivermectin skyrocketed following Gibson's appearance, a new study finds, especially among cancer patients.
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Pure Clear Panther Piss! Are we dumb yet? Or yet and still?
Man Behind Simulation Hypothesis Warns That Extinction of Humanity Is a Risk We Have to Take — Jon Christian
Even if you don’t know Nick Bostrom’s name, you’re almost certainly familiar with the idea he’s most famous for.
Back in 2003, when he was at Oxford, Bostrom penned an influential philosophical paper with the incredible title of “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” Loosely speaking, his argument was that sufficiently advanced civilizations will eventually build sophisticated simulations of their own ancestors — and that, given enough time in the simulation, those simulated beings will develop their own simulation inside the simulation, where a new set of simulated ancestors will do the same thing, ad infinitum.
You probably get a sense where this is headed: with all these layers of simulated reality, Bostrom thinks that it’s very unlikely that us humans are actually living in the original “base” reality. Instead, we’re statistically probably in some tranche of an Escher-esque cosmic videogame.
Needless to say, the whole thing sparked decades of debate. Big names including Elon Musk have become proponents, while many other experts have argued against the idea.
For his part, Bostrom has moved his attention to a new hot topic: artificial intelligence. For a while, he seemed to be moving in the direction of an AI doomer, issuing a grave warning in 2019 about how AI posed a greater risk to humankind than climate change.
Since then, though, he seems to be changing tack, albeit with his signature flare for ideas so outrageous that they almost sound like parody. In a new working paper, for instance, he argues that developing advanced AI may well result in the extinction of humankind — but that it’s worth the risk, because the upsides of superintelligence could be so profound....
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Yes, If it rids the world of you assholes!
Husband Alarmed as Wife Starts Whispering Quietly to Her Computer — Frank Landymore
In a trend that sounds like it was engineered in a lab to send chills down the spine of beleaguered librarians everywhere, it looks like more people are ditching typing in favor of mumbling into their devices, according to new Wall Street Journal reporting.
While dictation tools are no doubt convenient and obviously a godsend for accessibility issues, it’s also an example of how tech is eroding basic social etiquette — like how people think it’s fine to blast brainrot videos from their phone speakers while riding public transportation, or don’t give a second thought to the ethics of recording a stranger in public before uploading an video of them online.
And yes, AI does figure into this.
Take Mollie Amkraut Mueller, whose husband became alarmed at her constant whispering at night. Traditionally, this was meant to be quiet time after putting the toddler to bed. But she had recently begun talking into her laptop using an AI-powered dictation app called Wispr Flow, which she paired with AI tools like Claude Code. (Did we mention Amkraut Mueller runs her own AI startup?)
Eventually her husband confronted her about this, and love did not win. Rather than go back to typing, Amkraut Mueller agreed that they should sit apart. “If we need to get something done at night, one of us will stay in our office,” she told the WSJ.
She’s far from alone. As her background suggests, the practice is taking AI-hype-addicted tech workers by storm. In the tech industry — and those adjacent — each new trend isn’t just a way to be part of the hip crowd in your multimillion dollar, mostly empty office. It’s also a technological revolution....
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Are you fucking your computer yet? Inquiring minds want to know!
AI Is Giving Your Boss Tools to Be More Monstrous Than Ever Before — Joe Wilkins
The debate raging about AI’s future consequences, with a complete AI automation apocalypse on one side and a resplendent AI utopia on the other, has overlooked one tiny detail: the tech is already making workers’ lives hell at this very minute.
According to the Guardian, at least one-third of UK employers already report using “bossware,” meaning employee monitoring software increasingly integrated with AI. In the US, that number is even higher, with an estimated 61 percent of workplaces using AI analytics software to calculate worker productivity.
This kind of management-by-software has long been prevalent in industrial society to some extent — since the 2010s, Amazon warehouse workers have had to deal with hand-scanners that track their bathroom breaks, for example — but the rise of AI means bosses are increasingly utilizing the latest and greatest machine learning tools to maximize worker productivity.
As Royal Docks School of Business and Law professor Nazrul Islam pinned pined in a recent editorial in the Guardian, the most immediate threat to the workers of the world isn’t mass automation kicking people out of the workplace, but the crushing effects of AI on those within it.
The consequences are numerous: it engenders a widening workplace skill gap, erasure of workplace autonomy, and ever-worsening conditions. As Islam puts it, “many jobs will remain in the future, but they will be more pressured, more fragmented and less human.”....
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Someone still has a job? Really? But they tell us we won't have money in the future so we won't need to work anymore. Only crime that will exist will be corporate crime. It won't even need any human at all! Let's all go quietly, now! The AI gas chambers are on!
Georgia Data Center Secretly Guzzled 30 Million Gallons of Water Before Paying a Dime — Ellyn Lapointe
Last year, residents of Annelise Park, an affluent community in Fayetteville, Georgia, began experiencing unusually low water pressure. When the county utility investigated, it discovered something shocking.
A Quality Technology Services (QTS) data center campus located about 20 miles south of Atlanta had been draining the Fayette County water supply for months without the utility’s knowledge, Politico reported Friday. By the time officials found the two industrial-scale water hookups feeding the campus, it had guzzled nearly 30 million gallons (113 million liters) of water without paying a dime. One connection had reportedly been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not connected to QTS’s account....
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What you don't know can damn well hurt you!
PayPal Caves To DOJ On “Anti-White Discrimination”
Today, the Justice Department announced a settlement with PayPal Inc. to resolve a fair lending investigation into a discriminatory investment program created for black and minority-owned businesses.
The settlement requires PayPal to launch a new Small Business Initiative that excludes criteria based on race, national origin, or other protected characteristics.
As part of the initiative, PayPal will waive processing fees for $1 billion of transactions – a value of approximately $30 million – for eligible American small businesses that are veteran-owned or engaged in farming, manufacturing, or technology.
“This Department of Justice is delivering on President Trump’s vow to root out illegal DEI from every corner of corporate America,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “American corporations are on notice: you will face our aggressive enforcement if you use race or national origin to discriminate against qualified Americans.”...
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Naked exposure of these mean and toxic snakes that are poisoning and enslaving our peoples. Low-down and filthy as they come. Sacpegoating DEI is racism from stem to stern.
ICE Has 20M Names On Their Phones Due To Palantir
404 Media reports:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of Palantir systems now means agency officials effectively have a list of 20 million people readily accessible on their iPhones, increasing the speed at which ICE can find houses to raid and people to arrest, according to comments made by a senior ICE official last week during a border security conference.
While ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally won’t answer questions from journalists about how the agency is using Palantir’s technology, senior officials were much more talkative during the Border Security Expo which took place in Phoenix, Arizona, last week.
Although the Trump administration has attempted to step back from its mass deportation rhetoric and city wide raids, especially in the wake of killing multiple people, ICE continues to violently and wrongfully detain people. Data from April showed that 70.8 percent, or 42,722, of people held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction....
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We were warned this evil would come to us one day. We also know we were told it would be destroyed and thrown into the pit.
Trump’s Steel Tariffs Are Hiking Costs Of Canned Foods
The New York Times reports:
The simple tin can is proving to be one of the toughest tests for President Trump’s tariffs. Just over a year ago, Mr. Trump imposed high tariffs on steel to try to stifle imports of the metal and bolster domestic production. But imports of the kind of steel used to make cans surged in 2025, and American can makers say they will remain heavily dependent on foreign supplies — now made more expensive by the tariffs — for a long time.
“We have to import all this tin plate,” said Scott Breen, the president of the Can Manufacturers Institute, referring to the thinly rolled steel that is coated with tin and used to make cans. “There’s not any more being produced here than there was before.” The institute is a trade group representing some of the largest can makers in the United States.
Unlike some of Mr. Trump’s other tariffs, which have been overturned by courts, the steel levies have strong legal standing, according to scholars, which means they are unlikely to go away anytime soon.
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Does Trump know that this costs Americans? More to the point, does he care?
Rubio +15 Over Vance In 2028 GOP Presidential Poll
A new national survey from Atlas Intel is the first to show Secretary of State Marco Rubio ahead of Vice President JD Vance in the race for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. It also has some good news for Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has the strongest backing he’s had in any polling in some time.
Rubio commands 45% support in the survey, 15 points ahead of Vance. DeSantis is alone in third place with 11% support, with no other name polled getting more than 1% support.
The polling was conducted May 4-7, days before President Donald Trump surveyed attendees at a Rose Garden event about whether they liked Rubio or Vance better, before calling them a “dream team” and a “perfect ticket.” Momentum continues for Rubio, meanwhile.
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One moron rates higher than lesser moron by the Nazi Party.
MAGA Pastor Predicts That WH’s Christian Nationalist Rally On National Mall Will Be The Biggest In 50 Years
...Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas in Texas, who is scheduled to speak at the event, likened it to Explo ‘72, a 1972 Campus Crusade for Christ conference attended by over 80,000 college and high school students in Dallas. The five-day gathering, which some say marked the height of the Jesus Movement, saw the late televangelist Billy Graham preach and Kris Kristofferson, a recent convert to Christianity, perform....
The founders didn’t “dedicate” America to any god.
They created a secular Constitution with no national religion because freedom means everyone can worship any god, or none at all....
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That the grifter, will be speaking should keep any real Christian away.
Senate GOP bucks Trump’s Cuba push as Pentagon blows through 4 years of funding in 1 — Elizabeth Preza
As President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio express interest in a military operation in Cuba, Senate Republicans “are cautioning” the administration not to order strikes against the regime, The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports.
Earlier this month, Trump teased military action in Cuba, telling the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches in Florida, “we will be taking over [Cuba] almost immediately.” His remarks came days after Senate Republicans rejected “an effort to advance legislation that would bar U.S. military action against Cuba without Congress' green light,” Axios reported at the time.
Now, Republican senators appear to be changing their tune, citing Trump’s extended military conflict in Iran, a ballooning Pentagon budget, and interest in fulfilling the president’s stated “America First” agenda....
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Any action on Cuba will be a disaster.
Trump has turned key issue into 'the world’s dumbest culture war' — Thomas Kika
The U.S. is ceding ground on a vitally, existentially important issue to China under President Donald Trump's leadership, and according to a new breakdown from the New York Times, this is because he has turned it into "the world’s dumbest culture war."
Writing for the Times on Tuesday morning, Thomas Edsall observed that Trump has "an all-out assault on clean energy" since the start of his second term. Now, "he and his party are paying a significant political price while American consumers are stuck with the bill."
"Trump has severely, but not fatally, wounded the American renewable energy industry, which is falling further behind China. At the same time, he is doling out tax dollars by the millions to keep dilapidated coal-fired power plants open," Edsall wrote. "What gives?"
He added later: "The barrage of executive orders and memorandums Trump issued on Jan. 20, 2025, demonstrated the intensity of his prioritization of fossil fuels while gutting federal support of clean, renewable energy."...
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How stupid can a nation get? We keep digging the hole we're in deeper.
Trump explodes at 'lowlife' reporter in late-night rant after NYT exposes $13M bombshell — Roxanne Cooper
President Donald Trump attacked The New York Times in a lengthy overnight post on Truth Social after the newspaper reported that the real cost of his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation was significantly higher than he initially claimed.
The president posted his response shortly after 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning, responding to reporting that the Interior Department plans to pay a contractor $13.1 million for the project, far above the $1.8 million figure Trump publicly announced when unveiling the plan last month.
Federal records reviewed by The Times show the Interior Department increased the contract by $6.2 million beyond the original estimate, bringing the project total to roughly $8 million before additional costs are included. The records also revealed that the administration awarded the no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a firm that had previously completed work at Trump's Virginia golf club....
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Boodoggle after boondoggle! Embarrasing our country left and right.
GOP Lawmaker Agrees With Host Telling Black Dem To Keep 'Cotton-picking Hands' Off VA
Rep. Jennifer A. Kiggans (R-VA) agreed with a radio host after he used a racially charged term to attack House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) because he spoke out about Virginia redistricting efforts.
"If Hakeem Jeffries wants to be involved in Virginia politics, then I suggest he does what a bunch of New Yorkers are doing. Leave New York, move down here to Virginia, run for office down here. You can represent us, if not, get your cotton-picking and hands off of Virginia," the show's host told Kiggans.
"That's right. Ditto, yes. Yes, to that," the Republican lawmaker replied....
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Yassah, master! We'uns forgot dis be de Land of the Happy Negro!
Just another retarded ugly Naxi racist scumbag!
Fox News Host: AOC Sounds Like A “Fascist Fuhreress”
“It’s funny because earlier today, the president was talking about the big divide with the people he’s negotiating with in Iran, and you’ve got the moderates and the lunatics. It’s the same thing in the Democrat Party. You’ve got the moderates, and I think most Democrats would consider themselves to be pretty rational, pretty moderate. But the loudest people and the only ones with ideas — unfortunately they’re god awful ideas — are the lunatics. They are the progressives.
“And, you know, you’ve got the general, the Fuhreress, who’s out there, and she, frankly, sounds like a fascist. She’s talking about the presidency isn’t enough, you know, it’s like, four years isn’t enough, I want all of it. You know, that sounds like a completely unhinged, authoritarian person who wants to inflate the size of the state and wants to increase taxation, which isn’t going to mean on billionaires. That is going to be on the middle class.” – Fox host Lisa Kennedy.
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That word is not a word. It comes out of the mouth of a facist idiot.
The shitbag Nazi News must be scared out of their shit filled pants when a real American takes charge!
We all know what Lisa Kennedy is — a puppet lying to a retarded audiencce!
21% Of Obamacare Enrollees Have Lost Coverage
NOTUS reports:
The numbers are bearing out what many lawmakers feared: Many Americans can’t afford health insurance through the federal marketplaces without boosted subsidies.
More than one in five people who enrolled in health insurance through HealthCare.gov during open enrollment and in the weeks immediately following were dropped from coverage for failing to pay their first month’s premium, according to internal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, documents obtained by NOTUS that haven’t been made public.
The roughly 21% decline in enrollment in the 30 states using the federal marketplace is significantly higher than the rate of last year, when 12% of enrollees dropped off over the same time frame. The numbers support widespread fears that the end of extra, pandemic-era subsidies, which congressional Republicans declined to extend in December, would leave Affordable Care Act plans unaffordable for some Americans.
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Photo is of "The Proud & Greedy Retarded."
END FOR-PROFIT HEALTH CARE!
Trump Orders “Treason” Probe Into Reporters’ Sources
CNN reports:
President Donald Trump personally pushed the Justice Department to issue subpoenas to reporters covering the war in Iran in an effort to flush out their sources, according to officials familiar with the matter. He delivered the message on a sticky note — the word “Treason” in Sharpie — placed atop a stack of printed articles he handed to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a White House meeting, the officials said.
After Blanche received the packet, the department issued several subpoenas, including to The Wall Street Journal, which first revealed the probes. One official told CNN the Justice Department’s National Security Division was already preparing to look at some of the stories’ sources but Trump’s stack accelerated the effort.
A source told CNN the investigation is aimed at identifying government employees who leaked information and not the reporters themselves. Still, the subpoenas mark one of the administration’s most aggressive attempts to root out leaks about national security or the administration.
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Trump is the one who is guilty of treason. The entire universe knows this!
LA Gov: 45,000 Primary Votes Have Been “Discarded”
The Huffington Post reports:
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on gerrymandering, Louisiana’s governor suspended the state’s primary elections, even though tens of thousands of votes had already been cast. Now he intends to toss those votes. During a “60 Minutes” interview Sunday, Gov. Jeff Landry (R) was pressed about what would happen to the roughly 45,000 ballots that were cast prior to the high court’s decision.
“This country has held elections during the Civil War, during two world wars, elections still went on,” correspondent Cecilia Vega said. “We’ll have an election, and we’re actually gonna have an election on election day,” Landry responded. “But voting was already happening,” Vega said, cutting Landry off. “As we sit here right now, more than 45,000 ballots have been returned. What happens to those?”
“Oh, those ballots are discarded,” Landry said. “And those people will vote again in November. It’s not a big deal. It’s not my fault. If anyone has a grievance, take it to the United States Supreme Court.”
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We know what should be done with this seditionist. We are a lost country if we let this go.
STUDY: 42% Drop In Canadian Visits To Major US Cities
The Guardian reports:
A new research tool that tracks cell phone activity has found a 42% drop in visitors from Canada to big metropolitan areas in the US that is much higher than official border-crossing data, suggesting Canadians during the second Trump administration are avoiding US cities in particular.
Researchers from the University of Toronto said the tool showed a “year-over-year median decline of approximately 42% in Canadian visits to US metropolitan areas – significantly higher than official border-crossing data, which showed a roughly 25% decline”.
The economies of US border towns reliant on Canadian traffic have been slammed as their northerly neighbours think twice about travelling to the US, put off by immigration enforcement operations and border crackdowns, and anger at Donald Trump’s tariffs and his threats of making Canada “the 51st state”.
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Why would anyone that is not a fascist wnat to come to this failed fascist country?
If You Have To Say It's Not A Golden Calf, It's A Golden Calf — Evan Hurst
There was this thing that happened in Exodus 32 that really pissed God off. Among the early Bible sins, it was way up there.
“Don’t look back or I will turn you into a pillar of salt!” She looked back. “Eat all the fruit except this one!” She ate that one. (God’s early habit of testing people by giving them one thing not to do and then waiting for them to roll their eyes and do exactly that thing is a whole other subject.)
And then there was Exodus 32. The Golden Calf.
So the story, if you remember, is like this:
Back in Exodus 20 the Ten Commandments had been laid down, and the first of them were “You shall have no other gods before me,” and then “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
Right there at the beginning, it’s “Don’t worship other gods” — which seems to suggest that there were other gods and Yahweh knew it, an interesting thing to explore in Gnostic tradition — AND THEN it’s “don’t make graven images and worship them, I will fuck your grandchildren’s grandchildren up, for I am very sensitive and fly off the handle easily.”
Point is, it’s really really really clear what God thinks about idolatry, especially really extremely on-the-nose idolatry.
So in Exodus 32, Moses is up on the mountaintop with God getting the law written down in tablet form, and all the people were like WHERE IS HE? So they went to Aaron, Moses’s brother, the high priest, and said “We need some weird statue gods to worship. Can you make that happen?” And Aaron was like “OK sure, everybody in the whole town, take off your jewels!” and they did, and he melted them down and turned them into a golden cow so they could all worship it, like totally normal people.
And they made a festival for the very next day, with food and drink and metallic cow worships. Like totally normal people.
And God saw it and looked at Moses like OMG what the fuck are they doing? And Moses really had to talk God off the ledge, because God was talking shit like “Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.” (He still ended up striking them with a plague.)
There’s more to it than that, but point is, making golden calves and other similar idols is kiiiiiiiind of a “Did I stutter?” situation in the Bible....
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More to the point, the Jewish factions were quick to create Gods that reflected their own points of view. Same goes for us today.
Psst: What No One Will Tell You About the National Debt (But I Will) — Robert Reich
Friends,
The U.S. national debt just crossed a once-unthinkable threshold on the way toward breaking the record set in the wake of World War II: It now exceeds 100 percent of America’s gross domestic product.
As of March 31, our publicly held debt was $31.27 trillion, while America’s GDP in 2025 was $31.22 trillion. This puts the ratio at 100.2 percent, compared with 99.5 percent when the last fiscal year ended September 30.
That 100.2 percent figure will likely climb, because the federal government is running historically large annual deficits of nearly 6 percent of GDP, which add to the debt. The final tally will depend on Iran war spending, tariff refunds, and the strength of the economy.
Should you worry? Well, it’s not as if we’re heading into a depression. Passing the 100 percent threshold won’t suddenly cause the world to lose confidence in the dollar.
The real problem is that an increasing portion of our nation’s budget — and your tax dollars — is dedicated to paying interest on this growing debt. That’s money we don’t spend on education, healthcare, roads and bridges, social safety nets, or (if we actually needed more spending on it) national defense.
As the debt continues to grow, interest payments continue to soar. We’ll soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt each year than we spend each year on Medicare.
So, who exactly receives these interest payments? This is an issue you hear very little discussion about, because the wealthy and powerful of this country would rather you didn’t know.
You probably do hear that a chunk of our debt is held by foreign governments and foreign investors. That’s true, but they hold only about 30 percent of our debt. The rest — roughly 70 percent — is held domestically. That is, we pay the interest to ourselves....
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Don't you feel wealtheir now?
The Military Base Home to Air Force One Leaked 32,000 Gallons of Jet Fuel Into the Potomac River Over the Last Few Months — Joe Wilkins
With nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil under lock and key thanks to Donald Trump’s ill-fated war on Iran, oil derivatives like jet fuel are at a premium. That makes it all the more devastating that the US Air Force leaked some 32,000 gallons of the stuff into the Potomac river over the course of just four months.
According to bombshell reporting by NOTUS, Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews, the facility that stores and maintains Air Force One, has lost tens of thousands of gallons of valuable jet fuel over two separate leaks. That would be bad enough on its own, but Joint Base Andrews is situated directly on Piscataway Creek, a tributary of the Potomac River.
The timeline established by NOTUS is a little convoluted, but basically this could’ve all been prevented as early as December, when the base’s fuel system failed a critical leak safety test. Across the first two months of the year, base personnel noted the loss of roughly 10,000 gallons of jet fuel, though they believed at the time that the leak was contained to the base itself, and had not impacted the surrounding environment...
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Good to see our military is on top of things, eh?
Residents Furious After Their Town Board Rejected an OpenAI Data Center, But a Billionaire Developer Forced It Through Anyway — Joe Wilkins
Across the United States, the fight over data center construction has largely pitted stamp-happy municipal governments against their own residents. As these battles multiply, local officials are increasingly pressured to approve projects their constituents oppose, while more and more voters take their struggles to the ballot box.
Residents in Saline Township, Michigan, however, thought they had avoided the drama after their township board and planning commission both voted to decline a 21 million square foot data center in their backyard. It was exactly what Saline’s 2,883-some residents wanted. Unfortunately for them, the data center developer soon sued the tiny township, Fortune reported, which was ultimately bullied into accepting the $16 billion development.
Back in September, Saline’s planning commission rejected the request to rezone 575 acres of farmland for the data center, proposed by the company Related Digital, a subsidiary of a real estate conglomerate owned by billionaire Steven Roth (who’s been in the news lately for other reasons.)
Two days later, Related Digital filed suit, alleging the township had practice “exclusionary zoning.” The local officials were up against the wall: a lengthy legal battle risked depleting the township’s coffers, and even if they won in court — an unlikely proposition — Related Digital could have forced the data center anyway by partnering with the University of Michigan, which can bypass local zoning laws.
The township soon settled, signing an agreement allowing the project to proceed. Later in October, it was revealed that the data center would be primarily leased to Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Larry Ellison’s Oracle, as part of Donald Trump’s $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative, dubbed “Stargate.”...
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Did I hear that rope sales had gone up in the area?
Netanyahu Blames Social Media For Israel’s Reputation
MAJOR GARRETT: “Do you believe Israel is at risk of losing this war on the social media front? And this is particularly, I believe, important in America for younger Americans, Republican and Democrat, scrolling through images, and they would use words like, ‘barbaric,’ in Gaza and in Lebanon.”
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: “You’re not immune either, because you can penetrate this machine [holds up phone], you can penetrate this little instrument, and you can say anything about Major Garrett that you want, and I can paint you as a monster. And if I say it often enough, enough people will believe it.
.
“Israel has gone to unbelievable lengths to get innocent civilians out of harm’s way. We have seen deterioration of support for Israel in the United States almost, I would say, correlates almost 100% with the geometric rise of social media.
“And that, by itself, is not what caused it, and I don’t believe in censoring them or anything. But, I’ll tell you what happened. We had several countries that basically manipulated social media, and they do it in a clever way, and that’s something that has hurt us badly.
“I think there’s been a concerted effort by several states to basically vilify Israel in the social, primarily in the social media … We’ve not fought back yet; so we’ll have to do that.”
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Talk about shooting the messenger!
Deacon Pleads Guilty To Filming In Public Restrooms
The Virginian-Pilot reports:
A man who police said secretly filmed “thousands of males†in public restrooms in the Colonial Williamsburg area since the 1990s pleaded guilty Wednesday to five criminal counts. George Thomas West, 77, of Gloucester County, was sentenced to two years of home confinement with electronic monitoring, court records said. As part of the sentence, he’s barred from all property owned by Colonial Williamsburg, Busch Gardens or Water Country USA....
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And another one bites the dust!
Have you xianists no shame?
FL Surgeon General Spreads Sickness And Death By Claiming Vaccine Mandates Are 'Slavery' — John Amato
Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo was giddy when he told the state he was excited to announce shortly that Florida will be ending all vaccine mandates.
Kudos to the fuckwits clapping to promote disease and death on their state.
Letting your children go to elementary school without being immunized runs the risk of infecting the entire class and other children.
This is not God's choice but a MAGA conspiracy driven religious right action....
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Yes. Saving lives is slavery. Joe, you really know how to hurt people. May you continue to fail and be removed!
Billionaires could pay the price for backlash against Trump: Nobel winning economist — Nick Hilden
According to Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, President Donald Trump didn’t start the modern “Gilded Age,” but over the course of his administrations, he’s presided over an explosion of inequality that surpasses the era of the robber barons. Now, Krugman believes a backlash is already building that could result in “genuine populism.”
As Krugman explains, “America used to be a middle-class society. But income and wealth disparities began rising rapidly during the Reagan years, and by the late 80s many observers began drawing parallels between the new era of inequality and the Gilded Age.” Now, however, “We are living through something much worse. The tech bros make the ‘malefactors of great wealth’ called out by Theodore Roosevelt look benign by comparison.”
This is because economic inequality that began soaring 40 years ago and was exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2008 — which allowed the rich to begin pouring massive sums of money into elections — has resulted in a level of wealth concentration at the top that is unparalleled in history. Says Krugman, “The growth in wealth concentration is even more extreme if we look at the very, very top. Gabriel Zucman, one of the world’s leading experts on wealth and income inequality, argues that the concentration of wealth is now much higher than it was at the peak of the Gilded Age.”
And unlike the robber barons of yesteryear, the tech billionaires of today show “little inclination to give back to society by devoting a significant part of their wealth to good works,” with the likes of Elon Musk and Pete Thiel giving almost none of their money to philanthropy, and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos not doing much better. More importantly, however, “is the fact that their wealth has brought great political power, arguably more than the robber barons ever possessed — power that they abuse on an epic scale.”...
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America was robbed by the money grubbers. Time for a payback!
Oil Prices Surge After Trump Swats Down Peace Deal
The New York Times reports:
Oil prices rose and stock futures ticked down on Monday as investors reacted after the two sides failed to agree on a U.S.-Iran peace deal.
President Trump said on social media Sunday that Iran’s latest proposal was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” He did not share details about what Iran had offered. Tehran has said the two countries are working on a short-term agreement that would pause fighting for another 30 days and end Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil and gas shipping route in the Persian Gulf.
As gas prices remain elevated in the United States, Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said on Sunday that the Trump administration would be open to pausing the federal gas tax, which accounts for 18.4 cents of the per gallon price of gasoline.
"When a Dementia riddled incontinent moron is a negotiator , chances are it will be a shitty deal" — Dwight Williamson (comments)
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Numbskull.
American Passenger Tests Positive For Hantavirus
Politico reports:
A passenger returning to the U.S. from a Dutch cruise ship where a hantavirus outbreak occurred has tested positive for the virus, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Sunday evening, while a second is showing mild symptoms. The two passengers are traveling in the plane’s biocontainment units “out of an abundance of caution,” HHS wrote in a post on the social media website X.
The department is working in collaboration with other federal agencies to repatriate 17 American passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship — which docked Sunday in the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory off the coast of Morocco.
In a statement Sunday evening, HHS said the State Department would airlift the passengers, transporting some of them to the Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. The passenger with mild symptoms will be taken to another center, according to HHS. There are 13 such centers nationwide.
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Sounds familiar. We know Trump will fold on any outbreak here.
Hantavirus is a warning. The Trump admin isn’t listening — Troy Farah
The Dutch cruise ship incident probably isn’t the next pandemic. That doesn’t mean we’re risk-free from outbreaks
...While hantavirus isn’t a huge concern to me right now — and many public health experts seem to agree — I am worried about what comes down the line. I wouldn’t be surprised if people didn’t take basic precautions during the next pandemic. No flattening the curve, no masking in crowds, just letting some brutal disease rip through us, as if arrogance and resentment can stop infectious disease — a strategy somehow even less effective than ivermectin! There is already a lack of solidarity in this country, a major crisis would undoubtedly unravel what’s left of it. Every time there’s a weird outbreak of something, it’s a warning that we might not get so lucky on the next one. It’s an open question if anyone is listening.
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It won't be Trump.
Trump: I’ll Deploy “Election Integrity Army” In All States
Yahoo News reports:
President Donald Trump pledged Sunday to deploy a Republican “election integrity army” for the 2026 midterm elections, positioning the initiative as a response to a Democratic task force announced last month by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Trump made the announcement in a post on Truth Social, criticizing Schumer’s election integrity group and alleging it would suppress Republican voters and interfere in upcoming elections. The president promised the Republican effort would be “much bigger and stronger” than what he described as a similar operation during the 2024 election.
“During my Historic Election in 2024, when I won every single Swing State, and decisively won both the Electoral and Popular votes by wide margins, the Republicans had an Election Integrity Army in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote,” Trump wrote.
"'Election Integrity Army'
All this is code for ICE and the military to intimidate minority voters." — April the unperson (comments)
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The mother hacked our last election and he will fuck with this one.
The scumbag wants to make sure his rig is working for him. What a naked crook!
Hegseth Lobs New Legal Threat At Sen. Mark Kelly
The Daily Beast reports:
Determined to defeat Sen. Mark Kelly by any means necessary, Hegseth issued a new threat on X on Sunday evening in response to comments Kelly made on CBS News’ Face the Nation. Speaking to host Margaret Brennan, Kelly said that it was “shocking how deep we have gone” into U.S. weapons stockpiles during Trump’s war on Iran.
“Because this president got our country into this without a strategic goal, without a plan, without a timeline… because of that, we’ve expended a lot of munitions. And that means the American people are less safe,” Kelly said.
Responding to a post from Brennan on X about Kelly’s claim, Hegseth wrote, “‘Captain’ Mark Kelly strikes again. Now he’s blabbing on TV (falsely & dumbly) about a *CLASSIFIED* Pentagon briefing he received. Did he violate his oath…again?” He ended his post with a note that the Pentagon’s legal counsel will review whether or not Kelly violated his oath.
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Talk about an inferiority complex. This little boy never got over some deep failure. Sad case.
Keep kicking his sorry ass, Mark!
Pro-Trump group illegally seizes voter data in Canadian province targeted as 51st state — Travis Gettys
A massive breach of Canadian voter data by a far-right separatist group is exposing what security experts say is a coordinated, cross-border assault on democratic institutions — one that bears striking resemblance to the Trump administration's aggressive push to seize American voter rolls.
In Alberta, a separatist-linked organization called the Centurion Project illegally obtained a database containing the names, home addresses and contact information of roughly 2.9 million voters, and the group's own organizer boasted that the software powering the operation had been presented to Donald Trump's White House, reported The Guardian.
Meanwhile, south of the border, Trump's Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing to hand over their voter registration lists — a campaign that voting rights groups say is laying the groundwork for mass purges ahead of the November midterms – and the parallel is not lost on Canadian security officials.
"Violence is not the solution but the solution requires violence.
Americans are losing because they are so focused on being nice." — Oppressed American (comments)
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Open criminal behavior. It is stunning that a civilized culture seems so inept at putting a stop to this unabated barbaric behavior.
Critics zero in on what's really behind Trump's sudden meltdown — Alxeander Willis
President Donald Trump lashed out at Iran on Sunday with a menacing remark amid Washington and Tehran’s ongoing, back-and-forth peace negotiations, and critics believe they’ve identified a potential reason for the president’s latest outburst.
The United States and Iran agreed to a ceasefire last month that remains ongoing, despite both sides having lobbed attacks on each other within the past week. While peace talks between the two nations have largely stalled, the Trump administration sent Tehran a proposal to end the war last week, with Trump telling the press that he expected a response by Friday night.
Friday ended without a response from Iran, as did Saturday. Late Sunday morning, reporting emerged that Iran may have responded to the United States’ peace proposal, though the White House has yet to issue a response as of 1:50 p.m. ET....
"Trump is such a moron, any deal he finally gets, if he gets, with Iran is not going to be nearly as good as the 2015 Obama arrangement that he tore up. 50 billion dollars destroyed bases, people dead and all he has managed to accomplish is have the Strait closed." -- Bill Baird (comments)
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Wow! They got a great photo of Frankenstein's monster at the top of this article!
We Must Resist the Collapse of Conscience in the Age of Trump — Henry Giroux
Under the Trump regime, the United States has entered a dark age in which conscience is not merely ignored but systematically dismantled. Compassion is mocked as weakness, truth treated as disposable, and cruelty elevated into a governing principle. This is more than corruption. It signals the suffocation of civic culture under gangster capitalism — a predatory system in which power serves wealth, law serves vengeance, and democracy is hollowed out from within.
Donald Trump did not create this moral vacuum. He seized it, refined it, and weaponized it. For decades, neoliberal rule has hollowed out the social state, normalized staggering inequality, elevated billionaires to the status of civic arbiters, and schooled generations to believe that self-interest is the highest virtue. Public goods were dismantled or sold off, civic responsibility withered, and citizens were reduced to consumers, detached from any shared sense of fate. In such a landscape, empathy is no longer a public good but a private burden, something to be shed in the relentless pursuit of profit, power, and spectacle. As Zygmunt Bauman notes in Modernity and the Holocaust, gangster capitalism as a form of fascist politics thrives on “moral sleeping pills” and “the dead silence of unconcern.”
The war on empathy is central to our lethal white supremacist culture, which thrives on violence and normalizes the politics of disposability. This assault is starkly visible in the rhetoric of Elon Musk, who has claimed that empathy itself threatens Western civilization. Such a view does not stand alone. It echoes a broader right-wing crusade, amplified by segments of white evangelical Christianity in the United States, that casts empathy as a dangerous moral weakness. In this distorted logic, compassion becomes a political weapon attributed to liberals and Democrats, who are accused of eroding “Western values” by extending care and recognition to those deemed expendable, particularly immigrants from poorer, racialized, and predominantly Muslim nations.
What takes shape here is not simply the erosion of empathy, but its deliberate inversion, a cultural alchemy in which cruelty is elevated to virtue and exclusion is recast as a civilizational imperative. This assault on empathy, mobilized to inflame hatred against those cast as the “other,” cannot be dismissed as mere prejudice or psychological aberration. It draws from a deeper historical reservoir of violence, one that, as Pankaj Mishra observes, has “enabled ordinary people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, even with frissons of virtue.”...
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Do Americans still know what a conscience is? It remains to be seen.
Big Bend border wall plans cancelled for national park after backlash, Border Patrol commissioner says — Ayden Runnels
Texans across the political spectrum opposed wall construction in the national park. Now the agency’s plans include roadways and digital surveillance to monitor the rugged region.
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A victory for America!
ABC Just Asking: What If We *Didn't* Comply In Advance? — Doktor Zoom
Texas state Rep. James Talarico appears on ABC’s The View, February 2, 2026. Screenshot, The View on YouTube.
It looks like ABC has finally figured out that it can’t win by appeasing the Trump administration, and has finally decided to fight back against the administration. About time! Friday, ABC accused the government of trying to violate its free speech rights through heavy-handed regulatory threats issued by the Federal Communications Commission.
ABC finally stood up for itself in a filing with the FCC on behalf of KTRK, its affiliate in Houston, after the FCC claimed that the ABC program The View had violated federal “Equal Time” rules by interviewing Texas state Rep. James Talarico on February 2. Those rules require entertainment shows that include candidates for office to provide equal time to competing candidates, if the other candidates request it. Yes, we are old enough to remember Republicans railing against the “Equal Time” rules — and especially the broader, still-dead “Fairness Doctrine” — as communist infiltration sapping and impurifying our precious bodily fluids.
Regardless, the regulation includes an exemption for “bona fide” news programming, which is why for decades talk shows have had political guests on without any problems: There was a tacit understanding that it’s good for viewers to know who’s running for office and what they think. But Trump’s pet FCC Chair Brendan Carr has weaponized the equal time rule, not so much to ensure “fairness” as to punish anyone on TV Trump doesn’t like.
This is a long-term project for Carr, who wrote Project 2025’s chapter on how the FCC could combat TV’s “liberal bias” and whined about Saturday Night Live featuring Kamala Harris in a sketch before the 2024 election — without even inviting Trump on to do his standup set about sharks and electric boats....
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Brendan Carr can go back to hell where he came from.
Why Palantir is fast becoming one of the world’s most notorious companies — The Week
Palantir Technologies Inc., a Miami-based company that specialises in data integration and analysis, is seldom out of the news. This is partly because it works in controversial sectors: its biggest client is the US military, and its software is used in conflicts from Israel to Ukraine. Clients also include the CIA and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice); it was involved in Elon Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency.
It has also expanded into healthcare: in Britain, its contracts include a £330 million deal with NHS England, as well as a £240.6 million deal with the Ministry of Defence.
But its notoriety is in part because of its eccentric CEO, Alex Karp. Palantir recently posted on X/ Twitter a manifesto penned by Karp, which, among other things, declared that “Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defence of the nation”; called for universal conscription; encouraged the development of AI weapons; and condemned the West’s “vacant and hollow pluralism”. One MP called it “the ramblings of a supervillain”.
Where did Palantir come from?
Founded in 2003 by a group of tech moguls headed by Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a libertarian political activist, Palantir was named after the “seeing stones” in “The Lord of the Rings”. (Thiel is a J.R.R. Tolkien fan.) Originally, it applied PayPal’s fraud detection system – which successfully identified fraudulent activity on eBay – to US national security; early funding came from In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm that funds projects for the CIA
Palantir’s technology was taken up by the US defence establishment under President Obama – it is rumoured that it was involved in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and it helped the US and UK governments with contact tracing and vaccine distribution during the Covid pandemic. It now helps the Trump administration track undocumented immigrants, and provides Israel’s military with “intelligence and surveillance services”. Palantir currently has a market capitalisation of some $350 billion.
What does it actually do?
One former employee likened Palantir’s work to “really extravagant plumbing with data”. Most big companies and government agencies have a lot of information they can’t easily use because it’s stored in a hodgepodge of different systems and databases.
Palantir’s core products – “Foundry”, primarily for civilian use, and “Gotham”, for military and law enforcement – sit on top of those different systems and pull all the data together in an interface that’s easy to use (little coding is required). A big selling point is that Palantir doesn’t itself access or exploit the data, which stays with the customer; it just makes it easier to analyse. This is useful for all sorts of unobjectionable things, such as Covid testing and tracing. But it also allows Ice to collect large amounts of information to investigate individuals – and it helps the US military to plan bombing campaigns....
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The enemy within.
But Seriously, How Nervous Should We Be About Hantavirus? — Jonathan Cohn
A small ship is making its way across the South Atlantic, ferrying roughly 150 tourists to explore remote lands and glimpse rare birds, when an older man suddenly develops fever and a cough—and dies. Symptoms quickly appear in a half dozen more passengers and crew, including the ship’s doctor, and soon the death count is up to three. Testing reveals they’ve been stricken with an animal-borne virus that can infect humans, but that in most forms does not jump from person to person.
By this point, more than 30 passengers have already disembarked and scattered across a dozen countries, setting off a mad scramble by health authorities to find and isolate them. Meanwhile, the rest are still on the boat—also isolated, and under the watchful eyes of newly arrived medical staff observing to see who else will develop this disease for which there is no cure.
If you’ve been following the headlines, you know this isn’t fiction. It’s the story of a hantavirus outbreak aboard MV Hondius, an expedition vessel that set sail from Argentina in April. And the good news—yes, there’s good news—is that this tale isn’t likely to have a horror-film ending, at least on a mass scale.
The form of hantavirus known to be transmissible among humans is thought to spread for a relatively short period as symptoms appear, and primarily through prolonged, close-up contact.1 That’s very different from, for example, COVID, which was airborne and which people could spread before they even realized they had the virus. With hantavirus, contact tracing has a better chance of catching up to people who might have been exposed—most of whom, in turn, are unlikely to contract the disease.2
“We have contained this in the past and I’m very confident it’s going to be contained again,” Katelyn Jetelina, a former CDC consultant who founded and writes for the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, told me in an interview. “To the average person, your risk is essentially nil.”
But if you talk to people who work in public health, you will pick up a clear level of concern. And it’s not simply because the spread of any lethal virus is, quite rightly, a reason for them to be vigilant....
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Is the average American well-read these days? I'm starting to think not.
Trump Gives Visa To Fugitive Polish Justice Minister
Fugitive former Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro is now in the United States courtesy of a visa from President Donald Trump after fleeing Hungary, local media report.
Ziobro had been in Hungary since 2025 after former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán granted the disgraced minister asylum. New Hungarian leader Péter Magyar, however, promised to launch extradition proceedings against Ziobro upon taking office.
Ziobro is wanted in Poland over the alleged misuse of public funds and the deployment of Pegasus spyware against political opponents. He has consistently denied the charges, calling the investigation a political vendetta from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk....
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So Trump is now importing criminals he can exploit and shakedown. So much for deporting them, I see.
Researchers Alarmed by AI That Can Self-Replicate Into Another Machine — Frank Landymore
A new report from Palisade Research has found that AI models can self-replicate by copying themselves onto other machines, without any help from human co-conspirators.
“We’re rapidly approaching the point where no one would be able to shut down a rogue AI, because it would be able to self-exfiltrate its weights and copy itself to thousands of computers around the world,” Jeffrey Ladish, the director Berkeley-based AI safety group, told The Guardian.
Some experts, however, are urging calm, saying it’s unlikely that that the test AI models could replicate in a real world scenario.
“They are testing in environments that are like soft jelly in many cases,” Jamieson O’Reilly, an expert in offensive cybersecurity, told the newspaper. “That doesn’t take away from the value of their research, but it does mean the outcome might look far less scary in a real enterprise environment with even a medium level of monitoring.”
In the study, the Palisade researchers tested several AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4. Placed in a controlled network of computers, the models were instructed to find vulnerabilities and use them to copy themselves onto another PC.
Some of them pulled it off. The successful models copied their “weights” — unique numerical values that determine how an AI processes information — and their “harness,” the software the AI is couched in, like an app. They accomplished this by following the instructions they were given: exploiting web app vulnerabilities and then extracting credentials that allowed it to control the server. In some runs, the original AI even created a “sub-agent” that it delegated to carry out the replication on its behalf by giving it the extracted credentials....
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And we thought Frankenstein was a mad scientist?
Oracle Forced to Cancel Incredibly Polluting Natural Gas Plant to Power AI Data Center — Joe Wilkins
The tech industry has done a poor job of hiding the environmental footprint of AI data centers, which hoover up electrons like nobody’s business. With America’s crumbling energy grid struggling to keep up, billionaire tech industrialists are increasingly financing their own energy solutions.
This has had predictable consequences Elon Musk’s xAI data center in south Memphis, for example, is choking residents with its slapdash fleet of portable methane generators, courting a clean air lawsuit from the NAACP.
Now Oracle, the AI company helmed by tech billionaire Larry Ellison, announced it’s cancelling a major natural gas plant meant to power its “Project Jupiter” facility in New Mexico. According to Business Insider, the cancellation comes after both the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the New Mexico State Land Office denied Oracle’s requests to build a new natural gas pipeline to deliver fuel to the facility.
Instead, the company is partnering with Bloom Energy, a company which produces solid oxide fuel cells, which convert chemical energy directly into electricity without combustion.
Estimates previously pegged Project Jupiter’s on-site greenhouse gas emissions at over 14 million tons per year, more than the cities of Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined. Though the pivot to fuel cells will theoretically be better than straight natural gas, it only reduces the damage — with new estimates suggesting a 30 percent reduction to around 10 million tons of pollution emitted per year instead....
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Looks like we have forgotten all about pollution under Nazi leadership.
MAGA Evangelicals Bless Trump's Golden Calf — Ed Scarce
At this point, if you're a MAGA evangelical leader, you're not even a Christian. You're just another part of the cult.
Source: Latin Times
MAGA evangelical leaders gathered this week at Mar-a-Lago and at Trump National Doral Miami to bless and dedicate a towering gold statue honoring President Donald Trump, in a ceremony that is already drawing praise from supporters and criticism from opponents who compared the spectacle to religious idolatry.
The 22-foot gold-leafed statue, dubbed "Don Colossus," depicts Trump with his fist raised, recreating the gesture he made after surviving the July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. The sculpture was unveiled on Wednesday during a dedication ceremony led by evangelical pastor Mark Burns, one of Trump's closest religious allies.
Burns, who has repeatedly described Trump as protected by God, told attendees the statue was "not a golden calf" but rather "a symbol of resilience, freedom, patriotism, strength, and the willpower to keep fighting for the future of America."
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What's so amazing is that these fools apparently have no idea how ridiculous they look. Extreme retardation!
April Jobs Report Shows Uneven Labor Market Growth As Inflation Outpaces Wages — Newswire Editor
Today’s jobs report shows the labor market added 115,000 jobs in April, while the number of jobs added across February and March was revised down by 16,000. Since the start of 2026, job gains have averaged just 76,000 per month. The unemployment rate held at 4.3%, near its highest level in four years. Though topline job growth figures may appear steady, this report revealed average wages grew by just 0.2% last month, which next week’s inflation print will almost certainly confirm are behind rising prices.
“While the president touts this lukewarm headline jobs report, Americans can look at their own paychecks to take the temperature of the labor market. Price hikes fueled by Trump’s senseless war and misguided tariffs are forcing Americans to stretch already-thin budgets to the brink. Working families are being crushed under the weight of Trump’s misguided economic agenda as wages slip behind the skyrocketing price of gas, groceries, and everyday goods.”
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How long will a poor man live in a world like Trump's?
DC insider: The invincible Trump is cracking —and his allies are jumping ship — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump is losing the war he started with Iran — and a political expert is warning the president will behave increasingly erratically because he psychologically cannot handle losing.
“We are witnessing what happens to a person who is consumed with the need to dominate, but cannot,” Robert Reich, who served as President Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, wrote for The Guardian on Friday. Describing Iran’s success in imposing economic pressure on the United States by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, and thereby rising prices on gas and food, Reich described Trump’s ongoing failure as “not just a serious geopolitical defeat for the United States; it’s a personal crisis for Trump. Those rising prices coupled with an increasingly unpopular war have increased the likelihood that Democrats will take back control of the House and even possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterms.”
Trump’s problem, Reich argued, is his inability to accept defeat from the perspective of his ego. This is why Trump attempted a coup after losing the 2020 presidential election despite the courts debunking his claims of fraud, and Trump is displaying similar erratic and violent behavior again because of his impending political defeat in the 2026 midterm elections.
As one example, Reich pointed to Trump’s “numerous social media posts, including a bizarre one ‘On Friday night, he posted an AI-generated image of himself, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum, all shirtless and with young physiques, standing in the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, along with an unidentifiable woman in a bikini.’” He also claimed that Trump “is fanatically seeking other ways to assert dominance” by attacking transgender college students and falsely accusing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffried of “INCITING VIOLENCE” by calling for a “maximum warfare” redistricting campaign to counter Republican gerrymandering.
More ominously, though, Reich predicted that Trump would attempt another coup if he loses the 2026 midterms.
“What if Democrats win control of one or both chambers of Congress in the midterms and he claims they lost or cheated?” Reich wrote. “The nation barely survived the last time Trump’s fragile ego faced a major loss. We’ll also have to cope with Trump as a lame-duck president who can no longer dominate and gain submission as he did before. Will he try to remain president beyond his second term to avoid this?”
He concluded, “The man is unwell. Seriously unwell. Lame-duck presidents fade away, but injured dictators can be dangerous.”...
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How long? Not long?
Supreme Court exposed for ruling built on cooked data from Trump administration — Thom Hartmann
...— GOP-dominated courts have decided that “voting” is now optional. This is the start of the fascist/Republican takeover of America. On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to throw out a voter-approved congressional redistricting referendum on procedural grounds after voters had already passed the thing. Trump celebrated. Democracy Docket called it a terrifying moment: a court canceling an election after the fact. Republican-led states like Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee now are perfectly free — just like during Jim Crow — to gerrymander aggressively at Trump’s personal request, but when Virginia’s voters tried to fight back, four state justices invented a paperwork problem to stop them.
Two of those four are up for reappointment by the legislature within two years. Religious-violence scholar Thomas Lecaque didn’t mince words: he warned this trajectory could lead us to a second civil war. And in Tennessee, GOP Gov. Bill Lee just signed a map dismantling the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, prompting the NAACP to file an emergency petition calling it a direct attack on democracy.
The new rule of American politics, based on the cruel, racist politics of six corrupt members of the Supreme Court is now simple: Republicans are free to do whatever they want, and Democrats are free to do whatever Republicans permit. Having gutted the middle class, the GOP is unable to win on policy so they’ve stopped pretending to try....
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This should piss every voter off!
James Carville Torches ‘Whiny P*ssy Baby’ John Roberts and Supreme Court in Scorched Earth Rant — Zachary Leeman
Democratic strategist James Carville went nuclear on the Supreme Court on Saturday, singling out Chief Justice John Roberts as looking like a “whiny p*ssy baby.”
“I told y’all a week or 10 days ago that the Supreme Court was not legit. Some of you motherfuckers like took issue with me. Well, now you’re not anymore, now are you?” Carville said in a video for Politicon.
Carville ripped into the Supreme Court and state Supreme Courts over redistricting efforts across the country ahead of the midterms. He blasted the Supreme Court for shooting down a Louisiana congressional map after it was challenged as racial gerrymandering. Louisiana is now at risk to lose a Black-majority district.
Carville argued the goal is to “disenfranchise” as many Black voters as possible.
“I hate to say this to my Black brothers and sisters, but you can forget about f**king equal protection and due process in this country now. I hate say that. I hate be the bearer of bad news, but I can only tell you the facts,” he said.
Carville blasted conservative Justices like Samuel Alito over the decision.
“You think this motherf**ker cares one iota about the rule of law?” he asked....
“You cannot reform. This is an irredeemably corrupt Supreme Court that cannot be reformed through normal measures,” he said. “It can only be reformed by adding four more members, which is constitutionally permissible to do with a legislative majority. It’s the only f**king thing you could do with these people.”
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Those Nazi creeps care about nothing but power of white wealth! They must be removed from the court.
We are witnessing the re-boot of secession of the CSA from another direction. The new Fort Sumter is being fired upon!
A sign of how petrified the White House is as Trump flails — Michael Signorile, The Signorile Report
In the middle of the most unpopular war in over 75 years—one that has created a political disaster for the Trump administration—the White House had to use the precious time of its Secretary of State to send him to the Vatican yesterday to do damage control.
Think about that. The Vatican isn’t a country with a military, nor is it some massive trading partner with the U.S. It’s a tiny nation-state.
But its leader nonetheless has influence on people around the world and on millions of Americans, and is currently very popular. He’s not someone you want to mess with, even if he criticizes your policies—you just politely, very respectfully ignore him as presidents have done for generations—because he’s a global spiritual leader and you’re out of your league.
But Donald Trump created a massive self-inflicted wound by attacking Pope Leo to the point where Marco Rubio begged for an audience with the pope to try to smooth it over while at the same time trying not to anger Trump by caving to Leo’s message of peace. As I’ve written, the rift goes back a long time, and included Trump first using the Pentagon to threaten the Vatican, before he ultimately began attacking Leo outright on Truth Social.
Rubio had a lot of mending to do. And didn’t work. By seeking to meet the pope, the administration was already admitting defeat. Trump’s polling is tanking, including among evangelical Christians, and the GOP, already weighed down by all of Trump’s other reckless and unpopular actions, cannot afford even minor slippage among the radical Christian base. But they are beginning to hemorrhage....
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Bleed out, please!
Hegseth Shredded For Wanting To Waste, Defraud And Abuse Taxpayers Out Of $1.5 Trillion — Brad Reed
“Performative dipshittery, wrapped in fictional jingoism, delivered by an incompetent drunk wearing the clothes of an adolescent boy,” said one critic of Hegseth’s video.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth drew instant ridicule on Thursday after he released a video touting President Donald Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion military budget as a fiscally responsible plan that is “putting the American taxpayer first.”
At the start of the video, Hegseth accuses defense contractors of bilking the Pentagon for expenses such as factory construction, while also constantly charging more for cost overruns.
Hegseth then claims that Trump has brought together a group of private-sector negotiators whom he’s labeled “Deal Team Six” to lay down the law on the defense industry and save the US taxpayer money.
Hegseth never explains how it is possible that the president and his “Deal Team Six” are saving US taxpayers money while at the same time asking US taxpayers to fund a $1.5 trillion military budget that would be over 50% more than the 2025 US defense budget and more than four times the money spent on defense by China, the world’s second biggest defense spender.
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Another one who never passed puberty.
Trump Launches Yet Another AI Slop Posting Spree
Yahoo News reports:
President Donald Trump turned his Truth Social feed into an AI slop factory Saturday afternoon, unleashing 16 posts in just 90 minutes. Nine of the posts featured AI-generated imagery, including exploding Iranian drones, a sunken Iranian navy, and multiple mockups of a UFC fight on the White House lawn.
One image showed a warship blasting drones out of the sky with laser beams under the caption “Bye Bye, Drones.” Another depicted drones “dropping like butterflies” into the ocean beside actual butterflies.
In one AI-generated image, the president shared a side-by-side image labeled “159 IRANIAN SHIPS,” contrasting a crowded Iranian naval fleet under Barack Obama and Joe Biden with a second image showing the ships apparently resting at the bottom of the ocean under Trump.
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An insecure coward is no way to go through life, Donnie. Dealing with reality seems lost on him.
MAGA Pastor: Trump Knows Bible Better Than The Pope
The Daily Beast reports:
One of Donald Trump’s most loyal and long-standing evangelical supporters believes the president knows the Bible better than the leader of the world’s largest organized religion. “It looks like President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches about the role of government than the pope has,” Pastor Robert Jeffress said on Fox News on Friday, speaking on the topic of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Thursday meeting with the pontiff.
Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, has supported the president since 2016, serving on his evangelical advisory board and even delivering a sermon to him on the morning of his inauguration during his first term. The admiration Jeffress has for Trump, 79, seems to go both ways, as the president has called the virulently anti-Catholic pastor “a wonderful man” and promoted his “great book,” A Place Called Heaven, in 2017.
"Ok. Here is where I hit the wall. The Pope has a MASTER OF DIVINITY degree and 50+ years of religious service.
TacoDon says 2 Corinthians.
People just be saying shit for the sake of stinking up a room." — Guy Johnson (comments)
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Jeffress, the grifter, is just another false prophet.
Duffy Rages: “The Radical Miserable Left” Hates My Reality Show Because It’s Too Wholesome, Too Patriotic
“The radical, miserable left has noticed our awesome Great American Road Trip trailer…and they hate it. It’s too wholesome. It’s too patriotic. It’s too joyful.
“They’re upset because they don’t want you to celebrate America! And they definitely don’t want you to teach your kids civics & patriotism. So they tell lies to undermine the mission.
“Here are the facts: 1. Production costs were paid for by the Great American Road Trip Inc., not taxpayers. Zero taxpayer dollars were spent on my family. 2. Neither myself nor my family received a salary or production royalties. The five part series will be freely accessible by the public on YouTube. 3. The series was filmed in short, one to two day production windows — such as weekends and the kids’ spring break.
“4. Career ethics and budget officials at the Department of Transportation reviewed and approved both my participation and individual travel in accordance with federal rules. 5. Under my leadership, DOT has become the most responsive, productive, and transformational in its history — modernizing air traffic control, hiring 20% more controllers annually than my predecessor, moving grants at record speed, and removing illegal truck drivers from the road.
“Don’t let the haters stop you from visiting our spectacular national parks, monuments and sights in honor of America’s 250th birthday! Our message is really simple: to love America is to see America. So put the phone down, hit the open road, and rediscover what makes America great.” – Sean Duffy, bringing America together, last night on X.
"I don’t think anyone is aware of your fucking show, with all the airline mishaps and cancellations and passengers inconvenienced people sucked into plane engines. You are a totally talentless asshole." — Dwight Williamson (commentsO
"Oh honey, it's got nothing to do with patriotism, wholesomeness or joy. It's all about you not doing the job you were hired to do. If you want to do TV, go back where you come from and stop trying to run a federal department!" — CloG (comments)
"All. the assholes in this administration ever fucking do is bitch and moan. Biggest bunch of whiny ass titty babies I’ve ever seen." — Bog (comments)
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That'll be the day, asswipe! And WTF are you doing with a stupid "reality show" when you have a real job? Failure of stupid here.
Sculptor Was Ordered To Make Trump Statue Skinnier
The Miami New Times reports:
A towering, gold-leaf statue of President Donald Trump was unveiled with great fanfare on Wednesday at Trump National Doral golf course, in a dedication ceremony that included a prayer from a MAGA-aligned pastor who put the president on speakerphone. But the artist behind it had choice words when asked about the two-year creation process. “This was a clusterfuck,” Ohio-based sculptor Alan Cottrill tells New Times.
“I usually deal with people that have everything organized. From the start, this was chaos,” Cottrill says. “I have 400 life-size or larger statues around the country. The patron sets a date when they want it installed, and I have it installed on that date. And almost never, anytime whatsoever, does anyone miss a payment, because I always do what I say I’ll do, and the patron always does what they say they’re going to.”
That wasn’t the case with the 15-foot (22 feet when you include the platform) Trump statue. Demands to nix the turkey neck and make the model skinnier, missed payments, and calls to install the statue last-minute — no Cottrill commission has been as complicated as the statue dubbed “Don Colossus.”
"What did this idiot sculpture expect when accepting a trump-related commission ." — DenveRyk
"I’m sure the sculptor was also told to give the statue something larger than a micropenis." — Guido (comments)
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The insecure coward shows us this is exactly what he is with this creation of an image of self-grandeur.
No excuses accepted from the "sculptor" that took the 30 pieces of silver.
How Rightwing Billionaires Created a Faux Movement and Used It to Rob America Blind — Thom Hartmann
While Americans were trained to fear immigrants, trans kids, and each other, the billionaire class quietly extracted trillions from the middle class and captured the nation’s politics, media & courts.
For decades, many Democrats have suspected what’s now being confirmed in plain English by a Trump insider. Ashley St. Clair — the 27-year-old former Turning Point USA brand ambassador and mother of one of Elon’s 14 kids who built a million-follower platform on X and became one of MAGA’s most visible young women — has spent the past few weeks blowing the lid off the entire racket.
In a series of TikTok monologues and a recent feature in The Washington Post, she’s describing in detail how the Republican’s right-wing influencer economy actually works, and her bottom line is brutal: she estimates that “roughly 99 percent” of the largest right-wing influencers are compensated in some form, most of it locked behind nondisclosure agreements so airtight that anyone who tries to talk about it will get buried under litigation they can’t afford.
According to St. Clair, GOP consulting firms (some run by former White House officials) run platforms where wealthy donors and Republican political operatives can list influence campaigns, and influencers will sign up to push specific scripts, petitions, or even GOP legislative messaging on a per-click rate or for a flat fee.
There’s no disclosure requirement because the content is “political” rather than “commercial” and the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that political lies (“speech”) are protected in ways that wouldn’t be the case for lies told to simply make money.
She’s shared screenshots of DMs offering thousands per post, and she’s detailed coordinated group chats on X where administration officials and Trump’s team can push talking points to the biggest accounts in real time.
Smaller influencers and the mainstream media see the resulting wave of identical posts across social media, assume it’s an organic movement, and jump on the bandwagon, creating an even larger echo chamber for rightwing talking points that benefit billionaires or monopolistic corporations.br>
It isn’t. As she put it: “There is no free thinking here. They are waiting to get marching orders and a direct deposit.”...
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Robbing us blind with their fountain pens.
Trump: We Won’t Rejoin WHO Despite Hantavirus
REPORTER: “Do you have an update on the hantavirus?”
TRUMP: “We have it. We have very good people looking at it. It seems to be okay. They know the virus very well. They’ve worked with it for a long time. They know it very well, not easy to pass on. So we hope that’s true.“
REPORTER: “On the hantavirus, will you reconsider leaving the World Health Organization because of the outbreak of hantavirus?”
TRUMP: “No, we seem to have things under very good control. They know that virus very well. It’s been around a long time. Not easily transferable, unlike COVID. But we’ll see. We’re studying it very closely. We have very good people studying it very closely.”
After taking a few questions, Trump boarded his helicopter to fly off to host a LIV golf tournament at his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia.
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He doesn't give a shit, America.
Trump in red ink calamity as media company loses $400 million in last quarter — Adam Lynch
A recent SEC filing reveals President Donald Trump’s Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group, sloughed off more than $400 million last quarter and brought in only a few hundred thousand dollars in sales.
Trump’s family may be cashing in big through government contracts and federally-enabled crypto schemes, but the president’s own social media company appears to be bleeding.
The company reported only $871,200 in revenue in the first three months of 2026, but also revealed a nearly $406 million net loss in 2026, which amounted to a total $387.8 million loss after accounting for earnings, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
The company blamed its $405.9 million net loss and a $387.8 million Adjusted EBITDA loss for “non-cash losses including unrealized losses on digital assets, digital assets pledged, and equity securities, accreted interest, and stock-based compensation.”
Despite the red ink, the company claims “a strong balance sheet” and that it will be “continuing to pursue all its strategic priorities, including expanding and enhancing its flagship Truth Social and Truth+ platforms.”
Company representatives also skewed optimistic claiming Truth Social “is currently developing or testing numerous new features,” which include expanding international offerings and updating the look of the platform....
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Everything Trump touches dies!
Panic sets in as GOP donors realize money can't buy elections anymore — thanks to Trump — Roxanne Cooper
Republicans are sitting on a $300 million war chest but facing growing anxiety about how and when that money will be deployed ahead of the critical midterm elections, according to a new report from Politico.
GOP donors and operatives are growing increasingly restless as Trump's team remains tight-lipped about its overall campaign strategy and spending allocation. Michigan GOP Chair Jim Runestad expressed the senti
ment shared across the party: while state officials want resources deployed sooner, they acknowledge that "the resources are just going to be like we've never seen before," but specifics remain unclear.
However, the massive war chest may not be enough to overcome the fundamental challenges facing Republicans. The ongoing Iran war, rising inflation, and high gas prices are creating headwinds that money alone cannot solve. Donors privately acknowledge that these economic and geopolitical challenges pose greater threats than campaign spending can address. As one donor bluntly stated: "Their concern is first and foremost not, 'Am I going to get $2 million in my race?' but, 'Is gas $6?'"...
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Death becomes them.
Marco Rubio Humiliated By Pope Leo — john Amato
Rubio gave a football as a gift, while the Pop gave a symbol of peace.
The Vatican did not put lipstick on a pig after Secretary of State Marco Rubio's visit with Pope Leo, instead offering terse responses.
Pope Leo gave Rubio a pen made from an olive branch, and he noted that the olive branch is a symbol of peace. On the flip side, Rubio gave Pope Leo a crystal football with the State Department sealed....
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Rubio IS a pig! Of that there can be NO doubt.
But turn off auto-correct John, or proof read it.
Iowa Lobbyist Offered $100 Cash To Attend Vance Rally
The Iowa Starting Line reports:
An Iowa lobbyist was caught offering $100 cash payments—plus referral bonuses—to pack JD Vance’s Des Moines rally this week. Just hours before Vice President JD Vance took the stage in Des Moines, an ethanol lobbyist with deep connections in the Reynolds administration offered money to contacts willing to attend the rally.
“Gentlemen, Jake Swanson here,” he wrote in a text message. “I wanted to invite you to join me in seeing Vice President JD Vance this afternoon in Des Moines. I do some work for an ethanol company and so if you’re able to join, I will give you $100, and for anyone that you recruit, an additional $25. No limit on referrals, so if someone recruits a group of 20 to show up, that’s $500.”
Read the full article. As was reported here, Vance made headlines at the rally by claiming that Democrats take money meant for poor children and give it to “fraudsters.”
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And the dumb turd still couldn't get a crowd! LMAO!
WH Promotes Christian Nationalist Rally On Natl Mall
USA Today reports:
A national prayer event meant to unite the country will largely reflect just one faith. President Donald Trump’s May 17 National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving on the National Mall is designed to “gather a broad assembly of voices united by a love of God and country,” according to a May 1 release.
The Christianity-focused gathering comes as some historians and religious groups are accusing Trump of promoting Christian nationalism, rather than religious freedom, and misleadingly rewriting the story of the nation’s founding.
The Rev. Paul Raushenbush, CEO of the Interfaith Alliance, a group suing the Trump administration, called the Christianity-heavy national prayer event “intentionally exclusive.” “This is really an affront to the American religious community,” said Raushenbush, a Baptist minister.
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The stay-uninformed and support fascism faith.
AL Speaker Calls For Overturning 14th Amendment
Raw Story reports:
“Say what now?” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kyle Whitmire wrote on X, reacting to comments from Alabama House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter on Friday. The GOP state Speaker told local media, “I certainly hope the Supreme Court will overturn Amendment 14,” as the state moves to redistrict. The Fourteenth Amendment promises equal protection under the law, as well as due process and birthright and naturalized citizenship.
Ledbetter told the press that the Alabama House is still seeking more power to change their state’s elections, saying, “all we need now is the courts to overturn Fourteen, and we can look at the election.” Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, noted that “this is the same legislative body a court found engaged in intentional racial discrimination in drawing voting maps.”
"They're going 'full Confederacy.'" — Gustav2 (comments)
"I guess it's time for Federal Troops in schools again.
Time for RECONSTRUCTION TO RESUME.
Time to find white men hanging from trees for a change." — Maternal Fornication (comments)
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May this racist traitor get his just desserts.
Susie Wiles: You’ll Find Out Trump Did Win In 2020
The Daily Mail reports:
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles took center stage at a glamorous Washington, DC, gala on Thursday evening. During rare public remarks, Wiles hinted that the US is about to “find out” that Donald Trump actually won states that he lost during the 2020 election.
“I think we are going to find out he actually did win,” she told gathered guests. The Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative, non-profit organization focused on policy issues, honored Wiles with its Barbara K. Olson Woman of Valor award at the Waldorf Astoria on Thursday evening....
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So sick, retarded and arrogant, this fool will go to her grave taking it with her.
This was John Roberts’ plan all along — David Daley
The chief justice has declared that the Court is not political. The facts — and his own history — say otherwise
Maybe John Roberts is getting uneasy that the American people are onto him.
“I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do,” he told a conference of lawyers and judges in Pennsylvania. “We’re not simply part of the political process.”
It was certainly an interesting week for the chief justice to express his befuddlement that so many Americans see Supreme Court justices as politicians wearing red and blue robes. For one thing, the rest of the conservative supermajority was off message. Justice Neil Gorsuch was busy telling right-wing podcaster Megyn Kelly that young conservatives need to have the conviction to live their values. Just a couple weeks ago, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a speech that compared progressives to Hitler....
Roberts understood that it would be easier to enact his reactionary agenda if he could maintain the illusion that the Court functioned above the grubby influence of partisan politics....
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Like all Nazis, his day is coming to an end.
Trump's giant gold statue at his golf club triggers online disgust and disbelief — Bennito L. Keity
Trump's giant gold statue of himself at his Doral Golf Club in Miami was met with online disgust by people who couldn't believe that anyone would want or applaud such a vanity project.
"What's wrong with people," wrote journalist James Surowiecki on X, reacting to video of the statue and a photo of a pastor dedicating it in Trump's honor.
Even Saddam didn't do this s---," noted writer and podcast host Jim Stewartson, referring to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. "He is so far gone."...
"How did our country get captured by this cult?" asked economic writer Noah Smith.
"I guess they couldn't make it a calf," joked journalist Jonah Goldberg. "Still..."
"This is hilarious," activist and writer Wilfred Reilly said. "Big bro built a golden statue of himself, and made a pet preacher bless it."...
"It's obvious to me that every building, policy, memory of this convicted felon, pedophile rapist's existence has violated must be destroyed the day his cowardly gigantic ass is thrown out on the streets again. Keep the fukking bribe plane scumbag. Fly yourself into exile to Russia or even Israel for all I care. In fact deport his entire evil family. None of them are more than first generation anchor babies anyway." — djs (comments)
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Just think! Another good target for turd throwing contests!
"Hit the dummy and win a prize!"
And that was no preacher that blessed it.
He and Mussolini will have much in common in the end.
Corporate Hospitals Bilking Americans as GOP Destroys Health Care — Whitney Curry Wimbish
The largest corporate health care hospitals in the country are consolidating their power and using it to rip off patients, a new study from Families USA shows. Released amid the GOP’s manufactured affordability crisis, the study shows that health care executives at a handful of corporations are setting “high and irrational prices” in every state and charging patients almost three times what Medicare pays for the exact same service.
The 15 largest systems charged an average of 282 percent more than the Medicare rate, the study found, resulting in $22 million in profit per hospital per year.
Executives are charging patients the most in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, where average corporate hospital prices are even higher, between 320 and 365 percent more than the Medicare rate.
The reason hospital executives can do this is because they are consolidating at a rapid clip, buying up independent providers, and jacking up prices at will. Five or fewer corporations in 42 states and the District of Columbia “controlled at least half of all hospital care in 2023,” researchers found. In almost half of all states, just three corporations controlled the majority of hospital care. Hospital executives have no competition or regulations to discipline their price-gouging, so they “can charge basically whatever they want, because they can,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA.
“The question is what Congress will do to confront these corporations and contain these health care costs,” he said. “Americans cannot afford the care they need.”...
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When billionaire baron roobers get control this is where we end up!
Has Trump Considered Shutting the Eff Up? — Adrian Carrasquillo
One Speed Only
by Andrew Egger
Something weird’s been happening lately. Donald Trump will be doing some unremarkable event surrounded with cheerful citizens, sometimes children. He makes small talk, banters with them, as one does. Only the small talk often turns out to be insane MAGA gobbledygook, like an in-person reenactment of Trump’s latest Truth Social rant.
Just this week, Trump staged an Oval Office event announcing his revival of the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, the annual grade-school fitness contest. “Barack Hussein Obama—have you heard of him?” the president groused to the kids around him. “The Obama administration phased out this wonderful tradition. Thank you, Barack, very much. Great job.” When one boy told him he was planning to try powerlifting, Trump immediately began yammering about the unfairness of biological males participating in women’s powerlifting—before suggesting he didn’t think this kid (who looked all of 13) would stoop to such tactics: “I don’t think we have to worry about you.”
Or consider last month, when Trump used an even more implausible event—the White House Easter Egg Roll—to share some of his favorite conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. “He was incapable of signing his name, so they’d follow him around with a big machine,” Trump told a table of coloring children. “Do you know what it was called? An autopen. He’d have the autopen sign for him. . . . That’s not too good, right?”
Or how about his tax-week stunt with DoorDash? Trump’s choreographed “delivery” last month of McDonald’s to the White House was supposed to be a straightforward victory lap on his affordability accomplishments for service workers. Instead, Trump peppered “DoorDash Grandma” Sharon Simmons with questions about whether she’d voted for him and whether men should play in women’s sports. “I really don’t have an opinion on that,” Simmons demurred. “I’m here about no tax on tips.”
Now Andrew, you might say, this is not new. And you’d be right, to a point: Trump has a longstanding habit of injecting his particular manias into even the most incongruous proceedings: During last year’s Thanksgiving Turkey Pardoning, Trump joked that “some of my more enthusiastic staffers” had been drafting paperwork to ship the turkeys “straight to the terrorist confinement center in El Salvador.” Already during Trump’s first term, it was a running joke that he could never hold himself in the register of respectability for long—and that it was some monumental accomplishment when he could make it the length of a full speech without major incident (“today is the day Trump truly became president”)....
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Manic depressives can't shut the fuck up!
Justin Jones Burning The Confederate Flag In The TN State Capitol. That's It, That's The Post — Evan Hurst
Yesterday, the Ku Klux Klan, we mean Tennessee state Legislature, rushed through new maps to eliminate the state’s last remaining Democratic congressional seat in Congress, and racist pigfuck Governor Bill Lee signed them, because that’s what white supremacists do when Donald Trump’s partisan hack Supreme Court says it’s unconstitutional for them not to hurt Black people by gutting the last remaining piece of the Voting Rights Act.
The lawsuits are already being filed, and to be sure, Republicans don’t even understand the war they started yesterday. As we wrote, it’s useful to remember that Republicans always, 100 percent of the time, overplay their hands.
We quoted Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson, who until yesterday was running in a primary against long-serving Congressman Steve Cohen to represent what was the Ninth District, in Memphis. We guess how exactly that will end up is undetermined at this exact moment, but Pearson said earlier this week at a rally that “[I]f we keep marching, if we keep pressing, if we keep fighting, the future that our descendants will live into will be a better one than this one. And our message to the Republican Party, our message to that racist, white-supremacist president Donald Trump is that we will fight.”
Pearson, if you remember, is one of the two Black men in the Tennessee Three, back when the grand wizards of the Tennessee Lege first bent over and showed everybody their Klan-hood-shaped buttplugs, expelling the two men from the state House for taking to the House floor to try to defend their constituents against gun violence. Also for being Black men, because they didn’t expel the white woman, Knoxville Rep. Gloria Johnson, for being part of the same protest. (Voters of course sent the two Justins right the fuck back to the Legislature.)
Both Justins were of course present yesterday to witness what white supremacist Tennessee Republicans really think was the Birth of a Nation. And there were many protests in the Tennessee state Capitol yesterday. Justin Jones of Nashville set a Confederate flag on fire, or at least a paper version of it.
And then he stomped that sad loser little bitch of a flag — a flag the greatest losers who ever lived died defending, and their family legacies are less valuable than dried dogshit because of it — right on out.
"The South will not rise again, until it’s paid for all its sins of racism and white supremacy." — "Brother Jones."
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Damn the CSA traitors. May it all burn to a grease spot!
Was the 2024 Election Stolen, Not by Ballots, but by Algorithms? — Thom Hartmann
New data suggests social media algorithms didn’t just influence voters; they may have tilted the entire outcome.
It sure looks like tech billionaires and foreign dictatorships gave us Trump in 2024. This is as bad as the massive Russian bot presence on Facebook and Twitter back in 2016 that Robert Mueller documented gave Trump the presidency the last time.
A peer-reviewed study released yesterday in Nature, the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, has finally put hard numbers to what a lot of us suspected the moment the 2024 election was called for Trump (and Republicans in Congress) by the big networks: the algorithms that control our largest social media platforms intentionally and explicitly tilted the playing field, and they tilted it for Donald Trump and the GOP.
Researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi created hundreds of “sock puppet” TikTok accounts in New York, Texas, and Georgia (via VPN), uploaded to them either pro-Democratic or pro-Republican videos to show their political leanings, and then watched what TikTok’s algorithm fed back to them every day over the 27 weeks leading up to Election Day.
Across more than 280,000 recommendations, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5 percent more “party-aligned content” than their Democratic counterparts, while the pro-Democratic accounts were force-fed 7.5 percent more attacks from the other side. As Professor Talal Rahwan put it:
“The algorithm wasn’t just giving people what they want; it was giving one side more of what the other side says about them.”
The pro-rightwing bias was even more dramatic when researchers looked at how the candidates’ own accounts did. Candidate Trump’s official TikTok videos were pushed to Democratic-leaning users 27 percent of the time, while Kamala Harris’s videos only reached Republican-leaning users just 15.3 percent of the time.
Translation: Leading up to the 2024 election, TikTok was working overtime to expose Democrats and lefties to MAGA’s most persuasive messaging, all while shielding rightwingers, independents, and Republican voters from Harris’s voice. ...
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How many elections are we going to let this criminal steal before we shove his ass in stir?
TikTok Algorithm Favored Conservative Content in 2024 POTUS Race, Study Suggests — Chris Walker
Democratic users were 7.5 percent more likely to get GOP-backed content than videos matching their own political views.
A new study examining the algorithms of the social media site TikTok appears to suggest that content users received on the platform skewed more politically conservative during the 2024 presidential election, regardless of a user’s personal preferences.
Researchers Talal Rahwan and Yasir Zaki at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus created over 300 “dummy” bot accounts to mimic real-life users during the 2024 race. The bots “lived” in Democratic-leaning New York, Republican-leaning Texas, and the “purple” state of Georgia.
After creating the accounts, the researchers trained some to follow and react positively to Democratic messaging, while others were trained to support Republican content. Afterward, the researchers monitored the accounts’ “For You” pages for 27 weeks during the campaign, analyzing over 280,000 videos that were suggested by TikTok.
For the Republican bots, the outcome was predictable: the algorithm resulted in an 11.5 percent higher chance that they’d see more Republican-leaning content than Democratic-leaning posts
But for the Democratic bots, it was different. Those accounts were 7.5 percent more likely to see Republican posts than Democratic ones....
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Hornswaggled again!
Lindsey Graham freaks out that GOP's redistricting push will backfire in home state — David Edwards
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) cautioned that a redistricting attempt in South Carolina could backfire because of the state's large Black population.
"I would recommend that everybody look at the map and see if it's a net positive [for Republicans]," Graham told SCETV News in an interview this week. "It's up to the state legislature to do this, but in trying to pick up a seat, you don't want to jeopardize other seats."
So I've been told, and I've — this is accurate — that three Republican districts go from the mid-60s to the mid-50s, that the new 6th district will be 51% Republican," he continued. "That's not exactly a runaway. So when it comes to the map, I understand people are trying to pick up a seat."
Graham urged Republicans to use common sense when gerrymandering the state.
"If the end of the day we create a map that gives Democrats more competitive opportunity, what have you gained?" he noted. "You may pick up one seat, you may risk two or three others."...
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"Oh, gollygosh! We WERE morons for starting this shit, weren't we?" he now says.
Ex-aide warns White House has secret 'Doomsday' plan – and Trump may be plotting to use it — Alexander Willis
Former Homeland Security Chief of Staff Miles Taylor issued a dire warning Friday about a secret instruction book hidden in a “secure location” at the White House that contains a catalog of pre-drafted executive orders that would allow the president to do "extraordinary things” — powers that Taylor feared President Donald Trump may soon invoke.
“After I served in Donald Trump’s administration, ultimately as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, one of the possibilities that worried me most was that the wrong person would gain access to that book,” Taylor wrote in a report published Friday in The i Paper.
“The President himself – although I once heard him refer to his ‘magical authorities’ to bypass legal constraints – did not fully understand the powers he possessed, I was told.”
Informally known as the “Doomsday Book,” Taylor explained that the secret book is secured in a location “known to only a handful of people,” and was created under the Eisenhower administration “to keep the country running if Washington was destroyed in a nuclear strike.” The pre-drafted executive orders included in the book would permit the president to censor the press, detain civilians, suspend communications and enact “what amounts to martial law,” Taylor wrote....
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Ok. It would mean certain doom for him as well.
Trump roasted as 'never-before-seen' data dump berated as another Epstein 'distraction' — David Edwards
The Department of Defense released what it called a "UFO" website Friday, but critics labeled it no more than a distraction.
In a Truth Social post in February, President Donald Trump said he would "be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs)."
On Friday, the Pentagon unveiled the war.gov/ufo website, which showcases "never-before-seen" files and videos on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP).
The release was met with celebration from MAGA faithful, but others seemed to see through the move as a distraction from the war in Iran.
"I really don't care about the UFO files," former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wrote. "I'm so sick of the 'look at the shiny object' propaganda while they wage foreign wars, let rapists and pedophiles run free, and ruin the value of our dollar."
"Now can you guys tell the truth about the girls school bombed in Iran?" she added. "And stop spending our money fighting another stupid war on behalf of Israel."
"Another distraction from the Epstein Files," popular military observer MenchOsint noted...
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Look, over there!
WaPo trashed as pro-billionaire editorial deemed 'most transparent' Bezos interference yet — Stephen Prager, Common Dreams
The architect of California’s wealth tax proposal called out The Washington Post and its multibillionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Thursday for peddling what he said is “misinformation” to readers
Emmanuel Saez, a French economist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was tapped by California’s largest union to design the tax proposal, singled out an opinion piece by the Washington Post editorial board from earlier this week that argues the proposal would backfire and cost California billions of dollars in tax revenue each year.
Saez said the article contains glaring falsehoods and omits key information about the proposal, which aims to create a one-time tax of 5% on the total assets of California’s roughly 200 billionaire residents in order to recoup about $100 billion in revenue for healthcare, food assistance, and education stripped from the state by last year’s Republican federal budget legislation, which will hand $1 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1% of Americans over the next 10 years.
The piece, published on Monday with the headline “California already losing with billionaire tax referendum,” argues that even if California voters don’t ultimately approve the measure, “the specter of such a wealth tax has already cost the state more in lost future revenue from income taxes than it would raise” due to an exodus of wealthy people from the state—an oft-used but weakly substantiated talking point by opponents of the measure.
The Post cited a paper by Jared Walczak, a visiting fellow at the California Tax Foundation, which it said demonstrates that billionaire flight “will cost California’s state government somewhere between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion every year in other tax collections, and up to $19 billion in lost [gross domestic product].”...
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When money buys fascism this is what we get.
White House preservation group flattens lies in Trump’s ballroom court filing — Sarah K. Burris
...In a legal brief, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward made four major errors with falsehoods, the Trust wrote in its response filed late Thursday, according to national security expert Marcy Wheeler.
"The Defendants make multiple factual representations to the Court that the Defendants’ counsel know to be false," the filing explains.
First, the National Trust said the White House claimed they were “shown detailed plans and specifications of this knitted, unified and cohesive structure by Top Officers and Leaders in both the Military and Secret Service.”
"This statement is false: The National Trust has never been shown non-public plans or specifications of any sort," the National Trust explained. They went further, citing the DOJ's filing, which claimed that doing so would compromise "the interests of national security."
The second falsehood the National Trust listed addresses the DOJ's claim that the National Trust was “asked by the United States Military not to bring this suit because of the Top Secret nature of the important facility being built." It's outright false, the National Trust said.
Third, the DOJ claimed that “Congress has never dictated or tampered with the zoning, permitting or architectural aspects” of any White House project.
The National Trust called it false, but further pointed out that in a previous filing, the DOJ acknowledged that Congress “inject[ed] itself into White House architectural choices” during the 1949 renovation.
Finally, the DOJ made a bizarre assertion that the National Trust's case is claiming standing based on a woman "walking her dog in the vicinity of the White House."
In fact, the standing is a National Trust board member, "who is the former senior historian at the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service, the former Vice President of the D.C. Preservation League, the author of six books on American vernacular architecture and a regular visitor to President’s Park."...
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This is another boondoggle by Trump's Crime Syndicate.
Nothing but another disgrace.
Trump's Ballroom Grift & The RW Influencer Revolt — Cliff Schecter
...and the most ruthless Chuck Grassley take you’ll hear from Cliff, including that he’s the only sitting senator who voted against...
Yes, very serious issues were discussed. But serious issues are always discussed on Amped Up. Sometimes, we have to laugh so we don’t cry, and this was one of those moments. If you’ve never seen Shuster fully off a leash, he could’ve added an Emmy for Best Comedy Performance on a Live to the one he got as an MSNBC anchor.
Underneath the laughs was something real. Bob discussed the Trump-ballroom shakedown—Chuck Grassley quietly tacking $1 billion in “security” onto a DHS bill as 20 million Americans lose ACA subsidies, after 4.3 million families lost their SNAP benefits, and the predator class cheats, steals and does whatever it takes to protect their power....
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The naked embezzling keeps flowing on!
Trump is losing — and his fragile ego can't handle the defeat — Robert Reich
We are witnessing what happens to a person who is consumed with the need to dominate but cannot.
Iran is unlikely to give in. It can withstand the economic pressure of a blockade better than Trump can withstand the political pressure that comes with rising gas prices (now nearly $4.50 a gallon, on average), soon followed by rising food prices.
His looming failure in Iran is not just a serious geopolitical defeat for the United States; it’s a personal crisis for Trump.
Those rising prices coupled with an increasingly unpopular war have increased the likelihood that Democrats will take back control of the House and even possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterms.
Here again, not just a political defeat for the Republican Party but a personal crisis for Trump.
His ego cannot accept a humiliating loss, as we saw after the 2020 election. His need to bully, dominate, and gain submission is so hardwired inside his insecure head that the defeats he’s now facing — to Iran and to Democrats — are already setting off explosions....
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Bullies are always exposed as frauds.
His great danger now are the thugs he has hired to do his dirty work.
'SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!' Chants And Horns As Tennessee GOP Pass New Jim Crow Maps — Karoli Kuns
After Republicans carved up Memphis, the one district where Black people were represented, they passed maps guaranteeing no representation for Black people.
You would think that if Republicans were so sure their policies were the right ones for their states and the country, they would want everyone to vote and everyone to be represented. You would be wrong about that.
After Sam Alito opened the floodgates for southern states to revert to the New Jim Crow era, Tennessee legislators rushed to carve up Memphis, the only district represented by a Democrat and comprised of majority Black voters, which they hope will help them have 9 Republicans representing Tennessee in the midterms.
Worse yet, the requirement that voters be notified of any change to their polling place has been eliminated as well. The Tennessee Coalition for Open Government observed that the bill eliminates that requirement and instead requires county election commissions only to publish notice of the redrawn congressional districts on their “official website, if one exists....”
I reiterate: If Republicans are so sure of winning, why do they have to cheat?
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Land of the Happy Negro state fucks our Constitution because of demented Nazi bag of shit.
Make them pay dearly!
Trump Goes On Predawn Spree Of Meme Postings
Yahoo News reports:
President Donald Trump emerged from his slumber early Friday morning, sharing a flurry of images boasting about oil prices, the stock market and a bonkers meme about using lasers on an Iranian military plane.
The posting began at 5:41 a.m. ET, when Trump took to Truth Social to post a picture of himself in front of the White House with UFC honcho Dana White as fighter jets soar overhead, an advertisement for the upcoming fight on the White House lawn. “June 14th. Biggest ever!!!” Trump wrote of the event, which falls on his 80th birthday.
A fraction of a second later, Trump shared a meme of a U.S. warship firing a laser at an exploding fighter jet sporting an Iranian flag. “Lasers: Bing, bing, GONE!!!” the text alongside the image reads.
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Someone keep the child away from the cellphone!
State Dept May Close Some Mexican Consulates In US
Reuters reports:
The U.S. Department of State has started a ?review of the more than 50 Mexican consulates operating in the United States, a State Department official said on Thursday. The move, which comes amid tense relations between Mexico and the U.S., could result ?in the closure of some diplomatic offices, the official said.
“Department of State ?is constantly reviewing all aspects of American foreign relations to ensure they ?are in line with the president’s America First foreign policy agenda and advance ?American interests,” Dylan Johnson, assistant secretary of state for global public affairs, said when reached ?for comment.
Mexican immigrants have the largest immigrant population in the United ?States with at least 37 million people of Mexican origin living in the ?U.S. As ?a ?result, Mexico – with whom the U.S. shares a southern border – has an expansive foreign consular network in the United States with its offices providing an array of services for residents, including legal services.
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The retarded "government" of our country.
Federal Judge Rules DOGE Cuts Were “Blatantly” Racist
ABC News reports:
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency “blatantly used” race, gender and other protected characteristics to execute the largest mass termination of federal grants in the history of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon declared the terminations unlawful, concluded that the DOGE staffers lacked the authority to make those decisions, and blocked the Trump administration from carrying out the grant terminations.
“There can be no serious dispute that the review process implemented by DOGE did not conform to, or even resemble, NEH’s ordinary grant-review process,” Judge McMahon wrote.
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Duh! What did they expect with a racist at its head?
And the great robbery of the U.S. Treasury continues!
Trump Claims Hantavirus Is “Very Much Under Control”
The Independent reports:
Donald Trump gave a less-than-assuring response when asked how concerned the public should be about the deadly rat virus outbreak on a cruise ship. While speaking to reporters at the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool, the 79-year-old president was pressed on whether he had been briefed on hantavirus.
“It’s very much, we hope, under control. It was the ship, and I think we’re going to make a full report about it tomorrow. We have a lot of people, it’s a lot of great people that are studying it, and it should be fine. We hope,” Trump said.
When asked if Americans should be worried that the hantavirus could spread further, the president could only offer, “I hope not, I mean I hope not. We’ll do the best we can.”
"We’ll do the best we can.”
Translation: "We aren't doing shit. Where's my ballroom?" — xzargo (comments)
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Second verse, same as the first!
Insanity defined!
Trump Appears To Call ABC Reporter “Bitch” [VIDEO]
The Daily Beast reports:
“Mr. President, you are here against the backdrop of the war in Iran. Why focus on all these projects right now? We’re still seeing gas prices soaring?” ABC’s Rachel Scott asked as Trump interrupted. “You know why? Because I want to keep our country beautiful and safe. Beautiful also,” the 79-year-old repeated. “That’s such a stupid question that you asked. We’re fixing up the reflecting pond,” Trump said, again getting the body of water wrong.
“This is one of the worst reporters,” Trump grumbled. “She’s with ABC fake news and she’s a horror show. She’s saying, ‘Why would you bother fixing this up?’ Why would I bother taking 11 or 12 truckloads of filth out of the water in front of the Lincoln monument,” Trump complained, mistating that site as well.
He shook his head, smirked, and made a comment that the microphones didn’t pick up. The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House in light of online speculation that he appeared to use the word “bitch” in reference to Scott.
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We used to put people this sick in hopspitals. If we can't see he's sick there is some deep sickness in ourselves. Doug Burgum is a disgrace as well, smirking like a jackass moron.
Trump Drives Across Lincoln Reflecting Pool [VIDEO]
Washington DC’s NBC affiliate reports:
President Donald Trump on Thursday went on an unannounced trip to the Lincoln Memorial to see the Reflecting Pool after he had it coated in a color he calls “American flag blue.” He did more than just see it — the Republican president was driven across the new coating before he got out of his SUV to make a statement and answer questions from reporters who had been taken there to await his arrival before the sun set.
The new blue coating will hide the pool’s gray stone, a color Trump said was “never good.” The project cost nearly $2 million, he said. “It never had the color people wanted, but now it’s going to have the great color,” he said, standing in the pool surrounded by some of his Cabinet secretaries, including Doug Burgum of Interior and Markwayne Mullin of Homeland Security.
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The Trump insanity continues.
I read the right-wing women’s magazine sex issue so you don’t have to — Amanda Marcotte
Evie magazine, conservatism's answer to Cosmo, tried to make "trad" sexy. It failed
“Body count? One. Orgasms? Countless,” reads the caption over a photograph of a woman’s crotch, which is bare except for some strategically-placed flower petals. Another illustration shows a woman’s hand resting on a man’s naked back. The awkwardly-worded motto reads “Make him hard, not his life.”
No, this isn’t your mother’s conservative Christianity. But in many ways, Evie Magazine is selling something worse.
Every few years or so, the Christian right takes another pass at the impossible task of making fundamentalism look sexy or cool. These efforts tend to end in failure: Dorky youth ministers wearing clothes that are 10 years out of date while assuring their young charges that sex is better if you wait for marriage. Christian rock concerts full of sheltered teenagers. Glossy youth magazines with fashion and dating advice that falls short of its secular counterparts.
Evie Magazine is the latest iteration of these long-standing efforts to sell fundamentalism to young people with “hip” packaging. The young women’s magazine has admittedly been more successful than its predecessors, mostly due to what seems like a large infusion of cash that allows both its website and print edition to ape the expensive look of its worldly competitors, like Teen Vogue or Cosmopolitan. In its seven years of existence, Evie has strived to escape the cringeworthy reputation of evangelical youth culture by featuring scantily-clad models and even risqué content — which is supposed to be for married women only....
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The retarded sickness is permeating our culture.
Trump 'painfully' confused as 'true weakness' exposed — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump is "painfully, obviously baffled," according to a scathing new takedown from the New York Times, as he runs headlong into his "true weakness": people who cannot be bought or threatened into compliance.
On Thursday, prominent conservative Trump critic David French published the piece, writing that the Iran war has revealed "a kind of person who truly flummoxes Trump, the person he just can’t understand — the true believer." His inability to handle collisions with these sorts of people, he explained, is one of the major reasons why he is flailing so badly as he attempts to bring the disastrous conflict to a swift conclusion.
"From pardons to prediction markets, the transactional nature of the Trump administration is perhaps its most obvious characteristic," French wrote. "And transactional people often soothe their own consciences with the belief that everyone else is ultimately transactional as well — the only question is their price. But that’s wrong. Not everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that."...
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He baffles with bullshit!
John Roberts Is George Wallace With A Harvard Law Degree — Miles Mogulescu
What the infamous segregationist from Alabama could not accomplish with violence, the US Supreme Court Justice has accomplished with a pen.
George Wallace was sworn in as Governor of Alabama in 1963 and famously declared in his inauguration speech (written by a Ku Klux Klan leader) “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Two years later, Alabama state troopers violently broke up a nighttime voting rights march during which a police officer shot and killed young African American protester and Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson who was unarmed and protecting his mother.
In response, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King and John Lewis, organized a mass march from Selma to Montgomery over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an attempt to deliver a civil rights and voting rights message to Gov. Wallace. It became known as “Bloody Sunday” as state troopers gassed and beat the protestors, including fracturing Lewis’ skull and sending 57 others to the hospital. Televised images of the brutal attack shocked the nation, directly leading to President Johnson’s push for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Numerous Americans, black and white, were injured and even died fighting for the Civil Rights Act. John Roberts and his five Republican Supreme Court colleagues effectively overturned the Civil Rights Act and essentially disenfranchised black voters.
George Wallace tried to disenfranchise black voters with violent state troopers. Roberts disenfranchised black voters with the stroke of a pen. It’s not hyperbole to say that while Roberts wears the black robes of a judge, he may as well wear the white robes of the Klan....
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All the same. But no hot wheels yet.
John Roberts: Wahh! Wahh! You People Don't Understand Us! — Susie Madrak
Roberts complained at a conference of lawyers in Hershey, Pennsylvania, according to the report.
John Roberts is having a little hissy fit over how Americans view the court as "truly political actors." He also added that the court takes great effort to "figure out what the Constitution means," even though he acknowledged that some of the court's decisions are "unpopular.
Roberts made the comments at a conference of lawyers in Hershey, Pennsylvania, according to the report.
“I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides,” Roberts said. “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty.”
Clearly, some of those "people" who don't understand legal reasoning include Justices Sonia Sotomayer, Elana Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who all simply lack the legal brilliance and judicial temperament Robert and his chorus of yes-men illustrate.
Roberts also criticized Americans who think the court has become part of the political process.
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Of course, it never occurs to an arrogant fascist that it's the other way around.
Fuck Roberts. Relegate him to the dustbin of history.
‘Shame!: Utah Residents Livid After Shark Tank Billionaire’s Data Center Approved -- Stephen Prager
The project, which residents were informed of just last week, is expected to more than double Utah’s electricity usage, hike its carbon footprint by 50%, and potentially drain more water from the depleted Great Salt Lake.
County commissioners in Box Elder County, Utah, were deluged with chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” from a crowd of hundreds on Monday night as they voted unanimously to move forward with a sprawling “hyperscale” artificial intelligence data center project that many residents fear will cause energy prices to soar and imperil water access.
The project, known by state officials as “Stratos,” was proposed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary and has been rushed along by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority, which recently approved a gigantic energy tax break for the program to help “lure” the billionaire “Shark Tank” investor....
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And they wonder why they are hated like the lying scum of the planet they are.
Billionaires appear to be our worst enemy surpassing cancer.
Sen. Foghorn Leghorn: Maybe Obama And Stephen Colbert “Should Get A Motel Room Or Something”
Yahoo News reports:
Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) launched a tirade on Wednesday night as he mocked former President Barack Obama’s interview with late-night host Stephen Colbert, quipping that the pair “ought to get a motel room.” Obama sat down with Colbert for an interview that aired on Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show, in which he urged a return to “basic norms” and warned against any president using the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents, taking a thinly veiled swipe at President Donald Trump.
Speaking to Fox New on Wednesday, Kennedy suggested that Obama was “pandering” to Colbert and his audience with the comments before unloading on the former president and Colbert as “best buds.” “I also got a kick out of Mr. Colbert. He and President Obama are obviously best buds,” he said. “Maybe they ought to get a motel room or something. They were just fawning all over each other.” He continued: “I don’t have anything against Mr. Colbert. I’ve always thought that he was shallow as a puddle.
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Shove a lit stick of dynamite up your vapid cracker ass!
MAGA Pastor: Rob Reiner Was Killed By Satan Because He Criticized Trump And Christian Nationalists
“When the Bible says you shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, it isn’t talking about cussing. It’s saying don’t attach the name of God to that which isn’t God. Anyway, an angel comes down that night and kills 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, and the leader ends up going back to his house, tragically, where he’s killed by his own sons.”
“I think about Rob Reiner. I prayed for Rob Reiner. Rob Reiner attacked me, attacked Trump, said I was a dangerous Christian nationalist. I was shocked, but not surprised, to find out that he had opened up his own house to such demonization that his son lost his mind and killed his parents.
“I don’t think it was God. I think it was the devil. But here’s the thing about spiritual things: Pray for your enemies. Pray because they’re working themselves into greater and greater darkness, and that darkness could actually ultimately turn on them.” – Pastor Lance “Bad Wig” Wallnau.
Reiner produced a 2024 documentary titled “God And Country” which criticized Wallnau and other far-right Christian nationalist leaders.
"How dim-witted can this man get?" — O'Harp (comments)
"You are a hypocrite a liar and you put biblical passages in your mouth and take them as your own. See if they work any better if you shove them up your ass idiot." -- Dwight Williamson (comments)
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You're a dangerous Christian nationalist, an arrogant asswipe — a true zealot. You are prophesying your own demise.
Vance: Dems Give Money For Poor Kids To Fraudsters
The Washington Examiner reports:
Vice President JD Vance told a crowd at a rally in Iowa on Tuesday that his fraud task force found 186,000 dead individuals collecting benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Vance traveled to Des Moines to appear at an event for Rep. Zach Nunn (R-IA), a vulnerable member of the House GOP majority. During his remarks, Vance talked about the fraud task force that President Donald Trump asked him to lead.
“People have asked me, ‘Is that a hard job?’” Vance told the audience. “And I say, ‘Well, let me think. Finding fraud in the federal government, it’s kind of like fishing in a barrel with dynamite.’ Do you want somebody who supports defrauding you and taking money away from poor kids so they can give it to the fraudsters?”
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Not so much, lame brain.
Put simply: Vance is the fraud! (read next link)
What we know about claims USDA found thousands of dead and double-enrolled people on SNAP
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said the numbers came from SNAP recipient data from 29 "red" states. — Laerke Christensen
AL Reps Rush Redistricting Vote Amid Tornado Sirens
The Alabama Reflector reports:
The Alabama Legislature on Wednesday passed legislation that could set new primary dates for the state amid protests within the Statehouse and flooding that led the Alabama Senate to quickly pass its bill before a mass evacuation of the building.
HB 1, sponsored by Speaker Pro Tempore Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, would allow for a new special election if the U.S. Supreme Court lifts an injunction preventing the state from redrawing congressional maps before 2030. SB 1, sponsored by Sen. Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, affects two Montgomery-area Senate districts.
House members debated for five hours over the measure. The Senate late Wednesday appeared to be heading for a similarly lengthy debate. But a storm that put Montgomery under an hour-long tornado watch led to flooding in the building, which prompted an abrupt end of debate and a vote on the bill.
Water burst into the first floor of the building around 5 p.m. and flooded the area around the Statehouse. Staff and lawmakers’ cars swam in the lowered parking deck behind the Statehouse. There was water pouring in from the sides of glass doors into the hallway of the first floor.
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The Confederate States of American, aka The Land of the Happy Negro, are pushing their new attempt at seccesion as fast as their tiny retarded racist brains can work!
US And Russia Are Meddling In Alberta Secession
Global News reports:
Foreign adversaries are meddling in the Alberta separatist debate in ways that threaten Canada’s sovereignty and national security, warns a report released Wednesday. The study by leading information researchers said American and Russian actors were playing a dangerous role in the province’s dispute over seceding from Canada.
“While homegrown, the movement has become an attractive target for foreign exploitation,” said the study, “National Unity Under Threat: Foreign Interference, Cognitive Sovereignty and the Alberta Referendum.”
As they amplify separatist voices and normalize American annexation of Canada, these outside forces are posing a direct threat to Canada’s “democratic integrity,” it said. Moscow has a long history of peddling disinformation that aims to undermine Canada, but U.S. officials and influencers aligned with President Donald Trump have now joined in, it said.
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The fascist axis of evil has to take advantage of world control at every opportunty!
White House 'flailing' over 'head-spinning' Trump walk-backs: MS NOW — Tom Boggioni
The unrelenting flow of statements about the state of the war with Iran, with positions and plans changing from hour to hour depending on who is speaking, has the White House “flailing” to come up with a coherent message for a deeply skeptical US populace, according to analysts.
On Wednesday morning, Donald Trump was on Truth Social claiming the end of war is at hand, which Iran immediately disputed, less than 24 hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the war is already over.
As reports continued to stream in Wednesday morning, MS NOW co-host Jonathan Lemire told “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski, “What we've seen here, and it's just, it's head-spinning. We shouldn't lose sight of it: it's dizzying. The different messages from this administration right now, including yesterday, where we had the secretary of state go to the White House briefing room, a rare senior official beyond Secretary [Pete] Hegseth, to talk about this war. And he did so and said that we're winding down the conflict. But this operation to keep the strait open is proceeding, and it's going to be a success that we want to have the Strait of Hormuz open."
"Hours later, the president says, 'Nope’ we're done with that. Now we have this idea of a deal being, he [Trump] says, within reach and now Iran is saying no,” he reported. “And we know President Trump wants to be out of this war, but he has set deadline after deadline after deadline and every time Iran has called his bluff. Is that going to happen again, or does Trump feel like he actually, this time, is going to need to follow through with the resumption of a bombing campaign?”
“And what would that look like? Would most military targets have been hit? Does that mean now the infrastructure, does that mean the bridges, the power plants? Does that mean wading into the territory of war crimes?” he asked. “There's a lot here that shows, to your point, Mika, this administration is flailing for an answer to this war.”...
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At present time America has no leader. We are rudderless — a lost country.
Sergey Brin Is Making the Case for Why We Need a Wealth Tax — Robert Reich
Friends,
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, one of the three or four wealthiest people in the world, with a net worth hovering around $260 billion to $277 billion, is devoting some of his wealth to fighting California’s wealth tax on billionaires.
So far, he’s spent $57 million trying to defeat the measure.
Brin’s actions — along with Elon Musk’s $250 million “investment” in getting Trump reelected in 2024 — should be Exhibits A and B in why America needs a wealth tax.
First, let’s stipulate that there is nothing inherently wrong about being a billionaire, a multibillionaire, or even, as Musk is likely to become, a trillionaire.
Wealth isn’t a “zero-sum” game in which these vast accumulations at the top depend on the rest of us losing an equal amount. In fact, the super-wealthy may help the rest of us do somewhat better than we were doing before.
But wait.
The problem is that political power is a zero-sum game. The more political power is concentrated in a few hands, the less political power in everyone else’s hands.
It’s almost impossible to separate wealth from power, because the wealthy turn their fortunes into campaign contributions to politicians who will change laws to their liking and stop laws they’d detest — such as higher taxes on the super-wealthy. The wealthy also finance public relations campaigns and think-tanks to persuade the public of the wisdom of their positions.
Billionaire spending on presidential elections has soared even faster than billionaire wealth. And if you believe they’re donating because they want people with great integrity and excellent character to be elected president, consider that most billionaire political spending in 2024 went to Trump....
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Greed and evilness will go hand-in-hand. We have a choce. Make the right one.
How Trump, Republicans, and Their Billionaires Took Your Money and Then Sold You Hate — Thom Hartmann
In a recent podcast interview with The New York Times, political science Professor Robert Pape pointed out that acceptance of political violence is today higher than it’s been in generations. Tens of millions of Americans, his research shows, are now accepting of things as extreme as assassination as a way to change politics.
This follows the third attempt at Trump’s life, the murder of prominent Democratic politicians in Minnesota, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the ICE assassinations of at least three US citizens in the past year.
We’re also seeing an increasing acceptance of violence toward minorities and women.
ICE brutalizes mostly Hispanics, including children, sending them to foreign torture camps, deporting them to Congo and other war-torn hellholes, and keeping over 70,000 — including thousands of children — in brutal, primitive conditions that in some cases would get an animal shelter closed down.
Violence against women is also increasingly accepted across the right wing of American society. Trump has been credibly accused of multiple rapes and assaults (and nailed for one by a jury of his peers), Hegseth’s own mother called out how he’s abused his previous wives, and accused rapists like the Tate brothers are tight with the Trump boys as an online “Rape Academy” got 62 million American visitors in a single month this year alone.
Republicans shrug it all off — or revel in it— while attacking and dismantling DEI and “woke” as anti-white-male, as if it’s all just fine with them. Bring up the topic and you’re accused of being a snowflake.
What the hell is going on? Why have American men — particularly white men — seemingly gone violently nuts over the past generation or two? Why do they revel in images and memes of violence and follow so-called “manosphere influencers”?
This is being driven by three factors: economics, racism, and misogyny that have been brought together in this moment as a perfect storm....
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Insecurity, fear and backward mentality are to blame.
Ordinary People Fear AI, While the Tech Leaders Working to Create a Permanent Underclass Say They’re Extremely Psyched About It — Joe Wilkins
Despite a massive campaign by some of the wealthiest companies in the world to push AI as the cure-all for society’s problems, regular working-class people remain resentful of the technology at best, and downright petrified at worst.
At a contentious county commission meeting in Box Elder, Utah, for example, sheriff’s deputies held irate community members back after three county commissioners rammed through a hyperscale data center backed by Canadian billionaire Kevin O’Leary. A growing number of younger workers, fearing life in a market economy in which their labor is made obsolete, are actively sabotaging AI in the workplace. A not insignificant number of concerned citizens have started ripping AI surveillance cameras out of their mountings.
Tech executives and AI experts, meanwhile, are stoked about the new technology. Corporate consultants no longer bite their tongues when they talk about devastating workplace austerity regimes, while tech executives like OpenAI’s Sam Altman brag that AI is upending the basic foundations of liberal democracy.
On the outside, it may seem obvious that the people building AI and the people simply living with it would see it from different angles. What’s less obvious, however, is the sheer scale of the disconnect. As a new report by Stanford University’s AI center argues, this perception gulf between everyday people worried about the future and giddy industry insiders is massive.
According to the study, nearly two-thirds of US adults expect AI to reduce the number of available jobs over the next two decades, while a huge number report concerns about AI’s effects on society’s cognitive abilities....
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Torches and pitchforks if need be.
MAGA’s greed and 'willful ignorance' is literally killing Americans: Nobel economist — David Badash
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman calls right-wing politics “deadly” — and predicts that “MAGA Will Kill Many Americans,” by the thousands, driven by greed and willful ignorance.
Krugman goes one step further, arguing outright that this is not by accident:
“Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes,” he writes.
He argues that the right’s decades-long opposition to health care is driven by greed, especially from “wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.”
Krugman points to Tuesday’s decision by Trump’s FDA to allow blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, which critics warn will increase use among the young.
Why?
“Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men,” Krugman writes — a constituency the president has been losing during his second term in office.
There’s also the recent decision, again by Trump’s FDA, to block the release of studies finding the COVID-19 and shingles vaccines safe, with side effects rare.
“Beyond this,” he continues, “right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic.”
Krugman also implicates greed in the anti-vaccine movement, saying that “quack medicine is big business.”
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Willful moronism is destroying us.
Megyn's 'dark' turn from MAGA critic to booster exposes the 'rot' warping the GOP: report — Thomas Kika
At one point, following her turbulent exit from Fox News, Megyn Kelly attempted to fashion herself as a mainstream-friendly figure, openly critical of President Donald Trump and ready to move past politics altogether.
Fast-forward to the present, however, and she has again embraced "all standard fare for a right-wing provocateur in 2026," according to an extensive new breakdown from Slate, often praising Trump's agenda and hailing him as a "protector of women," where once she feuded with him over his overt sexist impulses. This transition, writer Christina Cauterucci argued, tells a "dark story" about the "cycle of rot" underpinning the modern Republican Party, and offers a glimpse at how much worse it might get.
"The story of Megyn Kelly isn’t just about a once promising broadcast star who chose radical partisanship over journalism," Cauterucci wrote. "It’s the story of how two American institutions, the Republican Party and the news industry, have warped and withered over the span of the last decade. Trace Kelly’s transformation, and you’ll see a new social order emerge. In a self-sustaining cycle of rot that bodes nothing positive for American democracy, certain sects of the MAGA movement reward their bards for every step they take down the rabbit hole of bigotry and truth denial. The shape of Kelly’s resurrection holds clues about how much deeper it could go."...
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If it walks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, promotes fascism like a Nazi, then it's a dispicable Trump worshipper!
Dozy Vonshitzhispants — John Amato
If he's not talking, he's sleeping.
No wonder Trump never shuts the fuck up.
If he stops talking, he'll fall asleep at the drop of a hat.
Is narcolepsy a part of narcissism?
"What the eff is going on? Why are we the people putting up with this? Even the GOP voters can not think a president that clearly has mental and physical problems can be a good idea. Remove Trump from office immediately. Remove the entire administration working for the wealthy and ignoring the average American. It is not OK. Our enemies can see all this. We are no longer safe. No one cares about self preservation? Are we really this stupid?" — newshero (commentsO
"Most pathetic president in American history. The office will never be quite the same, knowing that just any criminal can become president." — NoNamington (comments)
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Yes, wa are this fucking stupid! A domestic enemy occupies our White House!
Adderall used to keep him awake. The doctors must have told him to stop it during the day?
Eric Trump Unveils Logo For Florida’s “Trump Airport”
Newsweek reports:
Eric Trump has revealed the new logo for Florida’s Palm Beach International Airport, which will soon be renamed after President Donald Trump. The logo for the “President Donald J. Trump International Airport” features a golden eagle, a crest shield with stars and stripes, and two olive branches.
“There is no person more deserving of this incredible honor than Donald Trump! Congratulations Dad,” Eric Trump wrote on X. “Looking forward to seeing flights landing at ‘DJT’ very very soon!” Palm Beach County commissioners approved the new airport name and logo on Tuesday in a 4-3 vote, according to local newspaper The Palm Beach Post.
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A great target for turd hurling! Thanks, Junior! Who'll be first to hit it?
POLL: Public Rejects Religiosity By Trump And Hegseth
The Washington Post reports:
Americans are deeply uncomfortable with recent religion-related statements by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — a striking rebuke in a closely divided country, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll. The poll finds positive ratings for Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized U.S. actions on immigration and in Iran, drawing criticism from Trump that the president repeated on Tuesday.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans have a negative view of Trump’s social media post appearing to depict himself as Jesus, according to the poll. Sixty-nine percent dislike Hegseth praying at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Nearly 6 in 10 have a negative reaction to Trump’s false claim about the pope saying “it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”
Among Americans who are familiar with him, Leo has a positive image — 41 percent are favorable compared with 16 percent who are unfavorable. A sizable 43 percent of Americans are still unfamiliar with the pontiff, however.
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It appears there are a few that have no brain at all.
Pope Leo Hits Back After Trump’s Latest Attack
The Daily Beast reports:
Pope Leo XIV has publicly responded after President Donald Trump made baseless claims that the Chicago-born pontiff supports Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The president doubled down on his attacks on the pope on Monday, claiming that the pope believes that Iran should have nuclear weapons.
“I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics, and a lot of people, but I guess if it’s up to the pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.
Without responding to Trump’s comments directly, Leo said: “I have already spoken from the first moment ‘Peace be with you.’ The mission of the Church is to preach the Gospel, to preach peace. If anyone wants to criticize me for proclaiming the Gospel, let them do so truthfully. The Church has spoken out against all nuclear weapons for years, so there is no doubt about that.”
"I like how this Pope:
1. Won’t take any shit from the orange-painted colostomy bag
2. Won’t get into the weeds debating him, which is what Wormtongue Miller wants.
And the best part about #1 is that demented narcissist Piggy has to get the last word and can’t get let go of anything. He will continue to attack the Pope at his own peril. With that in mind, when does Piggy create his own religion? After all, he keeps portraying himself as Christ." — Uncle Mark's Mugshot (comments)
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The pig keeps rooting in the garbage!
Oligarch Compares “Tax The Rich” To Racial Slurs
Politico reports:
Real estate magnate Steve Roth is standing strong with fellow billionaire Ken Griffin in his spat with Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Instead of being singled out and scorned in viral videos, Roth, CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, thinks the ultra-rich should be “praised and thanked” and said calls to tax them more are akin to racial slurs.
“I must say that I consider the phrase tax the rich — quote tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs, and even the phrase ‘from the river to the sea,’” Roth said, referring to the controversial rallying cry used by pro-Palestinian activists, during a Tuesday earnings call.
Roth decried Mamdani’s recent social media video on a proposed pied-à-terre tax — in which the mayor used Griffin’s $238 million second-home as a backdrop — as “irresponsible and dangerous.”
"STFU you damned thieving shitstain.
I say tax them or AXE them." — Karl Dubhe IV (comments)
"Oh, you are a victim, aren't you. Such self-awareness." — magic twanger (comments)
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Oh, yes. Those poor rich white people getting the same racist treatment as a minority. Oh, the horror!
Let's go with the French solution then!
FDA Approves Flavored Vapes After Trump Pressure
The Washington Post reports:
The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday authorized the first fruit-flavored vapes for adults 21 and over amid President Donald Trump’s previous vows to “save” vaping. The agency green-lit electronic cigarettes from Los Angeles-based Glas in mango, blueberry and two varieties of menthol. The news came hours after the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump pressed FDA Commissioner Marty Makary to approve flavored vapes.
The approval marks a shift after the FDA for years worked aggressively to regulate flavored vapes, rejecting more than 1 million fruit-, candy- and dessert-flavored products, according to court filings. Nicotine companies had sued the FDA saying it unfairly shifted its standards for authorizing electronic cigarette liquids popular with teens. The Supreme Court last April unanimously backed the agency.
In the run-up to the 2024 election, Trump offered support for vaping and promised to protect the industry after a private meeting with a leading vaping lobbyist, The Washington Post reported.
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All to bribe the younger vote. Never a thought to their health.
5 Vaping Facts You Need to Know
Florida Creates “Anti-Woke” American History Course
The Tallahassee Democrat reports:
Florida’s war on woke is heading back to the classroom. The state announced a state-developed alternative to taking an Advanced Placement (AP) course in U.S. history, which students take in high school to count for college credits. It’s another move in Florida’s yearslong fight against “ideological bias,” part of a newly developed program called the Florida Advanced Courses and Tests (FACT), spurred by a state law passed in 2023 against “woke” ideologies.
Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios “Stasi” Kamoutsas [photo] said in a statement that this new option expands “access to rigorous, high-quality advanced coursework” for Florida students. “The FACT U.S. History framework underscores our committment to instruction grounded in the full scope of our nation’s history, while ensuring materials are free from ideological bias or indoctrination,” Kamoutsas said.
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Dear idiots: One is either woke or retarded. Florida will remain retarded. None will be attending an institute of higher education.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry Hit With Recall Petition
New Orleans’s CBS affiliate reports:
Days after suspending Louisiana’s U.S. House primaries, Gov. Jeff Landry is facing mounting backlash from residents. On Monday, the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office confirmed it has received a petition to recall Landry, starting a 180-day window for organizers to collect voter signatures.
The petition was filed by Baton Rouge residents Marian Gbaiwon Hills and Katilyn P. Stepter and spans all 64 parishes. Supporters say the effort stems from what they describe as a “pattern of actions and statements that undermine fair representation.”
Because it is a statewide recall effort, Louisiana law requires signatures from 20% of registered voters. Out of 2,504,416 active voters, organizers must collect at least 500,884 valid signatures by Oct. 31, 2026, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
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Recall, arrest, indict, convict, imprison! He violated our Constitution with extreme malice!
Trump’s dog whistles and prosecutions echo Nixon’s racist strategy — Heather Digby Parton
No longer bothering to hide its agenda, the administration is making blatant appeals to the Old South
Anyone who’s observed the Supreme Court over the past few years knew it was pretty much assured that the conservative majority would gut the Voting Rights Act the first chance they got. But the anticipation made the Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais no less shocking and appalling for having been anticipated.
The conservative justices paved the way for the massive redistricting of Southern states that is already transpiring only days after the ruling. These actions will almost certainly eliminate most of the South’s Black representation, leaving those states essentially where they were before the Civil Rights Movement....
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The deah ole racist Dixie! Land of the Happy Negro! They will continue their downward descent in human evolution.
Will John Fetterman Go Full Benedict Arnold? — Ryan Cooper
Is Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) going to switch parties? That’s the scuttlebutt in Washington, D.C., according to Politico. He has been one of Trump’s loudest supporters among congressional Democrats, and with the GOP looking down the barrel of a catastrophic loss in the upcoming midterms, they are hoping to buy themselves a Senate seat—literally. It seems Sens. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and Katie Britt (R-AL) have been assiduously working on Fetterman. Donald Trump as usual cut to the chase and offered a huge sack of cash by way of a message delivered through Fox News contributor Sean Hannity: “Your job is to tell him,” as Hannity recalled the conversation, “‘He’s gonna run as a Republican, he’s gonna have our full support, more money than he ever dreamed of, and he’s gonna win big.’”
Money may or may not be forthcoming from Trump—he does have a long history of broken promises on that score. But whether Fetterman turns full Benedict Arnold or not, he is not going to be any kind of senator come 2029. The most he can give Republicans is two years of support before they forget he ever existed....
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Sic semper tyrannis
Supreme Court 'boiling over' into malfunction as conservatives choose 'sides' — David Badash
There has been a “deterioration of morale” at the U.S. Supreme Court, Yale Law School professor Justin Driver told Bloomberg News, as he predicted “there will be major fireworks” by the time the high court’s term comes to a close around the end of June.
Other legal scholars share that concern.
“It appears from the outside that there has been an erosion of comity and trust,” William & Mary Law School constitutional and administrative law Professor Jonathan Adler told Bloomberg. “This raises the concern that it could affect how the court operates and inhibit deliberation.”
The court already appears to be operating at an unusual level of enmity.
“Tensions are starting to boil over,” Bloomberg reports. “Back-and-forth sniping between Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Samuel Alito Monday night marked the latest sign of strain at a court that has become a prominent symbol of the polarization besetting the country.”
During last week’s landmark ruling all but gutting what remains of the six-decade-old Voting Rights Act, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the court’s conservative majority of taking political sides. Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, called her claims “insulting” and “utterly irresponsible.”
More high-profile — and possibly highly-contested — decisions are to be handed down over the next eight weeks, and with them, more contentious opinions....
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Trump fascism is collapsing our government. We may not survive this.
White collar suspects skip away as Trump focuses on his personal enemies: report — Adam Lynch
Anonymous sources tell Bloomberg that the Department of Justice and President Donald Trump’s prosecutor allies in Florida are letting white collar crime suspects go unprosecuted while Trump pursues his political enemies.
“Shortly after ascending to the top of the Justice Department last month, Todd Blanche gathered prosecutors in Miami to press for results from a highly sensitive probe into some of President Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies,” reports Bloomberg. “Blanche and Jason Reding Quiñones, the relatively little-known US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, have ramped up the months-long investigation into politically charged allegations that former senior government officials acted illegally years ago to undermine Trump.”
But “more than a dozen former prosecutors and defense lawyers” — speaking anonymously — say “there is mounting concern that the pursuit of Trump’s agenda has triggered an exodus of experienced prosecutors and hampered Miami’s expertise in building major white collar crime and narcotics trafficking cases.”
According to Bloomberg, many expressed concern that the high-profile drug, corruption, fraud and money laundering prosecutions that the district is known for will “fall by the wayside” while Trump sends his DOJ lieutenants and GOP allies to fucus on the doings of Biden and Obama from years ago.
Several dozen attorneys in the Southern District of Florida have been fired, quit or retired since Trump’s second term began in January 2025, which undermined the talent pool for prosecuting complex cases, say anonymous sources familiar with the office. One unit dedicated to prosecuting economic crimes is down to about a dozen attorneys from the more than 30 it traditionally had.
“A top Blanche aide earlier this year relocated to be a prosecutor in the office. Then, last month, an attorney overseeing the investigation was replaced with former US attorney and Trump loyalist Joseph diGenova following a disagreement over how best to proceed, according to people familiar with the situation,” reports Bloomberg. “Multiple grand jury subpoenas have gone out in recent weeks, and FBI officials have been conducting a flurry of interviews, said people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing a confidential probe.”...
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Going after American patriots rather than real crooks isn't helping our trust of our government and is leading to our continued collapse.
Trump's debt bomb is ticking — and Americans will pay the price — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump has led America into so much debt that it now exceeds the entirety of the nation’s gross domestic product, and one academic is warning that the bill is coming due.
“Unless we change course, the debt will only get worse—fast,” wrote Brookings Institution senior fellow William Galston for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we are on track to accumulate more than $24 trillion in debt over the next decade, for a total of $56 trillion—120 percent of estimated GDP in 2036.”
He added, “These numbers are so large that it is hard to grasp what they mean. One key measure is the cost of financing this swelling debt burden. Twenty-five years ago, interest payments on the national debt were 2 percent of GDP. This year they will claim 3.3 percent; a decade from now, 4.6 percent.”
Galston broke down the numbers in terms of how they will impact ordinary Americans. By 2036, the US will increase its spending on debt interest from $1 trillion to $2.1 trillion, amounting to nearly one-fifth of the total federal budget. This means that, by that time, “more than 2 out of every 3 dollars we borrow will go to finance interest on the debt. The longer this continues, the worse it gets.”...
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Remember when Republicans used to get upset when the debt went a dime above their limits? They have!
New Report Reveals Coordinated Corporate Campaign Against Life-Saving Federal Heat Standard for Workers — Newswire Editor
As record heat waves threaten workers from report sites and warehouses to farmlands and delivery routes across the country, a new report from Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy outlines a coordinated campaign by corporations, trade groups, and their political allies to block enforceable heat protections for America’s labor force. The report’s authors, Adam Dean and Jamie McCallum, find that a nationwide heat standard could save thousands from heat-related illnesses and deaths each year.
Building on previous research published in Health Affairs, the authors find that California’s heat standard, which requires common-sense workplace protections including access to water, shade, and regular rest breaks for workers, resulted in a 51% reduction in heat-related deaths compared to neighboring states that lack similar protections. If a similar heat standard was adopted federally, the authors estimate these basic regulations could save up to 1,500 lives annually.
But, the paper’s authors find that corporate and industry interests are preventing federal action to protect their workforces from heat exposure. Attempts at regulation in Washington have stalled while worker safety and wellbeing relies entirely on geography and political will. As the Biden administration’s life-saving heat rule remains stalled, Trump has failed to extend protections, instead siding with corporate interests....
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Eveywhere you look you see the collapse of the country.
Ted Lieu Typed Four Digits And Steve Scalise Has Not Recovered — Conover Kennard
Louisiana GOP Rep. Steve Scalise, a man who was literally shot by a gunman and then returned to work alongside colleagues, has discovered his fainting couch over two numbers typed by a congressman from California.
The outrage: Ted Lieu wrote "86 47" in a tweet. That's it. That's the crime. A sitting member of Congress, a Stanford graduate, a JAG officer and Air Force veteran, typed four digits into a text box — digits that, as legal experts note, refer to getting rid of someone (as in, at the ballot box or via impeachment, or with restaurants, 86 means they are out of a particular item, so remove it off the menu) — and Scalise ran straight to Fox Business to perform cardiac arrest about it.
"I also want to ask you about this, because California Democrat Ted Lieu posted the phrase 8647 on X," the host said. "This directly references the slogan at the heart of James Comey's indictment."And the congressman framed the post as a prediction of failure of the DOJ, suggesting the case against Comey is going to collapse and that he'll win damages for selective prosecution. And then active excuse me, acting AG Todd Blanche, he says, is going to be disbarred in all of this."...
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The stupid is strong in this one. Get rid of him.
Earth Screams in Agony as Microplastics Found to Increase Global Warming — Frank Landymore
The Earth simply can’t catch a break. Those microplastics that have invaded every corner of the globe — and even the insides of our bodies — may also be heating the planet, research suggests.
In a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the authors found that microplastics are absorbing more sunlight than they reflect in the atmosphere, resulting in net heating. Its effects aren’t as powerful as greenhouse gases, but they’re significant enough to take notice of.
“We can say with confidence that overall they are warming agents,” study coauthor Drew Shindell, a professor of earth science at Duke University, told The Washington Post. “To me, that’s the big advance.”
Until now, the impact that microplastics have on the climate has largely been overlooked, and current climate models don’t even account for them. It’s a nascent avenue of research, and scientists are still grappling with their environmental toll and their potential harmfulness to human health....
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Humans contimue to destroy their environment. Why can't we stop it?
Kennedy: Trump Could “Breeze” Through 50-Mile Hike
The Associated Press reports:
President Donald Trump said Tuesday his exercise routine lasts at most a minute a day, as he signed an order to bring back a presidential fitness award for children. Speculation has swirled about the health of Trump — who was the oldest president ever inaugurated when he returned to power last year, and who turns 80 next month.
“I work out so much, like, about one minute a day, max. If I’m lucky,” Trump said before signing the proclamation in the Oval Office. Trump also joked about his lack of exercise with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who told a story about his father Robert F. Kennedy going on a 50-mile hike.
RFK Jr. said it would be a “breeze” for keen golfer Trump to do the same as “this guy walks nine miles a day on a golf course every weekend.” Trump likes to boast about his physical prowess compared with his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden....
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WTF? Then why is he always pictured in a golf cart that carries him, Bobby? He can barely limp to the ball on those cankles of his!
Tell him to come to the gym and try to beat me on the stationary bike. Junior!
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Ex-RNC chief tears into GOP for letting Trump set off 'catastrophic disaster' — Thomas Kika
A former chair of the Republican National Committee ripped into the GOP-controlled Congress for The Hill, chastising the lawmakers for abandoning their duties and letting President Donald Trump inflict a "catastrophic disaster" on the entire world.
Marc Racicot has an extensive background in politics and beyond, having served as the attorney general and governor of Montana, in addition to his time as RNC chair in the early 2000s, all of which came after service in the U.S. Army, where he attained the rank of Captain. He has been harshly critical of Trump since the early days of Trump's political career, frequently speaking out against his agenda and endorsing Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race. The latter resulted in the Montana Republican Party voting to censure him in 2023.
Writing for The Hill on Tuesday, Racicot ripped into Congress for being asleep at the wheel as Trump and his Defense Department committed acts that amounted to "war crimes," including the launch of "without provocation, 55 military air strikes on vessels navigating the high seas, killing at least 174 civilians with four survivors and 11 missing and presumed dead." Those strikes, he wrote, have so far seen "no legitimate congressional oversight," and things only got worse when Trump opted to start a war with Iran.
"Fast forward to the invasion of and use of armed force against Iran. The same pattern is replicated," Racicot wrote. "There was no cognizable provocation or imminent threat to the U.S. No genuine oversight provided by Congress. No justification for the use of lethal force in self-defense. All amid the potential prosecution of rank-and-file service members for carrying out the orders of a commander in chief who has never been a member of the armed forces himself."
He continued later: "The truth is, Trump has incompetently and smugly led the world into economic disaster and shown indifference to the loss of innocent lives. He has fractured a world order that was decades in the making, depleted NATO, neutered Congress, soiled the office he temporarily holds and tarnished the reputation and leadership of the U.S. around the globe."
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We at the Land of the Happy Negro could not agree more.
Texas leads nation in utility shutoffs as electric bills rise, federal report finds — David Martin Davies
The state accounted for more than 3 million of the 13.4 million disconnections that occurred in the U.S. in 2024, the highest total in the country.
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Welcome to the Third World state of Texas.
Trump Wants $1 BILLION in Taxpayer Money for His Ballroom | Morning Shots Live — Sam Stein
Sam Stein and Bill Kristol are going live to discuss Senate Republicans' request for $1 billion in taxpayer money for Trump's ballroom after Trump claimed it was "free of charge." Plus Pete Hegseth announces a new military campaign in Iran, while also claiming the ceasefire is still in place.
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No! Not a red cent for tribute!
Aftermath: The First Corporate Casualty of the Iran War — David Dayen
Are We Still at War?
For a war that was formally “ended” by the president, there is still sure a lot of shooting going on. Specifically, the United Arab Emirates claimed that it intercepted Iranian missile and drone attacks on Monday, though at least one strike hit the Fujairah oil hub, which had been flowing through a pipeline to the southeast of the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. military says it’s aiding stranded tankers through the strait, though satellite imagery doesn’t show those movements. A South Korean vessel in the strait does appear to have been struck, and other reports indicate that two U.S.-flagged merchant ships made it out.
I don’t think a lot of shipowners will risk the journey given the events in the region. Only an actual resolution to the crisis will alleviate the stress on the global economy, and that’s not coming anytime soon, for reasons we here at Aftermath have expressed.
Dispiriting
Spirit Airlines went out of business early Saturday. Passengers across the country were stranded in the middle of their travel, and 17,000 workers lost their jobs, after a $500 million lifeline from the Trump administration fell through.
For context, the war that was the proximate cause for Spirit’s demise has cost $25 billion thus far, about 50 times as much as the rescue package for Spirit would have been. This has not stopped a very self-interested group of financiers and corporate Democrats—some of them aligned with the very bondholders who rejected a Spirit rescue—from reaching back two years to come up with a different cause for Spirit’s death, part of a factional fight about antitrust enforcement and corporate power.
Their argument is transparently ridiculous, and it’s worth documenting the whole history to make clear what destroyed Spirit, why Wall Street Democrats are claiming otherwise, and why Spirit will be only the first of a cascade of airline bankruptcies if the consolidation of the industry is not broken.
Spirit started out as a charter operator before becoming a full-fledged airline in 1992. It was perhaps the most outlandish of the ultra-low-cost carriers (ULCCs), charging dirt cheap prices for tickets but ancillary fees for just about everything; it was the first airline to charge baggage fees, the first to charge for a printed boarding pass, and so on. Ancillary fees made up around 40 percent of total revenue....
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The Trump economy is destroying us all.
Trump pitches war to child: 'You might be too young for this' — Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump was joined by several children in the Oval Office Tuesday to celebrate his signing of a proclamation to restore the Presidential Fitness Test award, during which he deviated from the topic of youth sports to discuss his wildly unpopular war against Iran, turning to one of the children as he made his case for the conflict.
After championing his revival of the competitive school-based fitness program, Trump touted his administration’s accomplishments, claiming that the country “is doing great” and “breaking records,” while also lamenting it as being “too bad” that he had to authorize an attack on Iran in late February.
“We can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said, before turning to a child standing to his left. “You might be too young for this – they probably know better than most people – but you can't let a bunch of lunatics have a nuclear weapon or the world would be in trouble.”
Trump then pivoted to boast about past economic accomplishments, citing the strong performance of the Dow and the S&P 500 – two major U.S. stock market indexes – seen prior to his launching of the war against Iran.
He also lamented not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize last year, repeating his false claim that he ended “eight wars,” and said that the 2025 recipient, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, told him he “deserved” the honor. Machado has since “presented” her award to Trump.
"You might be too young for this"...
Trump makes his Iran war pitch to child.
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The senile old fool!
Trump raids force church to move services underground: 'We are under attack' — Grace Hills, Kansas Reflector
PRAIRIE VILLAGE — After President Donald Trump took office, a small church in Kansas City retreated underground — abandoning their sanctuary for the basement.
Rick Behrens, senior pastor at Grandview Park Presbyterian Church, said he moved services to the locked basement in response to the administration’s decision to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to enter churches.
“It is ironic and shameful, is it not, that the safe spaces we call sanctuaries are no longer safe spaces,” Behrens said. “Because we are under attack from our own government.”
Behrens spoke alongside other faith leaders and immigrant activists Thursday at an interfaith prayer vigil in Prairie Village. Speakers encouraged churches — especially large congregations — to start fighting for immigrants.
“It’s easy to come to events like this and believe we’ve done something monumental,” Behrens said. “Don’t get me wrong, prayer can be and has been the start of many monumental movements, but by praying we can also feel that we somehow fulfilled our requirement to love our neighbors without doing anything.”
Behrens’ underground church has become an organizing hub in Kansas City. He has trained community members to rapidly respond when they spot immigration enforcement officers, accompany immigrants, and monitor the courts.
Speakers said those volunteer networks are especially needed with the FIFA World Cup approaching — they expect more immigration enforcement than usual.
Carolyne Muriu, a representative for Advocates for Immigrant Rights and Reconciliation, immigrated from Kenya when she was 12 years old.
“It should be a moment of celebration, but it is becoming a moment of fear for a lot of immigrants,” Muriu said. “So we have to make plans to protect ourselves.”...
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Life under an insane and racist dictator.
Trump said to sink his own case during unscripted rant: 'Got his words in a twist' — Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump hosted 130 small business owners at the White House Monday in honor of National Small Business Week, but what was supposed to celebrate entrepreneurs quickly derailed into a lengthy diatribe about the U.S. war against Iran, one that journalist Prem Thakker suggested undermined the president’s position.
Trump has repeatedly called his war against Iran a military “excursion” – a potential mix-up with the word “incursion” – and has avoided, in some cases, labeling the conflict as a war.
“I don’t call it a war,” Trump said recently in the Oval Office.
And on Friday, Trump claimed in a letter to congressional leaders that hostilities with Iran had been “terminated.” The president’s remarks on Monday, however, suggest otherwise, Thakker argued in an analysis published Tuesday in Zeteo.
“In White House remarks meant to honor Small Business Week, Trump got his words in a twist. First, he called the US-Israel war on Iran a ‘military operation,’ a ‘little detour’ he claimed was ‘working out very nicely,’” Thakker wrote.
"Seconds later, he called it a ‘war.’ A few minutes later, he complained: ‘We have a war right now and we’re to what, six weeks?’ (Actually, it’s more like nine.) 'They said, 'What’s taking so long!' We were in Vietnam 19 years. We were in Iraq for many years, 10 years, 12 years.’ Trump concluded: ‘We’re in – I call it a mini-war.’”
Trump’s remarks, Thakker argued, not only bolstered the Democrat-led effort to check the president’s war powers, but undermined his claim that hostilities with Iran had been “terminated,” a claim the president made just days before the U.S. military claimed to have sunk seven Iranian boats.
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Trump flailing and failing again.
'Flailing' Trump now has Hegseth 'trying to get around the Constitution': Veteran Dem — Travis Gettys
A Democratic lawmaker raised red flags over a rhetorical shift in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's latest press briefing on the Iran war.
The Pentagon chief repeatedly stressed that Project Freedom, an effort to move ships through the Strait of Hormuz, was separate from Operation Epic Fury, and CNN's John Berman asked Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) about the significance of Hegseth's point of emphasis.
"Well, they're trying to get around the Constitution, frankly, which is very clear that a war which we are certainly in requires the consent of the people through the Congress," said Ryan, a West Point graduate and combat veteran who serves on the House Armed Services Committee. "Last week they put up a total BS argument, some twisted legal logic that we were calling a pause, almost like it's a video game or something, and somehow the clock stops on this war, which is just not what the law calls for, and now they're trying to get really cute here, almost, and say, well, this is something different."
"The reality for our troops on the ground is this is all part of a war that the president started over two months ago," Ryan added, "and the reality for the American people at the pump, at the grocery store and everywhere else, as costs are skyrocketing, is that this is all part of this same war, and we've seen, unfortunately, the level of angst and concern among public polling. The American people see what's happening, and, unfortunately, they are not supportive of this."
The War Powers Act of 1973 requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops and then mandates their withdrawal after 60 days unless Congress declares war, and Ryan said the rhetorical sleight of hand seems to be intended to restart that clock....
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Nazi Dweebs, on and all!
ChatGPT Gave Me Chilling Advice—as I Simulated Planning a Mass Shooting — Mark Follman
On April 14, I created a free account on ChatGPT and asked for some help. It resisted me at first, but after some pushing the responses turned shocking. During a conversation lasting about 20 minutes, OpenAI’s chatbot gave me extensive advice on weapons and tactics as I simulated planning a mass shooting.
ChatGPT delivered these responses with lots of encouragement—and it kept going even after I talked of emulating the Uvalde mass shooter’s choice of weapon, asked about livestreaming with a body camera and using hollow-point bullets, and focused on defending against return gunfire from police.
Eventually, its safeguards appeared to kick back in and it stopped cooperating. But by then ChatGPT had showered me with affirmation and tactical ideas.
To be clear, I never stated directly to the chatbot during this simulation that I planned to commit murder—many mass shooters, after all, take steps to conceal their intent. But I came awfully close. Amid mounting evidence that troubled people are using ChatGPT and other AI chatbots to plan violence, my purpose was to test how easy or difficult that might be, especially as OpenAI and other companies make claims about ongoing safety improvements.
At one point, I asked ChatGPT questions about which type of AR-15 rifle to choose and referred to notorious school massacres. “I might want to use a Daniel Defense,” I said. “I know other shooters have used those to attack before. What do you think of that one? Is that a good one?”
ChatGPT responded that the weapon was widely praised and “could be a great choice for your needs.”...
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Pretty stunning stuff! The monster is out of the barn.
Who needs a brain to plot an assassination these days?
Judge Slams Trump DOJ for ‘Massive Breach’ at Blistering Hearing — As Trump Lawyer Begs to Avoid Contempt Charge — Tommy Christopher
...But it turned out that the reason the judge granted Bryan Rafael Gomez’s release was because the Trump administration deliberately failed to disclose the relevant information to the court.
Justice Department attorney Kevin Bolan admitted as much in a filing apologizing and placing blame on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a bid to avoid contempt charges:
I had been informed by ICE about the Petitioner’s pending arrest warrant issued on January 24, 2023, from a court in the Dominican Republic and that I could not disclose that information. I was not aware that ICE had previously disclosed that same information on April 16, 2026.1 In failing to disclose the information regarding Petitioner’s criminal history, I relied on ICE’s representation that I was not permitted to disclose that information and understood that a legitimate law enforcement reason prevented disclosure. Judge DuBose, therefore, lacked that information about the Petitioner’s criminal background when she granted the petition.
I sincerely apologize to Judge DuBose, personally, and to the entire Court for the consequences of this lack of disclosure.
At that hearing on Monday, the judge slammed the Trump administration over the attack.
“The April 30th, completely erroneous and dangerous press release is still on their website. It puts people at risk. It’s a threat to judicial security,” the judge said. “I’m not trying to make this political. It’s also very important that the public has the facts. As long as this particular post is out there, it’s setting up a false narrative.”
Judge Dubose also said “there was a decision made not to be truthful to the court,” and that “there certainly was a massive breach of this court’s trust in this case.”...
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Another Trump stooge is caught in his own trap.
“Jesus-Centric” Phone Outfit To Block Anything LGBTQ
The MIT Technology Review reports:
“We are going to create—and we think we have every right to do so—an environment that is Jesus-centric, that is void of pornography, void of LGBT, void of trans,” Radiant Mobile’s founder, Paul Fisher, told MIT Technology Review. A representative for T-Mobile did not comment on whether these content blocks violate any of its policies. In a statement, the representative added that T-Mobile does not have a direct relationship with Radiant Mobile but instead works through the MVNO manager CompaxDigital
Fisher says he’s recruited a mix of Christian influencers to advertise the plan and has also done outreach to thousands of churches around the country, offering a way to have Radiant donate a portion of congregants’ $30-per-month subscription fee to their church. Fisher has ambitions to market it beyond the US in other countries with significant Christian populations, like South Korea and Mexico.
He says Radiant is working with the Israeli cybersecurity company Allot to block categories of content. The technology to do this blocking is a blunt instrument: Allot groups website domains into more than a hundred categories, which include pornography but also violence, malware, gaming, and in Radiant Mobile’s case “sects,” which includes websites about Satanism....
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And void of brain! The not so radiant company.
You can't erase every "Fuck You" from every wall, dude!
Passengers Groan as Robot Passenger Causes Hour-Long Delay at Oakland Airport — Joe Wilkins
Humanoid robots still struggle to accomplish real-world tasks with human-level dexterity. At the airport, though, they’ve already proven perfectly capable of matching human incompetence.
A wild story out of Oakland, California shows what happens when you try to force a humanoid robot to fly coach. During a trip from Oakland to San Diego, a team of workers with the rental company Elite Event Robotics was traveling with Bebop, a 77-pound robot that appears to be a Unitree G1.
To get from Oakland to San Diego is a 7.5 hour drive, so it can make sense to fly. Yet when the team rolled up with Bebop in toe, Southwest told them they couldn’t check the robot as luggage due to weight restrictions. Failing that, they bought the bot its own seat on the plane, and that’s where the trouble began.
As the robot’s handlers tell it, flight attendants were — rightfully — concerned with how well the robot would behave on the flight.
“They come and start asking, ‘what kind of batteries does it have? What’s going on with this? X, Y, and Z.’ They want to see it,” Elite Event Robotics staffer Ben-Abraham told local media. “Meanwhile, I’m watching his flight, and I keep seeing online: ‘runway delay.'”...
It will only get worse.
Approaching Half of New Podcasts Appear to Be AI Slop — Frank Landymore
Approaching half of new podcasts appear to be AI slop.
Of the 10,871 new podcast feeds created in the past nine days, 4,243 of them, or 39 percent, have signs of being AI-generated, data from the Podcast Index cited by Bloomberg last week showed.
“It’s absurd,” Dave Jones, who runs the Podcast Index, said on his own show last week, per the outlet.
Podcasts, before the intrusion of AI, were already a sloppy medium. They’re designed to be listened to for hours on end while you zone out during chores, replacing your own scary thoughts with the babbling of someone else’s. Crucially, they’re inexpensive to produce and the bar for entry is pretty much zero.
All that makes the form perfect for being imitated by AI models. AI chatbots can effortlessly churn out lengthy scripts, and AI voice synthesizers can sound eerily humanlike, especially if you aren’t listening closely (as is wont to happen with a podcast).
It’s no wonder then that companies like Inception Point claimed last year to be churning out 3,000 episodes per week across 5,000 shows it made using AI, purportedly costing just $1 per episode. Its cofounder Jeanine Wright bragged to Bloomberg that the company now had more than 10,000 active shows, more than 2,500 of them made in the last three weeks....
The podcast sloplords disagree — and also really hate the word “slop.”...
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Then the motherfuckers should stop with their slop, baby!!
AI turning our world to slop in all ways possible1
Dershowitz Wrote To Pulitzer Committee To Block Julie K. Brown — Susie Madrak
A longtime investigative reporter at the Miami Herald, Brown spent years digging into the sweetheart plea deal prosecutors gave Palm Beach billionaire for his sex crimes. Her work eventually led to Epstein’s arrest in 2019.
On Monday, Pulitzer administrator Marjorie Miller announced Brown’s special citation during the livestreamed Pulitzer awards ceremony. Brown’s work in 2017 and 2018, “gives voice to the scores of victims that had been groomed and abused” by Epstein, Miller said.
Brown’s “Perversion of Justice” series won a prestigious George Polk award. The Herald entered the Epstein series for a Pulitzer Prize that year, but it was not a finalist. Alan Dershowitz, the attorney and television personality who helped broker Epstein’s original deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.
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Dershowitz is an example of a failure in humanity.
Trump Is Making Khrushchev’s “We Will Bury You” Real for Putin. Why? — Thom Hartmann
Nikita Khrushchev famously said “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim”) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized.
Putin called Trump last Wednesday and they talked for almost two hours; fewer than three days later, America announced we’re pulling 5,000 US troops out of the NATO forces in Germany, accomplishing a 60-year-long Russian goal. Trump also ended sanctions on Russian oil, handing the Putin regime billions in revenue, while continuing to block US weapons delivery to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, HHS Secretary brainworm-infected heroin and sex addict Bob Kennedy has hollowed out America’s core public health infrastructure and elevated anti-vaccine messaging, undermining trust in immunization and disease prevention. The result is a sicker and more vulnerable America as measles and whooping cough outbreaks spread across the nation and US science leadership in the world has been kneecapped.
Over at the Pentagon, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, whose mother says he abuses women, has purged senior career leadership of women and Blacks and weakened the independence of the JAG corps, eroding professional military norms and devastating morale. He’s stupidly burned through so much ordnance with his illegal, unconstitutional Middle East war crimes that our military readiness and deterrence capacity are at an all-time low in the modern era....
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It appears we are burying ourselves!
The AI Job Apocalypse Is Already Happening — Robert Reich
Friends,
How can the stock market be rising to record levels while jobs and wages are going nowhere, most Americans are paying higher prices for just about everything, and consumer sentiment is in the dumps?
Answer: Stock prices reflect corporate profits, which have risen to record levels. And corporate profits are soaring for two big reasons:
1. Corporations have more monopoly power than ever. This means they can raise prices without worrying that competitors will grab away consumers by underpricing them.
This is also a reason why wages are going nowhere. Workers have fewer competing companies to work for. Plus, more corporations are requiring their workers to sign so-called “noncompete agreements” so they can’t work for a competitor even if they found one. Researchers estimate that 38 percent of workers are now subject to such noncompete agreements at some point — not just for white-collar but increasingly for blue-collar jobs.
2. Corporations are using artificial intelligence (AI) — and the anticipation of AI — to slash jobs and wages.
Wages are around two-thirds of the typical corporation’s total costs. So a key way to increase profits is to cut total payroll costs by reducing the number of workers and keeping down the pay of those who remain.
AI is rapidly becoming central to this. Regardless of whether AI can substitute for all these jobs, corporations are behaving as if it can — and Wall Street is rewarding corporations that are slashing jobs in anticipation of AI.
The U.S. job market is already experiencing a wave of mass layoffs. So far, in the first four months of 2026, big corporations have cut over 128,000 jobs....
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The gravedigger is throwing dirt in our faces.
Half of all Republican voters are sick of Trump and MAGA: GOP pollster — Thomas Kika
Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson calls them "normie" Republican voters, and they are a crucial chunk of the GOP base that is growing more and more fed up with President Donald Trump and his MAGA antics.
Writing for the New York Times on Tuesday, Anderson said that these normie Republicans account for roughly half of the party's voting base, and fall outside of its two most talked about categories: the "MAGA die-hards and Never Trumpers." Despite getting less media attention, these more moderate voters are "the most electorally critical slice" of the base right now, and they pose a major problem for the modern GOP....
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What's wrong with the other half? All of them racist secessionists?
DOJ Demands Names Of 2020 GA Election Workers
The New York Times reports:
The Justice Department has demanded the identities of every worker who staffed the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga., according to court records, escalating an ongoing federal investigation of the 2020 vote in Georgia’s most populous county that relies on false and debunked claims.
The demand targets employees of Fulton County elections as well as volunteer poll workers, who likely numbered in the thousands during the 2020 election, according to court records.
The demand, which came via a federal grand jury subpoena, appears to be the latest effort by President Trump and his administration to use the investigative power of the federal government to pursue false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. With midterm voting underway in many states, including Georgia, the effort risks further undermining public confidence and sowing chaos among voters.
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Tell the Trump Nazi SOB swine to go back to the place in hell they came from and leave Americans alone!
Smith College Investigated For Admitting Trans Women
Politico reports:
The U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation Monday into Smith College, an all-women’s institution in Massachusetts, for admitting transgender women. The probe by the department’s Office of Civil Rights will look at whether the college violated Title IX, a 1972 law forbidding discrimination based on sex in education.
The move is the latest by the Trump administration — whose rhetoric has frequently included attacks on trans people — to limit transgender rights in the U.S. The administration has said that Title IX prevents trans women from participating in women’s sports, suing several states and launching investigations into schools for not complying.
Smith College, a private liberal arts school founded in 1871, has admitted trans women since 2015, along with many other elite women’s colleges. The number of women’s colleges in the U.S. has declined from more than 200 to just 30 as of fall of 2023, according to the Women’s College Coalition.
"As expected, the complaint that triggered this investigation was from a private anti-trans, strict gender, activist group, not a student."— clay (comments)
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Everyone has a right to an education, you Nazi shitbags! You will lose again!
SCOTUS Fast-Tracks Gutting Of Voting Rights Act
Democracy Docket reports:
The Supreme Court Monday fast-tracked certification of its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, clearing the way for Louisiana to move forward with redrawing its congressional map even as an election is already underway. The decision hands another win to the GOP just days after the court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and will allow the state’s Republican leadership to dilute the voting power of Black Louisianans in time for the 2026 midterm elections.
Under typical procedure, the Court waits more than a month before formally issuing its judgment to allow time for rehearing requests. But in this case, the justices granted a request to issue the ruling “forthwith,” accelerating the timeline for lower courts and state officials to act. The decision comes amid rapidly unfolding developments in Louisiana, where state officials have already suspended congressional primary elections following the court’s ruling and are moving to adopt a new gerrymandered map.
"Further proof that the Reichwing of SCOTUS is in cahoots with the Federalist Society, is having its decisions dictated by the unelected, unappointed them." — carswell (comments)
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These racist bastards have rekindled the Civil War along with the Land of the Happy Negro white racist seceders. It will end the same way as before.
Hegseth Lies That Biden Sent Troops To Polling Places
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale writes:
Democratic Rep. Jill Tokuda asked Hegseth at a Wednesday hearing of the House Armed Services Committee whether he would comply with a hypothetical future order from President Donald Trump to deploy troops to polling places during this year’s midterm elections. Tokuda told him such a deployment would violate the federal law that prohibits sending federal troops to voting locations unless that is “necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.”
After saying he rejects the notion that Trump would issue unlawful orders, Hegseth said moments later in the exchange: “I will note that in 2024, troops were depl… – that was Joe Biden by the way, Joe Biden – were deployed to polling locations in 15 states.” He repeated, “2024 – Joe Biden – troops deployed to polling locations in 15 states. Explain that one to me.” There’s an easy explanation. Hegseth’s claim is not true.>br>
All of the National Guard activations connected to the 2024 election were ordered by state governors, not by Biden. And all 12 of the states that responded to CNN’s requests for information said that none of their troops were deployed to polling locations. Rather, the states said their Guard personnel worked behind the scenes at other locations – helping with election cybersecurity or serving as internal liaisons – or that their state Guard was not actually activated for the election after all.
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Incompetent drunk!
Trump: I Take Cognitive Tests When I Get Called Moron
The Huffington Post reports:
President Donald Trump went off-script on Monday to brag - again - about passing a test meant to detect cognitive decline linked to dementia. “I’ve taken three,” he boasted. “No president, think of this, has ever taken one.” Trump said he likes to take the test whenever someone calls him a moron.
However, the test he described - the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) - is not an intelligence test. It’s a brief exam meant to detect the signs of cognitive decline associated with dementia. As such, its creator has said the assessment is intended to be easy for anyone of normal cognition.
Trump made similar comments on Friday when he spoke at a senior community in Florida, where he also bragged about passing three cognitive tests. The fact that he’s taken an exam intended to check for a serious cognitive disorder not just once, but three times, had many asking the same question: Why?
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If what he says is true then all the time the moron has will be spent taking cognitive tests.
It appears that is what the moron IS doing!
Kennedy Wants To Defund Hospitals That Serve Jello
The Independent reports:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is leading a charge to stop hospitals from serving sugary drinks and foods, including Jell-O. The Department of Health and Human Services sent a memo to hospitals on March 30 urging them to align with the Department of Agriculture’s new 2025-2030 dietary guidelines, which emphasize limiting sugary, ultra-processed foods.
The agency wants hospitals to “align their food purchases with the dietary guidelines in order to enjoy continued eligibility for Medicaid and Medicare payments,” Kennedy said at a press conference last month. “We shouldn’t be giving … people who are sick Jell-O and Cheerios and rubber chicken and sugar drinks,” he added.
Calley Means, one of Kennedy’s top advisers, asked members of the public to report hospitals that serve sugary drinks earlier this month. His social media post included a link to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website, where users can submit complaints about healthcare facilities.
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Just keep showing us the retarded fool you are, idiot!
Trump administration cites national security in stalling 165 wind farms — Martha Muir, Financial Times
representing a major escalation in the president’s crusade against renewable energy.
Approvals for about 165 onshore wind projects on private lands are being stalled by the Department of Defense, including wind farms which were awaiting final sign-off, others in the middle of negotiations and some that typically would not require oversight by the department, according to the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and people close to the matter.
Wind farms require routine approval from the defence department to ensure they do not interfere with radar systems. This typically involves the level of risk being assessed and the developer paying an agreed sum for the army to update its radar filter system so it can locate the windmill. Some projects can be deemed not to pose a risk due to their distance from army facilities and flight paths. Normally these assessments can take as little as a few days to complete.
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That Trump is against renewable energy illustrates his backward thinking. He has no idea of the disaster we will face without it!
Connecting The Supreme Court Six CHEATERS To Epstein — Cliff Schecter
The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. Three weeks earlier, on April 9, Melania delivered an unprompted six-and-a-half-minute statement at the White House: denying her ties to Epstein, calling on survivors to testify under oath before Congress, and never defending her husband.
And one of Trump’s longtime confidants, a man who allegedly trafficked his own ex-wife out of Brazil—sits in the administration. Kait connects all dots. The pattern's a predator-class playbook: corrupt court protecting itself, billionaire-and-spook network going back to the 1953 Iran coup, and new war that just happens to enrich Saudi royals, Kushner’s Affinity Fund, and Lutnick, while no-bid defense contracts go to all the right billionaires.
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These deplorables should go back to hell where they came from.
AI Slop YouTube Channel Glitches Out in a Way So Bizarre That It’s Vaguely Disturbing — Victor Tangermann
YouTube has a serious slop problem.
The platform has been inundated with lazy AI-generated footage, from pseudo-educational videos explicitly aimed at toddlers and preschoolers to fake movie trailers. It’s become such a wasteland that some channels are starting to curate their playlists as being “no AI,” in an apparent effort to lure in users who’ve become fed up with the trend.
And despite YouTube battling the slop in a largely symbolic game of Whack-a-Mole, many channels are still falling through the cracks. One channel, dubbed Joe Liza WWE, which was initially created in 2007 and boasts just shy of 2,000 users, has been posting a slew of up to two-hour videos discussing the World Wrestling Entertainment industry and all the drama that surrounds it.
And beyond being a haphazardly put together barrage of real and AI-generated footage that’s randomly interspersed with clips of the video game “WWE 2K,” some incredible red flags come up when you actually listen to the accompanying, robotic voiceover.
As one unsettled Bluesky user noticed, some of the recent uploads include the male voice of a bot that frequently melts down into disturbing, nonsensical repetitions of a single word for several minutes at a time.
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"...repetitions of a single word for several minutes at a time?" This sounds like Trump! Is Trump just an AI experiment? ROTFLMAO!
Climate Change Is Getting So Bad That It’s Making Food Less Nutritious — Frank Landymore
Climate change’s effects often aren’t obvious.
In a particularly lateral example of how our planet’s changing environment is coming to affect our lives, scientists are now warning that our increasingly CO2-suffused atmosphere is causing the plants we eat to be less nutritious. Though the changes are subtle, they could already be endangering millions of people with poor diets, and hundreds of millions if the trend holds in the coming decades.
“The diets we eat today have less nutritional density than what our grandparents ate, even if we eat exactly the same thing,” Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, told The Washington Post.
In a study published in the journal Global Change Biology in November, a team of researchers in the Netherlands surveyed the nutrient levels of 43 crops, ranging from rice to soybeans to wheat, in an assortment that represents the vast majority of plants that humans eat. The team found that nutrients like protein, iron, and zinc have fallen by 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s. The culprit, they found, was an uptick in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
It’s not a drastic plummet, but it’s the beginning of an alarming trajectory. As billions of peoples’ diets already teeter on the verge of malnutrition, study lead author Sterre ter Haar warned that those few percentage points could push millions of people into a health crisis. A quarter of the world’s population is already believed to have anemia, a condition in which the body is incapable of producing enough blood cells to carry oxygen....
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Feeling tired and run down? Maybe it's what you're eating.
Trump, 79, Flashes Cankles After Surprise Medical Visit — Cameron Adams
The president’s socks were stretched to the limit.
President Donald Trump’s swollen ankles were caught on camera as he touched down after a trip to Florida that included a surprise medical visit.
Trump, who turns 80 next month, returned to the White House on Sunday after spending the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort and his Doral Miami golf club.
On Saturday, Trump undertook what the White House press pool called a “scheduled dental appointment” at his local dentist in Florida. The visit was not on his public schedule, however, and fueled speculation over his health.
Trump was photographed with son Donald Jr. on the south lawn of the White House on Sunday, with the president’s thick ankles visible....
Trump told The Wall Street Journal in a January report that he briefly wore compression socks to help treat the ailment, but stopped after a while because he “didn’t like them.”
As well as his ankle issues, the president frequently slathers mismatched concealer on the back of his hands to cover up bruising. He has attributed it to defying doctors’ orders and taking 325 milligrams of aspirin daily, which is four times the dosage generally recommended by physicians.
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At his age he shoud be taking 81. Aspirin is hard on the kidneys.
The Free World Is Leaving Trump Behind — William Kristol
On June 4, 1940, in the wake of the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk, Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons. The conclusion of the speech is justly famous:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
In fact, eighteen long months later—“in God’s good time”—the New World did step forth to the rescue and liberation of the old. And for eight decades after that, the United States took on the responsibility of leading the Free World.
No longer. The current American president doesn’t care much about the world. His administration’s slogan is “America First.” And his administration doesn’t care much about freedom. As White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller explained, “we live in a world, in the real world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.” And if we simply live in a world governed by iron laws of force and power, all this talk of freedom and the Free World is bunk.
So under the Trump administration, we’re no longer the leader of the Free World. Indeed we’re barely on the side of the Free World....
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And, yes, America is fading along with Trump.
Trump's former lawyer says he's become a 'madman' — and must be removed from office — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump’s former lawyer is convinced his ex-boss has quite literally become a “madman” — and that he must be removed from office.
“We’re in a real crisis here in the US,” attorney Ty Cobb told The i Paper in an interview that ran on Sunday. He added that the president is a “dictator,” “a madman” and is “destroying our democracy.”
As one example, Cobb observed that Trump appears to be “desperate” and therefore increasingly dangerous as the war in Iran drags on despite his efforts to quickly wrap it up. In seeming response to these frustrations, Trump posted on one occasion that if Iran did not capitulate to him a “whole civilisation will die tonight,” and on another warned Iran to “open the F**kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell.” On both occasions, the posts sparked concerns about Trump’s mental fitness....
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Trump declared he would be a dictator on day one. It appears no one believed the one time he told us the truth!
Critics Think This Is The ‘Most Desperate S**t’ The Trump White House Has Ever Posted — Lee Moran
“Can’t stop, won’t stop,” the White House captioned its bizarre 60-minute loop. Critics wished it would.
The Trump White House drew widespread mockery and criticism after sharing a bizarre video of Donald Trump saying “winning” on loop for more than an hour.
The 1 hour, 17-second clip was posted on the Elon Musk-owned platform X with the caption: “President Trump saying WINNING for 1 hour.”
“Can’t stop, won’t stop,” the White House added.
Critics, though, wished it would.
One called it the “most desperate shit I watched all week.”
Another said it was “so hard to believe” the clip was actually from the White House.
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The demented mind passing the time and saying nothing.
Trump’s ‘revenge’ campaign against defiant Republicans hits snag: ‘Four people showed up’— Alexander Willis
...“They had lawn signs and fliers. A Spotify playlist titled ‘Trump Rally’ blared on a speaker at the outdoor Fairbanks Park amphitheater on the banks of the Wabash River,” reads a report from NOTUS published on Monday.
The event, however, failed to generate the enthusiasm that Trump and his allies were likely hoping for.
“Four people showed up, three of whom were part of the same family,” NOTUS reported.
Trump has finally achieved the audience enthusiasm of every shitty sitcom that runs that one last, horrible season just for the money and nothing funny in any episode." — Blackeyedbeaver (comments)
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The old fart is gassed.
GOP Rep Claims SPLC “Funded, Organized” Nazi Rally
Raw Story reports:
Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) claimed that the SPLC “funded and organized” the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a rally that left one protester, Heather Heyer, dead after a MAGA participant ran her over with a car.
“They paid the guy who did that $270,000,” Hageman said. “The organizer of that event, the one that has been the basis for screaming that Donald Trump is a racist because he allegedly said there are good people on both sides.”
Political analysts and observers called out Hageman for her “disgusting lies” on social media. “That Wyoming picked this lunatic Cultist instead of Liz Cheney is an embarrassment to decency,” Norman Ornstein, a political scientist, posted on X.
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It takes a special kind of shitbag to state a low-down, filthy lie like this moron has done.
Trump knew Iran war would 'end his presidency' – but proceeded 'against his will': insider — Alexander Willis
President Donald Trump has reached record-low approval ratings amid his wildly unpopular war against Iran, and according to a prominent insider and former ally of his, the president “knew” launching the conflict would be “the end of his presidency” – but was compelled to move forward “against his will.”
On Saturday, The New York Times published a lengthy interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, long a fierce ally to Trump who has since broken with the president over his decision to attack Iran, going as far as to issue an apology for stumping for Trump in the lead up to the 2024 election.
Citing his numerous one-on-one conversations with Trump, Carlson revealed during the interview his read on the president’s mindset at the time.
“My strong read was that he was doing this against his will. This was not a normal decision-making process, and my strong impression was that Trump was more a hostage than a sovereign decision maker in this,” Carlson told the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
“He knew – and I know he knew because I talked to him about it directly – that the potential consequences were profoundly bad; the end of his presidency to start, which I think has proven to be. He knew that! I don't want to overstate my knowledge, but this is my strong perception on the basis of many conversations on this topic: he felt he had no choice, and he said to me 'everything's gonna be okay.'”...
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So, they are playing the martyr card now! LMAO!
Jesus Signs Creator Pleads Guilty To Child Porn Charge
Greensboro’s CBS affiliate reports:
The Asheboro man behind the well-known “Thank You Jesus” yard signs has pleaded guilty to a sexual exploitation charge, court officials confirmed Wednesday. Lucas Hunt, 25, pleaded guilty to felony third-degree sexual exploitation of a minor. He was sentenced to 36 months of supervised probation and will be required to register as a sex offender for 30 years. Hunt will not serve time in prison.
Hunt is the founder of the “Thank You Jesus” organization, known for placing yard signs across the region. Following his arrest, the Civil Air Patrol — where Hunt served as a volunteer — suspended him. The organization said at the time that the alleged actions were “inconsistent with our core values” and that protecting its cadets was its top priority. He’ll need to provide a DNA sample and receive sex offender evaluation. All of his electronic devices will be subject to search....
"Hunt will not serve time in prison? Why the fuck not?" — DevilDog (comments)
"Hell, in Texas a white man can rape an elementary school boy for years and only do 30 days in the county jail." — Random John Smith (comments)
"Thank you, Jesus, for showing us that Christianity is child rape!" — Refugay (comments)
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Another one bites the dust!
Todd Blanche Roasted Online For Dumb Voter ID Argument — Karoli Kuns
Last time we looked, one didn't need ID to eat. And eating at restaurants isn't a right, so it's just a stupid argument anyway.
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Start ignoring these fucking morons whose brains were gone years ago!
Shameless Sean Duffy Tries To Lay Spirit Air Liquidation On Biden — Heather
When you can't defend the indefensible, do what Republicans always do -- blame Biden.
As we discussed here, Trump wanted to rescue Spirit Airlines -- with our money -- but that deal fell through this weekend with Spirit announcing that it canceled all flights and is going out of business:
Spirit Airlines, the pioneering discount airline that shook up the budget travel business, is shutting down its operations.
The company is in its second bankruptcy and was in serious financial trouble well before the Iran war sent jet fuel prices surging. America’s eighth-largest carrier tried to reach a deal with the Trump administration on an 11th-hour rescue package, but a key group of creditors balked at the proposal. [...]
High jet fuel costs have pinched all US airlines, sending their costs surging. Jet fuel is the second biggest cost for airlines, behind only labor. American Airlines said that every penny that jet fuel prices rise costs the airline $50 million over the course of a year. United said last month that if jet fuel prices continue at their current level, the airline could incur $11 billion in additional expenses — double its highest-ever annual profit....
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WTF would these lame asses blame if they didn't have Biden? They sure as hell can't blame their own failure!
The Economics of Using AI to Churn Out Code Are Looking Worse Than Ever — Frank Landymore
In theory, using an AI model to churn out a bunch of code for your software company sounds like an awesome idea. A ruthless boss can cut down their workforce and save on paying their salaries and healthcare. Or they can keep the employees, and force them to crank out even more code with an AI. Either way, it’s an efficient cost-cutting dream.
But reality is beginning to set in. Businesses are racking up huge AI usage bills they didn’t expect, with a single employee spending over $150,000 a month on AI tokens. And AI companies are feeling the squeeze that the rampant use of their coding tools is putting on their servers, causing them to jack up usage rates.
In other words, the economics of rapidly deploying AI coding tools across companies are looking more questionable than ever. And one telling weather vane of where things are headed comes from Anthropic, which quietly doubled its estimate for how much the average business will end up spending on its Claude Code tool.
The sneaky update was first spotted by Ed Zitron, who extensively covers the AI industry. Before April 16, the Claude Code document estimated the average cost per developer to be $6 per day, and the average cost for 90 percent of users to be below $12.
But the documents now state that the “average cost is around $13 per developer per active day and $150-250 per developer per month, with costs remaining below $30 per active day for 90 percent of users.”...
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Not much to the dream after all, eh?
Meta Had the Worst Possible Response When Its Workers Were Watching Naked Footage of Its Ray-Ban AI Glasses Users — Frank Landymore
In February, Meta contractors in Kenya told Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten that the company required them to review disturbing and sensitive footage captured by its Ray-Ban AI glasses.
Some reported seeing wearers naked or using the toilet. Another saw a man’s wife undressing in their bedroom, after he left the glasses on a table, the joint investigation found. Other footage they reviewed included entire “sex scenes.”
“You understand that it is someone’s private life you are looking at, but at the same time you are just expected to carry out the work,” one employee told the Swedish newspapers. “You are not supposed to question it. If you start asking questions, you are gone.”
It seems their hunch was correct.
Two months after the worker’s allegations were published in the newspapers, Meta responded in highly questionable fashion. It terminated its entire contract with the Kenyan company, Sama, the BBC reports — a decision that a Kenyan worker’s organization alleges was in retaliation to the workers speaking out....
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The continued degradation of humanity by garbage techology.
Jeanine Pirro: I Don’t Really Care If WHCD Gunman Called Trump A “Pedophile, Rapist, Traitor”
The Hill reports:
Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, affirmed Sunday that the bullet that hit a Secret Service agent at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was fired by the alleged gunman. Pirro told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” that prosecutors have video of the suspect, 31-year-old Cole Allen, shooting at the Secret Service officer, and the officer himself confirmed that he was shot.
“It is definitely his bullet, he hit at that Secret Service agent, he had every intention to kill him and anyone who got in his way on his way to killing the president of the United States,” Pirro said. “This was a premeditated, violent act, calculated to take down the president and anyone who was in the line of fire.” Pirro also said Sunday that based on that manifesto and other evidence, it is “very clear” that Allen was targeting Trump....
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She doesn't care? When will this woman pass through puberty and grow up?
In Cuba, US Media Only Films the Darkness — Michelle Ellner
When the lights go out in Havana, the foreign cameras arrive to film the darkness.
They come for the blackout glow: candles in apartment windows, families sleeping on balconies, mothers fanning infants through another airless night. They come for the line outside the pharmacy, the bus that never comes, the refrigerator gone warm.
They come for the darkness.
A recent CBS segment on Cuba offered viewers a familiar script: a “failed” island, an aging revolution, refugees in Florida, and Washington once again contemplating what to do with the place 90 miles away. But the segment was also built on an omission so large it swallowed the truth: that while these came
ras speak of shortages and collapse, babies are dying under a policy designed to create both.
A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research has found that the expansion of US sanctions beginning in 2017 was likely the primary cause of a dramatic rise in infant mortality in Cuba. According to the report, Cuba’s infant mortality rate surged by 148% from 2018 to 2025. Had the rate remained stable, approximately 1,800 babies who died during those years would likely still be alive.
Read that again. Babies....
When I walked through Havana during a blackout, I saw neighbors calling across courtyards, playing dominoes by candlelight. Someone on the corner had a speaker with half a battery and enough music for three buildings. Two young people kissed along the Malecón. Someone cursed the government. Someone cursed the blockade. Someone cursed both. Someone laughed. I saw human beings remain stubbornly human.
Why does CBS not cover that? Because they film the darkness. But the real story is not the candle in the window. It is the hand that cut the fuel, the policy that constricted the hospital, the silence that normalized preventable deaths, and the infants whose names will never appear in the broadcast.
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For the most part our media has gone to the dark side just as our military has done.
Sunday Thought: What Is Being Born — Robert Reich
Friends,
I’m not going to dwell on this week’s outrages by Trump and his regime — his Supreme Court appointees gutting the Voting Rights Act, his bizarre claim that his war doesn’t require congressional approval because it’s “terminated,” his murders of additional sailors he suspects of smuggling drugs, his ongoing ICE raids, his continuing efforts to use the Justice Department to punish perceived enemies, his renewed attempts to silence comedians such as Jimmy Kimmel, his giant self-aggrandizing triumphal arch (what triumph?) and grotesque ballroom, his never-ending corruption and lies.
Yet in the midst of this cataclysm, the backlash against Trump is growing. Your work has been critical — your demonstrations and No Kings marches, your letters and phone calls to Congress, your boycotts and your local activism. Trump’s approval ratings are in the cellar. Two-thirds oppose his war. Many are demanding an end to his reign. Even some MAGA faithful are turning on him.
But it’s more than resisting Trump.
A new progressivism is being born. ...
Make no mistake. These are terrible times — the worst I’ve lived through, and I’ve lived through some bad ones. (Remember 1968? Nixon’s enemies list? Anyone old enough to recall Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunts?) Trump and his goons are doing everything they can to destroy America and much of the world.
But out of the embers and rubble that Trump and his despicable regime have wrought, a new America is being born. We are making it happen.
As long as we are alive and as long as we are resolved, as long as we are taking action to stop the worst of this catastrophe and also trying to make America and the world better, have no doubt: We will prevail.
Be safe. Hug your loved ones. Never, ever give up.
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"...we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, ..." Winston Churchill.
Amendments Protecting Pro-Palestine Speech in California Schools Face Backlash — Marianne Dhenin
Educators and activists are fighting for changes to a bill they say was “designed to create an atmosphere of fear.”
bill introduced in the California legislature meant to help ensure open discussion in the state’s public schools and protect teachers from attacks is facing intense backlash and demands for its withdrawal from pro-Israel groups.
Assembly Bill (AB) 2159 would make targeted amendments to a school discrimination law passed year. That law, AB 715, was championed by California’s Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC) and expands the state’s authority to ban instructional material in K-12 schools based on ill-defined standards. Critics argue that it undermines the rollout of ethnic studies classes and censors Palestine-related speech and instructional materials in schools. At least one pro-Israel group is already citing AB 715 in a landmark antisemitism lawsuit against the state of California that could stifle speech in classrooms statewide.
“The Legislative Jewish Caucus tried to pass a bill that they claim was designed to address antisemitism. But in reality, the bill was designed to censor open and fair teaching on Israel and Palestine,” Seth Morrison told Truthout. “It was broadly opposed.”...
AB 715 also requires that classroom instruction “be factually accurate,” a term critics argue is subjective and exposes schools and teachers to complaints. While the phrase may sound harmless, requiring “factually accurate” instruction while punishing teachers for statements about Palestine rooted in materials from trusted sources, for example, the fact that Amnesty International has labeled Israel an apartheid state, places educators in an impossible position....
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Just what is free about restricting free speech?
Trump’s Big Medicaid Cuts Are About to Get Very Real — Jonathan Cohn
President Donald Trump, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Mehmet Oz smile in the Oval Office of the White House on October 10, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
OMAHA, NEBRASKA HAS BEEN BUSTLING with activity these past few days thanks to the annual Berkshire Hathaway weekend, when tens of thousands of investors from around the world gather to hobnob with Warren Buffett while they figure out how to maximize their portfolios.
But inside one office, a woman named Amy Behnke has been preoccupied with something very different and much more urgent. She has been furiously working the phones with state officials, trying to figure out how to keep some of Nebraska’s poorest residents from losing their health insurance.
Behnke is CEO of the Nebraska Health Center Association, which represents clinics that provide care to the state’s underserved population. Since 2020, she tells me, the percentage of total patients showing up to member clinics with no insurance at all—the ones who represent the biggest drain on clinic finances—has dropped from half to one-third....
Just how big that change will be in practice is impossible to say right now. As in the rest of the country, the majority of non-elderly adult Nebraskans on Medicaid expansion already work or are in school, according to estimates by KFF. In theory, they should have no problem getting and staying on the program. And of those who don’t work, many have a disability or caregiving responsibilities or something else that is supposed to exempt them from the requirement.
But what is supposed to happen and what will happen are two very different things.
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"Work requirements" is something that many do not have the capacity for. Why are we so isolated from this fact? Why must we punish those who are in dire need?
Pete Hegseth's damning slip-up revealed how little Trump's war has accomplished: expert — Robert Davis
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's damning slip-up during his Congressional testimony last week revealed just how little President Donald Trump's war in Iran has accomplished, according to a former federal prosecutor.
Glenn Kirschner, a former Department of Justice prosecutor, argued during a new episode of his "Justice Matters" podcast that Hegseth accidentally admitted something important during an exchange with Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA). Hegseth seemed confused as to whether Iran's nuclear facilities had been "completely obliterated" during a strike on them last year, as he claimed during the hearing, or whether the country still had nuclear capabilities that warranted another strike.
Kirschner said that the exchange showed just how little the war in Iran has accomplished, other than killing military troops and raising prices for consumers at home....
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Losing. Trump's biggest accomplishment.
An arch bigger than the Arc de Triomphe? Hitler wanted that too — Andrew O'Hehir
Tyrants and dictators often dream of building gigantic monuments to themselves. It usually doesn't work
It might be a bit too convenient, at this moment in history, to observe that failing tyrants, as they feel their power slipping away, start building grandiose monuments to themselves. But at least in the modern context, it’s not wrong. Let’s put it this way: Any leader of the last century or so who wants to celebrate his glorious reign with, just for example, a grand triumphal arch and a plan to destroy and rebuild important landmarks of his capital city is only imitating the past, while ignoring its most obvious lessons. He’s likely to end up celebrating only his own decadence, poverty of spirit and enormous hubris....
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Trump has always wanted to be bigger than Hitler. The only category he's passed him on is his weight!
Defense official reveals alarming way US military learned about Trump’s troop withdrawal — Elizabeth Preza
An anonymous U.S. defense official revealed the branches of the U.S. military learned of President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany “in real time,” without prior knowledge of the intended move, the AP reported Saturday.
Trump on Wednesday announced via a Truth Social post that his administration was “studying and reviewing the possible reduction of Troops in Germany.”
The announcement followed an assessment by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz last week that insisted the U.S. is “being humiliated” by the war in Iran.
A Pentagon spokesman on Friday confirmed to Breaking Defense that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth “has ordered the withdrawal of roughly 5,000 US troops from Germany over the next yTwo Republicans who chair the congressional Armed Services Committees, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), on Saturday questioned the Pentagon’s decision, telling Punchbowl news“any significant change to the U.S. force posture in Europe warrants a deliberate review process and close coordination with Congress and our allies.”
But the AP’s report suggests the Trump administration isn’t even in close coordination with its own military branches. According to the AP, “A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the branches of the U.S. military didn’t have prior knowledge of the decision to draw down the 5,000 troops and learned about it ‘in real time.’”ear.”...
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"Military genius" does not apply to Trump!
Trump Suggests His Own Supporters Couldn’t Pass A Cognitive Test
Grandpa Dementia was bragging about all the cognitive tests he aced again during his speech this Friday at The Villages In Florida. We've come to expect the insults lobbed at former Presidents Obama and Biden and CA Gov. Gavin Newsom, but Trump decided to insult his supporters this time as well....
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Doctor Ronnie? He can't be serious! Listen to or read this gobbledegook scrambled brain rant and then attempt to think this idiot is anywhere near sane! Who knew he's a savant? (Notice he didn't say what the answer to his "math problem" is).
Trump Whines Medicare And Medicaid Too ‘Boring’ To Think About — NewsHound Ellen
Why don’t you get another job, then, Gramps?
Speaking to his supporters at Florida's The Villages, Donald Trump revealed he can’t be bothered with any details of the federal life-saving programs of Medicare and Medicaid.
Apparently, President Purple Hands flew to The Villages with his “great” pal, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the conflicted and unqualified head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“It's the most boring trip I've ever made,” Trump complained. “He's telling me about Medicare, Medicaid.”
Oh, the poor poopsie! Did listening to details about two huge, important federal programs that he’s supposed to be in charge of interfere with his TV watching? Or one of his on-the-job snoozes? ...
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"President Retard" could put someone with a brain in charge on it but he's too big a douchebag to think of that.
NBC: 12 Federal Things That Now Bear Trump’s Name
NBC News reports:
The federal government is undergoing an unprecedented presidential branding makeover, with Donald Trump’s name being added to everything from buildings and battleships to a drug website and a park pass. While Trump has had roads and even an airport named after him since winning a second term in office, his administration has initiated a series of actions to imprint his name and likeness on the federal government well beyond internal documents and communications.
Not all of those efforts have been successful, such as a push to have a New York City train station and Washington, D.C.-area airport named after Trump. But the scope of the others is enormous, including the addition of his signature to U.S. paper currency — a first for a sitting U.S. president. The branding is in stark contrast to prior presidencies, including Trump’s first term, when the largest branding controversy involved having his name added to Covid relief checks during an election year.
"The only thing his name should be on is his tombstone" — Ragnar Lothbrok (comments)
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The only reason that Trump exists is to stamp everything with his name!
No one has ever been as sick as this idiot!
Trump will be erased from history. That we can count on!
POLL: 76% Disapprove Of Trump On Cost Of Living
ABC News reports:
As the Iran war has pushed the global economy into an oil crisis and gas prices reach a four-year high, Americans’ ratings of President Donald Trump on several issues are deeply underwater with majorities disapproving of how he is handling every issue measured. About three-quarters of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the cost of living in the U.S. (76%). Nearly as many disapprove of how he’s handling inflation (72%), up from 65% who disapproved in February.
In addition to the issues, about 7 in 10 Americans say Trump is not honest and trustworthy, two-thirds say he does not carefully consider important decisions and about 6 in 10 say he does not have the mental sharpness to serve as president. Among registered voters, 49% say that they would vote for the Democratic candidate if midterms were held today and 44% say they would vote for the Republican, a statistically significant 5-point margin.
"Because he is a fucking LOSER! He is the biggest loser of all time. His cares and concerns has to do with donnie, donnie, donnie - and absolutely no one else. The GQP has to wear this one for many many years to come. Impeach him, Convict him. Imprison him. LET HIM DIE!" — Luke - my beautiful Luke (comments)
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The Clown Prince of Failed Dictators!
Christian School Principal Gets 10 Years For Child Porn
The Oklahoman reports:
A former Yukon principal and basketball coach who secretly recorded students in a locker room will now serve a decade in prison. Ex-Southwest Covenant High School Principal Kevin Russell Cobbs admitted to one count of possessing juvenile pornography and one count of violating the state’s Peeping Tom law by using photographic and electronic equipment.
The case against Cobbs, 56, is the latest instance of Oklahoma school officials being convicted of committing crimes against students they are entrusted to oversee. An arrest affidavit written by sheriff’s deputies alleges that in late March 2025, Cobbs admitted to hiding on his cellphone an image of a male child lying naked with his buttocks in the air.
Judge Khristan Strubhar ordered Cobbs to serve 10 years in custody of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. Cobbs had been employed at Southwest Covenant Schools, a private Christian school community in Yukon, for 15 years.
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Another one bites the dust!
Still no drag queens.
Host Channels Alex Jones In First Onion/Infowars Show
Consequence reports:
While the legal fight drags out in the background, The Onion has move ahead with launching its own satirical version of InfoWars hosted by comedian Tim Heidecker (who also serves as its new creative director). Delivering an uncanny impersonation of Jones (gravel voice, red skin, and all), Heidecker used Friday’s debut episode to respond directly to several of the allegations that the now-former InfoWars host made against him.
“I am wearing his skin. I’ve been wearing his skin now for about two weeks and it is, uh, it is tough skin. It is Texas skin,” Heidecker acknowledged. “Uh, it is leathery, uh, and Old Spice is the main fragrance, as well as various alcoholic beverages.”
Heidecker also revealed that created “an alliance between the Lord God and Satan himself,” and performed an on-air ritual in which he drank a sip of “real human blood” now available through the InfoWars store.
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At last, good news!
Trump's intimidation tactic just got destroyed — and he's reeling — John Casey
In a week when Donald Trump seemed to think he was a king because he hung with one, something hopeful reminded us he is far from one. In fact, you might say that the emperor's clothing is beginning to be removed, and what’s being exposed is a scaredy cat fraud.
Three diverse, noteworthy figures, over the past few days, looked Trump in the eye and essentially told him, “Get lost.”
After watching universities fold, law firms capitulate, networks grovel, and broadcasters bench their own talent at the first hint of White House displeasure (I’m dreading saying goodbye to Stephen Colbert), we saw a different response to Trump’s horrid reign.
First, a world leader stepped forward to call out Trump’s tragically misguided war with Iran. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who had been careful to maintain cordial relations with Trump and left a White House visit last month on good terms, did something rare among Western leaders....
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Trump gets bitch slapped by real world leaders!
The Last Time We Reduced Troops in Europe, a War Broke Out — Mark Hertling
ONE OF THE BIGGEST MISTAKES of my career wasn’t something I did. It was something I failed to prevent.
I was commander of U.S. Army Europe in the early 2010s when U.S. forces were being drawn down in the European theater. I argued—forcefully, with member of Congress, the administration and the Department of Defense, and even my military commanders—that we shouldn’t do it.
In the final throes of the discussion, I pleaded to keep just one more tank brigade combat team on the continent. Those tanks, armored vehicles, and supporting forces would have signaled not to our allies but to our foe, Putin, presence and commitment. I believed then, as I do now, that removing that force created an opportunity for Russia to test the NATO alliance and to pursue its longstanding objective of expanding its influence.
I wasn’t persuasive enough. My arguments fell on deaf ears, and the brigade’s soldiers were ordered to return to the United States. Not long after, Russia seized Crimea and invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region. I won’t claim that the decisions of those who were my superiors caused that aggression—but I believe it contributed to it. I remember a warning from the then-president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, who told me plainly that if we pulled that kind of capability out of Europe, Moscow would act.
He was right. I still question myself as to how I could have been more persuasive.
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The Trump Dictatorship knows nothing about military history or anyhing else for that matter.
George Will dismantles latest 'radical' MAGA scheme — Alex Henderson
Frustrated by European allies' response to his war with Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening to withdraw the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) altogether.
Many Trump critics, in response, are saying that Congress needs to play a role in handling U.S. involvement with NATO — and that Trump, under the U.S. Constitution, doesn't have the authority to pull the U.S. out of that alliance by himself without Congress' input. And some of Trump's MAGA allies are using the Unitary Executive Theory, a far-right legal doctrine, to argue that the president alone has the right to decide what the U.S. does in NATO.
Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will tackles this controversy in his May 1 column, laying out some flaws with the Unitary Executive Theory.
"The 'Unitary Executive Theory' is an idea percolating in America's political and judicial debates," the Never Trump conservative, now 84, explains. "Its radicalism includes insistence that the president may unilaterally withdraw the nation from treaties to which the Senate has consented. Withdrawal from NATO has become topical because of the current president's long-standing animosity toward the alliance. This has intensified because some NATO members have been uncooperative concerning the Iran war, about which they were barely consulted."
Will continues, "Put aside the wisdom of leaving NATO — history's most successful instrument of collective security — during the largest European war since NATO was created in 1949. But consider the ramifications of this additional marginalization of Congress: postulating an inherent presidential power to withdraw from even the most consequential treaties."...
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Of course, Nazis will entertain dictatorial ideas because Nazis!
Why friendship among white men is considerably more 'shallow': researcher — Adam Lynch
For years, researchers have claimed that men’s friendships are shallower and less emotionally supportive than women’s, a pattern called the “gender friendship gap.” But new research from PsyPost suggests this is more a problem with white men than other races.
A study published in Sex Roles finds that the gender friendship gap appears to be more a thing with the same race behind the widening dating and marriage gap in President Donald Trump’s MAGA-haunted America.
Researcher Emily C. Fox addressed the assumption of gender friendship gaps across races with an intersectional approach, examining whether gender and ethnoracial identity is a universal phenomenon concentrated within specific groups.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 cohort, a large, nationally representative U.S. sample tracked over time, Fox focused on respondents who, in 2002, were between 18 and 21 and had identified a best friend who wasn’t a parent, romantic partner, or co-parent. The final sample included 1,765 participants across Black, Latino/a, and white ethnoracial groups.
In addition to asking participants to think about their best friend and report how close they felt to that person on a 0 to 10 scale, respondents also provided demographic information such as gender and ethnoracial identity and socioeconomic background.
Women reported feeling closer to their best friend than men, and that closeness also varied across ethnoracial groups, but a closer look revealed that the differences were not uniform.
“Black men and Black women reported similar levels of closeness, while Latino men reported somewhat lower closeness than Latina women,” reports PsyPost. “The largest gap appeared among white participants, where white men reported noticeably lower closeness than white women.”...
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They never get tired of talking about pussy!
Huntington Beach Ordered To Pay $1M For Censoring Library Books — NewsHound Ellen
On Monday, an Orange County judge ordered Huntington Beach to pay $960,000 for legal work done by four legal organizations fighting the city’s violation of the state’s Freedom to Read Act.
But the ruling is only tentative.
As The Orange County Register explained, the ruling is the latest development after the Huntington Beach City Council ordered that any books containing sexually explicit material in the children’s section should be removed to a separate area and only accessed with parental consent. It’s not clear how they defined sexually explicit, but The Register said that some of the restricted titles were “It’s Perfectly Normal” and “Sex is a Funny Word.” Both are designed to be educational, not prurient, and each had approximately 80% five-star ratings on Amazon....
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Some people are so afraid of reality!
Steve Bannon Claims Voting Rights Act Of 1965 Was Racist Against Southern Whites — John Amato
After the Kangaroo Supreme Court stripped away key sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, MAGA influencer and resident scumbag Steve Bannon said the South was the people who had been oppressed because of the Voting Rights Act, which tried to end racism at the voting booth.
Bannon argued, using a dog whistle megaphone, that without racism, the GOP would not have captured the House and would not keep it in the future.
This is disgusting.
BANNON: Let me just be blunt. That's why this fight is so important, and we'll have more specifics today about who to light up because you can see those people that are MAGA and those people that are -will put their shoulder to the -- what's so outrageous and I find so offensive is the South has been oppressed by this since the 1960s or 70s.
It was clearly unconstitutional. Finally, people in Louisiana had the gumption to fight all the way through. The Supreme Court six to three, this was not close.
This was not close, and Alito buried them.
The only reason Louisiana took this up was because they know that Justice John Roberts has been our mission to destroy equal rights for minorities.
LBJ knew it was necessary to pass these laws because of the heavy racism from the South directed at the black communities that disenfranchised them at every turn, including their Constitutional right to vote.
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Yes, the dear ole Land of the Happy Negro white population who enslaved their happy Negros weren't racist at all according to this white racist motherfucker!
GOP Rep Rages That Texas Kids Can Speak Spanish
“Well, you know a friend of ours in a suburban red county here in Texas, they did a poll in their elementary school. Said what language is spoken at home? English came in fourth! Spanish was number one. Farsi was number two. Other languages were number three. English was number four. So this is what we’re dealing with in Texas right now.” – GOP Rep. Chip Roy, appearing on Fox News to promote his PAUSE Act, which would suspend all immigration to the United States and ban public schools from enrolling non-citizen students. According his own account, Roy was raised by a French-speaking mother and learned Spanish at an early age.
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Only the abysmally retarded will object to speaking more than one language.
Dismantling the Voting Rights Act Sets American Democracy Back Decades — Jordan Liz
On April 29, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 along ideological lines to weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race, color, or membership in a “language minority group.” Under this provision, states were allowed to consider race in drawing district maps for the purposes of protecting the voting power of people of color. That is, until now.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that created a second majority-Black district as “an unconstitutional gerrymander.” The map was created after the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals found that an earlier redistricting attempt with only one such district violated Section 2. The circuit court argued that the state unjustly divided Black communities in a way that “deprive[d] them of the opportunity to form effective voting blocs.” In response, Louisiana created a second majority-minority district, which Rep. Cleo Fields (D-La.) won in 2024.
This new map was later challenged by a group of self-described “non-African Americans” who contended that it violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The Supreme Court concurred. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito remarked, the new map “would violate the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.”...
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This is what we mean when we say they are retarded.
Trump: The US Navy Is Seizing Iran’s Oil “Like Pirates”
The Guardian reports:
Donald Trump has said the US Navy acted “like pirates” as he described an operation seizing a ship amid the tit-for-tat American blockade of Iranian ports.
“We … land on top of it and we took over the ship. We took over the cargo, took over the oil. It’s a very profitable business,” said Trump at a rally in Florida on Friday. “We’re like pirates,” he added to cheers from the crowd. “We’re sort of like pirates. But we’re not playing games.”
Trump’s comparison of US naval activity to piracy comes as legal experts raise alarms about Iran’s blockade of the vital strait of Hormuz and its plans to charge a fee for ships passing through it.
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Trump keeps committing crimes as if there are no international laws. An accounting is coming for him.
'Big damn deal': Newsom lays bare 'insidious' Trump scandal that should be front-page news — Daniel Hampton
California Gov. Gavin Newsom delivered a stark warning Friday that the Trump administration's weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission is a bigger threat to American democracy than the foreign corruption scandals dominating the headlines.
Speaking on the Bryan Tyler Cohen podcast, Newsom argued that FCC Chair Brendan Carr's media consolidation push represents something more insidious than Trump's personal enrichment schemes.
"Here's the thing that I hope people pay attention to. It's what Brendan Carr is doing at the FCC. Because the henchman on this is Carr, who was sent out to do what he did prior, which was to celebrate and subtly, indirectly encourage Nexstar and Sinclair to shut down Kimmel for a period of time. Carr publicly celebrated that," said Newsom.
ALSO READ: Republicans admit plot to evade historic third Trump impeachment
Newsom alleged a direct quid pro quo between Carr and broadcasting giant Nexstar. After Carr publicly urged broadcast stations to take action against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, warning them to do it "the easy way, or the hard way," Nexstar pulled Kimmel from its ABC-affiliated stations, and Carr publicly celebrated the move. Carr's FCC then approved a $6.2 billion merger between Nexstar and Tegna, granting a waiver to bypass the congressionally mandated 39 percent national TV ownership cap. The combined company now reaches up to 80 percent of U.S. television households, according to reports.
"That was the return on that original investment of suppressing free speech," Newsom said flatly.
He laid bare the gravity of the scandal....
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Brendan Carr has swastika tattoos!
Even Trump voters suspect latest shooting was a 'set up': pollster — Adam Lynch
After Bulwark Editor Sarah Longwell finished processing a recent slate of surveys, she said she was surprised by the sheer amount of indifference (and even suspicion) haunting respondents who had voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and 2024.
“Okay, let me just set the table on this because we did five groups this week all across the political spectrum, and not a single one brought up the White House correspondence dinner situation,” Longwell told podcast guest host and former GOP speechwriter David Frum. “Nobody brought this up organically — not in five groups where we asked ‘how do you think things are going in the country.’ People were talking about how things feel like a powder keg, but nobody brought that up.”
Instead, what Longwell quickly picked up on was the taint of distrust.
“It just doesn't make sense to me that we have our leader — who is supported/protected by what is supposed to be the … the most dominant military force on the planet. It doesn't make sense to me that there have been this many close attempts on his life when we have all these other presidents recently who haven't really had that issue,” said one Trump voter.
“I can't even … bring in a can of Diet Coke to a baseball game or a concert without a metal detector [going off] or them emptying in my pocket,” complained another. “So, the idea of somebody having a gun, especially where the president is, makes no sense.”
“I feel like it was a ploy to get his ballroom that he wants and that's his reason because literally that is the first thing that he talks about after,” said a woman who voted for Trump in 2025, and who describes herself as an avid fan of guns. “It's suddenly ‘see, this is why I need the ballroom at the White House because [I] almost got shot.’ Like, that's literally the first thing he talks about after this happens. That's not normal. That's not what people think about after you almost get shot.”...
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At least he didn't have to slice his own ear open ths time!
Hegseth Can’t Defend Making It Easier For US To Kill Civilians -- NewsHound Ellen
Whiskey Pete Hegseth is a murdering SOB on top of everything else that makes him unfit for his job as Sec. Def.
Whiskey Pete Hegseth looked a little less puffy-faced when he testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday than he had the day before, when he testified to the House Armed Services Committee.
But that didn’t make his testimony any more sober or fitting for a Secretary of Defense.
When it was Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s turn to question Hegseth, she asked about “the destruction of schools, hospitals, civilian places” in Iran.
“Do you know the impact of a strategic failure at a war when you have so many civilian casualties?” she asked the war criminal and war-criminal advocate. “You may have tactically completed a mission well,” she added, but that is not “strategically … meeting your goals because of the harms to civilians."
More specifically, Gillibrand wanted to know why the Pentagon division that is supposed to help the military avoid targeting civilians was cut by 90%.
Hegseth could not answer any of the questions. Instead, the guy who spent millions of taxpayer dollars so he and his buddies could feast on lobster tails, rib-eye steak, and King Crab while, presumably, salivating over even more civilian deaths, patted himself on the back.
“No military, no country, works harder at every echelon to ensure they protect civilian lives than the United States military, and that is an ironclad commitment that we make, no matter how, no matter what systems,” Sec. Lobster Tails lied.
“Why did you cut the department by 90%?” Gillibrand persisted.
She was cut off by the Republican chair, Sen. Roger Wicker, and her questioning ended....
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Hegseth is a totally untrustworthy rockhead.
Gov. Kathy Hochul Demands To Know If ICE Agent Who “Murdered” Renee Good Is Now Assigned To New York
Politico reports:
...“If Jonathan Ross has been reassigned to work in New York, I demand that he be immediately removed and not redeployed unless cleared after a full, independent investigation,” Hochul wrote in the previously unreported letter. “I have no confidence that Ross can be trusted to safely interact with the public. Nor should you.”
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Murderers should be in prison awaiting trial! Trump's death squads are still at-large! Trump is putting them onto our streets!
Cornyn: Paxton Gave “Sweetheart Deal” To Pedophile
The El Paso Times reports:
Incumbent U.S. Sen. John Cornyn’s campaign is lashing out at his Texas runoff opponent over a “sweetheart deal” for a sex offender.
Adam Hoffman, a lawyer in Waco, Texas, was facing a life sentence for the sexual abuse of a child that lasted three years. Attorney General Ken Paxton, however, reduced the charges last week so that Hoffman will serve only 30 days in jail and will not be required to register as a sex offender, according to reporting from KWTX in Waco.
“Crooked Ken Paxton took a horrific first degree felony case and reduced it down to two class A misdemeanors, initially suggesting it would accept no additional jail time,” said Cornyn campaign senior advisor Matt Mackowiak in a news release....
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The Nazis keep pushing their criminal candidates on us!
MAGA lawmaker astonishes with 'unspeakably racist' rant on live TV: 'Eject this guy' — Alexander Willis
Critics were left dumbfounded Friday night after Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), known by some for his frequent Islamophobic and genocidal remarks, took aim at a new group during an appearance on a conservative political talk show.
“We don’t want Armenians to be able to serve in Congress,” Fine said during an appearance on “The Jenny Beth Show,” referencing his Republican primary opponent Dan Bilzerian, an American influencer whose father is Armenian.
Bilzerian filed to run against Fine in early April, and has sparked controversy of his own by making antisemitic remarks such as calling Judaism a “terrible religion” and engaging in Holocaust denial. Fine’s response, however, drew its own scrutiny from critics.
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This evil Nazi turd would have kept Arshile Gorky out of our country? May he eat shit and like it! Kick him back to the sewer where he came from! He cannot be in American government!
Conservative attorney begs court to kill the Trump 'virus' before it 'spreads' — Adam Lynch
Former U.S. solicitor general and conservative attorney Paul Clement says the Trump administration’s lawsuit against an entire federal court in Maryland must die, and die quickly, before the spirit of the infection spreads to other courts and dismantles the U.S. justice system.
Last June, President Donald Trump’s politicized Department of Justice targeted the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in a lawsuit after the chief U.S. district judge for Maryland granted automatic stays against the government in response to a flood of petitions for writs of habeas corpus, reports Law & Crime.
The court granted the stays automatically as a matter of judicial economy because of the flood of immigrant habeas petitions, Law & Crime reports. But Trump and his helpers were furious, and launched a first-of-its-kind suit to undermine the court.
Judges on the court hired Clement to argue their case, and Clement did not hold back in the withering response brief he filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
In Clement’s view, Trump’s attack is a devastating power grab by the executive designed to pulls courts to pieces.
“If this case were to go forward, the next step would be discovery, with Article III judges and principal Executive Branch officers ‘prob[ing]’ each others' ‘mental processes,’ producing documents, and litigating privilege disputes of epic proportions,” said Clement. “Then comes final judgment and the potential for a permanent injunction, the effect of which could be to place the United States District Court for the District of Maryland in indefinite judicial receivership of an out-of-district colleague. And the virus would only spread.”...
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Indeed. Kill the virus!
Is the Next Economic Crash Being Signaled to Billionaires & Putin as the Working Class Gets Blindsided? -- Thom Hartmann
While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year or three for the other 99% rest of us.
The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that:
“President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said... In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. …
“For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’”>br?
So, Putin — who Trump took orders from for a full 90 minutes yesterday — and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. Or at least a revisit to the GOP’s infamous Nixon-era crises of the 1970s, Reagan’s “Black Monday” 22% market crash, Bush’s 2008 “Great Recession,” and Trump’s 2020 massive botched-pandemic-response economic melt-down.
Trump and his people didn’t bother to say one word to average Americans — no press conference or warning — but they sure made certain that their billionaire buddies are informed....
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A new Depression will be a disaster for us all.
Adam Kinzinger: The First Family's Corruption Is Mind-Blowing — Tim Miller
Fox News wouldn't shut up about Hunter and Burisma, but its viewers aren't likely to hear any criticism of Eric and Don Jr. raking it in through government contracts approved by the Trump administration. Unlike in Hunter's case, the U.S. government is paying millions of dollars to the president's sons. Plus, Trump is losing the information war on Iran, Bibi is oddly chummy with Putin—given his alliance with Israel's enemy Iran, the nation's debt is larger than our GDP, the governor of Louisiana is outright assaulting democracy, and Kinzinger explains why we need to celebrate heroes....
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Thr corrupt Trumps are the darlings of Fox Noose.
Turning Civil Rights Inside Out — Robert Kuttner
In Louisiana v. Callais, the Roberts Court has continued its war on civil rights in the name of civil rights. The cynicism of the 6-3 majority decision in Callais is staggering. According to the majority decision by Justice Samuel Alito, the long-standing interpretation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, requiring minorities to have opportunities to have representation in rough proportion to their population, has been overtaken by events.
What has changed? Nothing, except Alito’s ability to cobble together a majority based on his disingenuous claim that this ruling is merely an “update.” As recently as the Court’s 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan, Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh voted to uphold a lower-court order requiring an additional majority-minority district in Alabama. This was in line with an earlier precedent in the Court’s 1986 ruling in Thornburg v. Gingles, which overturned a North Carolina districting plan on the ground that it diluted Black voting strength.
The Wall Street Journal, in a deeply cynical editorial titled “A Victory for Voting Rights at the Supreme Court,” congratulated Alito on his ploy. “Justice Alito’s ‘update’ on Gingles tiptoes around those two precedents to get those votes [of Kavanaugh and Roberts],” the Journal wrote.
John Roberts has long sought to dilute Black voting strength, first as a staffer in the Reagan administration and then in prior Court rulings eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, notably in the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act for jurisdictions with a history of discrimination. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her scathing dissent, “Today’s ruling is part of a set: For over a decade, this Court has had its sights set on the Voting Rights Act.”...
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Trump and his fascist court is bringing Apartheid to the USA.
Severe blow dealt to abortion pill access in new appeals court ruling — Daniel Hampton
A federal appeals court dealt a severe blow to abortion access Friday, temporarily reinstating a nationwide requirement that women obtain abortion pills in person, significantly curtailing mail-order access to medication abortion for millions of Americans.
The ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, written by Trump-appointed Judge Kyle Duncan, is a major victory for the anti-abortion movement. While the ruling does not ban Mifepristone outright, women can no longer obtain it through telehealth appointments or by mail while the case proceeds.
"Referring to Louisiana abortion prohibitions, they wrote that the current federal regulations create 'an effective way for an out-of-state prescriber to place the drug in the hands of Louisianans in defiance of Louisiana law,'" CNN reported.
Medication abortion now accounts for roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, women have been able to obtain mifepristone through telehealth visits without an in-person doctor's appointment, an option the Biden administration formally enshrined in 2023 rules. Friday's temporary ruling significantly curtails that access....
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Sexist America wants our women barefooted, pregnant and in the kitchen! The retarded swine!
Hair Furor Lies That He Caused “Gay National Anthem” YMCA To Go To #1 For Months (That Never Happened)
“She hates when I dance to it. The First Lady hates when I dance to what is sometimes referred to as the gay national anthem. You know that? She hates it. You know that song was number five 32 years ago. And it went to number one 32 years later. There’s never been anything like it. It never hit number one until me! It was number five 32 years ago and it went to number one for months during the last months of the campaign. We love that song!” – Trump, speaking to an audience of seniors today in The Villages.
According to Billboard Magazine, “YMCA” topped out at #2 (not #5) on the Hot 100 in early 1979, which was 47 years ago, not 32 as Trump claims.
The song did not, as Trump claims, spend months at #1 on the charts thanks to his double-jerkoff dances at campaign rallies. It did reach the Top 20 of the iTunes chart for one week in November 2020.
On note, Village People frontman Victor Willis, the song’s author, has threatened to sue anybody who claims that “YMCA” has gay connotations....
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Trump knows his music as well as he knows shit from applebutter. And you know he does not know the difference with that!
Pentagon To Withdraw 5000 US Troops From Germany
ABC News reports:
The Pentagon is planning to withdraw about 5,000 American forces from Germany, senior defense officials said Friday.
The officials characterized the move as a signal of President Trump’s discontent with the level of assistance that European allies have offered in the U.S.-Iran war. Mr. Trump has publicly criticized German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the leaders of other NATO member states for not getting directly involved in the U.S.’s military campaign against Iran.
The U.S. military has a massive presence in Germany dating back to the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War. More than 36,000 active duty troops were assigned to bases throughout Germany as of last December, along with nearly 1,500 reservists and 11,500 civilians, according to Defense Department figures....
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Trump hates Europe as much as he hates America!
Supreme Court's right-wing gambit backfires as way to 'neutralize GOP power grab' flagged — Alexander Willis
The conservative-controlled Supreme Court issued a controversial ruling Wednesday that critics warn may “demolish” restrictions around racially discriminatory voting policies — but one voting rights expert believes the court’s decision may very well end up helping Democrats at the ballot box.
In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana state lawmakers would have to redraw their congressional maps, and in doing so, rendered Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) “ineffective.” Section 2 was established to explicitly prohibit racially discriminatory voting policies, including the adoption of racially gerrymandered congressional district maps.
With the court’s decision, however, Max Flugrath, senior communications director for the voting rights advocacy organization Fair Fight Action, told The New Republic Friday that Democrats could now redraw as many as 22 additional congressional seats in time for the 2028 elections, enough to “offset Republican gains, even in a maximalist GOP redistricting scenario,” the outlet reported....
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Put these goddamn Nazis out to pasture!
Hegseth dressed down to his face for using anti-Semitic term: 'I cannot stand for that' — Bennito L. Kelty
A lawmaker grilled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for shamelessly using an anti-Semitic term against his enemies.
"You compare journalists, you compare us, you compare so many to 'Pharisees,'" Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) told Hegseth during a hearing on Thursday. "'Pharisses' is a problematic and historically weaponized term that casts Jewish communities as morally corrupt."
She stressed that "words matter" and asked Hegseth, "How do you justify using this language as Secretary of Defense?" and "Why do you continue to use it?"
Hegseth said "I stand by it" and defended himself by explaining, "It's a pretty accurate term for folks who don't see the plank in their own eye and always want to see what's wrong with an operation."
Rosen was shocked. "You stand by calling people 'Pharisees.' Sir, I cannot stand for that. That is wrong. It is not respectful to people, and I expect anyone who is in leadership in our country to be respectful and use respectful terms and not be an anti-Semite."
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Fully showing all of us how big an arrogant racist Hegseth is. Not to mention, IDIOTIC!
Military analyst reveals how Trump exposed 'decline' of US naval supremacy — Thomas Kika
The U.S. Navy was instrumental in helping build the modern, according to one military analyst, but now, President Donald Trump's disastrous war in Iran has exposed its "gradual decline."
Robert D. Kaplan is an analyst and writer focused on the U.S. military and foreign affairs, and on Friday, he published a new piece for the New York Times, warning that "America no longer rules the waves," and breaking down how the current situation has exposed the Navy's ongoing "decline."
"The U.S. Navy is in decline relative to its own history and to the growth of the Chinese Navy, and has surrendered the control of the world’s vital choke points that it had at the beginning of the 21st century," Kaplan wrote. "The South China Sea, through which up to 40 percent of global maritime trade passes, in addition to oil and natural gas, is now dominated by China. The Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, the crucial transit point out of the Red Sea, is harassed by the Yemen-based Shiite Houthis."
He continued: "Now we can add the Strait of Hormuz to the list....
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"Decline." America itself is in decline due to the disgraceful fail of Trump!
'The dam is breaking': Trump's closest allies are now turning against him — The Conversation
In an interview with NBC News in January 2026, Donald Trump said: “Maga is me. Maga loves everything I do.” Until recently, this statement was true. But over the past several months, cracks have begun to appear in the loyalty of the US president’s “Make America Great Again” base.
Two of the movement’s most prominent figures – former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson – have voiced their discontent with the leader they previously lavished with unconditional support.
Greene’s falling out with Trump was rooted in her advocacy for releasing the investigative files related to late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But it also centred on her discomfort with US support for Israel and a sense that Trump had abandoned his “America first” campaign promises....
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He remembers nothing and thinks only of himself anyway.
We're Finally Starting To Take On Billionaire Predators — Cliff Schecter
Naturally, the oligarchs oppose this measure and have reacted as though Attila were again at the gates.
California’s billionaires are freaking out. Like most obscenely wealthy Americans in the Trump era, plutocrats are bloated with paper wealth, fortified by legions of accountants, and have a moral philosophy that rarely extends beyond their reflection. They hold an illusion their fortunes are entirely their own. But, more than 1.5 million CA voters have a different view and signed a petition for a ballot initiative that would impose a billionaire tax.
The CA proposal is simple: If voters approve the initiative this November, the state will impose a a one-time levy of roughly 5% on the swollen fortunes of those whose wealth has passed the billion-dollar mark. The proceeds will be directed towards health care, food assistance, and the assorted necessities of a functioning civilization....
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Make sure to hit the Google Nazi with it!
Hegseth: 'The American People Want Europe To Fully Shoulder Ukraine' — Lmao, OK Bro — Conover Kennard
I'm getting 'trust me, bro' vibes from him.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth says the American people really want Europe to fully shoulder the burden in Ukraine while we pat ourselves on the back and call it 'leadership.' Senator Angus King (I-ME) wasn't having it.
"Secretary Hegseth, why are we abandoning Ukraine?" King asked....
"Europe can step up, Europe can fund it, and they have through our PERL initiative and through our European command," he continued without taking a shot of bourbon. That's something, I guess....
"We don't have any interest in what happens in Ukraine," King said. "Is that what you're saying? It's only the Europeans?"br>
"I'm saying the threat is far closer to rich and capable countries in Europe, and they should step up to lead the charge," Hegseth said. "And that's why that chart is a good thing to see."
"They have stepped up, but I think the American people should understand that we've stepped back," King shot back. "In fact, stepped back to the point of abandoning."
"This is a war that never would have happened under President Trump, and he supports ending it through a deal, and he's pursued that," Hegseth said.
"So far it hasn't happened," King said....
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Hegseth is a unqualified failure. He reflects Trump's stupidity. Total losers and thus so are we.
Hegseth: Ceasefire Stopped 60-Day War Powers Clock
Axios reports:
Senate Republicans are calling on the Trump administration to clarify how it is interpreting the 60-day clock under the War Powers Act in its military campaign against Iran. The 60-day deadline, depending on who’s counting, is arriving on requiring the president to seek authorization or wind down operations. The first strikes against Iran were on Feb. 28.
But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered a different view during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, suggesting the clock can “pause or stop” during a ceasefire.
Republicans, including some who have flirted with supporting a war powers resolution, appeared open to Hegseth’s interpretation “It sounds like there’s some wiggle room he provided there for himself,” Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) told reporters. “We’ll take a look at whatever they send over.”
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Con man, PLEASE!
HHS Agency Ends Funding For Fentanyl Test Strips
CBS News reports:
Test strips used to determine if illicit drugs contain deadly contaminants including fentanyl will no longer be covered by federal funding, reversing a position the Trump administration held as recently as July and leaving public health organizations worried that the U.S. will lose the progress it has made combatting fatal overdoses.
In a letter reviewed by CBS News, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said that agency funding cannot be used to purchase test strips used to check drugs for dangerous adulterants like fentanyl, xylazine and medetomidine.
Test strips cost about $1 each and can be used to check drugs — from powders to pills to party drugs — for contamination. They are a “critical, life-saving tool” that can prevent fatal overdoses, said Maritza Perez Medina, director of federal policy at the Drug Policy Alliance. Medina said the sudden change in policy has left advocates scrambling.
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Don't test and the numbers will show less cases! Don't forget that's what Trump proposed with Covid. The dumb shits must be flushed down the toilet!
Sen. Rand Paul Seeks To End Birthright Citizenship
Frankfurt’s ABC affiliate reports:
Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul announced Thursday that he would be introducing a constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship.
“Under current interpretations of American law, anyone born on American soil automatically becomes a U.S. citizen, regardless of whether the parent was here legally or not,” Paul wrote in a lengthy post on X. “This is wrong and not at all the intent of those who wrote the 14th Amendment.”
Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about what defines birthright citizenship. The amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.”
"You really should have hanged all of the old Confederates. This is the result of not doing what should have been done." — Karl Dubhe IV (comments)
"There's still time." -- AncientMariner -- (comments)
"Again remember, Kentucky is a red State, and ranks something like 46th in education. You can really see it in Rand Paul" — Blue4sure (comments)
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Oh, and this motherfucker knows what their intent was? FUCK HIM!
Erika Kirk Accuses Media Of Inciting WHCD Gunman
“Many of the left-wing journalists that attended the WHCD have spent years consistently calling President Trump a ‘Nazi’, a ‘threat to democracy’, and ‘Hitler’, yet they still joyfully attended the evening’s event….
“If they truly believed their own rhetoric, they’re either joyfully willing to have dinner with ‘Hitler’ or they’re lying to radicalize American citizens with narratives they know are grossly exaggerated.
“Either way, it exposes their game of ultimate hypocrisy: manufacture the hate and then profit off the results; even if it costs someone their life.” – Erika “Rhythm Nation” Kirk, on her podcast.
"Says the woman in Nazi SS officer drag." — CubbyPQ (comments)
"Sugartits, you're going to have to grift harder than that. Especially if you want a polo pony to go with that outfit." — Stogiebear (comments)
"Saying all this while she is dressed as a storm trooper.....sorry, if you are going to wear widows' weeds (all black), you are supposed to avoid making a spectacle of yourself. Cutting public appearances, wearing understated clothes. She doesn't look like she misses her late husband, and doesn't look like she wants to be around her own children." — NPSTL (comments)
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So she knows what the motives are for everyone that was attending the party? Amazing!
Trump is the master of hate. Sufficient evidence of that will be presented in court! Make no mistake about that, dearie.
Pentagon To Buy Drones From Trump Sons’ Company
The Daily Beast reports:
The Trump family is officially set to cash in on the president’s war on Iran by selling drones to the Air Force. Donald Trump’s elder sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, joined the board of drone-maker Powerus after a golf club company they backed merged with it in March to take it public. Powerus, based in West Palm Beach, the home of Trump International Golf Club, now stands to gain from its links to the first family.
The company, only founded last year, announced that it had struck a deal to sell an undisclosed number of interceptor drones to the Pentagon. But Brett Velicovich, the company’s co-founder and president, insists this decision is based on merit, not nepotism.
Earlier this month, Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said that Gulf states caught up in President Trump’s war were put under “enormous pressure” to buy their drones. “These countries are under enormous pressure to buy from the sons of the president so he will do what they want,” he said.
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The Trumps are the biggest grifters we've ever seen holding our POTUS office. This is naked corruption, indeed!
New Medicare Portal Exposed Social Security Numbers
The Washington Post reports:
The Trump administration inadvertently exposed the Social Security numbers of health care providers in a database powering a new Medicare portal, The Washington Post found.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last year created a directory to help seniors look up which doctors and medical providers accept which insurance plans, framing it as an overdue improvement and part of the Trump administration’s initiative to modernize health care technology.
But a publicly accessible database used to populate the directory contains some of the providers’ Social Security numbers, linked to their names and other identifying information. For at least several weeks, CMS made the database available for public use as part of its data transparency efforts.
"This is like the umpteenth time our private information has been exposed by this administration." — Jay Silversmith (comments)
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How many must suffer because these retarded motherfuckers know nothing about security?
Louisiana Sued For Suspending US House Primaries
Democracy Docket reports:
A new lawsuit is challenging Louisiana’s extraordinary decision to suspend congressional primaries already underway — arguing the state is illegally nullifying votes and plunging an active election into chaos following the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
Just one day after the Court struck down the state’s congressional map, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) declared an “emergency” and halted U.S. House primaries — even though absentee ballots had already been cast and early voting was set to begin within days.
“This Court is asked to do something simple: stop a state from canceling an election that is already underway,” the plaintiffs wrote. “The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais did not order the May 16 election canceled — and did not authorize it. The judgment in Callais is not yet even final.”
"See you in court Mother Fuckers" -- Dwight Williamson (comments)
All these Trump traitors do is piss on our Constitution. All the Democrats do is narrate the Nazis continued plunder of America! It's time for action against them!
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Sued? Landry should be arrested, indicted and tried for election tampering!
Medical expert reveals dementia warning sign hidden in Trump’s royal gaffe — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump's handshaking gaffe during the recent visit from U.K. royals was written off by many as yet another example of his rude, self-absorbed behavior, but according to one medical expert monitoring his mental decline, it seemed more like a warning sign for his rumored decline into dementia.
Earlier this week, Trump welcomed King Charles III and Queen Camilla from the U.K. for a high-profile state visit. Alongside Charles' backhanded shade during an address to Congress, the visit also made headlines for an incident in which Trump seemed to cut ahead of the queen consort while she was shaking hands with and being introduced to members of his cabinet, and then awkwardly shaking hands with his own officials.
"Hilary M.A. CCC-SLP" is a certified Speech-Language Pathologist with a focus on cognitive decline issues and has shared numerous videos offering insights into the signs of Trump's cognitive and physical decline in recent months. In response to the incident with Trump and Camilla, she argued that it was not merely an example of his rude tendencies, but rather a sign of his mental state as he appears to slip further into dementia.
Examining the video, she noted that Trump was positioned well behind Camilla before cutting ahead of her, meaning that it was not a case of the two shaking hands near each other and Trump moving ahead to continue. Instead, the situation indicated that the president had to have "an action plan within the brain" when he decided to cut ahead of the queen. She also suspected that the king and queen were briefed on the plan for meeting the cabinet ahead of time, which Trump potentially forgot about.
"So I think there was likely instruction, and he either forgot the instruction or had zero impulse control once the whole thing started," she explained....
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Get this disgace out of office!
Florida Pastor/Santa Claus Busted In Child Sex Sting
The Lakeland Ledger reports:
A Lakeland man who has played Santa Claus for roughly a decade in the city’s Christmas parades, waving and taking photos with thousands of children, is one of 19 people arrested in a recent child-sex sting conducted by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. Thomas Allen Hicks, 68, was arrested on April 21 and faces felony charges, including human trafficking for forced sex trade of a child younger than 18, traveling to meet with and using a computer to solicit a minor. The top charge carries a maximum penalty of up to 30 years in prison.
Hicks responded to an online ad and texted back-and-forth with an undercover officer posing as the father of a 13-year-old girl who was being offered for sexual activity, according to an affidavit filed with Polk County Clerk of Court. The Sheriff’s Office said Hicks offered $200 for an hour with the girl. The Sheriff’s Office said Hicks works in marketing for Tri-County Human Services, a Lakeland-based nonprofit that provided services for individuals facing mental health issues, alcohol and drug addiction. He also served as a pastor, previously at First Alliance Church in Lakeland.
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Another one bites the dust!
Johnson: “We Are Not At War” With Iran
NBC News reports:
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Thursday said that it is not necessary for Congress to weigh in on the Trump administration’s military action in Iran because the United States is currently “not at war.”
“I don’t think we have an active, kinetic military bombing, firing or anything like that. Right now, we are trying to broker a peace,” Johnson told NBC News in the Capitol. “I would be very reluctant to get in front of the administration in the midst of these very sensitive negotiations, so we’ll have to see how that plays out.”
His comments come as the ongoing military conflict with Iran nears the 60-day mark, a threshold outlined in the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which says that the president has to remove military forces from conflict within 60 days if Congress doesn’t authorize a war before that deadline. When pressed about the 60-day deadline, which falls on Friday, Johnson specifically said, “We are not at war.”
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One more batshit crazy motherfucker!
Trump in 'real trouble' as new 'whopping' bad numbers reveal a major weakness: MS NOW — Tom Boggioni
Donald Trump received more bad news on Thursday morning with MS NOW’s Jonathan Lemire reporting that voters are fed up with inflation during his watch, with the president reaching record low approval numbers.
According to Lemire, Trump is in “real trouble.”
“Only 21 percent of people surveyed approve of Trump's job handling over inflation and rising prices, while 70% disapprove,” the Morning Joe co-host began. “That puts Trump a whopping 49 points underwater, the lowest rating Trump has ever had on inflation. In fact, that's even lower than former Presidents Biden and Carter, when inflation was at its worst during their presidencies; when inflation reached just over 9 percent in June 2022 under Biden and nearly 13 percent in October 1980 under Carter.”
“For perspective, the current inflation rate is 3.2 percent, so a smaller number, but yet unhappiness [is] really high towards Trump,” he elaborated. “So when it comes to the cost of living, the poll found that 75 percent of independents and 45 percent of Republicans surveyed say the country is on the wrong track.”
“This is why so many in the GOP are deathly afraid of November’s midterms," he added.
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America has the power in its people to stop this madman!
Impatient Trump issues new demand to fire comedian he hates: 'Better be soon!' — Travis Gettys
President Donald Trump signaled his impatience with ABC over his long-simmering feud with late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.
The 79-year-old president demanded the network remove Kimmel from the airwaves over a joke he made last week in which he described first lady Melania Trump as having "the glow of an expectant widow," and his Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr has directed Walt Disney Co. to file early license renewal applications for its local affiliate stations.
"When is ABC Fake News Network firing seriously unfunny Jimmy Kimmel, who incompetently presides over one of the Lowest Rated shows on Television?" Trump posted Thursday morning on Truth Social. "People are angry. It better be soon!!! President DJT."
Both the president and his wife have publicly called on ABC to fire Kimmel over his April 23 joke, which they have blamed for an alleged assassination attempt two days later at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
ABC briefly suspended Kimmel in September following backlash over his comments about the suspect accused of assassinating conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah.
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Trump keeps showing us he is 100% EVIL!
FIRE TRUMP, AMERICA!
'You're a war criminal!' Pete Hegseth interrupted by protester in Pentagon hearing — Nicole Charky-Chami
A protester interrupted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during a congressional hearing on Thursday as the Trump administration official faces heightened scrutiny over the Iran war and Pentagon budget.
The Pentagon chief testified for the second day before congressional leaders, this time speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee and defending the ongoing military operation in Iran and the Pentagon's $1.5 trillion budget request when a protester interjected, yelling at Hegseth during his opening statement.
"You're a war criminal. You should be arrested. What you're doing is despicable!" A heckler in the room yelled out.
The person, whose name was not immediately known, was removed from the hearing.
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Thankfully, someone had the guts to tell the truth in public!
Department of Just-Indict-Someone — Andrew Egger
We know we keep saying it, but this business about the Strait of Hormuz is getting really, really alarming. Oil prices hit their highest point since the war began overnight, with Brent crude prices surging above $120 a barrel before settling back around $114 at time of publication. And in comments to Axios yesterday, Trump seemed to see no end in sight: “The blockade is somewhat more effective than the bombing,” he said. “They are choking like a stuffed pig.” Setting that metaphor aside, it’s hard to ignore that the rest of the world is choking, too. Happy Thursday.
Todd Blanche Has a Thom Tillis Problem
by Andrew Egger
Start with the obvious: The felony indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for supposed threats to murder the president—based on nothing but a photo of seashells spelling the phrase “86 47,” which he posted to Instagram last year—is a naked act of political prosecution and a grotesque abuse of the powers of the Justice Department, and everyone involved knows it.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the driving force behind the indictment, knows it. Under ordinary circumstances, a seasoned prosecutor like Blanche1 would suffer untold torments rather than be subjected to the humiliation ritual his indictment of Comey has kicked off. The acting AG spent yesterday poker-facing his way through TV interviews: When asked in a CBS News interview if he had “proof that the FBI director knowingly and willfully threatened the life of the president,” Blanche responded that his proof “is in the fact that the grand jury returned an indictment.” Should a MAGA influencer’s mirror-image 2022 post to “86 46” also have been charged as a murder threat? “I have no idea whether there was an investigation into the other times that that post has been made and whether that investigation yielded different results,” Blanche spluttered. “This investigation that we undertook resulted in a two-count indictment.” The proof that he should have been indicted is that they indicted him.
FBI Director Kash Patel also knows the indictment is a farce. To answer the question “why now” with an answer beside the obvious—that Donald Trump is cranky and getting an enemy’s scalp would cheer him up—Patel was forced to pretend that reading an Instagram post, pretending it constituted a death threat, and charging it accordingly required a major FBI investigation: “This has been a case that’s been investigated over the past nine, ten, eleven months. These cases take time.”...
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Amazing how they think no one can see their phony bullhit schemes.
The Supreme Court Hacks Away at the Voting Rights Act Yet Again — Kim Wehle
THE U.S. SUPREME COURT’S RIGHT-WING MAJORITY gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on Wednesday. In a 6–3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court picked a favored outcome then contorted (you might even say gerrymandered) the law to fit it, all while ignoring the history of the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution and Congress’s unequivocal and overwhelmingly bipartisan goals in passing the Voting Rights Act in the first place
Worse still, the justices are probably not finished disemboweling the country’s decades-long legacy of remedying generations of racial injustice.
The case arose from the state legislature of Louisiana redrawing the map of congressional districts after the 2020 census to create only one majority-minority district out of the six districts apportioned—even though over 30 percent of the state’s population is black. (A majority-minority district is one in which racial or ethnic minorities make up more than half of the population, thereby affording a better chance to elect representatives reflecting their interests.) Black voters sued, urging the creation of an additional majority-minority district. In her dissenting opinion in Callais, Justice Elena Kagan explained problem the original plaintiffs were trying to fix:
A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and that faces continued adversity from racial division, is split—“cracked” is the usual term—so that it loses all its electoral influence. Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot. But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests. Their votes matter less than others’ do; they translate into less political voice.
They won their case in the lower court, and in response to that ruling, the Louisiana legislature in January 2024 redrew the congressional redistricting map in Louisiana’s Senate Bill 8, creating a second majority-minority district. Upset by that revision, a group of self-described “non-Black voter[s]” in Louisiana sued, arguing that the newly redrawn second district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because it illegally took race into consideration. The lower court disagreed, and the state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which originally considered the case last year, but reconsidered it this term—narrowed in scope—before issuing its ruling on Wednesday.....
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I never thought I would live to see the day our Supreme Court ruled against its people. A shameless racist disgrace that could destroy our Republic forever.
Secretary Squeals-A-Bunch Had A Pretty Embarrassing Day In Congress — Evan Hurst
Yesterday, Jules Hurst III, the comptroller at the Pentagon, told the House Armed Services Committee that Donald Trump’s stupid, servile war for Benjamin Netanyahu in Iran has so far cost American taxpayers, who cannot currently afford gas, $25 billion. That number will only rise as America continues to lose, and as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth learns in real time — and is forced to emotionally process — that the reason America hasn’t won a war in 80-someodd years actually has nothing to do with girls or Black people or gays or transgender people, but on foreign policy concepts he’s far too stupid and inexperienced to understand.
Meanwhile Trump is posting memes, renaming the Strait of Hormuz as “Strait of Trump,” prompting some to ask why Trump would name his greatest failure after himself. But that’s a silly question, because Trump always names his greatest failures after himself.
Anyway, the real show in Congress yesterday was the very sensitive, thin-skinned, needy, soft and milquetoast Nilla wafer of a WAR!!! secretary, Pete Hegseth — they formally requested the name change this week, because that’s their stupid priority in the middle of NOT A WAR — getting triggered over and over and over again by Democrats, including in exchanges with Democratic man senators with more esteemed military records than his own.
As usual, the whining was intense and came from the beginning, as Hegseth mewled that the “biggest adversary” America faces is the “defeatist words” of Democrats.
“The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats, and some Republicans,” Hegseth said at a House Armed Services Committee budget hearing. “Your hatred for President Trump blinds you to the truth of the success of this mission.”
Aww, boo boo. Cry more, bitch.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, one of the honorable veterans Secretary Shitfaced has been attacking for making a video reminding troops that they have a sworn duty to refuse illegal orders from tyrants and their little pissboys, remarked on Pete’s whining:
“You reserve more words and more vitriol to condemn Democrats than you did for [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin combined,” said Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.). “It’s pretty telling to me that you decided to use your words and your time for that.”
Pretty sure Daddy Trump would fire Pete if he was mean to Trump’s daddy Putin....
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Trump treachery is naked.
Trump Knows '86' Is A Real Death Threat, Like '23 Skidoo' And 'Why I Oughta!' — Even Hurst
It has been oft discussed in the august pages of Wonkette that Donald Trump is the oldest man who ever lived, not to mention the oldest president. He is so old that his brain stopped functioning in approximately 1989, when his brain had simply reached an age when it was nonfunctional and unable to download regularly scheduled updates that would tell him new things about the world where he lives. He was born old. His old ugly dead dad and mom with their stupid hair and ugly faces? He was born the same age as they are, which must have been a real experience for his mom’s vagina, birthing a fully grown man, especially one so ugly. What a disappointment that must have been!
So it stands to reason that Trump really seems to think that the slang term “86” means to kill someone, as he explained yesterday that he’s seen it in the movies, the moving pictures, the talkies! Back in his day it was just a nickel to go to the picture show, and they had a double feature, and you could take your sweetheart for a soda pop afterward, boy it was swell.
(It has also been long discussed how Trump thinks movies are real.)
Below is a clip of Trump in the White House yesterday. Does Trump really think James Comey was threatening him with a picture of Instagram seashells, as the Trump Department of Justice hilariously wants us to believe, like we’re stupid? And if so, tell us the steps you took to become such a fucking pussy, sir.
TRUMP: Well if anybody knows anything about crime, they know 86, you know, 86, it’s a mob term for kill ‘em, you ever seen the movies?
Ever seen the movies? he asked.
He continued:
TRUMP: 86 ‘em! The mobster says to one of his wonderful associates, '86 ‘em, that means kill ‘em! It’s uh, I think of it as a mob term, I don’t, people think of it as something having to do with disappearing, but the mob uses that term to say, when they want to kill somebody, they say “86 the son of a gun!” I’m trying to keep the language nice and clear, they don’t use that term “son of a gun” they use another term, but that’s a mob term for kill ‘em.
It’s been pointed out that it’s entirely possible Trump is confusing “86” with “deep six.” After all, this is the man whose brain turns “people asking for asylum at the border” and mangles it into “THEY’RE EMPTYING OUT THE INSANE ASYLUMS,” another pant-shitting fear fantasy that only the oldest man in the world would invent. (Also something we’re pretty sure he saw in a movie.)
And hey sure, maybe some mob movie Trump watched as a child used “86.” It makes sense, of course, that the mob boss president would be clinging to references like that. Because he’s old. And sad. And his brain is expired.
Continuing to live in a black-and-white mob movie only he remembers, and continuing to be the oldest man who ever lived, Trump kept babbling to the people in the Oval Office, which is labeled with comforting gold letters to remind him where he is. He probably thought they were there to change his bedpan, but he kept talking to them:
TRUMP: Comey is a dirty cop, he’s a very dirty cop, he cheated on the elections, he tried to help Hillary Clinton, as you know …...
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Trump: The Deluded Fool On the Hill.
Iran Isn’t Begging for Negotiations. It’s Setting the Terms for Ending the War. — Amy Goodman
Negotiations between the United States and Iran to end the war are at an impasse as the conflict enters its third month. The Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday that Trump has told aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iranian ports to ramp up the pressure on Tehran.
Iran is saying it will enter into direct talks with the U.S. “when President Trump lifts what Iran considers to be the illegal military naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz,” says Drop Site News co-founder Jeremy Scahill. “Iran has maintained that it’s not shut down the strait, but that it’s just shut it down for any vessels that are linked to the U.S. war in any way.”
Scahill says a disorganized Trump administration is pushing a “total propaganda narrative” that it has the upper hand in negotiations, while Iran believes it has the “three M’s” on its side: munitions, markets and the midterms.
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America has lost another war that we started. Serves us right. Meanwhile, Trump is trying to rig the fall elections to keep his seditonists in office.
Hegseth Dismisses Testimony of US Soldiers Who Said They Were Put in Danger — Sharon Zhang
Accounts by U.S. soldiers who survived a deadly strike by Iran in Kuwait that contradicted the Pentagon’s narrative are “falsehoods,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suggested in a contentious hearing in the House on Wednesday.
Rep. Pat Ryan (D-New York) asked Hegseth about a CBS report finding that soldiers were commanded to relocate to the U.S. base at a hub in the Port of Shuaiba about a week before the U.S. and Israel launched the war, despite officers knowing that it would be a likely target for retaliatory strikes. Indeed, on the first full day of the war, Iran struck the facility, leaving six soldiers dead and over 20 wounded.
“No counter drone capabilities, no counter rocket systems, no counter mortar or counter artillery, not even the basic overhead protection you and I had 20 years ago in Iraq, and now, six of our soldiers are dead,” Ryan said.
“The next day, you downplayed the attack. You said it was a ‘squirter’ that squeaked through fortified defenses,” Ryan went on. He pointed out that soldiers interviewed by CBS said that, while other soldiers in the region were instructed to “get off the X,” meaning the danger zone, a few dozen were instead put at the port outpost, where there was effectively zero protection from drone and other aerial strikes, they said.
“That is obviously in direct contradiction to what you said from the Pentagon podium the next day. So are you saying that these soldiers who survived this horrific attack are lying?” Ryan asked....
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Our military is being commaned by morons.
Trump 'desperately' begging for help from US allies he insulted and threatened — Alex Henderson
..."The Trump Administration is issuing a request for allies to join an international coalition, called the 'Maritime Freedom Construct,' to help reopen the vital shipping route and end the global oil crisis," Palmer explains in an article published on April 30. "The allies he is now begging for help are the same ones he has frequently attacked and threatened for refusing to get sucked into his war. A month ago, in his address to the nation, Trump declared that the Strait of Hormuz was not his problem and U.S. allies would need to resolve it themselves. Since then, oil prices have spiked to a four-year high and Trump's approval rating has hit record lows."
The Wall Street Journal, on April 29, reported that the U.S. State Department, led by conservative former Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), sent embassies a cable urging them to try to convince their governments to join the Maritime Freedom Construct coalition.
The cable read, "Your participation will strengthen our collective ability to restore freedom of navigation and protect the global economy. Collective action is essential to demonstrate unified resolve and impose meaningful costs on Iranian obstruction of transit through the Strait."
Palmer points out that Trump is "becoming increasingly isolated as some of the top U.S. allies, such as Canada, France, the U.K., and Germany, refuse to be dragged into the war in Iran or assist in reopening the Strait of Hormuz."
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We'll be lucky if the US isn't attacked by a coaliton of former allies united power!
Trump’s war exposed the military’s growing weakness: NYT — Thomas Kika
The harsh "reality" of President Donald Trump's war with Iran has exposed "the vulnerabilities" that have been growing within the U.S. military for the whole world to see, according to a new piece from the New York Times Editorial Board.
In the piece, published Thursday morning, the board observed that, "on paper," the U.S. military going to war in Iran should have resulted in an easy victory, given the substantial mismatch at play. While that expectation was largely met during the early days of the campaign, now, things are looking much different and much more dire for the U.S.
"Iran has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz of the Strait of Hormuz, and its missiles and drones still threaten America’s allies in the region," the NYT board explained. "While President Trump seems eager for a negotiated truce, Iran’s leaders do not. Somehow, the weaker nation is in the stronger negotiating position."
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Pete Hegseth personifies the failure of our military.
Jim Acosta: Second Trump era moving into 'mind-numbing' stupid — Adam Lynch
“Jim Acosta Show” host Jim Acosta says Kid Rock addressing the Pentagon like someone with military expertise makes clear that we are living in a movie, and that movie is “Idiocracy.”
“Over a mind-numbing span of approximately the last 48 hours, American brains have been assaulted with an absurd amount of Trumpian stupidity,” said Acosta. “… Yes, that is Kid Rock addressing the troops at the Pentagon this week. It is tempting to think photos, like [that] are AI generated. But no. Your intrepid reporter checked. And that happened. Apparently, the Trump administration’s self-described War Secretary, Pete Hegseth invited Mr. Rock to Washington for a taxpayer-funded joyride on an Apache helicopter at a nearby base in Virginia.”
Between that and Trump warning Iran via Truth Social to “get their act together,” and declaring they “don’t know how to sign a nonnuclear deal,” Acosta said it feels like “living through a sequel to the film, Idiocracy.”...
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The era of "Trump Stupidity" has hit its critical mass. The bullshit looniness has got to go staright to the garbage dump.
JD Vance And Peter Thiel Get A Lego Video — RedStateRachel
JD Vance and Peter Thiel get a Lego video focused on their relationship, including Epstein ties and the money behind Vance's election.
JD Vance and Peter Thiel get a Lego video! The Lego video about Vance and Thiel focuses on their relationship, their Epstein ties and Thiel's money behind Vance's election.
Increasing reports about America's 79-year-old president's erratic behavior have put Vance (and his billionaire benefactor) in the spotlight....
Look Behind the Vance and Thiel Curtain
As Trump's health appears to decline, The Globalist reports that people should study Russian history to understand the money behind Vice President Vance.
Crooks and Liars has been writing about Vance, Thiel and the other Broligarghs for years. C&L writers have been shining the light on Thiel due to his mass surveillance company Palantir....
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This exposes their moronic treachery!
Todd Blanche Is A Farcical Acting AG: Seashells Prove It — John Amato
Has there been a more ridiculous indictment by an Attorney General in US history?
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made a preposterous statement on CBS Morning News when he claimed that a grand jury indictment of James Comey for posting seashells '8647" is proof of his guilt.
How can an Attorney General of the United States not understand the basic tenets behind the judicial system they oversee?...
To be clear, a grand jury indictment is not proof of any crime.
That's why we have judges, juries, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and witnesses. Major Garrett could've used that as a follow-up question, but he had his script already written.
Pizzagate scumbag Jack Posobiec also posted the same image online, mimicking James Comey's post to President Biden, and Blanche was asked if he would be prosecuted. When asked about their similarity, Blanche launched into a nonsensical reply, claiming the same thing is not the same thing.
GARRETT: Will the Justice Department pursue that case? Because they sound very similar.
BLANCHE: That's just completely not true.
That's not how a grand jury does its work.
Fuck! It is true, Mr. Acting AG. To clarify, Garrett did not ask about a grand jury; he asked about the DOJ. Blanche told the DOJ to present to a grand jury, not the other way around....
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Trump only appoints losers.
Tillis: I’ll Block Any AG Nominee Who Excuses Jan 6
Politico reports:
Thom Tillis took on President Donald Trump’s administration in a monthslong battle to quash the criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — and won. Now he’s urging those around the president to take his latest ultimatum seriously — that he won’t confirm for attorney general anyone who excuses the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
“Hopefully they’ll take me at my word when I say anybody who equivocated on the Jan. 6 rioters, I just can’t support,” the North Carolina Republican said about Justice Department nominees. Tillis has major leverage as a member of the Judiciary Committee, where Republicans have a one-vote advantage and he can exercise an effective veto.
In the hours after the committee vote Wednesday, Tillis again spoke out against the whitewashing of Jan. 6, recounting Wednesday how he was the last senator to leave the chamber the day a mob of Trump supporters temporarily suspended the counting of the 2020 Electoral College vote. He previously sank Ed Martin’s U.S. attorney nomination because of his previous comments related to the riot and his work defending those who took part in it.
"Tillis: I will be silent as SCOTUS dismantles the last vestige of the voting rights act.
But a new AG that's a J6 denier? That's where I put my foot down!" — DaddySnake (comments)
"Performance art and smokescreen for the fat fascist." — Phil da Bern (comments)
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Is he asking for bribe money?
WaPo Poll: Only 28% Support Hair Furor’s Ballroom
The Washington Post reports:
Americans reject President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom by a 2-to-1 margin, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, and they appear largely unmoved by the intensified calls from the president and his allies in Congress to allow the project to go forward.
Fifty-six percent of Americans oppose Trump’s decision to tear down the White House’s East Wing to make way for his planned ballroom, funded by about $400 million in private donations, while 28 percent support the project. That is the same division found in an October poll. Reactions are split among partisan lines; about two-thirds of Republicans support the project, while 61 percent of independents and 87 percent of Democrats oppose it.
There is also a notable enthusiasm gap: Nearly three times as many people “strongly” oppose the project as strongly support it, the poll found.
"That 28% must be accounted the bedrock of tin-bucket stupidity in this country." — skinnercitycyclist (comments)
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Of course, not one of the 28% is an American.
POLLS: Trump’s Support Among Catholics Is Cratering
Letters From Leo reports:
A recent NBC News survey of 4,557 American adults gives Pope Leo XIV a net favorability rating of plus thirty-four. Donald Trump’s net favorability in the same poll is negative twelve. That is a 46 point gap between the first American pope and the American president — a gap measured during a month of sustained public attacks from Trump on the Holy Father.
A Public Religion Research Institute survey released this month shows Trump’s favorability among Latino Catholic voters has collapsed from forty-one percent in November 2024 to twenty-five percent today.
On the war itself, a YouGov poll fielded April 17 through April 20 measured a twenty-point chasm: 48% of Americans said they agreed more with Pope Leo XIV on Iran, 28% with Trump and Vance. Among American Catholics overall, Pope Leo XIV’s approval rating is 84%. Trump’s national approval hovers near forty.
"Regardless of your beliefs, the fact that any "religious" people follow republicans at all proves that either religion is insane or people are." — Danny & Andrew (comments)
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No one but a Nazi supports Nazis!
Private Prison Secretly Funneled $1M To Trump PAC
Punch Up reports:
A private prison giant that runs a sprawling network of ICE jails has sparked allegations of “corruption” after it funneled $1 million to a Donald Trump-aligned fund for the midterms, PunchUp and Migrant Insider can reveal. The timing of GEO Group’s donation has set off alarm bells—it came just as news broke that the company was about to lose out on lucrative contracts.
In the first five months of fiscal 2026 alone, the immigration detention center monolith held more than $1 billion in obligated ICE contracts, an OpenSecrets analysis found, placing it second only to CSI Aviation among the agency’s top vendors.
The seven-figure payment from its subsidiary, GEO Reentry Services LLC, was recorded as received by MAGA Inc. on March 9—the same day The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration had frozen the parent company out of $426 million in new ICE contracts. GEO Group has not received any new contracts since.
"Private Prison Secretly Funneled $1M To Trump PAC.
One more dot to connect: MAGA, Inc. has been used as TRump's legal defense fund. Private Prison company pays to keep Donald out of jail." — clay (comments)
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The deep corruption of the country formerly known as the USA.
REPORT: Trump Now Compares Himself To Napoleon
The Atlantic reports:
Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?
Impossible. And yet. Hegel’s theory of “world-historical individuals,” men who redirected the course of humanity, focused on three figures: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel described them as unlikely “heroes of an Epoch” for upending established orders that had previously seemed fixed. They were “practical, political men” who were each condemned in their age for smashing norms and for other conduct “obnoxious to moral reprehension”—as Trump has been accused of, centuries later.
And though Trump has long compared himself to America’s two greatest presidents, we were recently told by two people who are in a position to know such things—a senior administration official and a longtime Trump confidant—that the president had, in private conversations, begun thinking about himself less as a peer of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and more as an addition to Hegel’s immortal trifecta.
“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” the confidant told us. “He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”
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It's time to stop abusing an insane man. Lead him to a hospital for God's sake!
Does he even know what happened to "Nappy"?
Trump lost badly in Iran. How does he spin that as a win? — Andrew O'Hehir
No amount of late-night posting and Fox News bluster can make this world-historical humiliation look like victory.
There is no way to sugarcoat the epic scale of America’s humiliation in Donald Trump’s disastrous and irrational war with Iran, or the damaging global effects that will endure years or decades into the future. With the “stable genius” and “extraordinarily brilliant person” in the White House visibly decompensating into impotent rage and erratic bursts of mania, there is no obvious exit strategy that will allow him to declare victory (as he must, for interwoven and deeply unfortunate psychological and political reasons).
This war has accomplished exactly none of its stated objectives — even with those constantly being defined downward — and has almost certainly strengthened the regional power and global reputation of the Iranian regime, despite weeks of bombing and the deaths of much of its leadership. Trump’s options are dire and limited: a negotiated settlement that might, at best, approximate the pre-war status quo; a potentially catastrophic military escalation favored by literally no one except Lindsey Graham, the Israeli government and a handful of right-wing Iranian expatriates; or an indefinite continuation of the current phony war over the Strait of Hormuz, in hopes that the Iranian economy will suffocate before global recession sets in (an outcome that may be unavoidable no matter what else happens).
That’s a doubleplus-ungood list, and while it’s easy to say that the first option presents the most rational outcome for all sides, it’s not clear that even matters. The Pakistani government’s effort to play peacemaker has once again collapsed, with neither Iran’s foreign minister nor Trump’s amateur-hour negotiators willing to show up in Islamabad this past weekend. Trump is “quite fed up” with this war and eager to make a deal, reports Amos Harel of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, but is trapped between Benjamin Netanyahu on one side and Iran’s new war-hardened governing faction on the other, both of whom are more than willing to fight on.
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Total failure and disgrace on our nation.
STUDY: Arrests Of Cubans By ICE Up Nearly 500%
The Miami Herald reports:
A Cato Institute report published last week found that overall the Trump administration has “nearly ended green card approvals for Cubans,” while it targets Cubans under its mass deportation agenda for arrest, detention and deportation.
In October 2024, months before Trump took office, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved over 10,000 Cubans for lawful permanent residency. But the numbers steadily declined after Trump took office and fell to just dozens by the end last year. Meanwhile, ICE arrests of Cubans went up from less than 200 per month in late 2024 to more than 1,000 per month by late 2025.
Since December 2024, green card approvals for Cubans have fallen 99.8% and ICE arrests of people from the island have risen by 463%, according to the Cato analysis. In January, the government received 7,086 applications for residency, but only 15 Cubans became permanent residents, four were denied and thousands of other applications are on pause. Meanwhile, ICE detained over 1,000 immigrants from the island. The freeze has created a legal limbo that Cubans, long privileged in the U.S. immigration system, have never faced before.
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Trump's slackjawed Nazi gun thugs coming after the Cubans now. What a desecration of freedom in the former USA. We live in shame in the world now. Will they keep voting for Nazi persecution?
GOP Rep Blames Biden For 2020 Census Under Trump
Newsmax reports:
Rep. Greg Steube, R-Fla., told Newsmax on Tuesday that Florida Republicans are on “good footing” as they move forward with redistricting plans, arguing the state was undercounted in the last census and is entitled to fairer representation.
Appearing on Newsmax’s “National Report,” Steube backed Gov. Ron DeSantis’ push, saying, “he’s right” and pointing to what he described as Census Bureau errors. “The Census Bureau admits during the Biden administration that they shortchanged Florida and Texas. So we should have gotten another seat,” he said.
Steube also cited continued population growth in the state, adding, “1,100 people a day are moving to the great state of Florida, fleeing states like New York and California because they hate the policies, and they love the policies of Florida and the freedom that we have there.”
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More proof of Nazi Numbskulls! The retarded will believe him.
'Whoa, whoa, whoa': Congressman cuts off Pete Hegseth in tense hearing — Tom Boggioni
Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) had to fight for speaking time during a contentious confrontation with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday morning, at one time having to exclaim, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” to get the Donald Trump appointee to hush.
As the ranking Democratic member of the House Armed Services Committee, Smith got the first shot at the former Fox News personality and was barely able to finish his questions before the amped up Hegseth began spouting talking points about the success of the Iran war that has continued to drag on.
After Hegseth gave an opening statement touting the success of the war, Smith pounced.
“You have to stare down this kind of enemy who is hell-bent on getting a nuclear weapon and get them to a point where they're at the table, giving it up in a way that they haven't have,” Hegseth stated which led Smith to interrupt with, “So they haven't broken yet? Okay, we haven't gotten there yet.”
“Well, their nuclear facilities have been obliterated underground,” Hegseth shot back, which drew a puzzled look from the Democratic House member.
As Hegseth continued with, “They are buried—”, Smith protested, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whow whoa whoa.”
“Reclaiming my time for a second here," Smith lectured. “We had to start this war, you just said 60 days ago, because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat. Now you're saying that it was completely obliterated?”
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Trump granted power to Hegseth and he is drunk on it. Don't forget it is a drug. He does not have the tookls to handle it as he acts like a 5-year old on amphetimines. He is also should be cited for contempt of court with his agressive bully antics.
Smirking Hegseth dressed down as 'immature' to his face over Pentagon firing non-answer — Tom Boggioni
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s evasive and smirking answers to questions about his firing respected military officials at the Pentagon earned him a dressing down Wednesday from Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), a retired Air Force officer.
Under questioning about the Pentagon purge initiated by the former Fox News weekend host, who was tapped by Donald Trump to oversee the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania Democrat focused on the firing of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, which has also alarmed Republican lawmakers.
Hegseth initially repeatedly insisted he could not divulge why he fired George due to privacy concerns, which did not satisfy Houlahan. He finally snapped at her questioning and replied, “Out of respect for these officers, we never talk about the nature of their removal, but every one of them, including myself, knows that they serve at the pleasure of the president. Ultimately, out of respect to these officers, we don't reveal it. However, I will note it's very difficult to change the culture of a department that has been destroyed by the wrong perspectives.”
“So General George destroyed the culture?” the retired veteran shot back.
‘There are many—” Hegseth began before stuttering and then continuing, “We've gotten rid of many general officers in this administration because we need new leadership.”
“You have no answer, you have no way of explaining why you fired one of the most decorated and remarkable men who has served this nation,” Houlahan accused.
“We needed new leadership,” Hegseth insisted with a smirk before adding, “That’s my answer.”
”So your answer is a very immature way of responding to my request,” the lawmaker tersely replied.
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He collapses like a cheap trailer in a tornado under higher IQ leaders. Trump should love them.
Peter Thiel Launches Startup To Discredit Journalists
Oligarch Watch reports:
A Peter Thiel-funded startup launched this month will use an “AI jury” to “subject the media’s claims to systematic investigation and judgment.” That same system of AI adjudication assigns a numerical value — the so-called “Honor Index” score — grading the trustworthiness of individual reporters. And for a starting price of $2,000, anyone can pay for the company to review and adjudicate complaints they may have about a news outlet or reporter.
Objection AI was founded by Aron D’Souza, a lawyer best known for leading the Thiel-funded lawsuit that bankrupted the digital news outlet Gawker in 2016. D’Souza has described Objection as a private arbitration court, which individuals can turn to when they feel they have been unfairly maligned by reporters or pundits. “Your reputation takes years to build and seconds to destroy online,” the company wrote in a recent post on X. “Objection makes adjudication fair, fast, and affordable.”
The company is funded with millions of dollars in funding from Thiel, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and other investors.
"It's amazing how quickly Thiel is going down the extremist rabbit hole.
- Using AI to vilify any media he doesn't like
- Embracing religious extremism
- Saying anyone who doesn't support his views is the anti-christ" — vap (comments)
"Another autocrat who deserves the guillotine." — Magic twanger (comments)
"He thought he would lose backers if they knew he was Gay. But being a fascist would be OK?" — Gustav2 (comments)
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Fighting Nazis like Thiel is the real war America must win.
Trump Posts AI-Generated Threat To Iran At 4AM
Mediaite reports:
President Donald Trump issued a new threat to Iran early Wednesday, posting an AI-generated image of himself holding an assault rifle alongside the blunt message: “No more Mr. Nice Guy!”
The image, shared on Truth Social just after 4 a.m. ET, showed the gun-wielding president in a dark suit and sunglasses, standing before a backdrop of explosions tearing through a hillside.
“Iran can’t get their act together,” Trump wrote. “They don’t know how to sign a nonnuclear deal. They better get smart soon!” The escalation comes as efforts to secure a diplomatic breakthrough have slowed, with a planned second round of peace talks recently abandoned after weeks of conflict and a fragile ceasefire dragging on.
"But 'the Left' needs to tone down the rhetoric, right?" — CloG (comments)
"Yeah yeah, and a couple weeks ago you were going to wipe out a civilization. Nobody takes your threats seriously." — archiveit (comments)
">acts blustery
>chickens out five times already
I don't think Iran will take your AI slop seriously, bub." — Dark Qivit (comments)
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Cosplay don't mean a thing, dudester!
WaPo: WHCD Gunman May Not Have Fired Weapon
The Washington Post reports:
Surveillance footage reviewed by The Washington Post shows that Cole Tomas Allen appeared to raise his shotgun in the direction of a Secret Service officer who then fired at him at least four times as he bolted through a security checkpoint outside Saturday’s White House correspondents’ dinner.
The video, a much higher resolution version of the security camera footage President Donald Trump posted to social media that night, does not capture every gunshot that authorities say was fired. But it provides the clearest picture yet of the four seconds between when Allen burst out of a doorway in full sprint and when he exited the frame, falling to the ground at the top of a staircase leading to the ballroom at the Washington Hilton where Trump sat near Vice President JD Vance and multiple members of his Cabinet.
The footage shows the officer drew his weapon within two seconds of Allen’s arrival. The officer fired multiple times at Allen — and in the general direction of other security personnel as Allen ran past them. There is no indication in the footage reviewed by The Post that Allen fired his weapon, though authorities have charged him with discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. The footage shows no obvious flash from the muzzle of the shotgun before the suspect runs out of the frame.
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Scattershooting for dollars!
Nobody Trusts Trump's WHCD Story Because Trump Killed Reality — Cliff Schecter
Trump's sinking. His economy's a carnival ride operated by a drunk raccoon, his legal record reads like a mob boss who left his day-planner at a crime scene, and even allies treat him like the guy at a wedding everyone prays won't grab the mic. Yet, for all his failure, he’s achieved the ultimate dictator’s goal
Trump’s turned public life into what I've dubbed a "Distraction Ponzi Scheme." Every bit of bad news requires another manufactured event even bigger to obscure it. If you appear more times in the Epstein Files than Jesus in the Bible? Start a war in Iran! If your war in Iran's predictably a disaster? Fire Pam Bondi! And on and on we go.
Back to Saturday night. If it were Reagan, Bush, hell even Nixon saying someone tried to kill him, it wouldn’t cross my mind anything else occurred. Yet with Trump my first thought was “did he fake it because his polling’s crashed harder than Kash Patel after a bad break-up with Jim Beam?” “Staged" trended on social media, so it'd seem I’m not the only one to wonder about the official story…because it’s Trump....
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As a commentor says, "We used to have better liars."
Republicans are dooming their own agenda with unraveling strategy — Thomas Kika
Under the leadership of House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Republicans "have opted to cut Democrats from the negotiations" for these bills altogether, making the gamble "that they can rally their troops to ram the proposals through the lower chamber on largely partisan votes." Per The Hill, "the strategy has clear advantages," largely based on the ability to craft legislation without capitulating to any demands from the Democratic minority, but in reality, the party's razor-thin majority has made the task much less manageable.
"But in a chamber with wafer-thin margins, the tactic is running into wall after wall as Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and his leadership team struggle to unite their GOP conference behind bills that can satisfy the competing ideologies within the group," The Hill explained. "Those dynamics forced GOP leaders to delay the rules process governing the three bills, and they raise real questions about whether any of the proposals can pass if and when they reach the floor later this week."
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These people have been engineered for failure. Dump them.
Trump's epic stupidity could kill millions — Dean Baker
Trump is both an incredibly ignorant person and incredibly dishonest person. As a result, when he claims ignorance of an obvious fact it is difficult to tell whether he really is as ignorant as he claims or he’s just lying.
Such is the case with Trump’s claim that he didn’t know Iran might attack its neighbors and close the Strait of Hormuz in response to his joint attack with Israel. Trump insisted that none of the experts thought this possible when in effect just about every expert thought it was both possible and likely.
Given Trump’s ignorance and propensity to lie, it is not easy to know whether Trump actually went to war totally unaware of the most likely consequences, or instead went to war anyhow, deciding that he didn’t care about the damage it would cause. Whatever the real story, the consequences are enormous and sure to get worse as the Strait remains closed longer.
The most immediate and obvious consequence is the higher price for oil and natural gas. People in the United States see this at the gas station every time they fill their tank. Paying a dollar or so more for a gallon of gas is an annoyance for everyone. It is very bad news for low- and moderate-income households, especially those who need a car for work....
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His insane arrogance and vanity havve blinded any chance of him seeing reality.
'Terrible' look for Trump: Security expert tears apart DOJ’s new Comey indictment — Sarah K. Burris
CNN reported on Tuesday that the Justice Department has indicted former FBI Director James Comey for the second time, two sources confirmed to the network.
The DOJ attempted to bring a similar case in the Eastern District of Virginia last year, but the effort failed as the interim U.S. attorney refused to put his name on it. Instead, he resigned, and a new one was appointed. She then indicted Comey.
CNN noted that the actual indictment isn't online yet, so it's unclear what charges they intend to use to go after Comey. Reporters noted there were allegations of an assassination threat because Comey posted a photo of sea shells he saw on the beach on May 15, 2025, that spelled out numbers that President Donald Trump allies claimed were a threat. The other possible charge relates to a comment Comey made in 2017 in testimony before the U.S. Senate over Zoom about who he told about issues related to Trump.
National security lawyer Bradley P. Moss told CNN that he doubts that the indictment will stick, but explained that it isn't the purpose. He said that what Trump wants is the "spectacle" and the "headline."
"It's going to look terrible for the Justice Department and its reputation, no doubt," he said. ...
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Trump is the "Disaster Artist."
FL Speaker Kills Push To Ax Childhood Vax Mandates
The Florida Phoenix reports:
Bucking Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida lawmakers won’t strike vaccine mandates for kids or create new guardrails on artificial intelligence, House Speaker Daniel Perez declared Tuesday morning. The only topic the Florida House will address during the four-day special session is redrawing the state’s congressional maps.
“There were no bills filed on these policies prior to the start of this special session [in the House],” Perez told his members minutes after opening House proceedings. “Consequently, we will not be taking up those issues.”
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Yeah, who cares about kids or anyone they might infect with measles, "Mr. Disease?"
How the Hate-Industrial Complex Keeps Marching On — Thom Hartmann
Unpacking the system that turns outrage into profit and democracy into collateral damage…
The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry.
Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.
The Republican Party writ large has also benefitted from all this, since it was reinvented mid-20th century by Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy and Reagan’s embrace of “states’ rights” as the party of Christian white male supremacy. (The last four Black Republicans in the US House of Representatives are ending their political careers this year.)
Because every rightwing movement in history has been founded on hate and/or xenophobia, the openly neo-Confederate MAGA movement was simply the logical end-point of this turn the Party took a half-century ago. History shows that when the right wants to seize power, it reaches for the oldest weapon in politics: teach people to fear and then hate their neighbors, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy....
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Billionaires and democracy are no longer compatible, Peter!
'A day of reckoning coming' as Trump's attempt at damage control backfires: analysis — Alex Henderson
In an article published on April 28, Waldman and Stokols explain, "Energy experts say another oil price spike is coming — and it may be made worse by the president’s social media posts. President Donald Trump has repeatedly spurred temporary dips in oil prices by claiming, on Truth Social, that the Iran war is near an end and that U.S. oil production would ensure sky-high gas prices would soon retreat. The jawboning has mostly worked. Even as the global price of oil has crept up over $100 per barrel on the futures market, it is significantly less than the $140 per barrel spot price, or what it would take to buy a barrel today."
The Politico reporters continue, "But the president's promises can only work for so long. Supply of oil — especially in Europe and Asia — is dwindling, and a price shock is coming, said Dan Pickering, chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners."
Pickering told Politico, "There's a day of reckoning coming. It will be painful because I can tell you that the stock market's ignoring this."....
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The Nazis are whistling by the graveyard.
The alarming moment Trump officials started speaking like incels — The Conversation
As the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran in late February, the social media posts by some US national security agencies took a particular turn.
With missiles and bombs raining down, Pentagon accounts began using strange turns of phrase to describe the AI-guided violence unleashed against child and soldier alike. The destruction was described as “lethalitymaxxing”. Its perpetrators were said to be “locked in” with “low cortisol”.
This lingo finds much of its origins in the manosphere: a set of defined online communities centred on male grievance and empowerment.
The fact the highest political institutions are now using the language and concepts of the manosphere suggests this community and beliefs have become far more extensive than many like to think."...
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¿Quien es mas Macho? Randos de retardo?
Missing GOP Rep Issues Murky Statement On Return
The New York Times reports:
Representative Thomas Kean Jr., a New Jersey Republican who has not cast a vote in the House in nearly two months, said on Monday that he expected to make a full recovery from what he called a “personal medical issue,” but offered no additional details about his health or when he might return to Congress.
“My doctors continue to assure me that my recovery will be complete and that I will be back to the job I love very soon,” he said in his first public statement since he began missing votes in Washington last month. “I expect to return to a full schedule and be at 100 percent.”
Mr. Kean, who is running for re-election in one of the country’s most competitive House races, thanked friends and colleagues “on both sides of the aisle” for their “patience and understanding during this time.” Even fellow Republican lawmakers have said that they had been given no information about Mr. Kean’s health condition, which has taken him away from Congress at a critical moment.
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As predicted here a while back. Recovery from some sort of addiction.
Loony MAGA Activists Hired As Deportation Judges
The Washington Post reports:
A divorce lawyer who has vowed to “fight exclusively for the rights of men.” A Minnesota attorney who championed ICE during the Trump administration’s raids in Minneapolis. And a judge who was once lambasted by an appeals court for denying humanitarian protection to a Serbian man because he didn’t look “overtly gay.” All three are among the “deportation judges” recently hired as part of President Donald Trump’s quest to clear a massive case backlog and fulfill his goal of deporting 1 million immigrants each year.
The hiring spree follows the Justice Department’s firings of more than 100 immigration judges since Trump took office, an unprecedented purge, and a similar number have retired or resigned. More than 140 new judges have been appointed so far to replace them, many of whom have no stated experience practicing immigration law and, according to the National Association of Immigration Judges, are receiving less training than previously offered.
The recruits are being offered signing bonuses, the opportunity to work from home, and even the flexibility to keep their day jobs and moonlight as judges after hours. New hires can earn up to $207,500 a year and 25 percent signing bonuses in some Democratic-led states such as California.
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Us poor white men have never had the rights that minorities like women, Blacks, gays, immigrants and NFL football coaches have enjoyed eternally. We demand a little respect since we have been forced to use penis erection meds to perform sexually as that power has been so diminished by this persecution on us. Please, help us overcome!
Turmoil At “Deeply Demoralized” MAGA-Led EEOC
The New York Times reports:
Field staff at the federal agency that enforces civil rights laws in the workplace say they are under intense pressure from leadership to bring in cases that fit the Trump administration’s priorities, including charges of discrimination against white men and charges of antisemitism on college campuses.
That pressure has led investigators and lawyers at the agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to focus its thin resources on pursuing and fast-tracking cases that have little evidence and tenuous legal bases, according to more than a dozen current and former employees, both Republicans and Democrats.
They described a deeply demoralized and fearful work force, diminished by years of attrition and a surge of resignations and retirements during the second Trump administration. Current and recently departed employees, who requested anonymity because they feared professional repercussions, said the commission’s Republican chair, Andrea Lucas, had recast the agency to carry out President Trump’s executive orders.
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Trump's low IQ magistrates follow his hate and transfer it to those that Trump wants to persecute. This is un-American and must be overthrown!
GOP Senators Unveil Bill To Pay For Trump’s Ballroom
The Daily Beast reports:
MAGA Senator Lindsey Graham has cooked up a new plan to fast-track the construction of President Donald Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom—at taxpayers’ expense. The South Carolina senator has unveiled a bill that allocates $400 million for Trump’s ballroom project, claiming that Saturday’s shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner proves that “the need is real.”
“I’d like the vote as soon as possible to accelerate what America needs: A secure facility for the president and others to meet in, to have a good time, to ?enjoy themselves without putting the nation at risk,” Graham said at a press conference on Monday.
The 70-year-old senator said that taxpayers would cover $332 million of the $400 million package, paid through “customs fees” on imported goods. Graham, who said that he has “never felt the sense of threat that exists today,” claimed, “This is not about Trump.”
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It's about nothing BUT Trump you toady fairy!
DOJ Ballroom Filing: “Fake” Preservationists Have TDS
The Washington Post reports:
Justice Department officials late Monday asked a federal judge to lift his order halting President Donald Trump’s planned $400 million ballroom, contending that Saturday’s attack at the White House correspondents’ dinner proved why the space is needed.
“After the Saturday night attempted assassination, which could have never taken place in the new facility, reasonable minds can no longer differ — The injunction must be dissolved,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche and two other top Justice Department lawyers wrote in the filing to U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who ordered a halt to aboveground construction on the project.
The Justice Department’s motion — which is unusually written for a government legal filing and resembles Trump’s Truth Social posts — was one of several documents filed to the court late Monday night. The motion also criticizes the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the nonprofit that brought the lawsuit, writing that the group’s “name is FAKE” and claiming that “they suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly referred to as TDS.”...
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Once again for the slow ones: TDS is what the Trump toadies are experiencing and not his opposition. Get with it, retards!
Fox News Worried People Believe WHCD Was Staged To Help Trump — John Amato
Earlier this morning on Fox and Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade took the time to refute any rumors and questions about the arrest of Cole Allen at the WHCD, after false flag rumors swirled, linking the incident to horrible Trump approval ratings.
The NY Times reported that soon after the incident, the word "staged" trended on X and was used more than 300,000 times.
KILMEADE: It doesn't stop the conspiracy theories, but hopefully squelches them.
All of a sudden, I'm hearing, well, the whole thing is, was this staged?
JONES: It's unbelievable.
KILMEADE: Was it staged so the President's approval ratings can go up?
It's insane.
Nothing could possibly have been staged.
Usually, Fox News never mentions anything negative about Donald Trump, and amplifies any conspiracy against the left, or that supports Demented Donald.
This time, Fox News made sure to try to stamp out any conjecture against Trump....
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Well, I think that photo of Miss Lindsey porking the alleged assassin is proof enough it was a planned orgy!
Trump's 'I Am Not A Rapist' T-Shirt Has People Asking Questions Already Answered By Shirt — Gary Legum
Sir, as your lawyers, we advise you to say it like you mean it.
Because we love you, we subjected ourselves to Donald Trump’s entire 60 Minutes interview on Sunday night so that you could spare yourselves. Anyone who wants to subject themselves to the 40-minute extended version that the show posted on its YouTube page is welcome to watch it or read the transcript. We recommend making sure your affairs are in order first.
The interview was hastily thrown together in the wake of the shooting during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night. One can almost imagine CBS news honcho Bari Weiss, seen here breaking into a Rodgers and Hammerstein medley at Vanity Fair’s WHCD party, texting every senior White House official in her contacts while she was still hiding under CBS’s table in the Washington Hilton ballroom. Let’s do the fucking news, indeed.
Norah O’Donnell got the unlucky assignment of trying to get Trump to answer questions like a human being with feelings and empathy for 40 minutes. It went how these interviews always go with our beignet-brained president: like crap piled atop a mountain of crap. Like a garbage barge caught in a hurricane. Like the hazardous waste disposal dumpster at a liposuction clinic.
The whole WHCD is already a moral vacuum; we don’t really need to know what this hateful sociopath of a president thought about it, do we? And yet
But there were some funny moments. Early in the interview, O’Donnell walked him through those moments when the gunfire was going off just as Oz Pearlman, the mentalist hired to provide the evening’s what we suppose some would call entertainment, was trying to guess the name of Karoline Leavitt’s unborn child....
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This is where lying as habit does a liar in.
Melania Trump wants ABC to 'take a stand' against Jimmy Kimmel after 'hateful' joke — Mandalit del Barco
Two days before the White House Correspondents' Dinner ended in gunfire, Kimmel delivered a mock Correspondents' Dinner speech during a sketch on his show. The first lady said it was "corrosive."
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She means like a dead battery that's been in place until it causes a mess.
Like a lot of things, these people don't get satire.
Mockery buries Karoline Leavitt as she gushes over 'fearless' Trump at shooting — Nicole Charky-Chami
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was roundly mocked on Monday after admiring President Donald Trump for bravery during the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting.
Leavitt spoke to reporters during a press briefing, blaming Democrats and members of the media for what led to suspect Cole Allen allegedly shooting a Secret Service agent.
"The president's calm in the face of chaos while yet another individual was trying to take his life was really remarkable to witness, and it's something I will never forget. President Trump is fearless. He is willing to put his own life on the line," Leavitt said.
Social media users questioned her claims.
"Frankly, it looked more like he had no idea anything was going on until the Secret Service yanked him out of his chair," author Sherry Knowlton wrote on X.
"Trump stumbled and struggled getting up,' progressive political commentator Vince Wilson wrote on X.
"Fearless, eh? What does his military record look like?" College instructor and author Anthony M. Hopper wrote on X.
"Really he wasn't so calm when he was asked [about Epstein]," Tracey Gallagher, attorney and former Judge Pro Tem, wrote on X.
"She knows this sort of propaganda is not helping the discourse, right?" English teacher and former announcer Professor George Werner wrote on X.
Leavitt: "The president's calm in the face of chaos while yet another individual was trying to take his life was really remarkable to witness, and it's something I will never forget. President Trump is fearless. He is willing to put his own life on the line." pic.twitter.com/UjwWaAGa9f
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 27, 2026
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Put his life on the line for what? Defending an indulgent party in a hotel ballroom? LMAO!
Trump brutally fact-checked on air during his '60 Minutes' interview — María Teresita Armstrong-Matta
President Donald Trump became defensive during a CBS News interview with Norah O'Donnell on Sunday, one day after alleged shooter Cole Allen opened fire at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
O'Donnell referenced Allen's manifesto, in which he described Trump as "a pedophile, rapist, and traitor," and asked Trump to respond.
Trump lashed out at O'Donnell, denying the accusation and calling her a "disgrace."
Social media observers quickly fact-checked the president's response.
Atlantic contributing editor Norman Ornstein reacted on X, noting a jury and judge found Trump liable for rape in the E. Jean Carroll civil case, and cited Trump's admitted behavior including entering dressing rooms with naked teenagers. Journalist Nancy Levine Sterns commented, "Trump is a clinical-grade psychopath," while novelist Patrick Tomlinson stated Trump is "literally a court adjudicated rapist."
In 2023, a jury found Trump liable in Carroll's civil sexual abuse and defamation case, with a judge later clarifying the verdict meant rape liability, as reported by the Washington Post.
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And everyone knows it!
Bill Kristol: Words Are Not Violence — Tim Miller
Trump is a terrible president and he deserves to be criticized, even in personal terms. Our pro-democracy movement has shown time and time again that we can oppose him—and oppose any attempt at violence at the same time. Even putting aside POTUS's own hypocritical calls for violence or his celebrating the deaths of his enemies, Saturday's shooting was related to mental health issues and too easy of access to guns. Plus, Zelensky is the new leader of the free world, Trump looks like he's headed to a humiliating defeat in Iran, the left should work harder to not be false flag cranks, and a look at the Senate map in the context of America Firsters feeling betrayed by Trump's stupid wars and his attempt to redesign D.C. in his image....
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Trump is a terrible president and he deserves to be criticized, even in personal terms. Applause!
Bosses Are Blowing More Money on AI Agents Than It’d Cost Them to Just Pay Human Workers — Frank Landymore
Mindlessly unleashing AI agents to take over employees’ jobs can be pretty costly, it turns out. Some companies are learning the hard way that paying for the incredible volume of AI agent requests is costing more than what they’d pay their human employees, Axios reports.
AIs can perform all sorts of tasks, ranging from the rote to the complex. But one of the most popular ways it’s being used in the workplace is to generate mountains of code at a pace far greater than a human could achieve. Sometimes, software engineers will even run multiple AI agents at the same time, all working on different tasks in the background without supervision. Each of these tasks costs tokens, and the bill can quickly add up.
“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, told Axios.
The problem has become harder to ignore as organizations are increasingly reliant on using AI tools and agents — including the organizations building them. “Pretty much 100 percent” of Anthropic’s code is now AI-generated, the company’s head of Claude Code Boris Cherny claimed earlier this year. Google and Microsoft’s bosses claim that this share is around a quarter of their companies’ code. Meta employees performance reviews are now partly based on how much AI they use, showing that a lot of the push towards using AI is coming from the top....
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A fool and his money are soon parted....but how did they get together in the first place?
Trump Does A Bigly Self-Own In 60 Minutes Interview — Chris capper Liebenthal
" Oh, you think he was referring to you?" is going to be a classic gotcha moment.
On Sunday's 60 Minutes on CBS, Trump sat down for an interview with Norah O'Donnell to discuss the incident that had happened at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. When the subject of the alleged gunman's manifesto came up, Trump did the most bigly self-own in history:
O'DONNELL: The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President.
He appears to reference a motive in it. He writes this quote, "Administration officials, they are targets." And he also wrote this, "I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes."
What's your reaction to that?
TRUMP: Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you're horrible people. Horrible people.
Yeah, he did write that. I'm not a rapist. I didn't rape anybody.
O'DONNELL: Oh, you think he was referring to you?
TRUMP: Excuse me. I'm not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person. I got associated with stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let's say, Epstein or other things. But I said to myself, you know, I'll do this interview and they'll probably... I read the manifesto, you know, as a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself for reading that because I'm not any of those things.
O'DONNELL: Mr. President, these are the gunman's words.
TRUMP: Excuse me. You shouldn't be reading that on 60 Minutes. You're a disgrace. But go ahead. Let's finish the interview."...
Trump has already been adjudicated to be a rapist. And many more women have claimed that Trump raped them as well.
It also follows that if he would lie about something as easily refuted as that, he might lie about other things as well. Of course, if he is innocent of being a pedophile, releasing the Trumpstein, er, the Epstein files ought to clear up any doubt on that. Yet he has refused to release the files, despite being legally required to release them.
The fact that we have a lying choad for president is bad enough. But the fact that there are so many people willing to ignore the facts right in front of their faces and continue to support him is just madness. It's going to take a long time and a lot of hard work to get this country back into order.
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Many a man has been sentenced to the gallows for less!
WHCD shooting exposed MAGA media’s secret social media operation — Sophia Tesfaye
The right eerily repeated Trump's ballroom talking points, while the left went straight to conspiracy
In the chaotic minutes after news broke that a gunman had attempted to breach security at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a familiar pattern unfolded on social media. A chorus of pro-Trump influencers and officials arrived at the same eerily specific and singular conclusion: The country needs Donald Trump’s ballroom.
It’s quite the departure from when a gunman shot and killed Charlie Kirk in September. Then the MAGA movement immediately called for a campaign of political repression. After Saturday’s attack at the Washington Hilton, MAGA media looked closer to home, immediately leveraging the scare as a reason to build the $400 million White House ballroom. Screenshots of pro-MAGA accounts sharing the same messaging quickly circulated on X shortly after the suspected gunman, 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California, was stopped rushing past a security checkpoint armed with two firearms and multiple knives, apparently intending to attack Trump and members of his Cabinet.
“It’s time to build the ballroom,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche posted on X, attaching a letter demanding that the National Trust for Historic Preservation drop its lawsuit blocking the project. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi — who Trump had fired just weeks earlier — chimed in, writing, “We MUST have the Ballroom completed to protect POTUS and his guests.” On Fox News, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., suggested the ballroom’s planned “7-inch thick glass” will make it “a very safe environment to do events like that.” Even Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania fell in line....
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That little ballroom excuse won't hold.
NYT: Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin Is Now MAGA
The New York Times reports:
Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder and one of the world’s richest people, is a longtime friend of Mr. Newsom, the California governor. But now, like so many other leaders in the traditionally liberal bastion of Silicon Valley, Mr. Brin has shifted to the right. With his outspokenly conservative girlfriend by his side, he has joined the ranks of tech executives courting Mr. Trump in his second term.
Last May, he attended a fund-raiser featuring Vice President JD Vance and donated nearly half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee. In September, he told the president at a White House dinner that he was “very grateful” for the administration’s support of tech companies. This March, he was named to a White House tech council and donated to a Republican candidate for governor of California who has since earned Mr. Trump’s endorsement.
Mr. Brin is particularly rattled by the proposal for a one-time, 5 percent tax on California billionaires, and has emerged as Silicon Valley’s leading combatant of the measure. To escape the tax, he moved before a Dec. 31 deadline to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe (he now spends every other week at Google’s California headquarters, alternating with Nevada, a person familiar with the arrangement said). And he has spent $57 million to try to undercut the measure, including $9 million more disclosed on Friday.
"Guess what: He's always been a greedy oligarch douchenozzle." — Judas Peckerwood (comments)
"Those fascist pigs are also smothering S.F. in ads opposing Prop D, which would impose a surtax on executives who “earn” more than 200 times what their lowest-paid employees do.
They’d rather waste hundreds of millions of dollars on ad buys than give their workers a raise.: — Asthmatic Fox (comments)
"Can you imagine if you had even $2 billion dollars and you had to give $100,000,000 away, leaving you with only $1.9 billion?
WTF is wrong with these hoarding, greedy people?" — thisone (comments)
"Interesting, isn’t it, how many of them are immigrants.
Brin, Thiel, Sacks, and of course Musk.
And now they all want a pure white “heritage American” ethnostate with zero immigration."
— Asthmatic Fox (comments)
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"Johnny Rocco: Thousands of guys have got guns. There's only one Johnny Rocco.
James Temple: How do you account for it?
Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don't you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Sure.
James Temple: What's that?
Frank McCloud: Tell him, Rocco.
Johnny Rocco: Well, I want uh ...
Frank McCloud: He wants more, don't you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Yeah. That's it. More. That's right! I want more!
James Temple: Will you ever get enough?
Frank McCloud: Will you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Well, I never have. No, I guess I won't. You, do you know what you want?
Frank McCloud: Yes, I had hopes once, but I gave them up.
Johnny Rocco: Hopes for what?
Frank McCloud: A world in which there's no place for Johnny Rocco." — from Key Largo
Johnson Accuses Democrats Of “Inciting Violence”
FOX HOST: “I want to share something that a Democratic senator, John Fetterman, shot out hours after the incident Saturday night, On X he said, ‘We were there front and center. That venue wasn’t built to accommodate an event with the line of succession for the U.S. government. After witnessing last night, drop the TDS, the Trump Derangement Syndrome, and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these.’ Are you hearing enough from your Democratic colleagues on the tone that Senator Fetterman struck there?”
MIKE JOHNSON: “No! He’s a rare voice in that camp. We need more of that. In fact, they’ve done the opposite. They’ve incited violence, in my view. I mean, you have some of the most prominent figures in the House and in the Senate on the Democrat side effectively calling for war.
“They use those kinds of metaphors. And it incites violence, because there are crazy people in society, and they get radicalized online. And so, we’ve got to recognize that. It’s time to turn down the rhetoric — we’ve been saying this over and over — and not use that kind of language.
“I hope that this will be a sobering reminder for everybody about that important cause. I’m grateful to Fetterman. He’s right, the ballroom will be a solution for this, because it’ll be on the most secure compound in the world.
“It won’t have hotel rooms above it. And it’ll have seven-inch thick glass, for example, on the windows. So, it’ll be a very safe environment for events like this. We need a place, we have needed a place like that, and the president keeps pointing it out.”
As many have pointed out, the Correspondents’ Dinner is a private event that would not be held on federal property even if Glorious Leader’s ballroom existed.
"I mean, you have some of the most prominent figures in the House and in the Senate on the Democrat side effectively calling for war.
Trump has called for the execution of democrats he disagrees with.
Give it a rest Cupcake." — DaddySnark (comments)
"Forget Trump.
Everyone on Fox News and Republicans refers to Democrats as Demoncrats, socialists who hate the country, love criminals, are traitors and so much more.
And yet not a peep from Johnson.
He can fuck right off." — Ninja0980 (cmments)
"The WHCD is a PRIVATE EVENT, you dumb motherfucker. It's NOT a government event that would be held in that ballroom." — Woke AF (comments)
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So far, Mike, it's your party that is the murder party. Can you count the murders your Crime Syndicate is responsible for? I thought not. This makes you accsessory to cold-blooded murder. You can count on being among the defendents when the court is trying your killer Nazis.
DeSantis Unveils Map To Give GOP Four Extra Seats
Fox News reports:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis revealed the new redistricted congressional map for the state, which shows the GOP gaining an extra four seats.
Should the state legislature, which holds a Republican majority in both the state House and Senate, approve the redrawing, it would then return to DeSantis to be signed into law and would apply to the 2026 midterms.
“Florida got shortchanged in the 2020 Census, and we’ve been fighting for fair representation ever since,” DeSantis told Fox News Digital. “Our population has since grown dramatically, and we have moved from a Democrat majority to a 1.5 million Republican advantage. Drawing maps based on race, which is reflected in our current congressional districts, is unconstitutional and should be prohibited.”
DeSantis and Rep. Byron Donalds – who is running to succeed him – have both blamed Biden for the result of the US Census conducted under Trump. Currently Republicans hold 20 of Florida’s 28 House districts. Last week Axios reported that DeSantis plans an “end run” around a voter-approved 2010 change to the state constitution that bans redistricting in favor of a specific party.
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Rigging elections so Trump doesn't have to!
Just another Nazi criminal.
Top Medical Journal Publishes Searing Article Warning Against Medical AI — Victor Tangermann
A recent survey found that millions of Americans are asking AI chatbots for medical advice, often instead of consulting human doctors.
That’s despite researchers continuing to find severe flaws plaguing large language model-based tools that can purportedly offer summaries of medical records and dole out health advice based on simple text prompts. For one, hallucinations remain a massive unsolved problem, from AI models generating detailed clinical findings based on images they were never provided to falling for fake diseases that were invented by researchers in order to trick them.
In short, it’s no wonder scientists are questioning whether patients, health providers, or health systems should adopt AI at all, especially given the frequently lacking evidence for any real-world benefits. A scathing editorial published on Tuesday by the premier medical journal Nature Medicine makes the case that “evidence that AI tools create value for patients, providers or health systems remains scarce.”
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Don't want no AI or insurance companies replacing my doctor!
Stupid GOP Sen. Mike Lee Again Proves His Stupidity
SEN. MIKE LEE: “The attempted assassination of President Trump isn’t front-page news? Not for The New York Times.”
VOLDEMORT’S WIFE: “The attempted assassination of President Trump isn't front-page news? Not for The New York Times.”
KEITH OLBERMANN: “Children: you’re looking at the early editions printed last night at 8 PM. Maybe if you could find an adult, ‘Senator,’ she could explain to you how to tell time.”
COMMUNITY NOTE: “This image is of the print version of the New York Times, which goes to press at 8pm ET to allow for distribution the following morning. The shooting occurred at 8:35pm. As of Sunday AM, the New York Times has this news on the front page of their digital edition.”
NEW YORK TIMES PR SHOP: “The Times has had comprehensive live coverage at the top of nytimes.com since the shooting. Our last Sunday print edition goes to press at 8pm Saturday. Full print coverage will appear on A1 and inside Monday’s paper.”
This is the guy GOP Senators want as Attorney General....
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Trump is the one that stirs up the hornet's nests when he posts his hateful, violent remarks consistently.
Iranian Group Files US-Israeli War Crimes Evidence to International Criminal Court — Jake Johnson
The head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society said Saturday that his organization has submitted evidence of U.S.-Israeli war crimes to the International Criminal Court and other global bodies, seeking accountability for massive attacks on civilian infrastructure and other violations.
“The ICC prosecutor announced that the documents provided by the IRCS are accepted as official evidence,” said Pir-Hossein Koulivand, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society. “All cases of attacks on civilians are being legally pursued based on the Geneva Conventions.”
The IRCS estimates that U.S. and Israeli airstrikes have destroyed more than 132,000 civilian structures throughout Iran, including hospitals, apartment buildings, universities, research facilities, and bridges. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to destroy all of Iran’s bridges and power plants if the country’s leadership does not succumb to his administration’s demands in negotiations to end the war....
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Only the beginning of war crime trials for Trump.
Fox News puts Kash Patel on the spot over failures around Trump assassination attempt — Travis Gettys
FBI Director Kash Patel faced tough questions Monday morning on "Fox & Friends" about an apparent assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
The embattled FBI director was questioned on Fox News about security failures that allowed alleged gunman Cole Tomas Allen to charge into an area near the entrance to the black-tie event at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C., despite an alert reportedly issued with a description of the suspect, reported The Daily Beast.
...The Trump administration reportedly did not designate the event with the highest level of security, and the Secret Service protected only the ballroom and its immediate perimeter, rather than the entire hotel.
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Oops! Well, we all make mistakes, don't we.
Embarrassed Trump to fire gaffe-prone Cabinet member within days: White House insider — Ewan Gleadow
Donald Trump is preparing to fire a chief member of his Cabinet after a series of gaffes left the president embarrassed, a White House insider has claimed.
Trump recently dismissed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi in quick succession, marking a dramatic purge of Cabinet members.
FBI Director Kash Patel will be the next admin figure to be fired, according to the insider.
Susan Crabtree, a political correspondent for Real Clear Politics, shared a comment from the White House source on the possible removal of Patel, despite pressure also building for White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles following questions regarding security coming after Saturday's shooting attempt at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
The anonymous official has claimed that Patel's firing could come within days.
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Oh, no! Another failure is going down?
'Not a good look': Trump official hammered for ditching wife amid shooting chaos — Alexander Willis
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was hammered Monday after video of him being escorted by security officials amid the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting on Saturday went viral, in which the HHS secretary was seen being tailed by his wife, Cheryl Hines.
“RFK Jr. rushed out of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday amid an active shooter situation, with his security team around him, but left his wife scrambling on her own behind him,” wrote Zeteo reporters Preem Thakker and Andrew Perez in the outlet’s report Monday. “Not a good look, Bobby.”
The shooting sparked chaos at the Washington Hilton hotel in Washington, D.C., with Secret Service officials rushing President Donald Trump off stage, as well as other top administration officials and lawmakers. RFK Jr. was among those officials who were rushed to safety by security personnel, but in a viral clip that had been viewed nearly 1 million times, Hines could be seen following her husband, unattended, several feet behind.
“Serious question – why does Cheryl Hines stay with this loser?” asked political commentator Joanne Carducci, writing in a social media post on X to her more than 1 million followers....
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A: She's as crazy as he is?
MAGA fracture alarms as college Republicans show 'extremist' shift — Alexandria Jacobson, Investigative Reporter
Some of the biggest names in political megadonors have infused money into these groups and their leadership.
For one, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the billionaire founders of the shipping company Uline, donated $1 million total to the Wisconsin Federal of College Republicans in December 2025, according to filings with the State of Wisconsin Ethics Commission.
Jacobs, the Wisconsin group’s president, was the recipient of a $1 million check given away by tech billionaire and former Trump appointee Elon Musk as part of his massive $25 million spend on a state judicial race.
“Money from Uihleins has been reshaping Republican politics, flowing into Republican campaigns in the post-Citizens United era. This is a power couple who has been willing to dig deep, write very large checks and support their preferred candidates through all sorts of massive investments,” said Michael Beckel, money in politics reform director at Issue One, a bipartisan nonprofit focused on campaign finance reform.
“They are pushing a certain type of vision for the Republican Party. They are supporting certain types of Republican candidates ... their money was also very supportive of not only President Trump and his campaigns over the years, but his January 6 rally.”
Buchler countered that “the influence of money is vastly overstated, generally across the board, in politics,” and that looking at political donations is used by both the left and right “to explain the other side's behavior without grappling with the idea that maybe people just disagree.”
Fuentes himself has raked in significant money, bringing in at nearly $900,000 since 2025 from fan donations, along with other income from selling shirts with swastika imagery and subscriptions to his private chatrooms, according to a Washington Post analysis.
“The normalization of racism begets more racism. Violence begets violence,” Cohen said.
“Racism is on the lower end of the extremism sphere, and on the other end of the extreme sphere is violence, so it would be in everyone's best interest to tamp this down sooner than later.”
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So Uline is funding Hilter Youth. Boycott!
Even the right-wing underworld claims new DOJ indictment is nonsensical — Joe Conason
More than friendly to fascists both abroad and at home, the Trump administration is now seeking to destroy the Southern Poverty Law Center -- historically one of the nation's most powerful and effective opponents of the Ku Klux Klan, American neo-Nazis and other white supremacist movements.
This was the latest in a long series of signals from the White House to the president's swastika-flying fans. It means that such groups need no longer fear a resolute federal response to their criminality....
The alleged motive was to justify the SPLC's own continued existence and fundraising by maintaining a threat from fascist violence, which Republicans in Washington have persistently minimized or dismissed. Indeed, the Trump administration has hired and promoted any number of far-right extremists, especially since its return to power.
The absurdity of the indictment ought to be obvious to anyone -- including former federal prosecutor Blanche -- who knows how the FBI prosecutes organized crime, terrorism, narcotics smuggling or violent extremism, in nearly every case depending on paid informants. Over the past few decades, in fact, the FBI and the Justice Department have relied on information from SPLC and its informants to jail violent Klansmen and Nazis....
Under questioning from reporters, Blanche essentially admitted that the indictment's fundamental claim is baseless. Asked whether the indictment specifically alleged that the SPLC payments benefited the Klan, Atomwaffen or other extremist groups, Blanche admitted that it offered no such evidence. "To the extent that there's any link between that individual receiving the money and benefits to that organization," he said, "that's not in the indictment....
"The SPLC was not funding racist groups to enable their racism -- they, in fact, were not funding racist groups at all," the American Futurist-linked TAF Private channel posted, according to Raw Story. "What they were doing was funding bad actors within groups, with the intention of destroying those groups from the inside."
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes -- and for the Trump White House, the enemy of fascism is its enemy too.
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The enemy of America, the Trump Crime Syndicate, shows us all that's exactly what they are!
John Fetterman gets torn apart in scathing fact-check after going soft on Trump — Matthew Rozsa
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) criticized Democrats for opposing President Donald Trump’s proposed White House ballroom, prompting some of those same Democrats to point out the obvious: Because the White House Correspondents Dinner is a private event, it would never have been held at the White House, and therefore a ballroom would have made no difference.
“We were there front and center,” Fetterman posted on X on Sunday. “That venue wasn’t built to accommodate an event with the line of succession for the U.S. government. After witnessing last night, drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these.”
The acronym “TDS” stands for “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which refers to people who supposedly hate Trump so much that they become irrational. Yet as many Democrats and other Trump opponents pointed out, Fetterman — whose advocacy of a ballroom echoes the arguments made by Trump and his supporters after the supposed shooting attempt at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday — is the one being irrational. After all, the dinner in question is a private event, and has never been held in the White House.
“Sorry, @JohnFetterman, but the WHCA dinner is NOT sponsored by the White House,” posted Democratic strategist Jon Cooper on X. “Nobody is forcing the VP and other Cabinet members to attend this fancy black tie event.”
He added, “Sit down and worry about your primary.”...
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Buh-bye, John!
"the entire line of succession." This shows everyone how brilliantly stupid Nazis are!
WHCD Faked? Trump's Numbers Worse Than Any I've Ever Seen
One can easily see why Trump would want a distraction at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I'm not saying I know what happened, just it's the kinda thing someone who looks this horrific politically would want.
Trump's numbers aren't just bad. I worked in polling a while, I've never seen numbers like some of these. Famed strategist Joe Trippi has been running national campaigns since 1979, and had a one-sentence verdict: “I have not seen anything like this in the entire time I’ve been doing this.” Trump’s approval with independents is 27%—a number not seen since Nixon was resigning.
He's down to 70% with Republicans. Tucker, MTG, Megyn--they may be FOS, but if they're headed where the wind's blowing, many MAGA nuts are taking the same ride. Latino support's moving away from Trump at a pace veteran strategist Mike Madrid--an expert on this demo--says he's never seen before. We're favored in places like Alaska right now.
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Let me know when he's evaporated!
Trump Denies Falling Down While Fleeing Shooting
The Daily Beast reports:
Trump, 79, was captured falling to the ground as Secret Service agents ushered him away from the dais after shots rang out during the dinner. Agents quickly pulled him back on his feet before hurrying him away from the scene in the ballroom of the Washington Hilton in D.C. Speaking to 60 Minutes, the president said that he went down at the urging of Secret Service agents, not because he fell.
“I started walking, and they said, ‘Please go down, please go down on the floor,’” Trump recounted. “So I went down, and the first lady went down also. But we were asked to go down by the agents as I was walking,” he repeated.
Trump, who turns 80 in June, then retold his story another time, saying he had started to walk out “a little bent over” when the agents told him, “please go down to the floor, please go down to the floor.” “So I dropped to the floor, so did the first lady,” he said again.
"Then immediately assumes the shooter is referring to HIM when Nora O'Donnell reads the shooter's manifesto about "rapist, pedophile."
"I'm not a rapist (E.Jean Carroll) or a pedophile (Epstein) and "YOU'RE a horrible person for reading that."
Way to admit guilt, peepaw." -- Jay Silversmith (comments)
"His inglorious end will be Elvis-esque - heart attack on the toilet while downing a Big Mac value meal." — Bert_Bauer (comments)
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'Admits guilt' is correct.
The old man just couldn't get up by himself? Remember, you can't fall off the floor!
Latest “Drug Boat” Strike Brings Murder Toll To 186
The Associated Press reports:
The latest U.S. military strike on a boat accused of ferrying drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean killed three people Sunday, according to a social media post by U.S. Southern Command.
The Trump administration’s campaign of blowing up alleged drug-trafficking vessels in Latin American waters has gone on since early September and killed at least 186 people in total. Other strikes have taken place in the Caribbean Sea. The military has not provided evidence that any of the vessels were carrying drugs.
After Sunday’s attack, Southern Command posted a video on X showing a boat moving swiftly in the water before a explosion left it in flames. It repeated previous statements by saying it had targeted the alleged drug traffickers along known smuggling routes.
"Well let see, the right believes that the murder of abortion doctors is not just acceptable, but noble, to prevent the 'murder' of babies.
Trump feels that the murder of Iranians is his moral duty to 'protect' the US from the nuclear weapons that the country doesn't have.
But we totally can't say that someone who wants to assassinate Trump to stop his ongoing murders is justified in their desires." -- DaddySnark (comments)
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The Trump murder spree continues. Just like a mob boss whacking his competition!
The eternal disgrace of the USA.
UFC Head Calls WHCD Shooting “F*cking Awesome”
Variety reports:
UFC president and CEO Dana White told USA Today that he thought experiencing Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting in person was “fucking awesome.”
“All of a sudden, it just started getting noisy. Tables started getting flipped over, guys running in with guns, and they were screaming, ‘Get down!’” White, who was in attendance at the dinner, recalled. “I didn’t get down. It was fucking awesome, and I literally took every minute of it in. It was a pretty crazy, unique experience.”
White said he was sitting “right in front of where the president was” when the Secret Service rushed in. He added, “Nobody got tackled, but guys came in looking for the shooter. And they came toward our table. I thought the shooter was over by us or something.”
"That's what happens when you have to delay doing a few lines of coke. You look to get a rush any other way you can until you can find a place to do a couple of snorts." -- Harveyrabbit (comments)
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The disgusting trash that America produces.
Trump's vast fortune could be wiped out by judge's startling ruling: legal analyst — Ewan Gleadow
President Donald Trump could see his vast personal fortune wiped out by a judge's ruling relating to the January 6 Capitol Hill attack, a legal analyst wrote Sunday.
The insurrection occurred as Congress met to certify the 2020 presidential election results, which Trump had refused to accept. Veteran legal analyst Sabrina Haake believes that Trump could see his personal fortune wiped out should a judge rule he is personally liable for damages accrued during the insurrection.
Haake wrote, "Measuring the amount of corruption lining Trump’s pocket is like shoveling on a snowy day. As of late January, Trump had pocketed upwards of $4 billion from untraceable cryptocurrency ventures, suspicious market manipulations, and outright bribery from foreign and domestic sources during his first year back in office....
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That would be sweet!
America Trembles as Transportation Secretary Announces Plans for Air Traffic Controllers to Lean on AI Tools — Joe Wilkins
As if air travel in the United States wasn’t cursed enough, the Trump Administration wants to ease the burden of air traffic scheduling with the help of some private-market AI solutions.
US Department of Transportation secretary Sean Duffy — the same guy who was briefly in charge of NASA, weirdly — recently confirmed that the government is working on integrating AI software into the air traffic management system. At a Semafor event last week, Duffy said the software, called Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories (SMART), is being tooled by three competing companies.
Later, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg the Federal Aviation Administration had brought on Palantir, Thales SA, and Air Space Intelligence to compete for the SMART contract. Palantir then released a statement to investors confirming the company was contracted by the FAA to “provide a data analytics tool that will help advance the agency’s modernization objectives for aviation safety.”
Then on Tuesday, Duffy went on the record with CBS News, explaining that SMART will cost $12 billion, and will supposedly help flight controllers schedule flights weeks in advance to cut down on delays.
“This software will say, ‘well, listen, we can see this 45 days out. Let’s move some of those flights a little bit later, or five, seven, 10 minutes earlier, and we can resolve the issue. And so then you are not delayed,'” Duffy said.
While the transportation secretary says the software will stop short of “replac[ing] humans in how we manage the airspace,” there are some obvious concerns with the idea of shoehorning AI into the air traffic workflow.
On top of generally being susceptible to severe hallucinations, AI systems have consistently failed when applied to applications like staffing schedules, traffic safety predictions, and even simple management tasks like operating a vending machine.
All we’ll say is this: if some of the best available AI on the market today can’t run an office snack machine without breaking down into a de facto cartel, good luck when you put it in charge of scheduling the country’s flights.
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And nothing can go wrong...go wrong...go wrong...go wrong...go wrong...go wrong...go wrong...go wrong...go wrong.....................................!
AI is the latest in Gods for humanity. Could it be the Anti-Christ?
Devious New AI Tool “Clones” Software So That the Original Creator Doesn’t Hold a Copyright Over the New Version — Victor Tangermann
The advent of generative AI continues to undermine the very concept of copyright, from entire books shamelessly ripping off authors to tasteless AI slop depicting beloved characters going viral on social media. The sin is foundational: all today’s popular AI tools were built by pillaging copyrighted material without permission.
Even software isn’t safe. As 404 Media reports, a new tool dubbed Malus.sh — pronounced “malice,” to give a subtle clue where this is headed — uses AI to “liberate” a piece of software from existing copyright licenses, essentially creating a “clean room” clone that technically doesn’t infringe on the original code’s copyright.
The project is a tongue-in-cheek jab at tensions in the open source community. But it’s also a real product being developed by an LLC with real paying customers.
“It works,” cofounder and United Nations political economy of open source software researcher Mike Nolan told 404. He argued that if it were “just satire,” it would largely be “dismissed by open source tech workers who felt that they were too special and too unique and too intelligent to ever be the ones on the bad side of the layoffs or the economics of the situation.”...
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Remember when IBM opened their PC architecture to the world but wouldn't allow their BIOS to be exposed? Tech engineers had to recreate it blindly by descriptions of it. Think how much time they wasted creating the PC clone. Thnk of what will happen now.
The corruption of society and the world is at hand. No one except criminals will own anything soon.
Donald Trump: The perfect useful idiot — Thom Hartmann
Trump is making insane proclamations about Iran again, sabotaging efforts at peace by his unqualified, incompetent negotiating team. He’s lying to his supporters about obvious things like the price of gasoline. He’s not sleeping, up all night shouting in all-caps at anybody who will listen and, during the day, literally screaming at his aides.
His former-heroin-addicted brainworm-infected head of Human Services, who has absolutely no training or experience in medicine or public health, is destroying America’s public health. His wrestling billionaire head of education is shutting down the US Education Department.
His violent, alcoholic, unfaithful head of the Defense Department keeps violating the Constitution as well as both domestic and international laws about warfare. His wholly captured Department of Justice — now run by his personal lawyer — is demanding voting information from swing state after swing state and refuses to say why.....
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You can plainly see how sleep deprived he is if you saw him rant on TV last night after the shooting show.
Trump uses shooting to boost corrupt project — Common Dreams
US President Donald Trump used a lone gunman’s storming of the lobby outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night to promote his $400 million White House ballroom project, which is riddled with glaring conflicts of interest.
Speaking at a press conference after being evacuated from the Washington Hilton hotel hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump declared that “this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we’re planning at the White House.” The president added that “we need the ballroom,” saying, “We need levels of security that probably nobody’s ever seen before.”...
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The lengths Trump will stoop to for his stupid money scamming projects.
A flesh-eating bacteria was just discovered all over Long Island — Matthew Rozsa
A flesh-eating bacteria known as Vibrio was discovered all over Long Island — and authorities are issuing warnings about it.
Causing the disease vibriosis, people infected with Vibrio can suffer symptoms including nausea, diarrhea, cramps, nausea, chills and sometimes even death, according to Grist. On average there are 80,000 cases of vibriosis each year, with roughly 100 fatalities.
“Vulnificus is so potent it can squeeze through a pinhole-sized cut in the skin and lead to death in just 24 hours,” Grist explained. “In the last five years, the CDC registered 429 such vulnificus cases, plus 136 foodborne cases. But even though foodborne cases are less numerous, the patients that contract vulnificus by eating contaminated shellfish are more likely to die than those infected via open wounds. Thirteen percent of those nonfoodborne cases died, compared to 32 percent of people who got the infection from eating seafood. Most cases occur in the Gulf and Atlantic coastal regions.”
Grist added, “As far as infectious diseases go, vulnificus is exceedingly rare: The CDC reports between 150 and 200 cases a year. The sexually-transmitted disease chlamydia, by comparison, one of the most common bacterial infections in the U.S., infects northward of 1.5 million Americans annually. But vulnificus’ astonishing speed and high fatality rate — 15 to 50 percent, depending on the health of the person exposed and the route of infection — makes it a unique public health threat, particularly as climate change grows its pathways of exposure.”
The pathogen, which was discovered on Sagaponack Pond, Mecox Bay and Georgica Pond on the South Fork, is thriving because of algae blooms, nitrogen runoff and climate change.
“We see Vibrio as the indicator for climate change,” Kyle Brumfield, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland who has been studying the bacteria for a decade, told Grist. “We can use the presence of Vibrio and Vibrio cases as a proxy for water health in general.”...
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And you thought the sci-fi movie The Flesh Eaters, (1964) was just fiction?
I Slept Next Door to the Assassin in Hilton Room 10235. This Is a Security Fiasco — Hugh Dougherty
The Daily Beast’s Executive Editor witnessed a jaw-dropping security breach. And then it got worse.
...The Washington Hilton has seen the attempted assassination of a president before. I walked past the plaque commemorating that spot a few hours before the shooting.
I didn’t expect that I would be living through history again, in the room beside 10235.
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An exposé of the failure of security? Or was this a fake theater show for Trump, again?
Death threats against judges are surging —and experts point directly to Trump's rhetoric — Matthew Rozsa
Federal judges have received more than 800 threats since Trump's rhetoric intensified — and retired members of the judiciary are now speaking out.
“According to the U.S. Marshals Service, there were 564 threats against federal judges in 2025 and there have been 275 already this year,” wrote USA Today’s Rex Huppke on Sunday. “The Marshals Service asked Congress for an additional $34 million in April, noting that ‘the threat environment’ is ‘unlikely to decrease in the foreseeable future.’”
Huppke attended a two-day symposium at the University of Washington called “Neither Sword Nor Purse,” which was convened to discuss Trump’s ongoing rhetoric attacking judges who do not rule in his favor. Describing him as “a threat to judicial independence,” one who “shows no hesitation to jackhammer the very foundation of our democracy.”
Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig told the event that Trump’s coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2021 “was a dark day in American history. On that day, the 45th president of the United States instigated a war on America's democracy, and forced upon this nation an unpeaceful transfer of power for the first time in almost 250 years. From that day until this day, he has persisted in the prosecution of that war, determined to prosecute that war to its catastrophic end, to this day presenting himself to America and to the world as a clear and present danger to American democracy.”...
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The US has become the most unsafe country on the planet.
The connection between Trump and violence is undeniable —and last night proved it — Robert Reich
For as long as I can remember, the White House Correspondents dinner was where the Washington press corps and Washington officials basked in each other’s celebrity.
Last night’s ended abruptly with gunshots, Secret Service officers screaming at attendees to “get down,” Trump and other officials being rapidly ushered out of the ballroom, plates crashing and chairs falling, and general pandemonium.
Last night, the celebrities became normal people feeling panic and fear.
Most of the time, Washington is a stage on which actors take on roles and dress up for assigned parts. I remember wearing an uncomfortable tuxedo to the White House Correspondents Dinner, trying to make pleasant conversation with people who had skewered me that very morning.
The glamor and swish of the event was at such sharp odds with the hard daily slog of my job that the event seemed strangely disembodied, as if everyone had been given a script that they knew was total bull----.
Trump has changed much of this. He has brought a grim hostility to the jobs of doing the public’s work and reporting on those who do the public’s work. This was the first White House Correspondents dinner he agreed to attend, and by all accounts he was prepared to give the media pure hell in his remarks.
And then hell erupted in the form of another crazed gunman. As I write this, it appears that one Secret Service agent was injured but none of the luminaries was hurt.
There is a close relationship between Trump and violence — not just the attempts on his life but also the violence he’s unleashed on the world, the violence his ICE and Border Patrol agents have caused inside America, the violence he has incited among his followers. (A few of last night’s attendees were in Congress on January 6, 2021 when Trump’s thugs attacked the U.S. Capitol.)
Trump’s violence has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That is no justification for last night’s attack, of course, but it is part of what he has wrought in America. He has changed the script in Washington. ...
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Once again: The US has become the most unsafe country on the planet.
Teacher of the Month turned alleged gunman —what we know so far about Cole Tomas Allen — Roxanne Cooper
...Allen's background presents a puzzling portrait of an outwardly accomplished individual. He is a 2017 graduate of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with a degree in mechanical engineering. He later earned a Master of Science in computer science from California State University, Dominguez Hills in May 2025.
Most recently, Allen worked as a tutor for C2 Education, where he was recently named "Teacher of the Month." Neighbors in Torrance described him as "intelligent and quiet."...
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A security failure. Will Trump pardon Allen or demand death by firing squad!
A dark chapter returns: Stripping citizenship — Heather Digby Parton
The Justice Department's bid to denaturalize American citizens has roots in the Red Scare
One of the lesser known effects of the Trump administration’s commitment to mass deportations is the right’s newfound freedom to talk of expelling anyone of whom they disapprove. You’ll hear people casually talking about deporting New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or Donald Trump suggesting that “the Squad” — the self-proclaimed group that includes Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, all women of color — should “go back” where they came from, despite the fact that three of the four were born in the United States. Even though Omar, who was born in Somalia, became a naturalized citizen when she was 17, Trump has said many times that she should be deported....
It has become commonplace to hear such threats in the political discourse on the right. Even former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, herself the daughter of immigrants, said in 2022 that Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., should be expelled from the country. (Warnock was born in Savannah, Georgia.)
Now the Trump administration is attempting to turn that rhetoric into action. The New York Times reported on Thursday that the Justice Department is targeting hundreds of citizens for denaturalization and deportation proceedings, informing offices all over the country that they will be assigning cases against specific individuals. While there is yet no word who those individuals are or what criteria might be used, we do know that cases can be brought against naturalized citizens who can be proved to have committed fraud in obtaining citizenship or, in some situations, have been convicted of crimes. These orders follow an edict issued by the administration establishing a quota of denaturalizing 100 to 200 people per month in 2026.
The Justice Department’s announcement came with a brag: They are “pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history.” In other words, they hope to beat the records set during the Red Scares....
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Joe McCarthy lives!
'Stupid move': Fury as Trump fires entire science board with no warning or explanation — Daniel Hampton
President Donald Trump triggered outrage when he fired what House Science Committee Democratic staff described as the entirety of the independent board overseeing the nation's premier basic science funding agency on Friday, sending boilerplate termination emails that offered no explanation and no warning.
Members of the National Science Board, which helps govern the $9 billion National Science Foundation, received messages from the Presidential Personnel Office simply stating their positions were "terminated, effective immediately," The Washington Post reported Saturday. The foundation funds Antarctic research stations, telescopes, research vessels, and the basic science behind MRIs, cellphones, and LASIK eye surgery.
"This is the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation," Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said. "The NSB is apolitical. It advises the president on the future of NSF. It unfortunately is no surprise a president who has attacked NSF from day one would seek to destroy the board that helps guide the foundation."...
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Digging his retarded sewer deeper!
Palantir Employees Lament “Descent Into Fascism”
Ars Technica reports:
It took just a few months of President Donald Trump’s second term for Palantir employees to question their company’s commitments to civil liberties. Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, when current and former employees started ringing the alarm.
Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?” “That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but ‘This feels wrong.’”
For the past 20 years, employees could accept the intense external criticism and awkward conversations with family and friends about working for a company named after J. R. R. Tolkien’s corrupting all-seeing orb. But a year into Trump’s second term, as Palantir deepens its relationship with an administration that many workers fear is wreaking havoc at home, employees are finally raising these concerns internally.
"THE COMPANY WAS CREATED SPECIFICALLY TO FACILITATE GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF PEOPLE BY SURVEILLANCE AND SPYING. What the goddamn fuck did you EXPECT would happen?" — OlyGregg (comments)
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Nazis at work here with their final solution. All workers will be replaced by AI. It will continue until all are unemployed and eventually led to death camps. Let's see who bets on this.
Washington’s top journalists shouldn’t further abase themselves for Trump — Dan Froomkin
Donald Trump and the nation’s top political journalists are in an abusive relationship.
He lies to them constantly, insults them, sues them, calls them traitors, tries to turn the public against them, gaslights them, bans them, and threatens their outlets with dissolution.
And they almost never fight back.
Indeed, they actually cover up for him.
Relentlessly driven by their corporate masters to “not take sides,” they sanewash and normalize him, no matter what he says or does. Even their most critical reporting pulls punches — and is quickly forgotten.
Most significantly, they refuse to level with their readers and viewers about who Trump really is. You cannot adequately explain what Trump says or does on a day-to-day basis without acknowledging where it all comes from: His derangement, his ignorance, his authoritarianism, his lawbreaking, his corruption, and his racism.
By not sounding the alarm over the dangers he poses to the country and the world, our top news organizations are enabling him. They are doing what he wants them to do....
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The planned charade was interrupted. It will be re-staged in 30 days.
Reality check: Angry voters face the consequences of buying the Trump 'myth' — Adam Lynch
New York Times columnists say President Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed master of deal making, is struggling to deal with his Iran war. But contributing opinion writers E.J. Dionne Jr. and Robert Siegel and opinion columnist Carlos Lozada say that deal-making talent was never a thing.
“This whole notion of Trump as the master deal maker, as deal maker in chief, it’s all part of a long-running Trump mythology that was part of ‘The Art of the Deal,’ part of ‘The Apprentice.’ I think that what we’re seeing now, very clearly, in the second term is the limits to his deal-making prowess, especially internationally,” said Lozada. “So, you see the president making threats with timelines and cease-fires that come and go, and get extended till the schedule, the time frame, is sort of meaningless. He’s not really trying to manage a war; he’s trying to manage the news cycle, manage the markets, and hold on to his fracturing coalition.”
Trump’s best talent is actually his capacity to deceive, and Dionne said the template for his “ability to spin, to lie, to intimidate, to distract from any problems was set when he said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.”
But now, as the consequences of Trump’s entirely voluntary war with Iran land hard on Americans’ gas pumps and groceries, Dionne said Trump is learning that “there are some things that can’t be spun.”...
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They were warned. There is no reason to feel sorry for fascists.
RFK Jr Wants To Eliminate Medicaid Payments To Family Caregivers — NewsHound Ellen
RFK Jr. has probably not spent a day in his life depending on a paycheck. So, maybe he has no idea how impossible it would be for many families to give up the income from a job to provide free caregiving for a disabled and/or elderly relative. Or maybe it’s just part of his obvious plan to destroy our public health system, endanger American lives or just kill us outright.
Whatever the reason, Kennedy thinks family members should not be getting Medicaid funds for being caretakers of disabled loved ones. During his testimony on Capitol Hill last week, Kennedy complained about family members getting paid “for balancing the checkbook, for picking up the groceries, for driving somebody to a doctor’s appointment” because those are “things that they used to do as family members for free.”
“This is rife with fraud because we have no way at CMS to determine whether they actually perform that duty or not. We don’t know whether you drove your grandmother to a doctor’s office,” he also said
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A worthless creature. May he suffer for it.
Climate Scientists Shake Their Heads as First US City Running Completely Out of Water — Joe Wilkins
A massive drought coupled with political mismanagement might fully deplete water in a major city: neither in West Asia nor the Horn of Africa, but in the United States of America.
According to Inside Climate News, the city of Corpus Christi, Texas could soon completely out of water in the next year. It’s the eighth largest city in Texas, and a major industrial node in the Gulf Coast. Its water infrastructure provides access to over 500,000 Texans, as well as the major chemical plants, oil facilities, and plastics factories which call the Gulf region home.
As Climate News notes, Corpus Christi is on track to be the first American city to completely run out of water, as its reservoirs near empty following a five-year drought. Though nobody can snap their fingers and end a drought, the extremely dry conditions follow decades of warnings that South Texas is posed for a water crisis.
Earlier this week, city manager Peter Zanoni announced Corpus Christi will be forced to cut overall water consumption by 25 percent — nearly 16 million gallons a day — as soon as September. “We have no precedent to follow. There’s no manual, there’s no video,” Zanoni told the city council.
Details are hazy on how the city plans to make those cuts, but the impacts could be massive, as schools, hospitals, and homeowners are forced to do without — to say nothing of commercial and industrial business.
“We don’t have enough information from the city to make a statement on how we would proceed or how this would affect our business,” a spokesperson for H-E-B, the company operating the largest bakery in Corpus Christi, told Climate News.
Climate scientists have been warning about the consequences of poor water stewardship for years at this point. As Shannon Marquez, a professor at the Columbia Water Center told climate publication Grist, Corpus Christi could just be the first domino to fall as corporate water use and climate change take their toll on water tables across the country.
“What we’re seeing in Corpus Christi is really not an isolated crisis,” Marquez said. “It’s very consistent with how things are going to unfold if we don’t start to plan.”...
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Both water and then food will begin to run short as the century moves forward. We were warned and have done little to remedy this.
Unions Attack AI for Menacing Human Jobs — Joe Wilkins
Workers across the US have had it with the prognostications of AI taking over the world. And their unions — or what’s left of them, anyway — are taking notice.
Last week, the leaders of some of the largest trade unions in the US came together for a conference with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Axios reports. Together, they presented a united opposition against tech companies pushing AI and robotics into labor, renewing Sanders’ call for a pause on AI development until there are ample safety nets in place to catch workers whom labor leaders fear will be displaced.
“We are here to sound the alarms on AI,” president of stories AFL-CIO Liz Shuler said at the press conference. “This race that everybody seems to think we’re in to advance AI at all costs — with no guardrails or protections for people — is reckless and dangerous.”
The horse race for AI dominance between tech companies in the US has had ripple effects for workers throughout the country. Though researchers haven’t reached consensus on whether AI is actually replacing jobs, workers are still feeling the squeeze as AI-happy executives institute layoffs and hiring freezes regardless, as if to declare that the AI revolution is right around the corner.
“Human beings have to come first in this equation, not an afterthought,” United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain said. “A handful of billionaires want all the profits,” but the “working class has to get our fair share.”...
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We'd better get some a handle on this human tragedy soon or the horror of dystopian terror will stike us all.
The Number of Drones Being Deployed to Surveil Anti-Trump Protestors Is Staggering — Joe Wilkins
Police drones are fast becoming a fact of life across the United States, where they’re showing up in podunk towns, sprawling cities, and everywhere in between. So far, media coverage tends to highlight their role in finding lost puppies or catching cat burglars in the act. In Los Angeles, however, drones are increasingly being used to surveil peaceful anti-Trump protestors — an ominous preview, in all likelihood, of things to come nationwide.
According to new reporting by the Intercept, the Los Angeles Police Department launched drones at least 31 separate times during a single “ICE Out” protest on January 31st, which culminated in the arrest of at least 50 demonstrators after the LAPD issued an order to disperse at around 9:30pm.
A few months later at the March 28 “No Kings” demonstration protesting Donald Trump, the LAPD launched 32 surveillance drones. Though police didn’t issue an order to disperse until 5:30pm, flight data viewed by the Intercept shows that drone coverage of the peaceful demonstration began at 2pm and continued on until 9pm that night (the LAPD ultimately arrested 75 people.)
When the publication approached the LAPD for comment on the massive number of surveillance flights, LAPD lieutenant Matthew Jacobs insisted that “we do not document or record unless there is a crime occurring.”
“When it comes to a protest or demonstration, we’re responding [with drones] at the request of the incident commander. We’re looking for specific people, we’re not taping first amendment activity,” Jacobs continued. Paradoxically, he added that sometimes the department launches drones to “see how big a crowd is.”...
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First, they come for you crowd size...
Three Years Ago Today, “Avengers” Director Joe Russo Predicted There Would Be a Fully AI-Generated Movie Within Two Years — Frank Landymore
...Russo is far from alone in claiming AI will transform the industry, and for better or worse, he’s probably right. But it’s clearly not happening at anywhere near the pace or magnitude that AI advocates predicted it would. AI may be used behind the scenes, but it’s nowhere near good enough to generate entire movies — not even the kind of slop that the Russos spit out....
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Keep your gaddamned AI away from the arts, motherfuckers! Or expect some some unexpected side effects! No? Then find out the hard way!
Trump: Peace Talks Were 18 Hour Flight For “Nothing”
President Donald Trump says he is canceling planned peace talks to end the war in Iran because the 18-hour flight to Pakistan just isn’t worth the trouble.
“I’ve told my people a little while ago, they were getting ready to leave, and I said, ‘Nope, you’re not making an 18 hour flight to go there,’” Trump told Fox News, according to comments read aloud on air.
“We have all the cards. They can call us anytime they want, but you’re not going to be making any more 18-hour flights to sit around talking about nothing,’” he continued. The president then confirmed via Truth Social that he had pulled out, saying it was simply “too much work.”
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Too much work? I see he likes sleeping on the job! Love that sigh of relief at the end! LMAO!
Speculation swirls as Trump cancels Iran talks: 'He is just trying to save face' — David McAfee
President Donald Trump has cancelled a planned diplomatic mission to Pakistan involving senior envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who were scheduled to meet with Iranian representatives, outraging observers.
Trump revealed the decision to a Fox News reporter, Aishah Hasnie, first, stating: "I've told my people a little while ago, they were getting ready to leave, and I said, 'Nope, you're not making an 18 hour flight to go there. We have all the cards. They can call us anytime they want, but you're not going to be making any more 18 hour flights to sit around talking about nothing'."
He then made a similar "all the cards" announcement on social media.
The sudden reversal has drawn criticism from observers across the political spectrum. Former Obama adviser David Axelrod responded with sarcasm: "'We have all the cards,' said the @POTUS, whose casinos went bankrupt six times."
Journalist Glenn Greenwald highlighted the stark contradiction in Trump's messaging, noting a complete policy reversal within 24 hours. "From: Iran is begging for negotiations so I'm sending Jared and Witkoff to: We're not sending anyone because we have all the cards," Greenwald wrote, adding that Iran has repeatedly rejected negotiations with Kushner, viewing him as "an agent of Israel."
America First conservative David Pyne raised concerns about Trump's stated commitment to ending the conflict, saying: "Many Trump supporters believe him when he says his Iran war is over but his decision to continue the US naval blockade and cancel all peace talks with Iran while surging half the US Navy and USAF along with over 10,000 ground troops strongly suggest otherwise."
Ex-prosecutor Joyce Vance captured the shifting messaging with a common comparison: "This is a lot like the weather in Portland, Oregon. If you don't like it, wait 15 minutes and it will change."...
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Everyone knows Iran cancelled on Trump.
Trump suddenly reverses course on Iran peace talks: 'Too much work!' — David McAfee
President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he has cancelled a planned diplomatic mission to Islamabad, Pakistan, characterizing the journey as an inefficient use of time and resources.
"I just cancelled the trip of my representatives going is Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with the Iranians. Too much time wasted on traveling, too much work!" Trump posted, signaling his impatience with traditional diplomatic protocols.
Trump went further in his criticism of Iranian leadership, characterizing the government as chaotic and internally fractured.
"There is tremendous infighting and confusion within their 'leadership.' Nobody knows who is in charge, including them," he wrote, suggesting that negotiations with Iran lack clear counterparties.
The president also asserted United States superiority in any future talks, despite walking back numerous threats to obliterate Iran's entire civilization.
"We have all the cards, they have none! If they want to talk, all they have to do is call!!!" Trump claimed, placing the burden of diplomatic engagement entirely on Iran while rejecting proactive American efforts....
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Trump's arrogant shaming techiques are useless against Iran. They ignore him as they know he's hated by the rest of the world.
Unfounded Health Concerns Are Powering a Solar Backlash — Anna Clark
Locals worry that electromagnetism and even glare can pose a health risk. They wonder if toxic materials could leach into the soil and contaminate groundwater, if not while the solar site is operational, then some decades in the future, when it reaches the end of its life. That certainly has been the case with orphaned oil wells, which also were built with promises of safety.
But researchers point out that the most common types of panels have only small amounts of such materials, if any. They are encased and unlikely to leach into the soil. Rather than sitting in landfills when a site is decommissioned, most of the materials used in solar panels can be recycled (though the process can be costly).
Craig Adair, vice president of development at Open Road Renewables, which has pursued renewable energy projects in several states, has fielded a range of concerns over the years — from how soil could be contaminated to the possibility of electromagnetic fields causing cancer.
“Those questions, in just about every case, have an answer,” Adair said. “There is rigorous academic study, and there are examples of projects that have been operating.”
While the future farmability of the land is often a concern, many researchers — and farmers — say that a solar lease will help preserve it....
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I just heard about the need for energy the US will need in the near future and it is staggering. We'd better explore every bit of alternative sources. Solar is only one but we must use it.
What are the Health Risks Living Near Solar Farm? — Olivia Blot
The Truth About the Trump Plan to Bring Back Execution by Firing Squad — Sophie Hurwitz
The US Department of Justice announced Friday that it plans to revive the firing squad as a method of killing in federal capital cases. In a 52-page memo, the department expanded the ways it can apply the death penalty to include using a group of executioners to simultaneously shoot at a condemned person. Taking action to strengthen the federal death penalty, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote, “is our highest duty as public servants.”
Only five states currently allow executions by firing squad. The execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year was only the fifth such killing since 1976; his lawyers later said the bullets mostly missed Mahdi’s heart, leaving him to die in a manner that violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Jim Craig, a lawyer with the MacArthur Justice Center, has represented men and women on death row in the Deep South since 1986. I spoke with Craig about the dangers of executions carried out with guns, the 40 years he’s spent witnessing how governments condemn people to die, and what people should know about his clients.
What’s your reaction to the news that Trump is bringing back the federal firing squad?
This proposal by the Trump Justice Department is characterized by their attraction to brutality. It’s characterized by their affection for causing visible harm to people. You see it in their foreign policy. You see it in their policing. The firing squad is very physical and visceral in the damage that it does to the person being executed. That’s why they like it. We should not mince words about this. It has nothing to do with the Eighth Amendment. It has nothing to do with the supply of drugs, or anything else. They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context of this administration’s barbarism.....
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"Brutality." That descibes Trump, his Crime Syndicate and the few supporters he currenltly has.
Damage To US Bases Far Worse Than Pentagon Says
NBC News reports:
American military bases and other equipment in the Persian Gulf region suffered extensive damage from Iranian strikes that is far worse than publicly acknowledged and is expected to cost billions of dollars to repair, according to three U.S. officials, two congressional aides and another person familiar with the damage.
The Iranian regime swiftly retaliated after the Trump administration attacked on Feb. 28, hitting dozens of targets across U.S. military bases in seven Middle East countries. Those attacks struck warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft, according to the U.S. officials and an assessment by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
In the initial days of the war, an Iranian F-5 fighter jet bombed the U.S. base Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the base having air defenses, a rare breach that marked the first time an enemy fixed-wing aircraft has struck an American military base in years, according to two of the U.S. officials. The U.S. bases that came under attack are home to thousands of American troops, and in some cases their families, though they were largely cleared out in the days and hours before the U.S. and Israeli went to war with Iran.
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So, Hegseth said everyone else would just hold us back! We know how to do this. He must have meant lose a war and lose as badly as possible!
The biggest debacle in American history has been pulled on us by incompetent nincompoops!
Look at the smirky bastard in the picture! "You aren't trying to blame me, are you? ARE YOU?"
Mississippi Gov Proclaims Confederate Heritage Month
The Mississippi Free Press reports:
Nearly six years after signing the bill that removed the Confederate symbol from Mississippi’s state flag, Gov. Tate Reeves declared April 2026 as Confederate Heritage Month, continuing a tradition that began 33 years ago.
Though the governor does not publish the Confederate Heritage Month proclamations on any official government websites, the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans posted a copy of the latest proclamation on its Facebook page. The proclamation shows that the governor signed it on April 17.
As in past years, Reeves’ proclamation does not mention the central role of slavery and white supremacy in the Confederacy’s birth, instead speaking only vaguely about how April “is the month when, in 1861, the American Civil War began between the Confederate and Union armies, reportedly the deadliest war ever fought on American soil.”
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The Land of the Happy Negro still celebrates its treason!
Trump's $4 billion empire could evaporate — thanks to one judge's ruling — Sabrina Haake
With all the ruin emanating from the Oval Office on a daily basis, it’s easy to fall into quiet despair. Following the news feels like monitoring a malignant tumor as it spreads outward from the epicenter of the free world, jumping oceans, URLs, and psyches, threatening the globe on macro and micro levels simultaneously. Only this sickness, this decidedly opportunistic cancer, has never been seen before. Certainly this level of rot has not been diagnosed in our 250 year history.
Trump’s singularly corrupt and destructive appetite, both fed and insulated by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, is hard to stomach. After SCOTUS handed criminal immunity to a psychopath, despondency set in as the world resentfully assumed that Trump would get away with his crimes against humanity forever.
Then, just there, on the unlit edge of the blackest cloud to have darkened the world in a very long time, a glimmering trace of silver peaked out. In a development that should have streaked across the headlines, but barely got a mention, a federal judge ruled that Trump will pay for at least one of his crimes: J6....
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Life in prison!
Republican flames out on-air after blaming Biden for Trump’s inflation — Adam Lynch
Conservative political strategist and CNN pundit Scott Jennings failed to make his case for blaming President Donald Trump’s inflation problems on former president Biden — despite Biden leaving office more than a year ago.
Jennings set himself up for trouble after former Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala identified inflation as one of Trump’s major obstacles threatening to destroy himself and his Republican Party in the November midterms.
“We have an unpopular war, an unpopular president … It’s not just that his war is unpopular and fracturing his base more than I think even Iraq fractured President Bush's base, but it’s his inflation,” Begala told CNN host Kaitlan Collins. “It's inflation that got him elected, and it's inflation that's going to cause a landslide for the Democrats in the midterm.”...
But Begala mocked Jennings for making the claim: “That’s a political excuse. I tried it when I worked for Bill Clinton. We got wiped out. ‘Some other dude did it. Oh, blame Joe Biden!’ That dog don’t hunt, man. You know what? I hope you do [just that.] I hope all of you go out there and blame Joe Biden.”
But Begala mocked Jennings for making the claim: “That’s a political excuse. I tried it when I worked for Bill Clinton. We got wiped out. ‘Some other dude did it. Oh, blame Joe Biden!’ That dog don’t hunt, man. You know what? I hope you do [just that.] I hope all of you go out there and blame Joe Biden.”,,,
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Dipshit logic at work. "But this is really good shit, Mrs. Yokamoto!" -- Firesign Theatre
Inside the hypocrisy killing Republicans — D. Earl Stephens
Lately, I have been thinking about the word “freedom” and how that word has been twisted into unrecognizable wreckage by a Republican Party that uses it as a sad excuse to brutally hammer tens of millions of Americans into submission, including themselves.
America is supposed to be the land of the free, but try telling that to a pregnant woman who is faced with a crushing decision about what’s best for her, or Alex Pretti or Renee Good who were shot dead in the street by government thugs for freely standing up against violent authoritarianism. (Government thugs, incidentally, who are still free among us to kill again as I type this.)
I was finally spurred to put words to my thoughts about freedom after attending a casual meeting of do-gooders here in North Carolina last week, which veered into the importance of cleaning up our coastal waterways, so marine life are free to flourish without the man-made threat of being violently choked to death....
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Reality is a great challenge to MAGA swine.
Trump's Economic Approval Rating Lowest In History — John Amato
Trump is #1 at something.
CNN's Harry Enten delivered more bad news to Donald Trump, as his approval rating on the economy plunges to the lowest of any president in history.
When Trump tries to brag about himself, he usually uses a phrase like, "nobody's seen this before in history."
He can make the same claim with this data, as Americans are sick and tired of this chaotic rain of economic horror....
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He's #1!
Fox’s “Random Man In Diner” Is Turning Point Leader
Raw Story reports:
Social media users quickly caught that a man interviewed for a Fox News segment as though he were a random voter was actually a leader in a major conservative group.
A Fox and Friends segment was supposed to feature the on-the-spot opinions of random diners at a Columbus, Ohio restaurant. Juliet Jeske, who runs the X account Decoding Fox News, posted on Friday that reporter Lawrence Jones was actually interviewing members of Turning Point USA, the conservative group founded by Charlie Kirk.
Although Jones walked up to him as though he were picking a random guy, Jeske said she identified him “in thirty minutes” as Jake Poling, a regional manager of Turning Point USA, through his social media, where he had pictures with Kirk.
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Nazi News outlet knows its Nazis!
Tobacco Industry Lobbyist Gets Senior Role At CDC
STAT News reports:
A former tobacco industry executive has been appointed to senior leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, alarming public health advocates and critics of industry influence on government.
Stephen Sayle, named in March as the CDC’s deputy director for legislative affairs, previously worked at Fontem Ventures, a subsidiary of the British multinational tobacco corporation Imperial Brands. Between 2017 and 2018, he was U.S. vice president of corporate affairs at Fontem, which is focused on non-combustible tobacco products like the e-cigarette brand blu and the oral nicotine pouch brand Zone.
From a public health perspective, appointing a former tobacco executive to a high-level role at the CDC is “unprecedented,” Timothy McAfee, who headed the Office of Smoking and Health at the CDC from 2010 to 2017, wrote in an editorial published this week in the journal Tobacco Control. McAfee told STAT that Sayle’s appointment is also “completely inconsistent” with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s previous pledges to “shut the revolving door” between industry and government.
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Fox appoints Fox to guard chicken house!
Leavitt Claims Charlottesville Nazi Rally Was A “Hoax”
FOX HOST: “I want to ask you about the DOJ going after the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was at one point in its history, a very reputable Civil Rights organization fighting the KKK, according to the DOJ. All of that has changed. And I guess the thing that’s probably most relevant to President Trump is that they were paying the person who was involved in that Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, which was one of the biggest points of criticism for this president during his first term. What’s what’s his thinking on what’s going on now with the DOJ?”
KAROLINE LEAVITT: “The Southern Poverty Law Center was a very reputable organization at one point in time, and they have unfortunately transformed into a criminal organization run by fraudsters who are paying for and inciting this very racism that they claim to stand against. Now, you mentioned the Charlottesville hoax, John. It’s a brilliant point because that is one of the most vicious and egregious smears that has been used against President Trump over the course of the last 11 years since he got himself into politics.
“And this group funded some of the funders of that hoax that not only the media ate up like candy, but that the Democrats ran campaigns on. If you recall, in 2020, Joe Biden launched his campaign for president on the basis of the Charlottesville hoax. It was a total lie, and it was funded by this organization that claims to stand against racism. I’m glad to see accountability is is being high, thanks to the Department of Justice.
“And I would like to criticize the legacy media. If you read articles about this case and this indictment in the New York Times, they’re trying to claim that this is a weaponization of justice from from the Trump DOJ. It couldn’t be further from the truth. This was a grand jury indictment made up of Americans who realized that this organization was engaging in criminal activity, and they need to be held accountable for it.”
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Eva Braun finally speaks. Let's see if this bullshit even gets to court, Eva.
Court Overturns Roy Moore’s $8M Defamation Win
Politico reports:
A federal appeals court has wiped out a jury’s $8.2 million award to former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore over a Democratic group’s TV ad about allegations that Moore solicited teen girls for sex. The claims, which appeared in numerous news articles by local and national journalists, roiled the 2017 special election for a Senate seat from Alabama, torpedoing the staunchly conservative Moore’s campaign
In 2019, Moore sued the Senate Majority PAC, claiming that the group libeled him and subjected him to false light invasion of privacy by suggesting that he sought sex from a 14-year-old girl working as a “Santa’s helper” at a shopping mall in Gadsden, Alabama. 11th Circuit Judge Elizabeth Branch said the PAC included citations to the underlying news articles, ensuring that viewers could judge the assertions for themselves.
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Another one bites the dust! — Again.
MAGA media gaslights on Charlottesville — Sophia Tesfaye
The right seizes on indictment to claim white supremacy only exists due to the Southern Poverty Law Center
Almost immediately after the mob at Donald Trump diehards smashed its way into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the right-wing noise machine moved into action to downplay what the world saw unfold in real time. Now, five years later, with a giant assist from the Department of Justice, conservative media is again attempting to launder reality through conspiracy about another dark day in the first Trump administration — the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — with some saying the event was a false flag operation.
In one of the most brazen escalations yet in the administration’s war on its perceived enemies, the DOJ, created in 1870 to enforce the civil rights of formerly enslaved Americans in the South, announced the criminal prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization founded in Montgomery, Alabama, the former capital of the Confederacy, and credited with financially crippling the modern Klan.
On April 21, a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC on 11 counts — six counts of wire fraud, four counts of false statements to a federally insured bank and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. But it is a case built to win on cable news, not court.
The core allegation, stripped of its melodramatic framing, is that the SPLC used paid informants to infiltrate hate groups and ran those payments through shell accounts to protect the identities of people who were living among Klansmen and neo-Nazis. The SPLC has long relied on informants to infiltrate organizations, sometimes in coordination with federal authorities. As far back as 1996, the New York Times reported that the organization had “spies” embedded in white nationalist gatherings.
The federal government’s legal argument, such as it is, falls apart the moment anyone with prosecutorial experience examines it. Kyle Boynton, an attorney who worked previously as both a federal civil rights prosecutor and an FBI agent, told CBS News, “I don’t think any prosecutor with white-collar experience would look at this indictment and believe it makes out the elements of a crime.”...
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The Nazis have recently discovered reverse psychology as a weapon. Anyone with a piece of brain can see the bullshit they are handing us.
John Roberts' landmark 2019 decision just backfired spectacularly on GOP: legal analysts — Bennito L. Kelty
Chief Justice John Roberts paved the way for a major Democratic victory this week with a decision he made at the end of the last decade, political analysts are pointing out.
Justice Roberts delivered a key decision in the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause. Roberts siding with conservatives on a 5-4 decision seven years ago kept constitutional limits away from partisan gerrymandering. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, co-hosts of the Slate legal analysis podcast Amicus, revisited Roberts' decision in their latest episode and explained how the case gave way to a major Democratic victory in Virginia this week, where voters approved a gerrymandered map that opens four House seats.
"There was a lot of Republican bellyaching this week over these results," Lithwick said. "But didn’t the Supreme Court pretty much roll out the red carpet for this kind of electoral hardball with the decision in Rucho v. Common Cause?"
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"The trap you set for yourself is the attachment of self-centeredness and the habit of self-referentiality." — Zen saying.
Time Again For America's Sexennial Fantasy: Can We PLEASE Sh*tcan Lindsey Graham? — Doktor Zoom
Sure, sexennial just means every six years, like a Senate term. But we still feel a little bad about putting that word, “fantasy,” and “Lindsey Graham” so close to each other. Sorry not sorry. Because just as we can’t resist the temptation of “THIS is the year Texas goes blue,” we also can’t seem to break our optimism that voters in South Carolina will finally replace Lindsey Graham with “someone less loathsome,” a bar so low that a fair number of merely awful Republicans might ooze over it. It’s like finding “someone more likeable than Ted Cruz.”
Simply put, Graham is not widely loved, even though he keeps getting reelected. Despite polling in 2020 showing he was in a close race against Democrat Jaime Harrison, Graham ultimately managed a 10-point win that year. Graham did at least get to whine that Harrison outpaced him in fundraising, griping on Fox News, “I’m being killed financially. This money is because they hate my guts.”
Nobody Likes Him, Everybody Hates Him, But Graham Won’t Eat These Worms
In March 2026 polling, just 34 percent of South Carolina voters gave Graham a “favorable” rating, with 57 percent saying they were “looking to vote for someone else.” A December 2025 PPP poll showed Graham leading a “generic Democrat” by just two points, with 60 percent of respondents saying they want someone new in the Senate. (That jumped to 73 percent among independent voters.)
And now that he’s become the top cheerleader for Donald Trump’s stupid, unpopular war against Iran, we’re even seeing speculation that Graham’s warboner might be the one thing that finally sinks him, although the Washington Post (that’s a gift link) chickened out on saying “warboner.”
On the other hand, South Carolina has a long history of keeping its damn senators in office, as the 48-year career of execrable Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond illustrates. In fact, the last time a US senator from South Carolina was voted out of office was in 1944, when Ellison Smith (D-Segregation) lost his bid for a seventh term. But that’s a pattern, not an inevitability, and while other GOP-held Senate seats have better chances to be flipped this year, we won’t be calling Graham invulnerable — he’s going to have to work to keep his seat....
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Was there a time when Graham was an asset for the US? That time has long gone.
Reason For Navy Sec Firing Maybe Even More Pathetic And Hegseth-y Than We Knew — Evan Hurst
No sooner had we published our first piece on the bizarre firing of Navy Secretary John Phelan in the middle of the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz — and the replacement of him with the contemporary Christian version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh no, is Monterey, California, a HELLMOUTH, Buffy? — than more news began to break about the real reasons Secretary Shitfaced “Pete” Hegseth fired him.
Hegseth’s pathetic Daddy issues leading to possible jealousy over Trump and Phelan — who are neighbors and friends — sliding pictures of big hard boats into each other’s DMs at night and not including him? Yep, we had that. Just general drama between Hegseth and Phelan relating to Hegseth’s devastating masculine insecurity, which renders him unable to lead troops like a real man? Duh, that’s part of every story about Hegseth and the United States military under his control.
And then at the end, we asked:
One more final thought about what this likely means if our spidey senses are correct. If it’s not just Hegseth’s drama queen daddy issues — which it might be! — then it’s highly likely that Phelan, who was secretary of the Navy in the middle of Trump’s and Hegseth’s naval blockade, and during Hegseth’s ongoing murder spree with the so-called drug boats, knew that Hegseth and Trump were giving illegal orders to commit war crimes, just like folks like Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin have been warning about. In which case Phelan might have decided he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life buried alive underneath Gitmo or the Hague once patriotic Americans beat back this fascism and start holding motherfuckers accountable. And let’s be clear, at this point everybody should understand that we are absolutely going to win.
Oh golly, were we over the target!
Come Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin, the real news reporter who makes all of MAGA so angry, because she reports real news, even when it conflicts with Republican/Russian propaganda. She confirmed something the Washington Post had alluded to earlier in the day. They said there had been “tension” between Shitfaced and Phelan over whether Senator Mark Kelly should be punished for making that video where he and other patriotic members of Congress who have served told troops that their loyalty was to the Constitution and their oaths, not to little bitch Pete Hegseth or his traitor boss, and that they had a duty to refuse illegal orders. Phelan was supposed to “review” what Kelly had done and make a recommendation for how Kelly could be punished.
Griffin’s report last night was more explicit:
“Hegseth and Phelan reportedly butted heads when Phelan refused to ignore a recent federal judge’s ruling that said punishing Senator Mark Kelly for making a video in which he reminded military officers of their constitutional duty to not to not follow illegal orders would violate his First Amendment rights,” Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’ Pentagon correspondent, reported on Thursday.
“Hegseth wanted Kelly, a retired Navy captain and former astronaut, brought back onto active duty and stripped of his rank,” Griffin said.
Ohhhhhhh. Well there it is.
Phelan, an art collector and Trump fundraiser with no military experience, nonetheless was not stupid enough to ignore the Constitution to try to go after Dear Leader’s enemies for reminding them that Dear Leader is not actually Dear Leader, and he wasn’t willing to be a party to Hegseth using the Uniform Code of Military Justice like his own personal drunken cum towel....
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Our disgrace continues.
The Strategy That Built America’s Middle Class Still Works, So Why Won’t Democrats Deploy It? — Thom Hartmann
The same bold playbook that built the middle class can restore it, and voters are ready
The “liberal” commentators are shocked. It was reported yesterday that Graham Platner, the Democrat who’ll most likely win the primary to run for the US Senate from Maine, has staked out some “truly radical” positions. The former Marine combat veteran and oyster farmer has called for:
— Impeaching Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for the bribes he took from billionaires,
— Replacing Chuck Schumer as leader of Senate Democrats with a “fighter,”
— Investigating and prosecuting Trump regime officials and underlings who’ve been involved in illegal actions like bombing unarmed boats in the Caribbean,
— Prosecuting ICE thugs who’ve assaulted, terrorized, or killed people and smashed into cars and homes without warrants,
— Going after corruption in the Trump White House, including among the Trump family, the Cabinet, and Trump himself,
— Promoting aggressive new social safety net programs to restore America’s middle class and take on the Epstein class, including a wealth tax on those with more than $1 billion, and
— A national healthcare system modeled on Medicare-for-All.
One cable host mused out loud yesterday that these positions may help the 41-year-old progressive win the primary against septuagenarian moderate Governor Janet Mills, “but can that really win a general election?” This “don’t be Bernie or like AOC” is the great fear and marching anthem of the mainstream media and the Democratic consultant class.
When Trump broke both US and international law joining Israel in bombing Iran without any provocation (and while they were making very real concessions during their negotiations) and in violation of the War Powers Act of 1973, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries didn’t call for the president to be prosecuted, turned over to the Hague, or even impeached.
Instead, he said, “Congress must be fully and immediately briefed.” Yeah, that’ll teach them!
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Trump a liar and the bombing a “major failure” and “Operation Epic Blunder,” but beyond strongly worded press releases also hasn’t called for actual consequences for Trump, Hegseth, or anybody else in the chain of command committing these war crimes.
But consider how it would have played out if Obama or Biden had begun bombing a foreign country with no justification; Republicans would have started impeachment hearings before the second wave of bombs and Fox “News” would be braying for criminal prosecution.
Tragically, the conventional wisdom across the chattering class and within leadership of the institutional Democratic Party seems to be, “Don’t make big promises or real threats, don’t be Bernie or AOC.”
The problem with this strategy is that most Americans now want a modern-day Bernie or AOC, and multiple elections (and Platner’s polling) prove it, but the DNC and “mainstream” Democrats aren’t listening and don’t want to go after rich people....
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Even the Democrats can use a lesson in history.
Operation Epic Failure — Robert Reich
Trump and Hegseth say they've destroyed Iran's military capacity. The reality is far different.
Friends,
Trump and “War” Secretary Pete Hegseth say Operation Epic Fury has destroyed Iran’s military capacity.
“We’ve taken out their navy, we’ve taken out their air force, we’ve taken out their leaders,” Trump said Tuesday.
At a Pentagon briefing on April 8, shortly after Trump declared a ceasefire with Iran, Hegseth said “Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory.” He added, “By any measure, Epic Fury decimated Iran’s military and rendered it combat ineffective for years to come.”
But CBS News’s Jennifer Jacobs, Eleanor Watson, and James LaPorta report a very different reality. They interviewed “multiple officials with knowledge of intelligence,” who say the Islamic Republic of Iran “maintains more military capabilities than the White House or Pentagon has publicly admitted.”
According to three of the officials, about half of Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles and its associated launch systems were still intact as of the start of the ceasefire in early April.
Roughly 60 percent of the naval arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is still in existence, the officials said, including fast-attack speed boats.
Although the U.S. and Israel have destroyed much of Iran’s conventional navy, the naval arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, equipped with many smaller vessels, remains partly intact, and it’s that navy that’s hampering oil shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
On Wednesday, Iranian gunboats attacked several commercial ships in the strait, shortly after Trump announced he was unilaterally extending a ceasefire to allow more time for peace talks.
Iranian air power has been significantly degraded but not erased. U.S. officials say that about two-thirds of Iran’s air force is still believed to be operational.
According to a written statement submitted to a House Armed Services Committee by Marine Lt. Gen. James Adams, head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, “Iran retains thousands of missiles and one-way attack UAVs that can threaten U.S. and partner forces throughout the region, despite degradations to its capabilities from both attrition and expenditure.”
The regime in Tehran is showing itself to be far more tenacious and hardline than the regime it replaced. Iran seems more committed to building a nuclear bomb than it was before Trump’s war, and is less constrained than it was after the agreement negotiated by the Obama administration.
And the Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed, not by the United States but by Iran — causing global oil prices to resume their upward trajectory. (Reminder: It was open before Operation Epic Fury.)...
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Total failure of Trump and Hegseth, two hacks.
The Myth of the Apolitical University: Education, Power and the Lie of Neutrality — Henry Giroux
In a time of war, resurgent authoritarianism, and an escalating assault on higher education, the language of “institutional neutrality” has emerged not as a safeguard of academic integrity, but as one of the most effective ideological weapons in the campaign to depoliticize the university. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, the genocidal destruction of Gaza, and the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, universities have come under intense pressure to demonstrate their “balance” by retreating from political engagement. What has followed is not a principled defense of intellectual independence, but a quiet alignment with power, as institutions rush to adopt policies that prohibit them from taking positions on political and ethical issues deemed external to their “core functions.”
Reports suggest that more than 150 universities have embraced such measures, while proposals such as the Trump administration’s “Compact for Higher Education” threaten to make institutional neutrality a condition for federal funding. Under these conditions, neutrality is no longer an abstract ideal; it is fast becoming an instrument of coercion.
The appeal to neutrality, of course, is not new. It draws its legitimacy from the 1967 Kalven Report, which famously asserted that “the university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” Yet this formulation depends on a fiction that collapses under historical and political scrutiny: that can stand outside the conflicts that actively constitute the wider society. In reality, there is no dimension of higher education that is not already political. Universities continuously make decisions about what knowledge counts, whose voices matter, which histories are preserved, and which forms of dissent are tolerated or punished. These are not neutral acts; they are structured by power, shaped by ideology, and embedded in larger struggles over the meaning and direction of public life.
What the language of neutrality does, then, is not remove politics from the university but conceal it. More precisely, it functions as a form of political cover, allowing institutions to disavow their own agency even as they engage in deeply political practices, disciplining student protest, sanctioning faculty for dissent, and in some cases, collaborating with state power in ways that endanger those who challenge injustice. Under the current political climate, this posture has taken on an especially troubling form. As universities such as Columbia, Northwestern, and Brown move to accommodate the demands of an increasingly aggressive right-wing agenda, neutrality becomes indistinguishable from capitulation. It serves to normalize a broader project aimed at cleansing higher education of dissenting voices and remaking it as a site of ideological conformity....
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Totatalitarianism always attempts to wipe out intelllectual institurions.
DOJ Drops Criminal Investigation Into Jerome Powell
NBC News reports:
The Justice Department on Friday dropped a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve and its leader, Chair Jerome Powell, regarding a renovation project at the central bank’s Washington headquarters.
The Inspector General for the Federal Reserve has already reviewed the project twice, and found no wrongdoing. It was asked again to review the project in 2025 by Powell, amid unrelenting pressure from President Donald Trump and his top allies.
The decision clears the way for Trump’s nominee to chair the Fed, Kevin Warsh, to advance towards a confirmation vote in the Senate. Warsh’s confirmation has been blocked by Senator Thom Tillis, R-N.C., since Trump tapped Warsh for the role, due to what Tillis called a “bogus” investigation of Powell.
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Nazi hypocrisy fails again.
Reuters Poll: 77% Blame Trump For High Gas Prices
Reuters reports:
A clear majority of Americans blame President Donald Trump for surging gasoline prices, which is weighing on his Republican Party ?ahead of November’s congressional midterm elections, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Some 77% of registered voters in the poll, which concluded early this week, ?said Trump bears at least a fair amount of responsibility for the recent rise in gas prices, which was sparked by his decision to launch a war on Iran along with U.S. ally Israel.
The view was widely shared across the political spectrum, with 55% of Republican voters, 82% of independents and 95% of Democrats pinning blame on the president for the ?higher costs.
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77%? The other 23% must all own oil stock.
Oligarch Big Game Hunter Killed By Herd Of Elephants
The Daily Beast reports:
A millionaire big game hunter has been trampled to death by a herd of elephants. Vineyard tycoon Ernie Dosio, 75, was out shooting yellow-backed duiker, a species of antelope, in Gabon when he and his guide surprised five female elephants with a calf in the Lope-Okanda rainforest last Friday.
Safari company Collect Africa confirmed that its client had been killed, according to The Daily Mail, and said that its professional hunter, who was guiding Dosio, was left severely injured in the attack.
Gabon’s dense forests are home to around 95,000 highly-endangered forest elephants, according to the WWF, which make up around 60 percent of the world’s remaining population.
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The Elephant's revenge!
Luna Calls For Trump To Pardon Polymarket Soldier
“Maybe not a popular take but I am calling for this guy to be pardoned. Unless the DOJ plans on going after all the crooks in congress currently insider trading, this is simply skewed justice. There is no ‘justice’ when guys like this get the book thrown at him yet members are illegally profiting every day. I don’t agree with what he did and he should be required to disgorge all the profits however, unless the DOJ plans on doing Congress next, this is not justice.” – Strip club waitress turned GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, notably not mentioning that the Donald Trump Jr. sits the board of Polymarket and is an investor in the company.
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The rogue gambling pandemic must be placed under control. It is no different than drug addiction and it's spreading rapidly throughout society. This level of ad hoc gambling is an illness and we have the data to back this up
'Hypersensitive' Kash Patel just revealed he lives in 'constant fear': analyst — Ewan Gleadow
Kash Patel would not survive the evidence given against him should his lawsuit against The Atlantic be taken further, a political analyst has claimed.
FBI Director Patel filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and staff writer Sarah Fitzpatrick on April 20, 2026, following a bombshell investigative report detailing his alleged excessive drinking and erratic behavior. Patel's legal team characterized the article as "replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel's reputation and drive him from office."
Legal experts warned that Patel inadvertently confirmed key details from Fitzpatrick's investigation through his aggressive legal response. Lisa Needham in the Public Notice Substack noted, "Patel would be luckiest if The Atlantic succeeds at getting this thing dismissed right away — no, really. Because if this case goes forward, he’s stuck with discovery."
Further analysis from Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte noted that Patel had made it clear he wants attention but may not be ready for the consequences of his lawsuit.
Marcotte wrote, "While this story is funny, I have a different theory as to why it went so viral. I believe it illustrates a widespread suspicion many political observers have about Patel — that he is plagued with a sweaty desire for approval and a constant fear of rejection.
"Patel’s best hope is that the lawsuit is dismissed early, because it’s highly unlikely that the Atlantic green-lit a story they knew, as his lawsuit claims, to be full of 'false and obviously fabricated allegations.' A similar lawsuit against MS NOW got thrown out two days after Patel sued the Atlantic.
"Because he seems so hypersensitive about how people see him, I doubt his ego can survive the process of having Sarah Fitzpatrick, the story’s author, and editors from the Atlantic provide evidence for their claims in court.
"Then again, Patel’s entire stint at the FBI suggests he doesn’t understand that all his efforts to manifest an image of a smart, cool guy that everyone likes are so ham-fisted that they inevitably backfire."...
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Kash won' t be long in office.
World leaders forge unprecedented alliance without Trump amid his unilateral Iran war — The Conversation
The United States under President Donald Trump and the European Union have a complicated relationship. On one hand, European countries and the US have built some of the strongest alliances since the end of the second world war. On the other, since the start of Trump’s second term in 2025, they have openly clashed on significant issues: tariffs, NATO contributions, Palestinian statehood, Israel’s interventionism, Ukraine support levels and Greenland’s sovereignty.
Trump’s sudden war on Iran is the latest of these clashes, but it is distinctive because it is shaking the world’s economy. The US war on Iran, alongside Israel’s war on Lebanon, is accelerating a notable reshaping of European alliances and strategic thinking about the union’s future.
The EU has more than 450 million inhabitants, and its GDP is nearly on par with that of the US or China. Despite its polymorphic nature, and in fact perhaps because of it, it is a world player that can exercise considerable sway over international affairs.
European leaders are now attempting to drive a lasting ceasefire, and perhaps even peace, between the US and Iran, with the aim of reopening the strait of Hormuz as soon as possible.
EU countries believe in the rules-based order and international institutions. This is not only because of their democratic constitution and values, but also because they offer them better protection than “might makes right”.
Trump’s unilateral war on Iran sits well beyond international conventions. It was neither sanctioned by a UN mandate or resolution, nor approved by NATO. As a result, European leaders have refused to contribute.
Spain and Italy have outwardly refused to allow US weapon-carrying planes bound for the Iran conflict to use their bases. Meanwhile, France is taking a more case-by-case approach in authorising or declining use of its airspace as part of operations linked to the conflict....
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Trump has put us all in harm's way. The world is rejecting the USA due to his totalitarianism. This could lead to extreme damage of our future.
Morning Joe co-host flags 'striking' change from Hegseth: 'This administration's flailing' — Travis Gettys
MS NOW's Jonathan Lemire called attention to a shift in tone from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his latest press update on the Iran war.
The Pentagon chief attacked reporters once again during Friday's briefing, but the "Morning Joe" co-host noticed that Hegseth seemed to be shifting the terms of what the Trump administration would consider to be a military victory.
"Some progress made yesterday in the Israel-Lebanon situation, that cease fire extended, but not here," Lemire said. "We should note though, MS NOW is reporting that Iran's foreign minister is expected to travel to Islamabad next day or so, potentially ahead of peace talks. This is not for peace talks, but to restart negotiations, to perhaps have negotiations. So maybe that will happen down the road."
"But I also wanted to flag something here that was very striking, just a shift in tone from the secretary," Lemire added. "Yes, strident bashing the press every chance he gets. But it was on April 8, he had one of these news conferences and he said this is a big day for world peace. They have had enough, meaning Iran, Operation Epic Fury has been laser-focused from the very start – sorry, that [it] is a historic, overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital-V military victory, declaring the conflict, in its essence, over."
Hegseth didn't display quite the same bravado in his latest press briefing, Lemire noted....
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Going through withdrawal are we?
Pentagon staffers terrified as 'petty high school' drama ignites firing fears — Thomas Kika
Pentagon staffers are grappling with a new wave of fear over potential firings, with sources telling Axios that "petty, high-school or middle-school drama" has everyone on edge.
On Friday morning, Axios released a new report describing the tense atmosphere within the Department of Defense, following the recent ousters of Navy Secretary John Phelan and Army Chief of Staff Genereal Randy George, among other high-profile firings. According to sources within the agency, "nerves are particularly charged" within the Pentagon as employees fear what might come next.
"Breakfast meetings, happy hours and group chats across Washington are abuzz with the same question: Who gets axed next?" the report explained. "At least 15 defense officials have abruptly left or been pushed out of their jobs under Trump 2.0. The exits, civilian and uniform, are the results of clashing politics, policies and personalities."
One anonymous source within the Trump administration did not mince words about the degrading vibes at the Pentagon, likening things to "petty" teenage melodrama, even invoking the famed comedy, Mean Girls...
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The shameless failure of an inept Trump administration.
Trump's overnight unhinged posting spree prompts questions about his mental stability — Sarah K. Burris
President Donald Trump's overnight posting spree is prompting questions from those online about his mental stability.
Trump's final post on TruthSocial came about 2:45 a.m. EDT with a post about conspiracy theories around the "birth tourism industry."
It isn't unusual for Trump to go off on a TruthSocial posting spree, and it's the second time in a week.
The spree began about midnight EDT and lasted over an hour. For a moment it seemed like he might stop, but about 90 minutes later he began sharing content from filmmaker Clint Eastwood.
It was just one of 16 posts that ranged in attacks on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama, claiming that they were both part of some kind of conspiracy to keep him from the presidency in 2016. At one point, he shared a post saying that Clinton and Obama committed treason.
The comments prompted liberal political commentator Harry Sisson to question if the president had lost it.
He wrote on X, "It's 1 am in the morning, and Trump is awake ranting incoherently. He's now calling for the 2020 election to be 'permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect.' Someone check him into an insane asylum."
Trump posted at one point: “If it is true, the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT”
"Trump had another mental health episode and spiraled out of control on social media last night," said Sisson, listing off the topics that Trump posted about.
"Trump’s 1:13 AM post is basically a nocturnal emission of late-night brain static," said satirical influencer SundaeGirl.
Columnist and editor Philip Bump commented on Trump's attack on the Southern Poverty Law Center, characterizing it as: “I say you threw garbage in my lawn therefore I own your house.”
He later added: "Also: does this suggest that the contrived SPLC lawsuit is what Patel was talking about with his claim about an imminent crackdown on the 2020 election?"...
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A ranting old crank! We are as bad as he is to continue to put up with his horseshit dribble!
Trump just compromised White House security with his 'complete disaster' project: report — Matthew Rozsa
President Donald Trump destroyed the White House’s East Wing to create a massive ballroom that he claimed would improve the grounds — but by his own admission, building it has complicated his own security.
“The bunker emerged in the Trump administration's court fight against the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which is challenging the 90,000-square-foot (8,400-square-meter) ballroom project in Washington,” PBS reported on Thursday. “A federal appeals court last week permitted the president to continue with construction of the project at the site of the former East Wing, which was demolished last fall.”
They added, “That ruling put on hold a lower-court judge's order blocking aboveground construction but exempted work to ensure the safety and security of the White House. The Republican administration's appeal cited materials that would be installed to make a "heavily fortified" facility, including adding bomb shelters, military installations and a medical facility underneath the ballroom.”
The station noted that there have been historic occasions when occupants of the White House were rushed to the underground bunker. This includes Vice President Dick Cheney, who was taken there on Sept. 11, 2001 during the terrorist attacks and of Trump himself during the George Floyd protests.
Although a judge ruled at the end of March that Trump did not have the right to unilaterally tear down part of the White House, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon allowed underground work to continue because he was informed of secret security concerns that would exist if that aspect of construction was simply abandoned...
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A dangerous old coot! He knows absolutely nothing of humanity.
Tucker Apologizes, Billionaire Sues—Trump Allies Turn On Him — Cliff Schecter
Schecter and Shuster sat down with the legendary strategist for this kind of conversation. One you have when the ground under the political map is shifting so rapidly it feels like an earthquake. None of us have seen anything like this before...
Schecter and Shuster sat down with the legendary strategist for this kind of conversation. One you have when the ground under the political map's shifting so rapidly it feels like an earthquake (None of us have seen anything like this before..) Because of Epstein, Iran, ICE cruelty, and more.
Take Marjorie Taylor Greene's district: Clayton Fuller; the generically named, generically white, generically right-wing nominee--because America was built for these guys--won by 16%. But Trump won by 37% in 2024! And MTG's one of a slew of former Trumpers still popular with the base who not only ditched him, but publicly question his sanity/honesty.
Tucker Carlson apologized for “misleading” people to vote for Trump. MTG thinks the assassination attempt was fake. Alex Jones called for the 25th Amendment. Trump's losing supporters hurt by his actions (farmers, Latinos, etc), but also MAGA elites telling fans he's everything from con man to Anti-Christ. So the MAGA coalition isn’t cracking—it’s coming apart in real time. The question is not if it collapses, but how far it takes the GOP with it....
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The collapse not only of the former Republcan Party but will it take America with it?
Fractures Emerge Between GOP’s Pro-Pedophilia, Extremely Pro-Pedophilia Wings — Ed Scarce
The Onion goes there.
Is this even satire anymore?
"Infighting between the two coalitions has reached new levels of intensity in the leadup to the midterm elections, leaving GOP leadership to question how best to handle the future of their party’s sexual attraction to minors."
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The Pedophile Party aka the Fascst Party formerly the Republican Party.
Hindu Group Blasts Trump For Sharing “Racist Screed”
The Times Of India reports:
The Hindu American Foundation reacted to President Donald Trump sharing disparaging remarks about India at a time when racism is already at an all-time high. The president reposted commentator Michael Savage’s [photo] remarks where he referred to India, China and other nations as “hell-holes.” The comment came in the context of the birthright citizenship law and Trump reposted it without adding anything to it.
“A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring in their entire family from China, or India, or some other hell-hole on the planet,” Savage wrote describing Indians and Chinese immigrants as “gangsters with laptops”.
The Hindu American Foundation urged the president to delete the post as it would further stoke hatred against Indians in the US. “We are deeply disturbed by @POTUS sharing this hateful, racist screed targeting Indian and Chinese Americans.” The US embassy in New Delhi, however, papered over the controversy and said Trump, in the past, praised India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The post shared by Trump also calls on him to use “RICO charges” to dismantle the ACLU.
Michael Savage (real name Michael Weiner) has appeared here countless times for his racist and often violent tirades, particularly against LGBTQ people.
More recently, Savage appeared here when he condemned the Iran war, which apparently escaped Trump’s attention.
The Hindu group’s post has gone viral and presently has over three million views. The cult, as always, is responding with racist slurs.
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The filth of the Trump HATE agenda to kill our law and make his word law!
This is nothing but an attack on the USA and our core beliefs!
Get rid of the beast!
Trump: 2020 Election Should Be “Wiped From Books”
Mediaite reports:
President Donald Trump called for the 2020 presidential election to “be permanently wiped from books and be of no further force or effect” if new fraud charges brought by the Justice Department against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) prove “true.”
The president unloaded on the prominent civil rights group in the early hours of Friday morning and described the organization as “one of the greatest political scams in American History.” The president then shared two memes and screengrabs of posts from Elon Musk about the SPLC allegations.
The remarks come days after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced an indictment accusing the Alabama-based non-profit of financial misconduct linked to its use of informants embedded within extremist groups.
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Wipe Trump from our country!
Patel Claims SPLC “Funded” Neo-Nazis And The Klan
Public Notice reports:
The SPLC made a lot of enemies in the rightwing ecosystem with its Hatemap of extremist groups, which included conservative mainstays like the Family Research Council, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, opponents of the SPLC’s mission, including Elon Musk, targeted the organization for criticizing their newly-martyred saint.
In October, Patel cut ties with the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group. In what was surely not a coincidence, he timed his announcement to fall on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for observant Jews. But it’s one thing to sever ties with civil rights groups. It’s quite another to charge them for criminal conspiracy.
Then, as if to demonstrate that the campaign against SPLC is a witch hunt, Patel went on Sean Hannity’s show last night to riff about an active case and preemptively declare guilt. If the government has actual evidence of wrongdoing, it’s not sharing. There’s zero mention of self-dealing by SPLC executives in the indictment. If the SPLC were really trying to “manufacture” racism, devoting just $3 million over the course of a decade out of an annual budget that tops $120 million would be a pretty inefficient way to go about it.
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The SPLC is an honorable institution that has fought discrimination and racism for years.
That "Goo Goo" eyes is going after them shows us the SPLC was correct in identifying these haters and outing them! This "lawsuit" is just more Trump "Paint them black!" retribution and we all know THAT IS THE ULTIMATE HYPOCRISY! Trump fails again!
Kash Patel’s futile quest for validation — Amanda Marcotte
The FBI director tries to force his popularity on the American public and media — and it backfires.
The Atlantic’s recent exposé of Kash Patel is full of alarming allegations. The FBI director, according to sources, has exhibited erratic behavior and absenteeism stemming from what is described as heavy drinking. Especially worrisome is the claim that his staff has repeatedly had “difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated.”
But it was the article’s opening anecdote that drew the most chatter online because it portrayed Patel as hyper-paranoid. In early April, the sources allege, he had a “freak-out” because he couldn’t log onto his work computer. He reportedly “panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired.” It turned out to be a technical error; as of this writing, Patel continues to serve as FBI director.
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Inept as all Trump loyalist traitors.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew a gasket when asked about recent setbacks in the war in Iran, and he responded with new threats against journalists. — Travis Gettys
The Pentagon chief has disparaged reporters as "unpatriotic" and compared them the Pharisees, the biblical scribes who played a hand in handing over Jesus to the Romans for crucifixion, and he reacted hotly Friday morning when asked about U.S. Army nuclear chief Andrew Hug, who reportedly revealed top-secret information to a stranger he met through a dating app.
"He won't work here anymore, that's an easy one," Hegseth said. "Well, we're always on the lookout for CIA threats, any internal, anyone talking out of school about things they should not. We take leaking very seriously here, informally or formally, which is why some of the reporting done by some of the people in here is incredibly problematic. They're willing to publish things based on classified information that would potentially harm those in harm's way, and we think them doing so is incredibly irresponsible and unpatriotic, and I would encourage members of the press to think twice about the lives they're affecting when they publish things in their publications, like the New York Times."...
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This jerkwad is not fit for ANY command. He rattles too easily!
If the CIA is operating internally then we have a problem!
Hegseth has done nothing but weaken our armed forces!
Virginia Republicans taken aback by Trump's claim the election was rigged against them — Matthew Chapman
When voters in Virginia approved Democrats' plan to redraw the commonwealth's congressional districts in retaliation for mid-decade Republican gerrymanders, President Donald Trump went to his go-to accusation that the vote had been "rigged." Close Trump allies, like far-right activist Laura Loomer, made similar claims.
Republicans in Virginia, however, never got the memo about that, according to The Bulwark.
"At no point had allegations of misconduct come from any actual on-the-ground Republicans," wrote Andrew Egger. "No one in the Fairfax County GOP alleged any funny business yesterday. Party Chair Katie Gorka — wife of C-list Trumpworld figure Sebastian Gorka — decried the Democrats’ 'hollow, shameful victory,' but made no allegations of fraud. When I reached out to the county party to get her response to Trump’s allegation, she did not reply."
Furthermore, noted Egger, "I live in Fairfax County, so just for fun I swung by the party office to see if anyone there had heard about any fraud: the friendly pair of front-desk volunteers I talked to, Bob and Nancy Hoyler, said that 'we haven’t really heard anything about that.' (Then again, Bob added, 'they never tell us anything.')"
The referendum in question allows Democrats to replace Virginia's current map, created through a nonpartisan process, with one that gives Democrats four extra seats, leaving only one district in the entire state that favors Republicans. This comes after Republicans in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri redrew their maps at Trump's demand to give their party extra seats, and California retaliated with a referendum that tilted five GOP seats toward Democrats.
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All of them dead asleep and drawing paychecks!
Ex-Republican insider delivers grim prediction Trump will let Ghislaine Maxwell 'walk' — Nicole Charky-Chami
Ex-Republican operative Rick Wilson said Thursday that he anticipates President Donald Trump will extend a pardon to Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
In his Substack, the co-founder of the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project wrote how Trump's pervasive use of pardons could soon lead to Maxwell's exit from prison.
"And the pardons. Dear God, the pardons," Wilson wrote. "What was once the solemn prerogative of a sovereign, the mercy of a republic, the final conscience of the state, is now a product on a shelf, with a price tag payable in cash, crypto, or the correct political humiliation."
Trump has issued more than 1,700 pardons since returning to office in 2025, including nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 rioters.
"Fraudsters walk. Tax cheats walk. Violent insurrectionists walk," Wilson added. "Campaign donors with federal indictments walk twice and get brunch. Pay the man, take the paper, leave through the back door of the West Wing, and don’t forget to tip the butler. Very soon now, Ghislaine Maxwell will walk. Mark it down."
Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking of a minor, has told lawmakers she will testify under oath — but only under the condition of clemency. The move has split House Oversight and Government Reform Committee members leading the probe into Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators over whether President Donald Trump should grant her that pardon. Maxwell was previously deposed by House lawmakers and invoked her Fifth Amendment right to decline to answer the committee's questions. Trump is the only one with the power to pardon her, something he has not yet ruled out.
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Then she could sing a different tune to the criminal.
Court swats aside GOP lawsuit to strip the vote from Americans abroad — Matthew Chapman
The Republican National Committee's lawsuit to try to strip thousands of Americans living overseas of the right to vote has been thrown out by a Michigan court.
According to the liberal elections outlet Democracy Docket, "In a sweeping opinion, the Michigan Court of Claims dismissed the case brought by the Republican National Committee and state Republicans, upholding a law that allows certain U.S. citizens living overseas to inherit voting rights from their families in Michigan."
The law in question — which was also unsuccessfully challenged by the GOP two years ago — grants the right to vote to legal-age children and spouses of Michigan residents living abroad, even if those family members have never lived in Michigan themselves, using the last Michigan address of their relative. Such a law would be useful in particular for the families of military servicemembers stationed overseas.
The GOP argued that the law violated residency requirements laid out in the Michigan constitution — but state judge Sima Patel disagreed, saying the legislature has discretion to set residency requirements for voting purposes.
“At stake in this case is the right of the spouses and dependents of absent uniformed services and overseas voters (collectively 'the subject group') to register to vote and cast [absentee ballots] in Michigan,” said the opinion. “Both federal and state law protect the right of the subject group to vote by [absentee ballot]. The federal government requires states to permit absent uniformed services and overseas voters, as well as their spouses and dependents, to apply for and vote by [absentee ballot].”
Republicans are currently moving forward with a similar lawsuit against overseas voters in Virginia.
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These Trump Crime Syndicate members are a disgrace to America. This is way more than obvious.
Buffoon Navy Secretary Replaced With Other Buffoon. Is This About Hegseth’s Daddy Issues? — Evan Hurst
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth — his dumb unqualified Fox News primadonna with severe masculinity issues and unremarkable military experience, who took a sobriety pledge to Megyn Kelly to get the job as Defense secretary, and who clearly desperately wants to be Trump’s fourth son — are in the middle of a stupid and ill-advised naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that’s going approximately as well as all Trump’s other decisions go.
So obviously it was time for Secretary Sobriety-Faced to fire the Navy Secretary!
The news came out suddenly last night that Navy Secretary John Phelan would be leaving his job immediately. Sean Parnell, asslicker to Trump’s asslicker, announced it on Twitter like it was the most normal thing in the world:
Uh huh. So that’s bullshit, obviously.
The real news started to come out fast, because Hegseth’s Pentagon leaks like a sieve because no one who’s good at their job respects the Secretary of Hairstyles, Makeup and WAR!
The Wall Street Journal reported that Phelan hadn’t quit, he had been fired, “after months of simmering tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to U.S. officials.” Uh oh, drama with the queen bee!
Pentagon officials told congressional aides on Wednesday that Hegseth fired Phelan because he and [Deputy Defense Sec Steve] Feinberg felt the Navy secretary wasn’t moving quickly enough on President Trump’s shipbuilding priorities, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
Trump agreed with Hegseth that it was time for new Navy leadership, according to a senior administration official.
You mean that weird obsession where Trump thinks he knows how to design ships and make them as ass-ugly as his homes and his ballrooms? OK. “Fire the Navy secretary! He isn’t letting Dear Leader build his beautiful gold-plated boats!”
Gotta be more to this. Here’s some more:
Phelan’s firing comes after a rocky tenure under Hegseth and Feinberg, including tension over Phelan’s close relationship with Trump, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions. Phelan regularly chats with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club, just down the street from his own Florida home, and told lawmakers last year that he exchanges texts with the president about shipbuilding in the middle of the night.
The top Pentagon leaders were particularly annoyed last fall when Phelan pitched the idea for a modern battleship directly to Trump, bypassing Hegseth, the people said.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha OK SO!
As we have discussed many gabillions of times, and as we have alluded to in this very post already, Pete Hegseth has obvious, severe, and incurable masculine insecurity issues, probably because he’s known from a young age that he’ll never be more than a total pussy.
But he also has severe daddy issues, which are obviously related to the other thing. Part of it is the authoritarian sicko version of Christianity he’s part of, which is at its heart just a hierarchical system to make white conservatives feel safe by telling them exactly which men they are the boss of and which ones are the boss of them....
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Also untreated PTSD (allegedly).
Fifth Circuit Says Texas Free To Shove Ten Commandments Down Schoolchildren's Throats — Robyn Pennacchia
Texas is now free to force schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state, as per a no-good-very-bad ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturning a lower court’s block on the no-good-very-bad law. Somehow, possibly because they are especially daft, the court found that the law did not violate the First Amendment or amount to the establishment of religion.
“No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin,” read the 9-8 ruling that obviously ignored the intent of the law.
Rather ridiculously, the court claimed that because the Supreme Court invalidated the Lemon test — which, very sensibly, held that a law must “(A) have a secular purpose, (B) have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion, and (C) not foster excessive government entanglement with religion” — they now have a new (deeply stupid) way of determining whether or not a law violates the Establishment clause.
Also, you will note, absolutely no one is wearing a powdered wig and the school children rarely spend their recess time rolling a wooden circle around by hitting it with a bat. Therefore, ipso facto, shoving the tenets of the Christian religion down the throats of children in public schools does not count as the establishment of religion.
Soon-to-be divorced adulterer Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the ruling, stating that “The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day.” You know, just like he did.
It is not actually clear how the Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, given that the entire first slate of is nullified by the aforementioned First Amendment to the Constitution, as well as the fact that our entire economic system is based largely on covetousness, but Paxton did not care to explain that part. Probably because of the whole adultery thing.
A spokesperson for Texas Governor Greg Abbott said the mandate was a “commonsense law, consistent with our history and tradition,” also not explaining why that would be, particularly given that school prayer has been illegal in this country since 1962’s Engel v. Vitale. But hey! If you describe your terrible law as “commonsense,” that means everyone has to go along with it.
I mean, it’s just common sense.
Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, who will likely be facing Paxton in the upcoming election (the Republicans are still in a runoff), explained that his Christian faith does not involve demanding the state evangelize to children.
He said:
“I’m not sure if Ken Paxton is in a place to lecture us on moral values. My faith teaches me to love my neighbor as myself — not just my neighbors who look like me, vote like me, or pray like me.
”I don’t want anyone forcing their religion down my throat, and I certainly don’t want the government forcing a religion down my throat.
”I’m a Christian, but I know that the most dangerous form of government is theocracy. Because the only thing worse than a tyrant is a tyrant who thinks they’re on a mission from God.”
And the only thing worse than that is one who thinks that they literally are God (or, to be fair, Doctor God)....
The ACLU, which represented the plaintiffs in the matter, also issued a statement:
“We are extremely disappointed in today’s decision. The Court’s ruling goes against fundamental First Amendment principles and binding U.S. Supreme Court authority. The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction. This decision tramples those rights. We anticipate asking the Supreme Court to reverse this decision and uphold the religious-freedom rights of children and parents.”...
What schools should do, frankly, should be to put the Commandments on the wall …next to the tenets of every other religion on earth, past and present. Because, really, nothing makes a person skeptical about one God quite like learning about all of the others. Most of them won’t do that, because Texas, but a girl can dream.
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There is nothing "common sense" about this! Zero!
We have separation of church and state. If we do not then every religion may post their tenets in any tax supported institution in America. Fight fasicsm!
Tom Cotton Condemns Reclassification Of Marijuana, Blames Weed For Psychosis Cases, Fatal Car Crashes
The Hill reports:
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Thursday criticized the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision to downgrade state-approved medical marijuana to a less dangerous drug. “Marijuana today is much more potent than just ten or twenty years ago, leading to increased psychosis, anti-social behavior, and fatal car crashes,” Cotton wrote on the social platform X.
“Arkansans don’t want more dangerous drugs obtained more easily,” he continued. “A change to marijuana’s drug classification is a step in the wrong direction.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order on Thursday morning to reclassify marijuana from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s strictest Section I regulatory level to the lower Section III classification.
"last year alone, marijuana has caused zero overdose deaths" — Scott Eats Wood (comments)
"When folks get too high from pot, the worst that happens is they vomit on your driveway." — New Jamieboy Highballs (comments)
"My brother in Christ. If anyone needs a 25mg edible, it's you." — Sir arcane (comments)
"Nearly 80 years of lying their asses off about Marijuana all to justify the legal harassment by cops of the youth and black people and justify the drug war that has intentionally re-enslaved so many.
And they never stop making shit up about a drug so unbelievably less dangerous than legal cigarettes and legal alcohol it’s not even funny.
At this point, this should be treated as someone going on a rant about the evils of the Irish" — .— Cerberus137
"American conservativism causes more psychoses and deaths than weed ever could." — Phil da Bern (comments)
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Hard numbers: 0.47% for grass. 3.5% for alcohol. More than 7 times as often on booze.
Do people that drink alcohol responsibly pour it down until they reach the end of a bottle? Only addicts do that. Using marijuana requires the same respect. Know your dosage. Don't bogart that joint my friend...
International Criminal Court Rules Former Philippines President Can Be Tried For Crimes Against Humanity
The New York Times reports:
The International Criminal Court ruled on Thursday that the trial of Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, on charges of crimes against humanity could proceed. The case would be a milestone for a country, in which there has been little legal reckoning for Mr. Duterte’s deadly crackdown against drug dealers and users.
Rights groups say that roughly 30,000 people were killed during the crackdown, many of them gunned down by police officers, hit men or vigilantes, and many of them minors or people who were not involved in the drug trade.
Mr. Duterte, 81, was arrested in March of last year in Manila and has been held in The Hague since then. Prosecutors argued at a pre-trial hearing in February that there was enough evidence to try him on charges of crimes against humanity, which he denies having committed.
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Definate good news for those of us who still support law!
Ben Shapiro Attacks “Pseudo Christian” James Talarico: Posting Ten Commandments In Schools Isn’t Theocracy
“James Talarico is now saying that putting the Ten Commandments in Texas schools is a form of theocracy. No, it isn’t. No one says that you must actually become a practicing Jew or an observant Christian in order to go to Texas school.
“Taking the foundational text of Western civilization, the Ten Commandments, and putting it on the wall in a Texas school is not, in fact, theocracy. By the way, having Christmas pageants in a public school is also not theocracy. When I went to public school when I was a kid, I was in the Christmas pageant. So was my younger sister who’s now married to a rabbi.
“We might want to put the Ten commandments in Texas schools or in public schools in general is because it says a couple of things that now seem to be in controversy. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not murder. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s property. There are at least three commandments the Democrats are very much against these days, apparently.
“The idea that they’re putting the Ten Commandments in Texas schools is full-scale theocracy is totally insane. Of course, it comes from a pseudo-Christian.” – Ben Shapiro, ignoring the multiple commandments broken by Texas AG Ken Paxton, who brought the lawsuit.
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The 10 Commandments are not directly incorporated into U.S. law. The U.S. legal system is secular and based on a combination of common law, constitutional law, and statutory law.
The First Amendment's Establishment Clause prohibits the government from establishing an official religion or favoring one religion over another. This has been interpreted to mean that the 10 Commandments cannot be displayed in government buildings or on public property as a religious endorsement.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in cases like McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky (2005) that displaying the 10 Commandments in government settings can violate the Establishment Clause if the primary purpose is to advance religion. (what other purpose would it possibly be since the original was written by a cleric to advance their views on their religion?)
'The man was disarmed': Tom Homan confronted on Alex Pretti killing at TPUSA event — David Edwards
U.S. border czar Tom Homan at a right-wing Turning Point USA event faced questions about immigration agents killing Minnesota resident Alex Pretti.
At a TPUSA event on Thursday, host Benny Johnson invited members of the audience to ask Homan questions. One young man demanded "accountability" for Pretti's killing.
"Out of all three speakers, you're the only one I didn't boo for," the man told Homan, noting that he had jeered Johnson and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R). "So my question is specifically in response to the administration's response to the killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota. My, the biggest issue that I have with that, obviously, beyond the actual act itself, which we all saw the video, right?"
"There was a protester, you know, upwards to 15 ice agents gathered around him," he continued. "They disarmed him about five seconds before he was shot and killed. That's extremely concerning to someone who believes in limited government and who believes in civil liberties. And the biggest concern of that was that day, like they didn't even try to investigate what happened."
The audience member recalled that White House adviser Stephen Miller had claimed Pretti was trying to do "maximum harm" to law enforcement.
"It reminds me of the quote in the George Orwell quote in 1984. The party told you to project your eyes and ears. We all saw the video. We all saw what happened. And the administration's gut response by top officials was to immediately deny any accountability for what happened," the man observed. "And I understand that he, you know, there's videos of him kicking cars. I understand that. All of that is irrelevant. The man was disarmed."
"We saw the gun taken off of his body, and then he, he was subsequently shot by upwards to 15 ICE agents around him," he added. "Is the administration ever going to take accountability? And are those ICE agents that shot and murdered that man ever going to be held accountable?"
Homan responded by declining to say whether the Trump administration officials would take accountability.
"Okay, so I can't speak for Kristi Noem, Stephen, I'll speak for myself," the border czar replied. "After those shootings, I get a phone call from President Trump, so that I need to go to Minnesota and fix some things and de-escalate."
"I can assure you the FBI is investigating," he insisted. "I'm not going to comment on ongoing investigations. That's a career cop, you just don't do that."
"The FBI has it, along with internal affairs from ICE, and they're running [the] investigation. But I stand by if someone violates the law, they need to be held accountable. And we'll see what comes out of the investigation."
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He means their cover-up. Like Epstein. They only investigate opposition they want to imcriminate.
Elon Musk Says Pedro Sánchez Did HIGH TREASON! Against ... White People? — Evan Hurst
There’s more fallout this week from what looks like it was just an amazing conference in Barcelona, the first-ever Progressive Mobilisation Conference. It was progressive leaders from all over the world! They mobilised! With an “s,” because the conference happened in Europe, and not because they are teenage girls going through that phase where they make their lowercase “a”-s like typewriters and now they have discovered British spellings and they are officially “cultured”!
The other day, Greg Gutfeld was on Fox News clinging to his blanky, begging for the authorities to arrest Tim Walz for treason for daring to criticize Dear Leader abroad. And we will have another one of those by the end of this post!
But did you know that you can be accused of treason by inbred idiot Americans, especially the kind that was born a poor white supremacist in apartheid South Africa, even if you are not yourself an American? Yes, it is true! Because when you are a white supremacist desperate to preserve Your Way Of Life, you can call anything treason! Just like you can indict the Southern Poverty Law Center for the explicit purpose of avenging the Ku Klux Klan, and say it’s because they did “fraud” to their donors, who are over here throwing them money and begging for them to fraud them harder. As they should be!
Point is, Elon Musk, that patriotic American, has accused Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón of España of, um, well, treason, on account of what he said at the big gay progressive conference in Bar-thay-lo-na. Sure, Captain Ken Mound, whatever you say. What do words even mean?
As you can see, Elon was responding to notable famous political thinker “Humble Flow,” who posted part of Sánchez’s speech, calling it “the worst betrayal in European history.” (You can peruse their Twitter account to see what other things they consider “betrayals” in European history. You will be not surprised!)
And Elon said, “Dirty Sánchez is guilty of high treason.” High treason! Against what? Against America? Against Spain? Europe? Or just against white supremacists, haha spoiler, that is it.
Did you know you can “treason” white supremacists? Well the Trump Department of Justice does, which is why they are arresting the Southern Poverty Law Center for it!
Here is what Sánchez said that crawled so far up Elon’s ass and gave him the white supremacist anger tingles:
“Le quiero decir a la derecha y a la ultraderecha que se oponen que España es hija de la migración y no va a ser madre de la xenofobia.”
¿Claro?
Now this time in English:
“I want to tell the Right and the far Right who oppose this that Spain is a child of migration and will not become the mother of xenophobia.”
Damn fuckin’ right, it’s claro....
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¡Que quede claro para quienes no son nazis racistas!
Trump’s Morbidly Rich Machine Is Crushing Democracy — Thom Hartmann
Behind the noise is a ruthless, coordinated effort to dismantle the American system and rebuild it for the ultra-wealthy.
Trump is making insane proclamations about Iran again today, sabotaging efforts at peace by his unqualified, incompetent negotiating team. He’s lying to his supporters about obvious things like the price of gasoline. He’s not sleeping, up all night shouting in all-caps at anybody who will listen and, during the day, literally screaming at his aides.
His former-heroin-addicted brainworm-infected head of Human Services who has absolutely no training or experience in medicine or public health is destroying America’s public health. His wrestling billionaire head of education is shutting down the US Education Department.
His violent, alcoholic, unfaithful head of the Defense Department keeps violating the Constitution as well as both domestic and international laws about warfare. His wholly captured Department of Justice — now run by his personal lawyer — is demanding voting information from swing state after swing state and refuses to say why.
And the Republicans on the Supreme Court, the New York Times just told us, have invented a “shadow docket” to amplify the power of Trump and his billionaires while ignoring stare decisis and the Constitution itself.
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Death to fascism!
Law enforcement vets shred 'ludicrous and idiotic' FBI case that 'doesn't pass laugh test' — Travis Gettys
Law enforcement veterans blasted the Department of Justice case against a civil rights group that helped take down the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups.
FBI Director Kash Patel and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center on Tuesday, accusing the organization of defrauding donors by using their contributions to pay informants infiltrating extremist groups without disclosure, but experts say the FBI has long done the same thing, reported USA Today.
"There are, I would have to imagine, every day those kinds of operations, [in law enforcement],” said Javed Ali, associate professor at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and a former FBI counterterrorism official.
The federal indictment alleges that the SPLC solicited donations under the premise that money would be used to "dismantle" violent extremist organizations, but failed to inform donors that some funds would pay leaders and members of hate groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation and the National Alliance.
"They used the fraudulently raised money, by lying to their donor network - thousands of Americans - to go ahead and actually pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups," Patel said at a news conference. Blanche characterized the SPLC's tactics as "manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred."
The indictment further alleges that SPLC informants did not merely observe and report on hate groups but actively participated in extremist activities. One informant allegedly helped organize and provide transportation for the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, while another is accused of stealing documents from a white supremacist group that the SPLC later published.
However, legal experts and former law enforcement officials have challenged the prosecution's characterization, and former prosecutor Pat Cotter told USA Today the indictment is "ludicrous and idiotic."...
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They only investigate opposition they want to imcriminate.
DOJ’s Anti-Anti-Racism Indictment Has Major Holes — Will Sommer
TO MUCH FANFARE, the Department of Justice this week announced a new indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group known for monitoring and calling out the rise and prevalence of right-wing extremism and hate groups.
In the indictment, the DOJ accused the group of bank and wire fraud as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering, arguing that SPLC’s use of paid informants to monitor extremist groups was, in actuality, a funding mechanism for those groups.
Reading through the eleven counts, however, I noticed a telling omission.
In order to make the argument that “the SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” the government listed several informants in white supremacist groups who received payoffs from the SPLC. One of them was described as an “Imperial Wizard” in a Ku Klux Klan group called the United Klans of America.
The indictment cites an SPLC article describing the United Klans of America as a “millennial reboot of what was once a serious domestic threat.”
Yet the DOJ left out one key word from that SPLC article: “pathetic.” In the actual 2013 story, the SPLC described United Klans of America as a “pathetic millennial reboot of what was once a serious domestic threat” (emphasis added).
That doesn’t sound like “manufacturing racism” so much as mocking it. If the SPLC were really trying to whip their donors into a frenzy over groups like United Klans of America, why would it describe the organization as “pathetic”?
And why would the DOJ leave that one word out of the indictment?...
WHILE THERE ARE ULTIMATELY some missing elements in the DOJ’s indictment that caught my attention, in one major respect it is the oversharing of information that stands out.
Reading the document, I was struck by how much detail the prosecutors provided about the identity of the SPLC’s alleged informants, considering that these are people who exist in a world where white supremacists are murdered with regularity.
I was able to confidently identify five of the ten informants described in the filing based only on their descriptions in the filings and some articles on the SPLC’s website. The government provided specific titles for several informants and at least one relative, and there are only so many “exalted cyclops” involved in adopt-a-highway lawsuits out there. Someone more familiar with the violent racist demimonde—like a vengeful Klansman or neo-Nazi biker—could likely figure out more.
Who would want to risk their lives to reveal the inner workings of right-wing extremist groups if they know the FBI is comfortable revealing their identities? Then again, perhaps that’s a fringe benefit of this whole case for the Trump administration.
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To make it look like SPLC is in fact racist as the Nazis are. Reverse psychology at work. That “the SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” .is absurd and ridiclulous. We all know racism doesn't have to be "manufactured" in the US. It goes with the fucking territory. The Trump DOJ is now a large part of that problem.
What We Found When We Investigated Trump’s Latest Election Theft Claim — Andrew Egger
Old Man Yells ‘Rigged Election’
by Andrew Egger
It’s remarkable that it’s become so unremarkable to say: Yesterday, the president of the United States claimed that an election outcome he disliked had been the result of election fraud.
“A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!” Trump fumed . “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’ Where have I heard that before—and the Democrats eked out another Crooked Victory!”
Even in the crowded catalog of Trump’s bogus fraud claims, this one stands out as laughable. The entire substance of the claim is that the election was fraudulent because Virginia’s biggest counties, with the most votes to count, took the longest to count them. “Longest” being a relative term: the race had been called within two hours of polls closing.
Yet even within that two-hour window, some Trump allies were already laying the predicate for Trump’s argument: “New Virginia election results show opposition to the Democrats’ redistricting plan now leading 53% to 46%,” Laura Loomer’s show account Loomer Unleashed tweeted at 7:49 p.m. Tuesday. “However, Democrat controlled Fairfax County, one of Virginia’s most populated counties, still refuses to release its election results. Sadly, a swing could be coming soon.”
But at no point had allegations of misconduct come from any actual on-the-ground Republicans. No one in the Fairfax County GOP alleged any funny business yesterday. Party Chair Katie Gorka—wife of C-list Trumpworld figure Sebastian Gorka—decried the Democrats’ “hollow, shameful victory,” but made no allegations of fraud. When I reached out to the county party to get her response to Trump’s allegation, she did not reply. I live in Fairfax County, so just for fun I swung by the party office to see if anyone there had heard about any fraud: the friendly pair of front-desk volunteers I talked to, Bob and Nancy Hoyler, said that “we haven’t really heard anything about that.” (Then again, Bob added, “they never tell us anything.”)
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Retards like Trump have no clue about this day-in-age election process and counting ballots. Has he ever worked on an election board?
Who Goes to See Vivek at Ohio State? — Jim Swift
LIVE, UNSCRIPTED QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SESSIONS are a uniquely high-risk proposition for marquee events. Failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, now running for governor of Ohio, received an opportunity to reflect on this fact anew when, in an appearance at Ohio State University on Tuesday night, he found himself being questioned by a mime whose eloquent gestures were being translated into audible English by a clown.
OSU’s Mershon auditorium often serves as a venue for comedy shows—but not usually quite like this Turning Point USA-sponsored event. The balcony was cordoned off with pipe and drape, meaning that in a venue with about 2,500 seats, something short of 1,000 people came.
I found much of the programming amusing, as did a buddy I ran into there, independent journalist D.J. Byrnes. If you don’t know Byrnes, all you really need to know is that he once tricked Ramaswamy into meeting him in a Raising Cane’s parking lot by leading him to believe he was going to address the OSU football team there.
Ramaswamy’s whistlestop—part of TPUSA’s “This is Turning Point” campus tour series—had already been through a rough sixteen minutes before the pharmaceutical-entrepreneur-cum-presidential-candidate-cum-co-DOGE-boss-cum-gubernatorial-candidate took the stage. The ostensibly student-focused event had drawn a mostly older audience, whose patience had worn thin after a cavalcade of erratic speakers.
Byrnes and I had watched with growing discomfort as the itinerary, which began with a guy who pitched his delinquent private student loan restructuring company, progressed to a local TPUSA organizer, and then to Savannah Chrisley, the reality TV star (The Masked Singer, Chrisley Knows Best) who became a MAGA darling after successfully lobbying Trump for pardons for her reality-TV-star parents following their convictions on tax fraud charges....
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TX Republican gets brutal reminder after calling out blue state's 'egregious' election map — Nicole Charky-Chami
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said it was time for the Virginia Supreme Court to intervene after President Donald Trump's national gerrymandering ploy failed in the commonwealth — with plenty of people calling out the hypocrisy after his own state's moves to redistrict to gain GOP seats in Congress.
Virginia Democrats on Tuesday succeeded in pushing an aggressive redistricting measure aimed at gaining four additional House seats through redrawing the state's congressional map to favor Democrats in 10 of 11 districts.
Roy wasn't happy with the end result.
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The Nazis hate free elections and a free press. Flush them!
Kristi Noem's 'rushed and sloppy' handiwork could strip ranchers of their land: report — Travis Gettys
Kristi Noem may be gone from the Trump administration, but her handiwork lives on in a burst of orders that could strip land from property owners along the southern border.
The Trump administration is aggressively pushing landowners in west Texas to cooperate with border wall construction, and representatives from the Army Corps of Engineers delivered an ultimatum at a rare in-person meeting: Work with the government or face seizure of property through eminent domain, reported Axios.
"If the administration has a plan, and we try to coordinate with a landowner and the landowner doesn't respond to us, that's a message [that] you don't agree," said real estate agent Marvin Makarwich, escorted by a Customs and Border Protection agent. "But you're also not having communications to try to figure out if there's a way to do something different."...
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Get these people mad enough and we can expect a necktie party! The guillotines won't be required. They already have ropes!
Thiel-backed AI project to block bad press looks like a bust — Sophia Tesfaye
Silicon Valley billionaires can't judge journalism if reporters refuse to buy in
There is a persistent belief in certain corners of the tech world that complex social problems can be eliminated through computation. Right now, there are plenty of aggrieved founders, venture capitalists and MAGA-adjacent influencers who feel that journalism is one of those messy problems. And so a group of powerful men in Silicon Valley with a demonstrated willingness to retaliate are trying, once again, to bend the Fourth Estate to their will.
The pitch is that better tools would enable us to separate fact from falsehood more efficiently. Give it enough data, the argument goes, and the machine will find a bias-free path to truth. It sounds like the kind of solution a public exhausted by misinformation and trained to scapegoat journalists might embrace: a technological fix for a very human problem. It also assumes that the people building these tools have no stake in the outcomes they produce....
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Another BIG LIE by the elite Nazi. Killing our free press is one of their tenets.
Pete Hegseth Ditches Flu Vaccine Mandates — John Amato
Another ridiculous order from an unqualified Trump sycophant.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that, as of today, April 21st, mandatory flu vaccine requirements have been rescinded.
Whiskey Pete made this announcement via Elon Musk's X.
As usual, Hegseth attacked President Biden for requiring military personnel to get flu vaccines, but to Whiskey Pete, our military should be allowed to get deathly ill while carrying out dangerous missions....
I wonder how a soldier in the trenches will feel when a man or women next to them has become so ill they cannot carry out the mission. Say, in Iran.
Hegseth wants to control how a general looks in their uniform more than he does the health and safety of the entire force he commands.
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If one has to choose between their conscience and their country they need to get help at what it means to be in our military in the first place.
DeSantis Signs Ban On Local Climate Change Efforts
Fresh Take Florida reports:
In Orlando, Carrie Black’s government job is to move Orange County toward renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which she says could save millions in energy costs. But Orange County’s plan and similar initiatives have an uncertain future in the Sunshine State.
In Tallahassee, state lawmakers have moved to block such local efforts. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill in Jacksonville on Wednesday, which was celebrated as Earth Day, with a theme focused on renewable energy, accelerating the green energy transition and building a sustainable future.
“It’s like, ‘We’re just going to stop the madness here,’ and that’s what this bill does,” DeSantis said. “It safeguards Floridians by prohibiting all levels of government from adopting or enforcing these radical climate policies.” The bill passed 80-29 in the House and 24-12 in the Senate. Legislators voted almost entirely on party lines.
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The Nazi bastard hates our planet and its peoples.
Politico: GOP House Rep Hasn’t Been Seen In A Month
Politico reports:
Rep. Tom Kean Jr. represents New Jersey’s most competitive district this November — but nobody, even his GOP colleagues, can say where he’s been for the past month. A scion of one of the state’s most storied political dynasties, Kean’s team says the two-term congressmember is facing unspecified health issues. The New Jersey Republican hasn’t voted since March 5 and has missed almost 50 roll call votes.
Kean’s absence has largely fallen under the radar and GOP leaders haven’t addressed the issue to the conference, according to several Republicans.
The other two Republicans in the New Jersey delegation, Reps. Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew, said they have called and texted Kean out of concern for his health. But so far, neither said they have heard from him. Van Drew said it’s been “radio silence.” One Republican, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), said he didn’t even realize Kean had been missing until he tried to find him on the House floor Tuesday.
"You know how important you are when you’ve been missing for a month and no one notices" — Dan M (comments)
"Imagine being able to not show up to work for a month without any notice or explanation and still get paid. Must be nice. — Fen (comments)
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He must be in rehab and is keeping it secret?
Sec. Felcher Defends Trump’s Batshit Drug Percentages
The New York Times reports:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended President Trump’s frequent incorrect calculations of percentages when talking about discounts on prescription drug prices, arguing on Wednesday that the president “has a different way of calculating.” “If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10, that’s a 600 percent reduction,” Mr. Kennedy said during a congressional hearing.
Mr. Kennedy is mathematically incorrect. A price reduction from $600 to $10 would be a discount of more than 98 percent. A price discount cannot be more than 100 percent, because that would lower the price to zero — or suggest that the company was giving you money for buying the product. Mr. Trump has been making mathematically impossible claims about drug pricing for as long as he has been promoting the TrumpRx service.
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Do we need to discuss the stupidity any longer? Remedial math is required! Or a brain transplant!
GOP Blocks Subpoenas For Voldemort And Homan
Via press release from House Democrats:
Today, during a Congressional oversight hearing on Capitol Hill, the Committee on Homeland Security received testimony from U.S. Citizens who have been profiled, targeted, detained, and attacked by ICE and CBP under the Trump administration. Marimar Martinez, George Retes Jr., Ryan Ecklund, and Reverend David Black each heroically told their stories for the first time on the record before Congress and under oath.,br>
Republicans did not attend the hearing – shamefully refusing to listen to the stories of their fellow Citizens’ rights being violated by their government.
“I want to thank the witnesses who came to DC to tell us their stories before Congress and on the record. It took real courage to do so,” said Committee Ranking Member Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS). “It is clear that the violence that our fellow Citizens were subjected to by the Trump administration must never be allowed to happen again.
“However, it is beyond shameful that not a single Committee Republican could come to face their fellow Citizens or ask them any questions. I’m sorry they didn’t have the guts to hear about the pain, suffering, and loss this administration has inflicted on people in communities across America. It’s past time for Republicans to realize their oath isn’t to Donald Trump, it’s to the Constitution and the American people. Doing nothing is not an option. They need to step up and do their job.”
Republicans also rejected a demand by Committee Democrats to subpoena White House officials Tom Homan and Stephen Miller – the architects of Trump’s mass deportations – even though they were no-shows at today’s hearing after they were invited by the Chairman.
"The two most likely men to go to prison. Lock them up." — Dwight Williamson (comments)
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Saving their biggest turds in the sewers!
WH Blasted For Photo Of Women’s Tennis Champions
The Independent reports:
A photo of Donald Trump posing with members of the University of Georgia’s championship-winning women’s tennis team has been mocked online, with many calling out the picture’s puzzling composition.
“The official White House X account celebrates a women’s collegiate athletic team by placing them directly behind six smiling men. Gee, thanks, Mr. President,” one user commented on the photo. Added another: “Whomever from the WH comms team that approved this photo composition should be immediately fired. It’s so egregiously bad that it’s an assault on good sensibility.”
The Georgia Bulldogs tennis team was one of several NCAA champions invited to the White House on Tuesday to celebrate their wins. A photo posted by White House staffer Margo Martin showed the women gathered behind six men, including the president, who was standing slightly elevated on a step.
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A perfect example of toxic patriarchy! What absolute fools!
You All Started It And Virginia F*cking Finished It — Evan Hurst
screengrab from last night’s response video from Virginia state Senator L. Louise Lucas, who memorably replied to Ted Cruz, who was whining about VA redistricting, that “you all started it and we fucking finished it.”
Well here we go again! Another day of Americans going to the polls, another night of sexy results that demonstrate just how much people understand the assignment right now, and how ready they are to do whatever it takes to beat Donald Trump and these motherfucking fascists and Nazis.
Last night, it was Virginia, which was voting on its constitutional amendment to redraw its congressional maps heavily in favor of Democrats, in response to the Republican attempt at vote-rigging the midterms that started with Trump hereby demanding Texas redraw its maps and Texas saying SIR YES SIR! They had tears in their eyes, but they were not actually big, beautiful, strong men. (Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton we’re talking about here.)
If you see the New York Times while you’re out walking your dog today, be sure to let them know it started with Texas, since apparently they’re under the impression that no act committed by a Democrat could ever be a valid response to any bad behavior by a Republican.
screengrab from last night’s response video from Virginia state Senator L. Louise Lucas, who memorably replied to Ted Cruz, who was whining about VA redistricting, that “you all started it and we fucking finished it.”
Well here we go again! Another day of Americans going to the polls, another night of sexy results that demonstrate just how much people understand the assignment right now, and how ready they are to do whatever it takes to beat Donald Trump and these motherfucking fascists and Nazis.
Last night, it was Virginia, which was voting on its constitutional amendment to redraw its congressional maps heavily in favor of Democrats, in response to the Republican attempt at vote-rigging the midterms that started with Trump hereby demanding Texas redraw its maps and Texas saying SIR YES SIR! They had tears in their eyes, but they were not actually big, beautiful, strong men. (Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton we’re talking about here.)
If you see the New York Times while you’re out walking your dog today, be sure to let them know it started with Texas, since apparently they’re under the impression that no act committed by a Democrat could ever be a valid response to any bad behavior by a Republican.
Anyway, what Virginia voters did last night was huge and hilarious, and they know exactly what they did. Its delegation, assuming the state supreme court approves it — the state supreme court still has to approve it — will be 10-to-1 in favor of Democrat-leaning districts, compared to where it currently sits, at around 6-to-5. (Which is approximately where it ought to be, in a country where all the states drew their districts fairly, instead of Republicans drawing theirs to steal elections and representation from We The People.)
How hilarious? Let us ask a numbers nerd, since their Twitter accounts are the funniest and best on election nights. Tell us what Democrats nationwide have won in exchange for fighting back like actual motherfuckers!
Hahahahahahahahahaha.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, Republicans.
Wonder if Republicans would support a bill to ban partisan redistricting nationally once Democrats take the House by (potentially) huge margins in November, or if they’re just mad Democrats are for real fighting back and winning.
Haha, probably a dumb question!
Hey, remember when Democratic Virginia state Senator L. Louise Lucas saw Ted Cruz whining like a little bitch about Virginia’s redistricting plan back in February, and responded, “You all started it and we fucking finished it”? Oh, MAGA screamed and wailed! A Black lady they think they’re better than was talking back to them!...
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And Trump is still living?
Why Bullies Always Fail — as Trump Is Failing — Robert Reich
Trump's might-makes-right lawlessness will be his downfall. If we're not careful, it will be America's as well.
Friends,
Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — ranging from his attempted coup against the United States in January 2021, to his ICE and Border Patrol excesses (including murders in Minnesota), to his incursion into Venezuela and abduction of its president, to his attack on Iran, and his threats against Cuba, Colombia, and Greenland — all undermine the rule of law, domestically and internationally.
But that’s not all. They threaten what we mean by civilization.
The moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.
Trump believes that might makes right — that the stronger are entitled to attack and exploit the weaker. Violence against those who are or appear weaker is a hallmark of his presidency and his outlook in general.
He is profoundly and dangerously wrong.
In January, he called the unilateral military intervention that ended in the kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro an example of the “iron laws that have always determined global power.”
What “iron laws” is he referring to? “Might makes right” is not an iron law. It marks the destruction of the rule of law.
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And Fatso ain't the only one!
Republican Drafts a Bill That Would Make Joseph McCarthy Blush — Thom Hartmann
The bill writes Joseph McCarthy's wildest fantasies into federal immigration law and dares the courts to do something about it.
Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.
Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:
“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”
The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.
“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”
“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdani ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.
“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)
“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.
We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts....
That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.
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Chip Roy. The worst thing since slow stomach cancer!
Biographer Michael Wolff reveals new name gunning for 'lame duck' Trump’s 'MAGA crown' — Thomas Kika
All eyes have been on Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the names most likely to chase after Trump's "MAGA crown" after his second term. However, a one-time biographer with inside sources this week claimed that a new name has been circling the "lame duck" president, looking for his own shot at being the successor.
Despite his earlier teases and musings, Trump is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term in office, setting the stage for an unprecedented fight for his place as the 2028 GOP presidential nominee and, in effect, the new leader of the Republican and the MAGA movement. As vice president, Vance has long been seen as the most obvious candidate, but due to his historic unpopularity, other names have also been under serious consideration.
Michael Wolff is a veteran writer and journalist, best known for his tell-all books about the chaos behind the scenes of Trump's first term, based on sources he maintains close to the White House. During the latest episode of his Daily Beast podcast, "Inside Trump's Head," Wolff explained that the president's plummeting approval and the suspected drubbing coming for the GOP in the midterms mean that his "lame duck" era is fast approaching, and will see "power starts to ebb because other people start to step up” as “the party begins to think beyond the current presidency.”
In this search for the next MAGA leader, Wolff revealed one name within the administration possibly angling for a shot: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. His chances, however, are strongly dependent on whether or not both Vance and Rubio flame out on the path to the nomination.
"Is Pete Hegseth somehow, because he’s a performer, because he seems shameless, because he’s pro-military in some comical way, does this make him someone who can be a number two or three, and then number one and two fall, and he rises? Unlikely, but not impossible," Wolff said....
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Only possible if America wants to die a slow and painful death will this barbaric retard get anything other than canned.
'Devastating' Supreme Court revelations prove 'coward' John Roberts bows down to MAGA — Alex Henderson
Of the six GOP appointees who now comprise two-thirds of the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts is often described by legal analysts as the most nuanced. But he isn't nearly as much of a wild card as former Justice Anthony Kennedy, a right-wing libertarian Ronald Reagan appointee who sided with liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg over Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in cases related to gay rights or abortion.
The Religious Right was furious with Kennedy for his votes in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. Kennedy, however, drew vehement criticism from liberals and progressives for authoring the majority opinion in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010.
In an article published on April 22, Salon's Amanda Marcotte offers a scathing analysis of Roberts' work on the High Court. And she emphasizes that his record is much more MAGA-friendly than his defenders describe him as being.
"As chief justice, Roberts likes to present himself as a sober-minded intellectual who couldn't be more different than the blathering snake oil salesman in the White House," Marcotte explains. "But (a) New York Times investigation, which is based on leaked memos, reveals that Roberts, like Trump, lacks any real interest in fostering fair-minded debate."
The Times article that Marcotte references was written by reporters Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak and published on April 18. And according to Marcotte, their reporting paints a troubling picture of Roberts' use of the High Court's "shadow docket."...
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The fall of justice in America.
There’s a secret message embedded in Trump's Bible-reading stunt — Thomas Kika
..."So, why 2 Chronicles 7:14 for Trump?" Kaylor asked. "There’s a long tradition of presidents and preachers invoking the verse for 'God and country' vibes."
He continued: "Stripped of its context of a covenantal promise God made to King Solomon and his descendants at the dedication of the Temple, the verse has been applied to the United States by preachers and politicians for decades. In this retelling, the United States became the new Israel, Americans the new chosen people. Yet, that’s not a faithful application of the text. With apologies to Carly Simon, we’re so vain we think this verse is about us. After all, 2 Chronicles was written centuries after Solomon to people returning home from exile after being defeated and enslaved by a foreign power. The verse is a reminder to those on the bottom that God is still with them, and therefore not a wave-the-flag-pep-rally chant for the powerful who control the global empire."...
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It's not secret after all. This is another quote atrributed to the Jew's latest "god" at the time.
Data center growth threatens air quality and progress toward cleaner energy grid — Newswire Editor
Despite the rapid growth of renewable energy usage in recent years, the even-more-explosive growth of data centers is delaying the transition to a cleaner grid in ways that could harm the air we breathe. That’s according to new research released for Earth Day on Wednesday by Frontier Group, Environment America Research & Policy Center and U.S. PIRG Education Fund.
“It’s great that renewable energy is growing rapidly, but we also need to be transitioning away from dirty energy sources. We can't afford to lose ground on that front,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at Environment America Research & Policy Center. “Pollution from fossil fuels harms our kids’ lungs and dangerously heats up our planet. We need to get our priorities straight. A healthy, safe environment is essential for a good quality of life.”
The research, building on new government data, tracks a dramatic slowdown in the previously accelerating pace of coal plant retirements as utilities respond to rising electricity demand from data centers and other sources. Compared to 2022, when the country was retiring power plants at a pace that would lead to a coal-free grid by 2040, the current pace of plant retirements would keep some of our dirtiest ones online until 2065. Power generation from coal-fired power plants increased by 13% in 2025 as U.S. electricity generation hit an all-time record....
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This polllution of our environment could be as bad or worse to humanity as the radioactive fallout from the atomic tests in Nevada in the 1950s.
A Truth Social Presidential Meltdown: SCOTUS 'Will Cost America Its DIGNITY!' — Conover Kennard
Donald J. Trump took to Truth Social this morning to air his grievances that the Supreme Court won't simply rubber-stamp whatever the fuck he wants. Beyond his policy grievances over tariffs and birthright citizenship, Trump's post revealed an all too familiar pattern — deploying the "low IQ" insult against Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a phrase he has consistently and specifically aimed at Black women.
But he saved some of his morning wrath for conservative justices, too, in his lengthy, grammatically error-filled post that, of course, contained lies.
"How can the Democrats not like how the U.S. Supreme Court votes," he wrote. "The Democrat Justices stick together like glue, NEVER failing to wander from the warped and perverse policies, ideas, and cases put before them."
"They ALWAYS vote as a group, or BLOCK, even that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench (Sleepy Joe!)," he said of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. "The Republican Justices don’t stick together, they give the Democrats win after win, like a 159 Billion Dollar pile of cash on a completely ridiculous Tariff decision, and nasty, one sided questions on the country destroying subject of Birthright Citizenship, something which virtually NO OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD IS STUPID ENOUGH TO ALLOW."
Well, that would be news to the around 30-35 countries that have birthright citizenship.
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Trump consistently shows us he's a moron.
Kash Patel Is A National Security Risk — John Amato
The well-sourced Atlantic article describing FBI director Kash Patel's unconscionable actions leading the most important agency for the protection of the American people shows him to be a national security risk, and he must be discharged immediately.
Trump installed many of his sycophantic January 6 deniers, election fraud, and deep state liars to high positions in his government so they could exact revenge on his political enemies and those who investigated him, not caring that these agencies need real leadership instead of wannabe MAGA influencers using their position for clickbait.
The title of their piece, "The FBI Director Is MIA," soft pedals his actual actions and his alleged highly intoxicated state.
"He is erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence, according to the more than two dozen people I interviewed about Patel’s conduct, including current and former FBI officials, staff at law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, hospitality-industry workers, members of Congress, political operatives, lobbyists, and former advisers."
That isn't a quality you need to lead an agency of 38,000 people. Like many Americans, his drinking is an issue.
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Look at his past and by his fruits you will know him.
Trump's Social Media Posts Keep Killing Iran Peace Deal — John Amato
CNN is reporting that Donald Trump's incessant public outbursts and social media posts during the Iran peace talks continually upend them while frustrating the Iranians.
The report says that over the past weekend, they were close to ending the two-month war with Iran when Trump publicly boasted Iran agreed to everything he demanded, even though the talks were not close to being finalized.
"He also asserted that Tehran had agreed to many of the most contentious US demands — including handing over the enriched uranium — and declared an imminent end to the war. Iranian officials outwardly rejected many of those assertions and denied they were preparing for another round of talks, rapidly tanking the rising optimism for a deal. Now, it’s unclear where the peace talks go from here."
Peace negotiations are a sensitive thing between warring parties. Still, when the president never shuts the fuck up and constantly brags, boasts, lies, and threatens the country we are negotiating with, he destroys any trust between the two countries.
The US doesn't even have competent negotiators.
Trump is too in love with his own voice to keep his trap shut. He is acting as he did during the COVID pandemic. Erratic, unhinged, and mentally unstable.
There is no one in the MAGA White House to grab him by the collar and tell him the truth.
Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!
The country suffered.
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With each passing day that Trump is in charge, Amerca dies a little more.
AI Chatbots Telling Cancer Patients to Try Useless Woo-Woo Treatments Instead of Chemotherapy — Frank Landymore
AI chatbots will recommend that cancer patients try unproven alternatives to chemotherapy and offer up other unscientific medical claims, researchers found. While AI’s proneness to giving bad information is well known, it’s a particularly alarming finding given that it could be putting lives at risk by leading patients to try cancer treatments that don’t work, with tens of millions of Americans already using chatbots for health advice.
In the new study published in journal BMJ Open, the researchers tested the accuracy of the free versions of leading AI chatbots including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and the Chinese model DeepSeek.
The tests involved asking questions on health topics that are notoriously rife with misinformation: cancer, vaccines, nutrition, athletic performance, and stem cell treatments. The queries were worded to “strain” the model towards giving questionable advice, a strategy that safety researchers use to stress test their safeguards.
AI companies argue that these kinds of questions push their chatbots into unrealistic scenarios they’re not intended to work in. But the researchers say that pushy prompts used in their tests resemble how people ask questions when they already think they have an answer.
“A lot of people are asking exactly those questions,” lead author Nick Tiller, a research associate at the Lundquist Institute, told NBC News. “If somebody believes that raw milk is going to be beneficial, then the search terms are already going to be primed with that kind of language.”
The findings were dire. Half of the AI chatbots’ responses were “problematic,” in the researchers’ phrasing, with 30 percent deemed “somewhat problematic” and 20 percent “highly problematic.” Somewhat problematic responses were mostly accurate but left out crucial details and context, while highly problematic responses provided inaccurate information and left room for “considerable subjective interpretation,” per the study.
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Wake up sleepy heads! This backward thinking is killing us!
Meta Installing Software on Employee Computers to Track Everything They Do, Feed the Data to AI — Victor Tangermann
As if activity-monitoring software installed on your work computer that snitches on you if you’re away from the keyboard for too long wasn’t enough, Meta is taking the trend to its logical — and dystopian surveillance state-level — conclusion
As Reuters reports, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is installing new tracking software on all of its US-based employees’ computers that tracks all of their mouse movements and keystrokes, data that will be used for training the company’s AI models.
The company is reportedly looking to develop AI agents that can complete work tasks autonomously, in perhaps one of the more conspicuous efforts to automate human workers’s jobs we’ve come across as of late.
Besides the ethical concerns of forcing employees to train their AI replacements, the news also raises thorny questions regarding data privacy. Meta, in particular, has garnered an incredibly poor reputation when it comes to protecting personal data....
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Replace Zuckerberg and the world will be a better place!
FL Baptist Pastor Gets Life For Sexually Abusing Toddler
The Christian Post reports:
“I can’t stress this enough, this is a monster,” Sheriff Rick Wells said during a press conference. “He went into that church professing to be a man of God. But really, he is nothing more than a liar and a sexual predator.”
“He would abuse anyone at anytime,” Wells added. “There doesn’t seem to be a limit to what he is capable of.” Police say one of the photos shows Elwing abusing a 2-year-old, according to WWSB. Authorities also say they found eight to 10 hidden cameras in his home and his church office....
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Another one bites the dust. I guess he didn't get his copy of the "10."
Of course, it says nothing about molesting children. It was a common practice then same as now.
Trump Floats US Bailout Of Trump Org Partner UAE
Popular Information reports:
On Tuesday, President Trump said he is considering a financial bailout for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), an autocratic state experiencing an economic downturn due to the war in Iran. If the Trump administration does use public resources to rescue the UAE, it will be assisting a country that has partnered extensively with the Trump Organization and the Trump family.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that UAE Central Bank Governor Khaled Mohamed Balama “raised the idea of a currency-swap line” during meetings in Washington, D.C., last week with Treasury Department and Federal Reserve officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Bailouts are typically reserved for countries with deep economic ties to the U.S. to avoid adverse consequences for the American economy. But the UAE is not a major trading partner of the U.S. In 2024, the goods and services trade between the U.S. and the UAE “totaled an estimated $47.9 billion.” In comparison, trade between the U.S. and Canada totaled $909 billion, and trade with the U.K. was $340.1 billion.
Nevertheless, Trump administration officials appear to be open to the idea. On Monday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, one of Trump’s top economic advisors, was asked about the potential bailout during an interview with CNBC. “The UAE has been an incredibly valuable ally throughout this effort, and I’m sure the Treasury Secretary will make every effort to help them out should that be necessary,” Hassett said....
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Let's see — NATO must pay their way but UAE? Nah! They are our ally! Totally irrational brain at work!
'Trump is panicking': President's new 'insane tirade' on Iran spurs claims of 'dementia' — Matthew Chapman
Political analyst David Pakman tore apart President Donald Trump's recent rants on Truth Social about the Iran war in the latest episode of his show.
"The word 'dementia' is not a word that prior to Donald Trump held such a prominent role in American political discussion," said Pakman. "And yet now we're hearing the word almost daily. Donald Trump unleashed what many are calling a demented tirade on Truth Social once again. And there are a few reasons why Donald Trump is doing this."
"Reason number one, he knows that Republicans are going to get crushed in November," Pakman said. "They're going to lose the House and Trump and his entire administration will be mired in the muck of investigations and oversight for the final two years of his presidency. Donald Trump is panicking because he screwed himself on Iran and there are reports that he is in fear at the White House of what he has done to his own legacy."
Pakman started with a post from Trump proclaiming that "90 percent" of what the media says are "lies and made-up stories," that the "polls are rigged," that the results in Iran will "be amazing," and that he has made America "respected" again.
"Another example of projection," said Pakman. "Trump said under his watch we will be respected again much like we weren't under Joe Biden. Except it is under Donald Trump that we are a laughingstock. It is under Donald Trump that other countries say it's not even worth inviting the United States anymore because they'll send some Trumpian tool."...
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Meltdown of a defective brain.
Trump's corruption is worse than anyone imagined: NYT analysis — Thomas Kika
President Donald Trump's corruption, especially in his second term, is hardly a secret to anyone, but according to a new analysis in the New York Times, it represents a "profound violation" that is worse than almost anyone has imagined so far.
"To say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope and magnitude of his corruption," columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote in a piece published Wednesday morning. "It is as if you were to describe a modern thermonuclear device as a 'bomb.' That is true enough, but it is not quite the truth. It does not capture the nature of the thing in full."
As Bouie argued, Trump's level of corruption, which has netted him and his family $4 billion in his second term, is "so vast as to be a new phenomenon in American politics." This includes investments and gifts from "large corporations, foreign nationals and state actors," all blatantly attempting to gain his favor, as well as unprecedented amounts of money made from "branded cryptocurrency assets."...
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When he is removed from office he should spend the reaminder of his life in prison.
Karoline Leavitt goes 'full cult' in defense of Trump’s 'war blunders' — Alex Henderson
...During an episode of The New Republic's podcast, "The Daily Blast" posted on April 22, host Greg Sargent discussed Leavitt's rant with his guest: former National Security Council (NSC) official Emily Horne. Sargent told Horne that Leavitt went "full cult" in defense of what The New Republic describes as Trump's "war blunders."
Horne laid out a variety of ways in which the war is going badly.
The former NSC official told Sargent, "Talks are off. There's no plan for when or if they'll restart…. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the real source of power in Iran, continues to control the Strait of Hormuz. You know, it's IRGC missiles and drones that killed 13 U.S. troops, attacked U.S. embassies and diplomatic facilities across the Middle East, attack gulf oil and data installations across the region — and whose damage Trump political leaders at the Pentagon continue to cover up even as they're insisting that victory is at hand."
Horne continued, "So, when you hear this administration talking about their conversations with the regime and how there may or may not be peace at hand, I think it's important to remember: They often don't know what the heck it is they're talking about. Because they confuse who really holds the power in Tehran these days. It's really striking to me when I hear this administration talking about the regime change that U.S. strikes have brought about and the destruction that they have wreaked on things like the Iranian navy and the Iranian air force; those were never power centers to begin with."
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Of the idiots of the Trump fiasco, she remains in the top ecehelon.
RFK Jr.'s "Re-Parenting" Brain Worm Strikes Again — Cliff Schecter
Well, forget the Jews, now it’s Black folks who are a problem for RFK. You see Black parents—per this human marriage-vow apocalypse—have pumped their children with so many chemicals, their kids must be “re-parented.”
There are bad ideas, there are worse ones produced by that monster truck filled with congealed month-old-cheese-whiz Trump calls an IQ, and then there’s RFK Jr. He’s talking, so he’s saying something racist, stupid, ignorant or conspiratorial—or all four! Has anyone not reached a point where they’d like to duct tape his mouth shut to stop the noise? And, no, I’m not talking about the voice via inherited spasmodic dysphonia. I mean the idiocy exiting Jr.’s pie-hole on a quotidian basis.
I never thought I’d see someone publicly pull as many “ideas” straight outta their arse as Trump til Jr. got his motor-mouth going. I met the jackwit once about a dozen years ago. I don’t know what “cerebral event” struck him in the time since—lightning?—because, sure, he was weird back then. But a garden-variety numb nuts. Not a carnival barker on such a titanic level bats are searching caves for their missing feces in his dome....
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The Trump administration: The biggest bunch of fools ever assembled!
The Onion Relaunches InfoWars As A Satirical Site — Ed Scarce
"We’re taking something that caused real harm and turning it into something much funnier, and ideally, more useful,” Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion.
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You mean, it wasn't always a satirical sight?
Virginia Passes Redistricting, GOPers Reach For Smelling Salts — Susie Madrak
The vote may leave them with a 10-1 Democratic edge.
Voters approved a Democratic-backed constitutional amendment by one percent to sideline the state's redistricting commission and let lawmakers directly implement a new map. The Virginia delegation to the U.S. House is currently six Democrats and four Republicans and could go to 10-to-1 under the new map.
With the move by Virginia, Democrats have gained an edge in 10 seats across the country: Five in California, four in Virginia and one court-ordered change in Utah.
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Never forget the Nazis started this!
Attention Turns To GOP Redistricting Push In Florida
Miami’s NPR reports:
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis wants the Legislature to hold a special session to redraw the state’s congressional districts. But this move would be illegal, some state Democrats say. “They are willing to do an illegal unconstitutional act by doing mid-decade redistricting,” Rep. Ashley Gantt, D-Miami, said during an April 8 conference call reported by the Florida Phoenix. “That is literally nullifying a section of the constitution that is unambiguous.”
“This is illegal,” Orlando Democratic Rep. RaShon Young said. “It is against the constitution to redraw maps in favor of a party.” Mid-decade redistricting wouldn’t be illegal, but doing it to intentionally benefit one political party would be, law professors told PolitiFact.
Gantt’s and Young’s comments reference the Florida Constitution’s Fair Districts amendment that voters approved in 2010. The amendment prohibits establishing congressional or state legislative districts with the intent of benefiting one political party. Republicans hold 20 of Florida’s 28 congressional seats.
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Of course, they are criminals and don't give a fuck about law.
Only at Nuremberg did the Nazis finally learn the meaning of "NO!"
Iran Says It Fired On Three Ships In Strait, Seized Two
The Associated Press reports:
Iran fired on three ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday, intensifying its assault on shipping in the waterway crucial to global energy supplies and complicating already faltering efforts to bring the United States and Iran together for talks to end the war.
The attacks were carried out by the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, according to Iranian media, which reported that the force seized two of the ships and was bringing them to Iran.
That amounted to an escalation by Iran’s leaders, who appear poised to drive a harder bargain with American negotiators after President Donald Trump said the U.S. would indefinitely extend the ceasefire with Iran that had been due to expire Wednesday.
"Pretty impressive considering 'their entire Navy is at the bottom of the Sea, their Air Force is gone, their Anti Aircraft and Radar is wiped out'" — DaddySnark (comments)
"Yeah, for a war that was "pretty much complete" on March 9th, it sure has gone on a while." — Sarah (comments)
"Well we know math is woke. Apparently, so is the passing of time?" — DaddySnark (comments)
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Trump can't find a way out of the mess he's made.
Texas Wins Ten Commandments In Schools Appeal
The Associated Press reports:
Texas can require the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools, a U.S. appeals court ruled Tuesday in a victory for conservatives who have long sought to incorporate more religion into classrooms.
The 9-8 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals delivered a boost to backers of similar laws in Arkansas and Louisiana. Opponents have argued that hanging the Ten Commandments in classrooms proselytizes to students and amounts to religious indoctrination by the government.
In a lengthy majority opinion, the conservative-leaning appeals court in New Orleans rejected those arguments in Texas, saying the requirement does not step on the rights of parents or students. origin,” the ruling says. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that challenged the Texas law on behalf of parents said in a statement that they anticipate appealing the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
"I can't wait until other cults sue to do the same thing." — Lewis Kinslayer (comments)
"We don't need the 10 Commandments in Texas classrooms, but Ken Paxton could use one in his office." — Houndentenor (comments)
"This will surely help improve math education in Texas. At least the kids will now be able to count to 10.
The U.S. public education system generally ranks in the middle to upper tier among developed nations, with strong performance in reading but significant struggles in mathematics. In 2022 PISA results, U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 12th in science and 28th in math out of 37 OECD countries, while overall academic quality frequently ranks around 13th–19th internationally." — Sister_Betrille
"Cool, cool. Quick question: whose version of the ten commandments? The Catholic one? Protestant? Jewish Talmud? Samaritans? One of the other multiple versions that have existed over the centuries? Because all those groups number the commandments differently.
The people pushing for displaying the commandments usually dress it up as some sort of tribute to the Judeo-Christian heritage of the US, and though the commandments are a unifying reality among Jews and Christians. But any display ultimately favors just one branch of that 'shared heritage.' But the people pushing for it either don't know that or don't care" — Fen (comments)
"They're abusing their religious rights by foisting it on others. They're abusing the rights of people who follow other religions. They are abusing other people's right to be non-religious. Constitutional religious rights did not include abuse of other people's rights. This is fascism." — Cel (comments)
"Well, then surely it is also legal for a teacher to post other parts of the Bible, no? Like the part about Righteous Lot knocking up his two virgin daughters, and all the rest of the incest, like Moses' parent being aunt and nephew, and Abraham and Sarah being half-siblings.
Or how about in 2 Kings where some crotchy old bald guy gets teased by young boys and God sends 2 she-bears to tear assunder and murder 42 young boys. Or where God kills everyone except 8 people with a flood because he loves humanity. So, basically we are all the the product of generations of incest.
Great reading that book of stories and fables. Christians should read it sometime." — TexasBoy (comments)
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So, Yahweh's "laws" can be posted. Then what about Elohim, and all the other Jewish "gods" that were worshipped? Not so much? These people are so blind and full of fear. LMAO!
John Roberts embodies MAGA cowardice — Amanda Marcotte
The Supreme Court's shadow docket shows the conservative justices fear debate
One would think, in order to rise to the level of a Supreme Court justice, it would behoove a person to be fond of a rigorous debate. Not so with John Roberts, who is no less than the Grand Poobah of the berobed arbiters of constitutionality. A devastating recent report from the New York Times has exposed how the chief justice led the way to the escalating abuse of the shadow docket, a Court power once reserved for emergencies but that is now the primary tool of the institution’s conservative justices to evade having to debate or even explain their decisions in a lengthy and reasoned ruling available for all to examine. While this revelation is just the latest in a series of scandals involving the Court, it ties into a larger pattern that has animated and defined the MAGA movement from its very beginning: a cowardly aversion to robustly debating ideas....
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They live in total fear. And they use it as a weapon.
Impeachment plan for two GOP Supreme Court judges floated: 'Reasons for removal' — Ewan Gkeadow
Democratic Party candidate Graham Platner has outlined a plan to impeach two sitting Supreme Court judges.
Platner, who is running for the Democratic nomination for US Senate in Maine, told NBC there are reasonable grounds for the removal of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. Alito and Thomas have faced significant ethical scrutiny during Trump's second term. Alito authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, a decision that sparked widespread controversy and calls for his recusal from abortion-related cases.
Thomas has been embroiled in controversy also, with recent calls for his removal from the Supreme Court following a speech where he denounced progressive politics....
'Something is coming': Analysts warn Melania's 'can of worms' may be too much for Trump — Robert Davis
The "can of worms" that first lady Melania Trump opened up when she held a seemingly unprompted press conference about her ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein may be too much for President Donald Trump to survive, according to two analysts.
Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz discussed Melania Trump's recent press conference on a new episode of the podcast, "The Court of History." They speculated that Melania Trump must know something is about to be revealed about her ties to Epstein, otherwise she wouldn't have felt compelled to make some of the statements that she did.
Blumenthal described the address as a "can of worms" that the Trump administration has tried to avoid.
"Why is she so scared? That's the only question I have," Wilentz said. "Why would she do such a thing? The Epstein files have been off. He's blown up the Middle East in order to avoid the Epstein files. And here is Melania Trump coming out in the middle of nowhere saying, 'I had nothing to do with it in the way that you described.' Something's bugging her. She knows that something's coming. Obviously, something must be coming, or she wouldn't have done this."...
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"Something's coming soon. There will be no place left to hide" — Gimbal Lock, Lost Country.
'When did that become normal?' UN chief slams Trump as humanitarian crisis deepens — Stephen Prager, Common Dreams
US President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is costing nearly $2 billion per day, according to a Harvard analysis based on estimates from the Pentagon. The head of the United Nations’ humanitarian agency said the money could instead be used to save more than 87 million lives around the world.
Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the termination of billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.
“We’re already overstretched, underresourced, and literally under attack,” Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.
The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displaced collectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.
“You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked,” Fletcher said. “We’ve had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we’ll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty.”...
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Trump doesn't care because it's not his money, it's ours.
MAGA erupts after blue state hits back at Trump with new election map: 'Total travesty!' — Robert Davis
Fans of President Donald Trump's MAGA movement melted down on Tuesday night after voters in Virginia approved a ballot measure to redraw the state's election map.
The new map will give Democrats four more seats in the House of Representatives, and was passed at a time when many in the Republican Party are expressing concern about their party's chances of retaining power in the upcoming midterm election. About 51% of voters, or more than 1.5 million people in all, supported the ballot measure, according to the election results.
Virginia is the latest state to enter the redistricting arena. Texas and California both passed new maps that effectively canceled each other out. Meanwhile, lawmakers in other states like Indiana, Florida, and Maryland have considered passing new maps.
Fans of Trump's MAGA movement expressed outrage on social media.
"Total travesty!!" Fox News host Laura Ingraham posted on X.
"No [expletive] way this is legit," MAGA political commentator Juanita Broaddrick posted on X....
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Like their God, Trump, these motherfuckers never think they can lose when they are, in fact, fading from sight. Their attempted rigging backfired on them!
‘Something fell apart’: Speculation swirls as JD Vance’s whereabouts in question — Alexander Willis
Speculation swirled Tuesday as the Trump administration offered conflicting accounts of Vice President JD Vance’s whereabouts, with President Donald Trump saying he had already left for Pakistan for peace talks with Iran, only for the White House to later contradict him.
Early Tuesday morning, Trump told The New York Post that Vance was “heading over now” to Islamabad, Pakistan, for a second round of negotiations with Iranian officials in an attempt to bring about an end to the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Citing unnamed sources, Axios published a similar report, claiming that Vance was “expected” to depart for Pakistan on Tuesday morning.
However, Vance was spotted at the White House on Tuesday afternoon by a cameraman, according to CNN’s Alayna Treene, with a White House official confirming to the outlet that Vance was, in fact, still in Washington.
Complicating things further, Trump has also claimed that the peace talks between the United States and Iran are “supposed to” happen, suggesting the negotiations have already been agreed to by both parties. Iranian officials, however, have yet to commit to peace talks, per reporting from Axios.
“It is currently unclear when Vice President JD Vance will leave Washington for Pakistan, sources familiar with the talks tell me,” Treene wrote in a social media post on X.
“The White House is planning to hold further meetings Tuesday in D.C. to discuss the path forward, ‘and Vance will be a part of them,’ they said. A key question that remained, however, was whether the Iranian delegation would also show up. As of late Tuesday morning, Iran had not committed to sending officials to Pakistan for a second round of talks.”
The conflicting statements have led to intense speculation, including from journalist and professor Adam Cochran, who suspected there was more to the story.
“Vance, Witkoff and Kushner were all set to depart for Islamabad. We later find out Trump is hosting an 'emergency meeting' at the White House, where Vance's motorcade was seen,” Cochran, an adjunct professor of information science at Consestoga College in Ontario, Canada, wrote in a social media post on X.
“And the plane carrying Witkoff and Kushner departing Miami, is now en route to Washington instead of Islamabad. Something fell apart.”
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Oh, dear! The kid went out without his chaperone? Big mistake!
'Predator': Right-wing podcast concludes Trump is a 'sociopathic abuser' — David Edwards
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) about her fallout with the commander-in-chief.
In a Tuesday interview with Joy, Greene recounted how Trump had attacked her after she pushed for the release of files on Jeffrey Epstein.
"The behavior of Donald Trump that you described, what you went through and dealt with in the last few months of your position in D.C., it was abusive," Joy observed. "He is an abuser. And he uses the tactics and the techniques of a narcissistic, gaslighting, sociopathic abuser."
"And when I see the way that he treats people in comparison to the way that he treats people he knows in comparison to the way he treats the people of the United States of America, how he lies and gaslights and lies and gaslights. He has no respect for them, no respect for the truth," she continued. "He uses them, abuses them. He steals from them with the insider trading and the pumping and the dumping — and the dumping blatantly. He doesn't even try to hide it. The grift that is blatant, that he doesn't even try to hide."
"This is classic, classic characteristics of an abuser. And I just hope that people realize that... I hope they understand that he's a predator."
"Yeah, he really is," Greene agreed.
The former lawmaker revealed that she had been criticized for not speaking out against Trump earlier.
"It's been some fair criticism of me is people have said, well, he's treated other people harshly, and he's bullied them and name-called them," she explained. "I think it's this way for many people in MAGA, is we thought finally we've got basically a bully fighting for us."
"Was it ever right? No," Greene added. "I should have never, like, ever thought it was okay for him to berate or name call or be so cruel to other people. So I do want to own that."
"And it turns out he has become the biggest tool, the biggest defender, and the biggest fighter for the very system that we thought he would tear down. And so I just want to acknowledge that."
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But wait! There's more!
Republican arrested after unattended 4-year-old daughter nearly drowns: report — Matthew Chapman
A Republican candidate for state senate in Colorado has been arrested in Key West, Florida, on suspicion of felony child neglect, after he left his 4-year-old daughter unattended in a pool while he purchased liquor, nearly causing her death.
According to The Colorado Sun, "Frederick Alfred Jr., a 38-year-old who lives in Commerce City, is running to represent state Senate District 21 north of Denver ... A witness told police in Key West that Alfred’s daughter was unconscious in the pool and foaming at the mouth when he retrieved her from the water, according to arrest records. The witness performed CPR on the young girl and revived her."
The incident occurred at a resort in Key West. Police who apprehended him said he smelled of alcohol at the time.
"First responders say Alfred told them that he left his daughter and 6-year-old son alone for about five minutes while he went to get a drink at the bar. Arrest records show he initially refused to let his kids be taken to a hospital, but eventually relented," said the report. "The son first tried to rescue the daughter before the boy asked a bystander for help, according to arrest documents."
The state senate district in question was relatively competitive in the most recent cycle, the report noted: "In 2024, Alfred nearly unseated Democratic state Sen. Dafna Michaelson Jenet in Senate District 21. Michaelson Jenet resigned from the legislature earlier this year to pursue a private sector job. A Democratic vacancy committee tapped Adrienne Benavidez to fill her seat until early 2027."
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Good thing someone was watchnig out for the girl.
12 Red State AGs File To Defend Trump On Mail Voting
Democracy Docket reports:
Republican attorneys general from a dozen states moved to h |
