Finally Friday Reads: A Whole Lot of Shit be Flying

John Buss, @repeat 1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I think we can agree that the year 2025 has sucked so much that our ears are ringing. Most of today’s headlines are going to follow us into the New Year, too. I’m going to try to be gentle, but wow. At least we see karma catching up with some of them. I hate to spoil your meals for the day. Any survivors of sexual trauma and assault may want to take the day off to breathe deeply and prepare for the new information that will start pouring in. This CNN story is both welcome and as horrifying as we thought it would be. “New photos released from Epstein’s estate showing Trump, Bannon, Bill Clinton, and other high-profile people.” We’ve known these connections, but when will we find out how lurid they go?

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released photos from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate Friday showing the many powerful figures in the late sex trafficker’s orbit, including President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and others.

Many of the men have been previously linked to Epstein, though the photos may shed new light on the extent of those relationships.

Taken collectively, the 19 images – which the Democrats on the committee said came from Epstein’s estate – reinforce the financier was tied in the past to a wide variety of powerful and high-profile people whose ties to him are now under significant scrutiny.

One released image shows Trump with six women with leis whose faces were redacted by committee members, while another depicts what appears to be a bowl of novelty condoms with a caricature of Trump’s face with the text, “I’m HUUUUGE!” The condoms – shown in a bowl with a “Trump condom $4.50” sign – were produced by a novelty shop in New York City named Fishs Eddy. The item is described as a “political satire condom” in the National Museum of American History’s online collection.

Other released images depict Steve Bannon and Epstein taking a photograph in a mirror; Bill Clinton with Epstein, Maxwell and another couple; and tech billionaire Bill Gates with the former Prince Andrew. Former Harvard President Larry Summers and lawyer Alan Dershowitz also appeared in pictures from the estate.

None of the released images depict any sexual misconduct nor are believed to depict underage girls. It was not immediately clear when or where they were taken, or by whom.

Politico also has coverage of the basic picture dump. “Trump, Clinton, Gates included in Epstein photo trove. The House Oversight Committee Democrats released photos from the Epstein estate linking powerful men to the late convicted sex offender.”  You’ll notice in this coverage, the photos have black squares covering the faces of the victims. More on that in the next suggested read.

Photos from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein tie the convicted sex offender to President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, tech billionaire Bill Gates and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

These men and others are featured in the roughly 95,000 photos the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has received from the Epstein estate as part of its ongoing investigation. House Democrats publicly released 19 photos Friday morning.

“It is time to end this White House cover-up and bring justice to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends,” the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, said in a statement. “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all the files, NOW.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement accused Democrats of “selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions.”

“The Democrat hoax against President Trump has been repeatedly debunked and the Trump Administration has done more for Epstein’s victims than Democrats ever have by repeatedly calling for transparency, releasing thousands of pages of documents, and calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends,” she continued. “It’s time for the media to stop regurgitating Democrat talking points and start asking Democrats why they wanted to hang around Epstein after he was convicted.”

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

The dump came after “U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman reversed his earlier decision to keep the material under wraps.”   This is from the AP. “Justice Department can unseal records from Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking case, judge says.”

Secret grand jury transcripts from Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 sex trafficking case can be made public, a judge ruled on Wednesday, joining two other judges in granting the Justice Department’s requests to unseal material from investigations into the late financier’s sexual abuse.

U.S. District Judge Richard M. Berman reversed his earlier decision to keep the material under wraps, citing a new law that requires the government to open its files on Epstein and his longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell. The judge previously cautioned that the 70 or so pages of grand jury materials slated for release are hardly revelatory and “merely a hearsay snippet” of Epstein’s conduct.

On Tuesday, another Manhattan federal judge ordered the release of records from Maxwell’s 2021 sex trafficking case. Last week, a judge in Florida approved the unsealing of transcripts from an abandoned Epstein federal grand jury investigation in the 2000s.

The Justice Department asked the judges to lift secrecy orders in the cases after the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump last month, created a narrow exception to rules that normally keep grand jury proceedings confidential. The law requires that the Justice Department disclose Epstein-related material to the public by Dec. 19.

More things will undoubtedly be released. Finally, we see some action from those of us who strongly believe in the preservation of our historical and geographical moments, parks, and buildings. The Washington Post has the story on this good news. “National Trust sues to stop Trump’s ballroom construction. The organization, which is charged by Congress with historic preservation, has retained President Barack Obama’s former lawyer as it seeks to pause the project.”

Historic preservationists begged President Donald Trump in October not to rapidly demolish the White House’s East Wing annex for his ballroom project, urging him to wait for federal review panels and allow the public to weigh in. Now a group charged by Congress with helping to preserve historic buildings is asking a judge to block construction until those reviews occur, arguing that the ongoing project is illegal and unconstitutional.

The lawsuit from the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation, which was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, represents the first major legal challenge to Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot addition and is poised to test the limits of his power. The organization argues that the administration failed to undergo legally required reviews or receive congressional authorization for the project, which Trump has rushed to launch in hopes of completing it before his term ends in 2029.

“No president is legally allowed to tear down portions of the White House without any review whatsoever — not President Trump, not President Joe Biden, and not anyone else,” the complaint says.

The administration in October rapidly demolished the East Wing to make way for the ballroom over the objections of the National Trust and other historic preservationists who urged the White House to pause its demolition, submit its plans to the National Capital Planning Commission and seek public comment.

“She’s like the Energizer Bunny.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Finally, we should see the release of the first true face of the assault on our nation’s immigrant population. This is also from the AP. “Federal judge issues order to prohibit immigration officials from detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia.”

To let you know exactly how jumpy we are down here about these things, I’ll share this short tale this morning from Temple’s morning walk. I was talking to my neighbor, who had just come back from walking Dame Maggie, his Yorkie. I was just saying goodbye to her when a white SUV stopped in front of the house with the cherries flashing. I gulped noticeably. Josh closed the door, and I walked down the street towards the river and crossed to the neutral ground behind the line forming. I spoke with the woman in the car for a bit. The first thought that hit both of us was ICE, but after a bit of worrying, we decided it was just someone who had to return to the construction at the base. We were all white, and thankfully, none of our neighborhood’s gardeners or construction workers were around.  All of us thought the same thing, though. This is not normal.  And yes, I am still actively in the resistance.

A federal judge blocked U.S. immigration authorities on Friday from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia, saying she feared they might take him into custody again just hours after she had ordered his release from a detention center.

The order came as Abrego Garcia appeared at a scheduled appointment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office roughly 14 hours after he walked out of immigration detention facility in Pennsylvania.

His lawyers had sent an urgent request to the judge, warning that ICE officials could immediately place him back into custody. Instead, Abrego Garcia exited the building after a short appointment, emerging to cheers from supporters who had gathered outside.

Speaking briefly to the crowd, he urged others to “stand tall” against what he described as injustices carried out by the government.

Abrego Garcia became a flashpoint of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown earlier this year when he was wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. He was last taken into custody in August during a similar check-in.

Officials cannot re-detain him until the court conducts a hearing on the motion for the temporary restraining order, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland said. She wrote that Abrego Garcia is likely to succeed on the merits of any further request for relief from ICE detention.

ProPublica remains my go-to source for uncovering outrageous abnormalities within the Trump administration. Keeping eyes on our Department of Justice (sic) is a necessary and noble cause. “The Shakedown: Trump’s DOJ Pressured Lawyers to ‘Find’ Evidence That UCLA Had Illegally Tolerated Antisemitism.” I’m not sure why Anti-Semitism remains the only “woke” policy this regime recognizes.

On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.

Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.

He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration.

The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.

In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an investigation by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education,based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved, revealsthe extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its case against the school. It also surfaced something equally alarming: How the UC system’s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught, a vulnerability the Trump administration’s tactics brought into sharp focus.

According to former DOJ insiders, agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March, pressuring them to rapidly “find” evidence backing a preordained conclusion: that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism, which would violate federal civil rights statutes.

The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA, which had been rocked by pro-Palestinian protests in the spring of 2024. But even that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration investigation based on the same incidents. The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening.

This is a long read, but well worth your time. I leave you with a personal story from Facebook of a Father of a Daughter. Matthew Berdyck is one of those smart asses like me. He and his daughter are currently under attack by MAGA bullies. I know what it’s like to have your daughter stalked by folks like these. My youngest was three at the time, the so-called church people, and “right-to-lifers”. It has only gotten worse over time. I can only tell you how much my heart goes out to him and his family.  I got nightly phone calls telling me exactly where my daughter had been all day and telling me what an after-birth “abortion” would look like if performed on her. The Sheriff’s department told me I shouldn’t take these people seriously when I called to complain. That was 1992.

92 days after Charlie Kirk’s death, I finally understand.

When I saw the news reports that Charlie Kirk was shot, I didn’t know who he was. At first, I spoke out against his shooting because I get threatened a lot myself—killing people over political speech is well beyond reasonable.

Over the last 92 days, as my profile got bigger and bigger, I became subject to ongoing and continuing rage from the right. Boy, do they just love making jokes but start crying that they’re victims when someone gives them back what they dish out. Babies.

They’re gonna “get them dems,” but if someone gets them back, oh lord, the temper tantrum is going to be epic and heard all the way to dwarf-planet Pluto.

Over the last 92 days, I’ve had over 25,000 vitriolic comments from MAGA—I’m gay, I’m a lady, I’m a beta-male cuck, I’m a pedo, and on and on. At minimum, they’re just name-calling, but at worst they’re targeting my 17-year-old daughter like predators.

Currently, on my wall, there are hundreds of sexual comments about her, repeated threats to kill her, threats to hurt my 70-year-old mom, even a threat to dox and hurt my 94-year-old grandfather.

I’ve got 55 harassing voicemails, I’ve been subscribed to gay porn sites, cuckold newsletters, received spam from life insurance companies (death threats)—like, wow, these people are throwing a massive, uncontrollable fit over comedy.

I realize today, after 92 solid days of relentless, aggressive harassment, that I’m not even remotely shocked that someone offed Kirk. In fact, I’m actually surprised someone didn’t do it sooner.

These MAGA are rabid animals. Kirk was their demigod, Agent Orange.

Today, yet another one of them threatened my daughter and me—like, bro, you’re a real big man threatening a little girl, but that’s what MAGA is about.

It’s who they always were and it’s who they always will be, all the way to the day they’re voted out by the rest of us.
If one day I stop posting, then I guess I am Charlie Kirk—after I’ve been shot by some far-right, grammarless dingleberry honkeytron who couldn’t take a joke.

Follow me if you feel me.Update:
They’re already in the comments denying all of this happened even though it’s all visible on this page 💀💀

I can only tell you that any time you go after the blind followers of an autocratic cult, it ain’t gonna be pretty at all. I have some time off, and I have found all the good trouble I need to end the year on a high note.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging List today?

Well, I’ve seen all there is to see
And I’ve heard all they have to say
I’ve done everything I wanted to do
I’ve done that too
And it ain’t that pretty at all
Ain’t that pretty at all
So I’m gonna hurl myself against the wall
‘Cause I’d rather feel bad than not feel anything at all