This year has been one fucking sad death after another. Now, we lost Barbara Barrie. She was like a constant visitor in my household. She was always on the TV or in movies that we saw…I love the scene in Breaking Away where she pulls out her passport and tells her son:
Mrs. Stoller is trying to encourage her son, Dave, to imagine a bigger life for himself. So she reveals a secret. Mrs. Stoller is trying to encourage her son, Dave, to imagine a bigger life for himself.
Mrs. Stoller: Did I ever show you this?
David: It’s a passport.
Mrs. Stoller: Quite cheap you know. A real bargain. I carry this with me all the time. Someday there’ll be a new girl at the A&P, and when I want to cash a check, she’ll ask me for my identification, and I’ll take out my passport and I’ll say, “Here!”
Her son hugs her, newly emboldened to see beyond the boundaries of his small hometown.
I tried to find a video of that clip but couldn’t. It really is such a sweet part of the movie. I’m sure if you have seen Breaking Away you remember it.
Barbara Barrie — who earned a Tony nomination for ‘Company,’ and both an Oscar and Emmy nom for playing the mom in the film and TV versions of ‘Breaking Away’ — has died at 95.
Barbara Barrie, Actress in ‘Breaking Away,’ ‘Company’ and ‘Barney Miller,’ Dies at 95An Oscar, Emmy and Tony nominee, she was impressive early in her career in the groundbreaking drama ‘One Potato, Two Potato.’www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie…
In that people article it says that Barbara died with medical assistance. Her cancer was terminal.
Now the cartoons, via Cagle:
Have you seen this?
Click for link.
Three Dems running for Congress have been injured in car crashes in recent days, and not one of them is quitting.
Mary Peltola was stopped at a red light in Anchorage with her family, headed to the Alaska Federation of Natives banquet, when a driver rear-ended them and pushed their car into a third vehicle.
Her doctors told her to rest, so she moved two campaign stops. Her team says she’s eager to get back out there.
Just one day earlier in Memphis, Heidi Kuhn and her husband Matt were caught in a three-car crash on I-240. She came out of it with a broken nose, whiplash and other facial injuries, and called it “quite a traumatic accident.”
Kuhn is running under a new map Tennessee Republicans drew this year to wipe out the Democratic district in Memphis.
Broken nose and all, she’s still taking on Republican David Kustoff.
Back in August, 80-year-old Marcy Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in House history, was riding to church in Toledo when another driver slammed into her car and ran from the scene.
Police arrested a suspect this month and say speeding on wet roads caused the crash.
Within weeks she was recording videos for supporters from a wheelchair. Now she’s fighting for a 23rd term.
Police say they’ve found no sign the Peltola or Kaptur crashes were deliberate. None of these women waited around for answers anyway. They got hurt, and they got right back to work.
Wish them a speedy recovery, then go vote like they’re counting on you.
And let’s not forget the one woman in Arizona who is a candidate that was recently raped while she was out working on her campaign signs.
It is all just crazy…
This is an open thread.
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The midterm elections are now less than a week away. It’s still looking very good for Democrats, but we can expect that the Trump gang will do everything in their power to interfere with voting and vote counting.
Delores Huerta
But before I get to the election news, there has been another notable death. Co-Founder of the United Farm Workers and famed Civil Rights leader Delores Huerta has left us.
Dolores Huerta, who with Cesar Chavez founded what became the United Farm Workers and led strikes and boycotts in the 1960s and ’70s that unionized many California table-grape growers, changing laws and the lives of thousands of migrant laborers, died on Wednesday at her home in Bakersfield, Calif. She was 96.
The cause of death was cancer, Erik Olvera, a spokesman for her family, said.
Ms. Huerta, who became a kind of Mexican American folk hero, depicted in murals and ballads, was the union’s vice president for nearly four decades and, until Mr. Chavez’s death in 1993, his second-in-command. He was the charismatic — and, it was later revealed, abusive — leader; she, the skilled organizer who coordinated walkouts and boycotts under a black Aztec eagle banner and negotiated pathbreaking contracts with agribusiness.
But there was a long-hidden dark side to her years by Mr. Chavez’s side. She was, by her account, raped by him — an assault she never spoke about publicly until early 2026, when she was interviewed by The New York Times as it was reporting on the extensive evidence that Mr. Chavez had also groomed and molested underage girls as young as 12.
“I saw him, again, as my boss, as my hero, as, you know, somebody that would do the impossible,” Ms. Huerta told The Times. “I never talked about it to anybody, and the reason I didn’t is because I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”
On picket lines and in civil disobedience protests, Ms. Huerta and Mr. Chavez practiced the nonviolent civil rights strategies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She was arrested 22 times, roughed up by strikebreakers and once severely beaten by a police officer, suffering broken ribs and a ruptured spleen that left her disabled for months.
The mother of 14 children, Ms. Huerta sometimes changed diapers between organizing meetings and nursed her babies during breaks in negotiations. Her children often lived with friends and supporters, ate donated food and coped with frequent moves. Most grew up to become activists and professionals, including a lawyer, a physician, performing artists, a therapist, business administrators and a chef.
Ms. Huerta also championed immigrants’ and women’s rights and was an ally of progressive Democrats like Gov. Jerry Brown of California, who signed legislation she sought; Senator Robert F. Kennedy, whose murder she witnessed; and President Barack Obama, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in 2012.
Mr. Chavez and Ms. Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 with little but a dream of an organization to help migrant laborers who toiled long hours at backbreaking work for low wages and with no job security, and to challenge abuses, including exposure to toxic pesticides, by powerful California growers.
“People thought we were crazy,” Ms. Huerta told The Salt Lake Tribune years later. “They asked: ‘How are you going to organize farm workers? They are poor, powerless immigrants. They don’t have any money and they can’t vote.’”
“Don’t be a marshmallow. Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk. Stop being vegetables. Work for justice. Viva the boycott!” – Dolores Huerta
But by 1965, they had 1,200 members and enough clout to join Filipino workers in a strike against table-grape growers in the Delano area of the San Joaquin Valley, and later in the Coachella Valley of Southern California. It was a bitter fight. The growers brought in strikebreakers, and the local police ignored repeated acts of harassment and violence.
When one grower began selling grapes under another’s label, Ms. Huerta and Mr. Chavez called for a boycott against the offender’s products. The F.B.I. placed both labor leaders under surveillance for suspected Communist ties.
But the strike won the support of some other unions, including the United Auto Workers, and of Senator Kennedy, who attended a rally in Delano on March 10, 1968. “The world must know,” he said, addressing the crowd of 4,000, “that the migrant farmworker, the Mexican American, is coming into his own right.”
The senator then handed Mr. Chavez a piece of bread. Mr. Chavez had been fasting for 25 days, taking only water, and weighed 140 pounds, having lost 35. Accepting the bread, Mr. Chavez broke his fast. It was a crucial moment for both sides in the strike.
The union had recently declared a national boycott of all California table grapes, and Ms. Huerta was already in New York City organizing what became one of America’s most successful produce boycotts, a cause célèbre that, polls showed, drew the support of 17 million households and thousands of food stores.
Delores Huerta was one of the great heroes of U.S. history. You can read the rest using the gift link.
The Trump administration is doing everything it can to interfere with the elections.
Attorney General Todd Blanche has delivered the same message time and again, at turns soothing and combative: The Justice Department is doing nothing out of the ordinary, and nothing remotely improper, in the lead-up to the midterm elections.
“We don’t do political paybacks,” Mr. Blanche declared last week, after he announced the indictment of a prominent Virginia Democrat on drug-trafficking charges.
“You got to stop it with that!” the usually measured Mr. Blanche said on Sunday, scolding Dana Bash of CNN for suggesting his effort to potentially block certification of Alaska’s Senate election to protect the Republican incumbent was undemocratic.
Yet it has become increasingly difficult to reconcile reassurances with reality, critics say.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announcing the indictment of L. Louise Lucas, a prominent Virginia Democrat, on drug-trafficking charges last week in Norfolk, Va.Credit…Steve Helber, Associated Press
In recent days Mr. Blanche and his team have announced, unsealed or initiated a succession of headline-grabbing actions certain to placate Mr. Trump’s demand for results, many targeting his longtime adversaries or promoting contested claims of election fraud.
That cadence seems to be quickening to a gallop.
On Monday, a federal judge in Washington unsealed new charges against James B. Comey, the third criminal case brought against the former F.B.I. director Mr. Trump openly reviles. If it is sustained in court, the charges open a new lane of criminal inquiry after the department’s indictment against Mr. Comey in April for sharing an image of seashells that Trump appointees say was a veiled assassination threat.
“This is a classic flood-the-zone strategy — run so many plays at once that the defense doesn’t know where to look,” said Greg Rosen, a former federal prosecutor who led the Justice Department section that investigated Trump supporters who ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Department officials declined to comment on ongoing investigations or matters before grand juries. But Emily Covington, the agency’s spokeswoman, said that all of the recent actions reported in the news media broadly reflected the normal progression of investigations and were in no way related to the election or partisan motives.
Mr. Comey’s team requested the charges be unsealed, and a judge determined the timing of the release. The government did not object, Ms. Covington said.
“This department is following the facts and the law, not anyone’s political timetable,” she said in a statement.
In the run up to the Nov. 3 midterm elections, the nation’s most powerful law enforcement official has hit the campaign trail, stumping at the Republican convention in Texas and at rallies for candidates aligned with President Donald Trump in New York and North Carolina.
The Justice Department, under Blanche’s leadership, has filed broad and controversial election-related lawsuits, including suing the state of Alaska last week to preemptively block certification of the results of the state’s tight Senate race if the Republican candidate loses.
The Justice Department has also executed search warrants and filed criminal charges against some of Trump’s political foes, delivering on promises to the president’s conservative base that current and former officials viewed as corrupt or undermining the president would face legal consequences.
The Justice Department has traditionally stayed quiet in the months before an election, fearful of being perceived of using its law enforcement weight to influence elections. But Blanche has had some of his busiest weeks as attorney general ahead of next week’s midterms, cannonballing into politically fraught cases as the president cheers him on.
The agency’s recent targets include James B. Comey, a former director of the FBI and staunch Trump critic who this month was hit with a third federal case in 13 months.
The Justice Department also this week tried and failed to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump aide, for allegedly lying to Congress during her testimony about the president’s actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Days earlier, the agency charged two former FBI officials, who have long been targets of right-wing attacks, with lying to Congress.
Trump’s most ardent supporters have applauded Blanche, saying the Justice Department has long been weaponized against the president and that he is bringing legitimate cases against people who they believe broke the law.
Use the gift link to read more details.
It used to be a rare occurrence for a grand jury to decline to indict someone charged by the DOJ. It has happened more than once under Trump and Blanche. The latest was the failure to indict Cassidy Hutchinson.
A federal grand jury in D.C. rejected an attempt by the Justice Department to indict former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for the account she gave lawmakers of President Donald Trump’s actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a grand jury matter.
Cassidy Hutchinson
In a brief court appearance Tuesday afternoon, Neville S. Hedley, who introduced himself as the acting senior litigation counsel at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui that the grand jury had not concurred on the proposed indictment. Hedley did not specify the defendant, but the people familiar said he was referring to Hutchinson.
The failure of the Justice Department to secure the indictment marks the latest rebuke of its efforts to prosecute one of the president’s political enemies. Attorneys for Hutchinson could not immediately be reached for comment.
The decision to present a case to federal grand jurors followed years of calls from Trump and his Republican allies for Hutchinson to face legal consequences for providing what they contend was false and damaging testimony about what Trump said and did as his supporters stormed the Capitol that January day. The case was presented to the grand jury by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in an unusual move for a false-statements investigation, The Washington Post has reported….
It is exceedingly rare for grand juries to reject indictments, in part because prosecutors only need to convince a majority of grand jurors that there is probable cause that a crime was committed — a relatively low threshold. But the Justice Department’s campaign to target Trump’s perceived adversaries has repeatedly been rebuffed by grand juries and judges, including in February, when another federal grand jury in D.C. refused to indict six Democratic lawmakers over their comments to military service members.
Read the rest with the gift link.
I hope Democrats are prepared for what Trump will do to try to interfere with the elections–this week and after the results are in. Here’s the latest on that.
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of Los Angeles just concluded a 3 1/2 hour hearing (minus recesses) in the California election case without issuing a ruling. He promised one tomorrow.
But he concluded the hearing with a very direct and unmistakeable warning to the Trump DOJ: “This court believes that it would be wise that any threats to state and county election employees cease immediately.”
The warning comes after top DOJ officials have repeatedly threatened to prosecute election administrators if they process ballots cast by noncitizens. The threats continued earlier in the hearing, with Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, again insisting that knowingly processing ballots that the DOJ claims are from noncitizens would be a federal crime.
The DOJ is promulgating President Trump’s Big Lie of rampant noncitizen voting by seeking a temporary restraining order that would force Los Angeles County to segregate and not yet count ballots from voters who appear on a Trump administration list that it alleges contains the names of some 20,000 noncitizen voters. It’s an unprecedented move to introduce a documented citizenship verification procedure into the election process while voting is underway.
While Judge Carter didn’t immediately rule, he telegraphed that he was likely to deny the TRO and suggested that instead he would schedule an expedited preliminary injunction proceeding in roughly two weeks so that he could hear evidence and witnesses and build a factual record for appeal. He also indicated he would appoint a special master, whom he had already decided on and was present in courtroom, to help him sort through the technical election administration issues involved in the case.
Importantly, Judge Carter’s suggested timeline of two weeks would kick the case past Election Day and prevent the Trump DOJ from interfering in the processing of ballots while voting is still underway. The DOJ could still prosecute noncitizen voters, if any, he said.
Jacqueline Wallace, a Jamaican national who had applied for a U.S. green card, was asking about student aid at a junior college when a school employee asked her to register to vote. Wallace signed up as a Republican and filled out the 2024 Florida GOP primary ballot that arrived in the mail, her attorney said in court.
Last year, in a push to investigate what President Donald Trump has alleged is a Democratic scheme to perpetuate voter fraud by noncitizens, the Justice Department charged Wallace with making a false statement in order to vote and illegally casting a ballot as an alien. The first charge is a felony, the second a misdemeanor.
People cast their votes on the first day of early voting, Saturday, in New York. (Heather Khalifa, AP)
After she pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor this spring, federal prosecutors touted the outcome as a win for Operation Take Back America, the Trump administration’s effort to “repel the invasion of illegal immigration” and combat transnational cartels.
To U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker, however, Wallace’s actions were something else: an honest mistake. At sentencing in April, the judge said Wallace, now 54, had not intended to commit a crime and was not part of an organized plot to sway the presidential election.
If anything, said Walker, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, it was Trump and his allies — “everybody from the leader of the free world all the way down” — who were undermining public faith in the electoral system by falsely claiming Democrats were rigging elections.
He sentenced Wallace to time served.
As the midterm elections approach, the Trump administration is again ramping up attempts to root out voting by noncitizens. The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security are devoting massive investigative resources to the effort, and they have announced indictments in more than 20 states across the country in recent weeks.
Authorities have charged more than 180 people with illegally voting or registering to vote as noncitizens since the start of Trump’s second term, according to a Washington Post analysis of those cases. Roughly 70percent of those people were charged in the last two months.
None of the cases includes allegations of an organized effort by Democrats or anyone else to cheat by drawing noncitizens to the polls. Rather, they appear to involve isolated incidents scattered throughout the country, many with defendants who told authorities they were simply confused about voting rules.
Read more details using the gift link if you’re interested.
What other nefarious plans could the Trump gang have to interfere in elections? Some possibilities:
So far, four doomsday scenarios based on Trump’s statements and actions have yet to materialize, in part because of legal challenges against aggressive attempts by his administration to restrict voting. There has been no major purge of voter rolls, no widespread failure to deliver mail ballots, no major presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers at early voting locations, and no national emergency declaration that could suppress or even halt voting.
“We look at every potential situation that could arise, and so far it’s just been really a smooth, quiet election . . . and early voting is going strong,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, noting that elections officials nationwide are in communication. “We’re all sharing best practices and making sure that we’re on our toes, ready for anything that could happen during that 12-hour period when the polls are open on Election Day.”
But even as more than 34 million people already have cast their ballots, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida, state officials still must get through the surge of voters on Election Day and count all the ballots. Then comes the certification of winners and their official seating, both of which the Trump administration and its allies could try to block.
Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, published an academic paper in September outlining the threats and guardrails in the 2026 elections, making the case for “restrained optimism” despite “the cloud of an aggressive campaign to undermine the integrity of the election administration system.”
State and local election officials across the country have been redoubling training efforts to prepare for the potential for federal interference.Credit…John Locher, Associated Press
“I’ve put a lot of my optimism into the lack of capacity to do the doomsday things, and the demonstrated fecklessness of the administration so far in following through on many of its threats,” Stewart said in an interview. “It’s also the case . . . that the the main activity is yet to come, and it’s likely to come in the post-election challenges.”
With a difficult midterm environment for Republicans given high prices and the historical trend of the party in power losing congressional seats, Trump has taken steps to restrict voting and undermine confidence in elections. He declared a “crisis of election security” in a July primetime speech and ended September’s Republican midterm convention by asking attendees to pledge to “try and cheat like hell” as he said his opponents do.
“The interference in the election, I think is going to be very difficult at any level because the courts have been pretty clear they’re not going to tolerate people interfering with the states’ rights to run elections,” said Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin, a Democrat. Although Trump has been focused on states with more competitive elections, Galvin noted that he had to successfully fight a Justice Department suit to force him to turn over voter registration information.
Much of the preparations for Nov. 3 can be distilled into one overarching concern — that the Trump administration will somehow attempt to meddle with the voting process or the results. The tricky part, officials said, is predicting what shape that interference might take while also recognizing that it might not materialize at all.
“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” said Shenna Bellows, the secretary of state in Maine. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”
It remains to be seen whether any of these scenarios will play out. Many federal officials have dismissed the idea that agents or soldiers could be sent to the polls, and the courts have blocked most of President Trump’s efforts to insert the federal government into state and local election administration….
With one week until Election Day, officials around the country say that they are bracing for even more unwanted and potentially undemocratic federal intervention — even as they can’t be sure what, if anything, the Trump Administration might do. To prepare, secretaries of state and other state and local officials have met with lawyers and local law enforcement agencies, trained poll workers and held meetings to consider what could come next.
Among their top concerns: that Mr. Trump’s attacks on the integrity of American voting systems could form the basis for challenging the legitimacy of the results. Along with that unease comes the worry that any federal intervention could further undermine public confidence in elections and cause voters to stay home….
Could federal officials try to seize ballots, as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Ga., as part of a criminal investigation that thus far hasn’t resulted in any charges?
Could Mr. Trump deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel or other federal agents to polling sites, even though his homeland security chief has said I.C.E. will not patrol polling stations and would be deployed to such an area only to investigate “specific threats?”
Might he invoke the Insurrection Act and somehow summon the military in connection with the election? Mr. Trump has refused to rule out the possibility.
“We really are shadowboxing here, because we don’t know when or if the blow is going to land,” said Steve Simon, the Minnesota secretary of state. “We don’t know the character of, or content of, what might be headed our way.”
Use the gift link to read the whole story.
That’s all I have for today. Food for thought as you vote early or next Tuesday. So far the courts have managed to protect voters from Trump. Lets hope that continues.
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The most important day is coming up. What makes me nervous is all this talk of being ahead in the polls. If you remember, Hillary was way ahead in the polls…and look what happened. (Honestly, that has always bothered me.)
Just a few things before the cartoons.
Let’s take a look at a few clips of Trump and his minions, these fuckers:
Trump on DC: "Nobody wanted to eat out. They were afraid. Even if you were in the restaurant, people would walk in and like the Wild West, 'Hold it up!' Everybody is standing there. Can you imagine? A fancy restaurant. They were robbing the whole restaurant. It's crazy."
RFK: "There's five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don't produce science. They don't win the Nobel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature."
That last clip is a bit queer…Vance seems to be making the democrats talking points.
JUST IN: Judge Gleason in Alaska sounds deeply skeptical of DOJ's 11th hour lawsuit there to halt certification if Sen. Dan Sullivan loses.She grants Dems' motion for expedited consideration and notes DOJ waited four months to sue over the ballot. s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28…
BREAKING: Judge Reyes has issued a preliminary injunction over the golf course and begins with this: "Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting President."ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show…
BREAKING: Preliminary injunction granted in the golf course case by Judge Reyes! The threat to close & destroy this historic property is the latest act of Trump corruption that the courts have responded toKudos to our wonderful clients & cocounsel @democracyforward.org & Lowell & Associates
“Affordability. The midterm Trump-like message delivered.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
There are a lot of headlines today worth investigating. There were two that struck home for me. First, the announcement of the death of actor Walter Koenig at 90 was symbolic of missing another piece of my childhood. Star Trek was such an inspiration to me. The series gave me such hope for the future. The second is the reminder that the expectations I held as a child were not met quite as I had hoped.
There’s some progress on the Epstein front. Lisa Rubin from MS NOW has this headline today. “House Judiciary Democrats release 50-page report on Trump’s alleged involvement in Epstein files. The report — issued just eight days before the election — makes multiple, uncorroborated allegations against the president while also detailing discrepancies in his statements about Epstein. I’m pretty excited to read this. Hopefully, both houses of Congress change hands, and we can progress to some real hearings.
House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Monday released an unsigned staff report laying out what they call “the case against Donald Trump emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s desperate efforts to cover it up,” with those Democrats now calling for an independent special counsel to investigate the president as well as what they describe as Attorney General Todd Blanche’s conflicts of interest and the Justice Department’s reluctance to share relevant evidence with state and foreign law enforcement.
“The women who survived Epstein deserve to be heard,” the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a statement. “Congress must have the complete files required by law, and an independent special counsel must investigate Epstein’s co-conspirators and DOJ’s cover-up and ensure that state and foreign prosecutors have the evidence they need to pursue justice.”
The more than 50-page report alleges that Trump was “an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women in the mid-to-late 1990s.” Although it also contains at least one entirely new allegation against the president, it provides no direct evidence other than the woman’s own conversations with Judiciary Committee staff.
For years, Trump has denied that he engaged in any sexual misconduct with any woman connected to Jeffrey Epstein, and he has also said that he knew nothing about Epstein’s crimes.
The report also repeats several other longstanding, unsubstantiated allegations against Trump.
A Democratic Judiciary Committee source told MS NOW the report draws on publicly available accounts as well as conversations with survivors. The source declined to provide additional details about those conversations, citing concerns for survivors’ privacy. The source also declined to quantify how many survivor conversations they had.
The report also compares Trump’s statements about Epstein in recent years to documentary evidence — including emails, deposition transcripts, Trump’s prior public statements, and Trump’s drawings and signatures.
Among the discrepancies highlighted in the report are inconsistencies with what Trump has said about his awareness of Epstein’s crimes.
The report also suggests that DOJ officials, including the attorney general, are “doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark” about Trump’s alleged participation in Epstein’s abuse of young women.
“Attorney General Blanche may have engaged in criminal obstruction of justice while acting on a mission to protect Trump,” the report alleges.
This report from CNBC by Dan Mangan and Kevin Breuninger adds more fuel to the fire. These headlines should stick for awhile. “Trump DOJ unlawfully fired Epstein prosecutor Maurene Comey, judge rules.” This finding shows how desperate Trump is to make it all go away.
A federal judge ruled Monday that the Department of Justice’s firing of New York federal prosecutor Maurene Comey last year was unlawful.
Judge Jesse Furman ordered that Comey, who is the daughter of former FBI director James Comey, be retroactively reinstated to her job as an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. The judge also ordered that she receive back pay from July 16 through December 20, 2025, when he inferred that Comey accepted another job, in the ruling in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
Maurene Comey, who had been involved with prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein, his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Sean “Diddy” Combs, was fired in July 2025. She later sued the Department of Justice, challenging its right to terminate her.
Her father has long been a target of criticism from President Donald Trump. James Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director in 2017, is being prosecuted for allegedly threatening Trump’s life by posting on Instagram a photo of seashells forming the number “86 47.” His attorneys are seeking to have that case tossed out.
Furman, in his ruling for Maurene Comey in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, rejected the DOJ’s arguments that then-Attorney General Pam Bondi could remove a federal prosecutor “at will” and without cause, and that current AG Todd Blanche could ratify that act after the fact.
Furman also rejected the DOJ’s argument that even if the Civil Service Reform Act requires removal of a prosecutor for cause, an attorney general’s firing of her constituted an implicit determination that she was removed “for such cause as will promote the efficiency of the service.”
“The Court need not dwell long on Defendants’ second statutory argument justifying
Comey’s removal,” Furman said, referring to that claim. “That is because the argument borders on frivolous.”
The judge said the DOJ all but admitted that its argument that the attorney general had power to fire Comey under Article II of the Constitution sought “to overturn nearly two centuries of Supreme Court precedent.”
“This Court, however, is bound to follow the Supreme Court’s precedents unless and until the Supreme Court overturns them,” Furman wrote.
Comey’s lawyers, in a statement Monday, said, “This hard-earned victory belongs to Ms. Comey, to all civil servants, and to all fighting for the rule of law.”
“As the Court correctly held, to accept the government’s argument about unlimited executive power ‘would be to unsettle the very equilibrium established by this Nation’s constitutional system,’” the lawyers said. “This decision reaffirms our bedrock system of checks and balances: the President is not above the law.”
This HuffPostarticle is quite interesting. It seems like Pete Hegseth’s conscience is bothering him. “Pete Hegseth Reportedly Angling For Blackburn’s Senate Seat To Avoid Impeachment.” Ron Dicker has the lede.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “angling” for Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) to appoint him to her Senate seat so he can avoid potential impeachment, Puck reported Sunday.
Blackburn is likely to win her race for Tennessee governor, opening up the post for the rest of her term, which ends in January 2031.
Hegseth and his family set up residence in Tennessee in 2022. Rep. Tim Burchett is also interested in the Senate seat, according to Puck.
The progressive advocacy group MoveOn told HuffPost there might more momentum toward impeaching the secretary than President Donald Trump.
“There’s a lot of ways to hold folks accountable. I think impeachment is one of them, and I think just from the perspective of our members at MoveOn, our members don’t want to take any of those options off the table,” spokesperson Joel Payne said.
Massie’s resolution charges Hegseth with waging war against Iran without congressional approval and an imminent threat, and ignoring laws to minimize civilian casualties. He also accuses the Cabinet member of using unauthorized lethal force on suspected drug-smuggling boats.
Wyatte Grantham-Philips of the AP reports “In his own words: Trump on gas prices and energy costs since launching the war with Iran.” Well, so much again for affordability vs. Trump Family Grifting.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that more expensive fuel is small price to pay for the war, which he describes as necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He’s also continued to blame his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, for the country’s economic problems. And the president has tried to frame the world’s oil squeeze as good news for U.S. production.
“We’re making a freaking fortune,” Trump told supporters at a campaign rally in Georgia over the weekend.
Here’s how Trump’s views on gas, oil and other energy costs have shifted since the war began.
Trump bragged about gas prices in his 2026 State of the Union address, just days before joining Israel to launch the Feb. 28 attacks on Iran.
“Gasoline, which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my predecessor and was, quite honestly, a disaster, is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states, and in some places $1.99 a gallon,” he said. “And when I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline, the lowest in four years, and falling fast.”
AT THE PUMP: Gasoline prices averaged $2.95 a gallon nationwide, about 19 cents cheaper than a year earlier.
As oil costs cooled amid hopes for peace earlier this summer, Trump expressed frustration that gas prices were not falling quicker.
“They’re too high considering that Oil is now at $68 a Barrel, and heading south,” he posted on social media. “The Retailers must quickly react to this statement, and do what they know is right — DROP YOUR PRICE FOR OUR GREAT AMERICAN PEOPLE! There will be no gauging, which is totally illegal. If Retailers don’t do this, big problems lie ahead!”
AT THE PUMP: The national average for gasoline was $3.86 a gallon — down from over $4.50 in May, but still about 67 cents pricier than a year ago.
Read the rest for all the lies. This makes me glad I’ve given up the car but I have a pretty good lifestyle here in New Orleans where staying at home and letting it all come to you works well. Also, this is my 15th year teaching on-line for Purdue University. It’s been a life-saver.
We continue to watch Voting Rights disappear under the Trump Regime. This article from ProPublica is a very necessary read today. We cannot allow any of our citizens to become disenfranchised. It’s downright Un-American! Gerrymandering is still the weapon of choice. “In a Newly Drawn District, Black Voters May Get a Representative Who Spent Years Undermining Their Interests.” How appalling is that?
Not two weeks after the Tennessee legislature carved Memphis into three congressional districts this spring, in a move designed to eliminate Democratic representation, Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor made his electoral expectations clear in a photo posted on social media.
Taylor and U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, a fellow Republican, sat side by side on the U.S. Capitol steps. “My friend Tim Burchett showing me the dadgum ropes,” Taylor wrote in a Facebook post.
On May 7, the same day that the new districts were approved, Taylor had announced his bid to represent the redrawn Congressional District 9, which for more than four decades had stood as the state’s sole majority Black district. During that time, it covered mostly the Memphis area; it now stretches across half the state and is majority white.
Taylor, 58, already has a track record with many of the voters he is now seeking to represent in Washington, D. C.: In his nearly four years as a state senator, he has taken steps to strip authority from local officials elected by many of those same voters. With the backing of a Republican supermajority, Taylor, who is white, pushed through half a dozen laws that superseded the power and priorities of local politicians.
Around the country, state legislatures from both parties have used preemption laws to control local governments. That tactic has been embraced by Republican-dominated statehouses in recent years as a way to restrict the ability of Democratic-led cities to enact policies state leaders disagree with, including protections for civil rights, public health and workers.
Memphis has long struggled with high rates of violent crime that have begun to fall only in the last couple of years. This is where Taylor focused his legislative efforts. He led the charge to prohibit judges from considering a defendant’s ability to pay when making bail decisions. He has tried to oust Steve Mulroy, the first Democrat elected as Shelby County district attorney in 25 years, and pushed through legislation authorizing the state to review every decision made by his office. And he co-sponsored a law that voided the Memphis City Council’s ban on police stops for minor traffic infractions, which had been passed after the 2023 beating death of Black motorist Tyré Nichols.
The question of how to keep communities safe has drawn divergent political approaches in Memphis — from Mulroy’s focus on rehabilitation as part of his effort to lower violent crime, to Taylor’s emphasis on aggressive prosecution and incarceration. Those approaches can mean very different experiences for the people of Memphis, which makes up most of Shelby County. Some elected officials and criminal justice experts warn that the laws Taylor has championed will embolden police to detain drivers without justification and the criminal justice system to lock up more people for longer periods in the already overcrowded county jail, where more than 65 people have died since 2018.
“I think he’s very dangerous for Shelby County, and he’s going to be very dangerous for the Ninth District if he gets elected,” said former Shelby County General Sessions Court Judge Bill Anderson, referring to how Taylor’s policies could especially harm Black men. Anderson retired in May 2025 after clashing publicly with Taylor over bail reform measures. (Anderson supported them; Taylor opposed them.)
Taylor is favored to win because of redistricting by Tennessee Republicans after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April made it harder to challenge gerrymandering that dilutes the Black vote. The Mississippi native, who lives in an antebellum-style mansion in a tiny and heavily white community east of Memphis, has loaned his congressional campaign $1.5 million. The candidate made millions after selling his funeral home businesses to a private equity firm.
Taylor’s opponent is state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a 31-year-old Black Democrat who has taken a very different approach to what the district needs. Pearson has called for addressing the root causes of crime by improving schools and economic opportunities instead of a singular focus on incarceration. He first made national headlines for his role in stopping the construction of an oil pipeline in a Black Memphis neighborhood. He is also one of two Democratic legislators expelled by the Republican supermajority after leading a protest calling for gun control following a 2023 school shooting. With deep family roots in southwest Memphis, Pearson has positioned himself as the better fit for the historically Democratic Ninth Congressional District. He has also received support from national Democrats and has outraised Taylor in campaign donations.
More at the link. I”ll finish with this article from salon written by Amanda Marcotte. “MAGA attacks on women voters are no joke. Even if they can’t repeal the 19th Amendment, opponents of women’s suffrage are gaining power in the GOP.”
If the polls are correct, Republicans are set for a shellacking in the Nov. 3 midterms, losing the House and quite possibly the Senate, and likely some prominent governorships across the country. If that happens, there’s a good chance that online chatter about repealing the 19th Amendment will heat up once again.
For a decade now, MAGA social media users have been aggrieved at the way women vote for Democrats at higher rates then men, such as in 2024, when 53% of women voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, who received 55% of the male vote. Their solution to this imbalance began in 2016 as a trolling hashtag on what was then called Twitter: #RepealThe19th, a reference to the constitutional amendment, ratified in 1920, that extended suffrage to all women in theory, but mostly white women in practice. The hashtag has faded since then, but not because of a lack of interest. The idea has morphed from a joke into a serious proposal that is making its way from fringe Christian right circles into the mainstream of the Republican Party.
Douglas Wilson, a prominent Christian nationalist who lead the church Pete Hegseth belongs to, has grown increasingly loud in his calls to replace individual voting with “household voting,” where only heads of households, who are presumably male, would be able to vote. The defense secretary has praised Wilson for a CNN interview he gave in which he outlined his vision of a Christian theocracy that disenfranchises women. Other prominent pastors with large online followings, such as Dale Partridge and Joel Webbon, both in Texas, have explicitly denounced the 19th Amendment.
Ending women’s suffrage is a hot topic among the right’s youngest leaders. Earlier this year, Kai Schwemmer, the political director of College Republicans of America and one of the many young leaders angling to be the new Charlie Kirk, called for the end of women’s suffrage. On his Daily Wire podcast, conservative commentator Michael Knowles hosted a panel of young women and spent an hour justifying the arguments for repealing the amendment. White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, who has a large audience of young men, routinely calls for the end of women’s voting rights.
Most alarmingly, Turning Point USA, which is among the most well-funded and popular conservative organizations in the country, is now routinely platforming opponents of women’s suffrage. Along with Schwemmer, the organization recently booked the Christian nationalist pastor and podcaster Joshua Haymes, who argues that women voting undermines the family, for their new “Pick Up The Mic” tour. Commentator Andrew Wilson, who frequently goes viral by arguing that women should lose the vote, has also been representing TPUSA in podcast interviews. Alex Clarke, the host of TPUSA’s most popular women’s show, has platformed guests who oppose women’s suffrage, including one who argued it was a “net negative” for society. Savanna Stone, a popular MAGA influencer who opposes women’s suffrage, spoke at this year’s TPUSA Women’s Leadership Summit, a name whose irony gets worse by the year. Multiple attendees of the conference told the CBC that they would be happy to lose their right to vote.
This is truly shocking. And there’s more of it at the link. So the election baby in me is waiting to vote on Tuesday the 3rd then using my birthday as a double celebration. I’ll be waiting in front of the TV with my nerf balls to throw at anyone who deserves it. I just have to visualize cream pies in my head and dreams.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
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If I wasn’t so nauseous from my mounjaro dose being increased, I’d know I’d be sick from the shit that has been flung around by the Republicans this past week. I don’t want to rehash it all, in fact I am just posting political cartoons. And as you can see…the foreign press gets it. Trump is a fucking traitor. The US press is slow on the uptick. (Except for a few that no longer live in the USA.) Funny that. Enjoy these cartoons while you can.
Via Cagle:
Tom Skerritt was one of my favorite actors. Everything he did was so natural and unforced. Just a few more cartoons and memes:
As you can see, I’ve been saving them up the past few days.
I think I got the duplicates taken care of…
Be safe out there.
This is an open thread.
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This report from 
This 
Read the rest for all the lies. This makes me glad I’ve given up the car but I have a pretty good lifestyle here in New Orleans where staying at home and letting it all come to you works well. Also, this is my 15th year teaching on-line for Purdue University. It’s been a life-saver.
More at the link. I”ll finish with this article from 
