Finally Friday Reads: Crimes, Misdemeanours, and Ignorance of the Law

“The new White House Press Secretary is a hoot!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I’m pretty sure this craziness with our neighbors to the north is more tap dancing to get our minds off the Epstein files, the failed Israeli/US war on Iran, and basic affordability. Look at dat!  Look at dat! Look over there with jazz hands isn’t flying with most of us. Who the hell still believes all this? But it tends to distract the mainstream media, which is really bad.  Very bad stuff is hiding behind all of this. Let me show you today.

If you’ve known me long enough, you know I have a serious love affair with our nation’s National Parks. I’ve camped and hiked around more than I can remember, but that’s only because some of the big ones are so amazing they took this little girl’s heart to the point she still reminds me what it means to see wild animals in the wild and breathtaking views. As I got older, my sketchbook filled with every place we camped and explored. They also remind you of our indigenous peoples and the glory of endless wilderness.

That’s why my blood pressure took off when I read this. “Trump’s Quietly Working to Give Part of Yosemite to a Private Developer. The National Park Service is under pressure to make an unprecedented deal that cedes a quarter-mile strip of the park.” The article can be found at NOTUS and is written by Anna Kramer. Yosemite is one of the nations’ oldest and most glorious examples of American landscapes.  He’s totally dedicated to the idea of selling stuff off to support his Trumpify every historical place in the District.

For more than a year, the National Park Service has been quietly working to fulfill an unprecedented directive from Trump officials: Parcel off a corner of Yosemite National Park to give to a private developer.

National Park Service staff in California and Washington, D.C., are trying to arrange a land exchange between a Nevada-based company and the federal government, according to four people directly familiar with discussions, as well as agency documents reviewed by NOTUS.

Since the spring of 2025, the Trump administration has been looking into ways it could cede a roughly quarter-mile strip of land inside Yosemite to a company that, through a web of limited-liability companies, is operated by real-estate developer and investment firm Kingsbarn Realty Capital. Officials are proposing the Park Service give up the land or “interest” in the land in the form of an easement, and in return receive land of equal value somewhere in California that has yet to be decided.

The private developers own an 83-acre plot of land just outside the western boundaries of Yosemite, about five miles from one of the park’s defining ancient sequoia groves. Jeff Pori, the CEO of Kingsbarn, wants to build a short road connecting the property to one of Yosemite’s central thoroughfares. The new road would give the land exceptionally rare private access to a park that is otherwise almost entirely buffered by national forests.

The property’s current access road is more than 10 miles from an entrance to the park, and much further from Yosemite’s most iconic sights. Without a new road, visitors to the property — whether it be developed into a hotel, resort or private residence — would need to drive an hour and a half in a circuitous route to reach the popular Yosemite Valley.

This is an unprecedented move and a dangerous one.

If the deal goes through, the Trump administration would be breaking with 150 years of American precedent at the birthplace of the national park system. The federal government has historically strived to expand the crown-jewel national parks, not give up land within them.

“The national park idea started in Yosemite with Abraham Lincoln’s preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias,” said Cicely Muldoon, a 40-year veteran of the Park Service who served as Yosemite’s superintendent for about five years. Muldoon retired from Yosemite shortly after President Donald Trump took office in 2025.

“Our basic purpose in the national parks is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, not letting go of that for the purpose of private profit,” she said Interior’s advocacy for the deal is a significant reversal of a pledge Secretary Doug Burgum made in his 2025 confirmation hearing: “The national parks, absolutely we need to support and protect every single inch of those,” he said.It also contravenes the presidential message Trump shared on Aug. 24 of this year, to announce the beginning of National Park Week: “My Administration is committed to protecting every acre of our lands and preserving the cleanest air and water in the world.”

And it goes against the agency’s past position on this specific piece of land. The Park Service has received this privatization request before, and it has rejected it repeatedly for over two decades.

Don’t even get me started on Trump trying to rename Lake Ontario.  But you don’t have to take my word on it try this at Business Insider.  The internet has gone into full meme mode over Trump’s Lake Ontario name change. The story is reported by Joshua Nelken-Zitser.

President Donald Trump renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America, and it’s making waves on the internet.

After tense trade talks between the US and Canada collapsed and the US imposed new 50% tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of Canadian goods, Trump turned to another tool in his arsenal: rebranding.

On Thursday, Trump issued an executive order to rename Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes that straddles the US-Canada border, as Lake America. As the Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney wrote on X, the name predates the Confederation of Canada and the US Declaration of Independence. “The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘”the lake is beautiful, the lake is big’,” he wrote.

The name change follows a similar move Trump made last year when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, a change that Mexico and other countries, including the UK and China, have refused to adopt.

After Thursday’s executive order, it didn’t take long for the internet to respond with memes. Here are the 10 best.

Go check them out!

Trump tries over and over again to remove all the settled cases against him. Most courts remain firmly on the side of the settled case based on settled law. Here’s yet another Trump failure to ditch responsibility for all his crimes. This is from local TV station Spectrum News NY1.  “Trump loses again in bid to erase his N.Y. hush money conviction.” You may remember that this is the payment to Stormy Daniels.

A federal judge on Friday once again spurned Donald Trump’s effort to erase his hush money conviction, rejecting the president’s bid to move the state court case to federal court and have it dismissed on presidential immunity grounds.

Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein reiterated his earlier finding against Trump, saying that the reasons Trump cited for renewing his request were “neither new nor legally sufficient.”

The judge added: “He has failed to show good cause and diligence.”

It is the third time Hellerstein has blocked Trump from having the U.S. District Court in Manhattan seize control of the case from the New York court where he was tried and convicted.

And, like before, Trump will appeal, according to a spokesperson for his legal team who called Hellerstein’s ruling “baseless and lawless.”

“The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the Federal and New York State Constitutions, and other established legal precedent mandate that the Witch Hunt perpetrated by the Manhattan DA be removed to federal court, and immediately overturned and dismissed,” a statement issued on behalf of the legal team said. “President Trump will be filing a powerful appeal, and will continue defeating Democrat weaponization at every turn.”

The guilty verdict, reached in May 2024 while Trump was between terms, made him the first former — and now current — U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. Trump is also challenging his conviction through the state court appellate process, which is pending.

Hellerstein’s decision came after a federal appeals court last year ordered him to reconsider his prior denial. The judge previewed his ruling during oral arguments in February, slamming Trump’s lawyers for legal maneuvers that amounted to taking “two bites at the apple.”

State prosecutors did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Stormy and E. Jean are high on my list of tough and amazing women for see these cases through. We can only hope we get the Epstein files released and we see more women damaged by Trump receive justice and compensation. And speaking of the Stormy case, this headline yesterday from Raw Story is an eye opener. There most be a line as wide as big as the country itself of co-criminals waiting for Trump Pardons. “Explosive motive unmasked by DOJ insiders as Michael Cohen crawls back to Trump: report.” Travis Gettys has the story.

The Department of Justice has discussed using former attorney Michael Cohen – who has seemingly come crawling back – as a witness to build new criminal cases against President Donald Trump’s legal adversaries, according to a new report.

Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng, who has a personal history with Cohen, the president’s longtime personal attorney and fixer, reported that Trump administration officials are hoping to leverage his testimony to bring criminal prosecutions against New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg – both of whom successfully battled Trump in court.

“Bragg’s case, of course, is the reason Trump became America’s first felon president, a label Trump bitterly resents,” Suebsaeng wrote.

That’s why the president wants revenge against them both, Suebsaeng said, and he’s apparently dangling a pardon to Cohen as leverage for his testimony.

“Cohen had previously posted on Substack that he felt ‘pressured and coerced’ to be those prosecutors’ star witness against Trump, though Cohen has been publicly very coy about claiming whether he was ‘coerced’ to give false testimony,” Suebsaeng wrote.

DOJ does have the authority to charge prosecutors with coercing false testimony, although that almost never happens, but Trump officials are considering it now.

The headlines from independent media sources never fail to amaze.  Even local government officials have trouble with Trump’s ignorance of how things are done in American. He abuses his position and ignores well-settled law over and over.This is from the New York Times.   “Wyoming Governor Objects to ‘Very Odd’ D.O.J. Election Monitoring. Governor Mark Gordon, a Republican, said he was concerned by the behavior of election observers who visited a polling station in Cheyenne.”  This story comes from the keyboard of Tim Balk.

Mr. Trump has often returned to such conspiracy theories in his second term, arguing that widespread fraud could affect this year’s elections. As president, he has deployed the resources of the federal government, notably the Justice Department’s, to investigate his unsubstantiated claims, sowing more doubt in the nation’s elections and raising alarm among state officials about whether he will try to intervene if Republicans lose their congressional majorities in November.

Governor Gordon, a low-key, term-limited Republican who leads one of the country’s most conservative states, said at a meeting with state election officials on Wednesday that he had been concerned by the behavior of the election observers.

“I feel very strongly about the federal government coming in and taking our guns — I don’t like that,” Mr. Gordon said at the meeting. “And I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes, either.”

The monitors ultimately visited six polling places, showing their credentials only when asked for them, Mr. Gordon said in the interview, describing their behavior as “very odd.” He said he had asked the state attorney general, Keith Kautz, to investigate the matter.

The observers had cited statutes related to the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Act, Mr. Gordon said.

This year, the Justice Department’s observers have visited polling places in other states, including politically tense regions such as the Minneapolis area. The agency said on Tuesday that it had sent 80 monitors to seven states during primary season.

But the requests to interview voters and gain access to machines in Wyoming were unusual. And they come at a moment when the Justice Department has been locked in an intense legal battle with roughly 30 states, demanding their private, unredacted voter rolls in a hunt for evidence of noncitizen voting.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump is still convinced that noncitizens vote.  Most allegations turn out to be baseless. There has to be something sketchier in Trump’s election interference.  It’s more likely he’s trying to ‘monitor’ polls to intimidate certain classes of voters not known to vote Republican. He is hot for voter suppression.

This is my favorite headline for the day. It comes via from Public Notice.  “Are voters finally realizing GOP presidents are disasters? Michael Tomasky makes the case that they are.”  I could make the case easily for their economic policy. I’m pretty certain that others in other areas could do that as well.  Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson share the lede.

“Trusting the Republicans more on the economy at this point is like trusting Sean Combs to be your babysitter,” writes Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, in his recent piece headlined, “At Long Last, Americans Are Starting to See the Truth About the GOP.”

“For decades now, the Republican Party has built its electoral success on myths and lies,” Tomasky adds. “Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president who your average person would say left the country better off than he found it.”

One could quibble about the legacy of George H.W. Bush, but it’s hard to dispute that the last two Republican presidents easily rank among the worst in American history. Their successors have each been handed a flaming bag of economic and cultural ruin and did commendable jobs putting out the fire, only to hand the reins to the man who will unequivocally go down as our worst president of all time (so far!), Donald J. Trump — whose second term is shaping up to be even more disastrous than the one that ended with mass death amid a pandemic he badly mismanaged.

Tomasky argues Democrats are missing a golden opportunity by not campaigning more aggressively on the obvious truth that from the presidency on down, the Republican Party has a cataclysmic record when it has power, especially in the 21st century. But messaging aside, he says he’s heartened by recent polling showing voters may finally be seeing the light.

“Jobs are just one factor. The performance of the stock market under Democrats is much, much stronger than under Republicans. The increases in median household income and amount by which they’ve reduced the deficit are much greater,” Tomasky told Public Notice. “The comparisons aren’t close, but you never hear any Democrats talk about it.”

“Why this is changing now is really simple and straightforward: The economy is bad, and there’s a Republican president,” he added.

Trump has basically wrecked the idea that Republicans are better at foreign policy and wars. There’s no way any of his health policies via the nuts he put in Health and Human Services can be seen as anything but charlatans. And, the DOJ is a laugh. So much for law and order.  Since the Republic party continues to enable all of this mess, I can’t understand that anyone other that a member of the Orange Caligula Cult could tolerate what’s going on these days.

Okay, this is my last suggested read for the day. It comes from Balls and Strikes and is written by Jay Willis. “The Trump DOJ Is Running Out of Ways to Humiliate Itself In Public. Another week, another argument from your federal government that would be kind of embarrassing if a high school sophomore tried to make it.”  Sounds about right.

For some time now, I have been tracking the Justice Department’s alarmingly rapid transformation from one of the legal profession’s most prestigious employers into a clubhouse for semiliterate dunces whose primary qualification for the job is a willingness to sign their names to legal filings that resemble lightly edited Truth Social posts. This week’s addition to the canon comes in the course of President Donald Trump’s relentless pursuit of what is somehow among the highest-priority items on his second-term policy agenda: slapping his name on the Kennedy Center before his time in office runs out.

The legal fight began back in December 2025, when the Kennedy Center’s Trump-aligned board of trustees first tried to shoehorn the words “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” above existing Kennedy Center signage. A federal court ordered the removal of Trump’s name in June, but the board remains committed to fulfilling the president’s wishes. Its latest proposal would append a “RENOVATED AND RESTORED BY PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP” inscription to the side of the building, beneath the Kennedy Center signage this time around. The board also wants to name the grounds on which the Kennedy Center sits the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza,” like an enterprising NFL team selling a secondary set of stadium naming rights to whichever corporate behemoth is desperate enough to pay for it.

In a new court filing, the Trump Justice Department is warning about what might happen if its client does not get his way: According to Brantley T. Mayers, a lawyer in the Civil Division, prospective donors will not open their wallets unless the renovation plans include “prominent recognition” of Trump’s involvement. And without those renovations, Brantley says, the “dilapidated” and “crumbling” Kennedy Center will “deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure,” and may even have to be “taken down” in order to avoid “collapse or calamity.” In other words, the Justice Department’s official position is that without the addition of an (apparently load-bearing) “RENOVATED AND RESTORED” inscription, the Kennedy Center will be at risk of falling down and killing everyone inside.

“The Board recognizes that President Trump’s efforts and prestige provide the sole hope for the Center’s financial survival, and structural renewal,” Brantley writes. “The Trump Administration, and President Donald J. Trump, should, therefore, be given the respect and dignity of acknowledgement.” (All weird comma placements in original.)

How is this even a legal issue?  Anyway, this country is so fucked-up under Trump that it’s hard to recognize. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.

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