We’re moving closer to the midterm elections. Yesterday, there were some important primaries in Texas. Another of Trump’s enemies–John Cornyn–went down in flames, and now he’ll join other losers like Bill Cassidy who are now free to criticize his policies. Is it possible that Texas could turn purple in 2026? Here’s the latest:
Ken Paxton, the Trump-endorsed and MAGA-backed insurgent, ousted Senator John Cornyn in a runoff on Tuesday, becoming the second primary challenger to knock out an incumbent Republican senator in less than two weeks in a raw display of President Trump’s powerful hold on the party base.
Texas Senator John Cornyn
The contest was the most expensive primary in American history — and Mr. Paxton prevailed despite being outspent on advertising by pro-Cornyn forces by roughly $80 million.
Now, Republicans are bracing for a potentially competitive general election in Texas, where Democrats have not won statewide in a generation. Democratic donors nationwide have swooned for their nominee, James Talarico, a smooth-talking 37-year-old seminarian and state legislator, in the hopes he will realize their long-dashed dreams of turning Texas blue.
National Republicans have warned for months that Mr. Paxton’s scandal-riddled past could put the Republican-held seat in jeopardy. But G.O.P. primary voters proved on Tuesday that they were in no mood for political guidance from Mr. Cornyn or a much-reviled party establishment.
The scope of his defeat was staggering. Mr. Cornyn, once the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, was trailing in nearly all of Texas’ 254 counties.
Here are Goldmacher’s takeways from the election. You can read more details on each with the gift link above.
— Cornyn’s defeat is another proof point of Trump’s sway.
— An ugly G.O.P. primary could take time to heal.
— The general election is going to have a Texas-size price tag.
— Cornyn’s loss could reverberate on Capitol Hill, too.
— An old-guard Democrat [Rep. Al Green] goes down.
— Crypto spent big and won.
— A sheriff’s deputy prevails over a sex therapist accused of antisemitism.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won the Republican Senate primary in his state Tuesday night, ousting incumbent Sen. John Cornyn.
Paxton excited President Trump and his MAGA base. But many Republican leaders and strategists are worried.
Few politicians have garnered as much scandal in Texas as Paxton. He was impeached by the Republican-controlled state House on multiple charges of abuse of office. His own senior staffers reported him to the FBI, alleging he illegally used his position to help a prominent donor. His wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, filed for divorce last year on “biblical grounds,” citing adultery.
Ken Paxton
And yet, Paxton has repeatedly come out on top. The state Senate acquitted him on all charges, and the FBI dropped its investigation. Paxton won reelection for his current job twice and defeated Cornyn, one of the best-funded Republicans in the country, with a fraction of the resources and institutional support.
Senate Republicans are now nervous they’ll have to pour boatloads of cash into the race to prop up Paxton against state Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic candidate in the race. Talarico has blown past fundraising records for a contest that is likely to break spending records.
Why is Paxton so controversial?
The state House impeached Paxton in 2023 on overwhelmingly bipartisan grounds, with 60 Republicans joining 61 Democrats. Only 21 Republicans voted against impeachment charges.
The charges stemmed from his relationship with Nate Paul, a real estate developer and political donor. Paxton allegedly ordered his employees to improperly intervene in Paul’s legal troubles. Paul allegedly provided Paxton free services including a home renovation and a job for a woman with whom Paxton was allegedly having an extramarital affair. Paxton was also charged with retaliating against whistleblowers on his staff who had reported his conduct to the FBI in 2020.
Paxton was tried on 16 charges in the Senate, which acquitted him on all of them. His wife, Sen. Angela Paxton, was part of the Senate jury, though she was not allowed to vote.
The Justice Department continued investigating the allegations made by his senior staff to the FBI but closed its investigation at the end of the Biden administration.
Paxton was also indicted on felony securities fraud charges just after becoming attorney general in 2015. He was charged, as a state senator, with defrauding his fellow lawmakers by encouraging them to invest in Servergy, a tech company where he was secretly making a commission on their investments. He agreed to settle the case in 2024, paying $300,000 in restitution, though he never admitted to any wrongdoing. That case was unrelated to his impeachment.
It’s hard to believe this guy is still in office. But Trump likes him, and I guess that’s enough for Texas Republican voters.
President Donald Trump proved once again that his endorsement is, as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton put it in his primary runoff victory speech Tuesday night, “the most powerful force in politics.”
One by one, Trump is putting an end to the political careers of lawmakers in his party that he deems, for reasons more personal than policy-oriented, to be apostates. But in doing so, he may also be liberating them as they serve out their remaining seven months in Congress. They now have nothing to lose if they stand up against him.
By giving belated independence to a handful of incumbents he vanquished at the ballot box or forced into retirement, the president is creating a growingly noxious dynamic between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Thom Tillis
“It’s hard for me to see how the president is going to get his agenda through the Senate in the next seven months if he keeps purging Republican senators who support him,” former senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) told CBS News last week. “… I think Republican senators will find they can say what they think and the country will be better off if they do.”
In his Trump-engineered defeat, Sen. John Cornyn joins a club of two other Republicans in the chamber, where their party holds a 53-47 majority. The other two are already expressing resistance to the president’s dictates.
One is Thom Tillis (North Carolina). Under a barrage of Trump attacks for opposing parts of the president’s agenda — including the sprawling One Big Beautiful Bill that was its domestic centerpiece — Tillis announced his retirement last year rather than making what was deemed to be a hopeless bid for a third term.
Tillis has since become a regular Trump critic. He has criticized the Justice Department’s recently announced “anti-weaponization fund,” which could allow the Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to receive taxpayer dollars, as “stupid on stilts” and said: “These people don’t deserve restitution. Many of them deserve to be in prison.”
Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), who failed to even make the runoff in his party’s May 16 primary, voted for the first time a few days later to advance a resolution to block Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran without congressional authorization.
If you want to read more, you can use the gift link above. I’m using up my gift articles because it’s close to the end of the month.
Paxton will now face Democrat James Talarico in November.
In the end, James Talarico and Democrats got the matchup they had been salivating over for months.
Within two hours of Ken Paxton’s GOP primary win on Tuesday, Talarico had hauled in $600,000 — the strongest two hours of his entire campaign. Recent internal polling from a pro-Talarico PAC shows the Democrat has a 7-point lead against Paxton. Both figures were shared first with POLITICO.
In an interview, Talarico said he’s confident about his chances.
But Talarico faces a Texas-sized challenge to finally deliver on Democrats’ long-held fantasy of flipping the state, just two years after Trump won it by 14 points….
James Talarico
Talarico said Tuesday night that to win in November, he must convert supporters of Sen. John Cornyn — a conservative by almost any metric, except Trump’s. After Cornyn conceded, Talarico thanked the four-term incumbent for his service and told his supporters “you have a place in our campaign.”
It’s all part of his general election pitch, which Talarico outlined in the interview following Paxton’s primary win.
“I have a legislative record that I think has a lot to offer supporters of Senator Cornyn. Ken Paxton has a criminal record. I have a legislative record,” Talarico told POLITICO (Paxton struck a deal in 2024 where he paid restitution and securities fraud felony charges were dropped). He emphasized his history reaching across the aisle “to cut property taxes and raise teacher pay and lower the cost of housing and child care and prescription drugs,” and touted his willingness to break with Democrats on issues including energy and the border that are important in Texas.
“I’ve called out the extremes in both parties, on the right and left, and as you know, called out President Biden for failing to secure our southern border,” he said. “I’ve pushed back against national Democrats who want to hurt the Texas oil and gas industry and so I think that Texans are looking for a senator who is going to be independent, who’s not going to serve a political party, not going to serve any special interests or megadonors, but who’s going to serve people of Texas.”
We’ll have to wait and see. The dream of Texas going blue again has been with us for a long time, but so far it hasn’t come close to happening.
While it’s tempting to be skeptical, a blue Texas is increasingly easy to imagine. It’s even easier to imagine after Ken Paxton’s victory over John Cornyn, the incumbent senator, in the Republican primary runoff on Tuesday night.
That’s partly because Mr. Paxton, the state attorney general, has distinct political liabilities. He’s faced investigation, indictment,impeachment and a messy public divorce.
But there’s another reason Democrats might pull off a statewide win for the first time in three decades: demographics. Texas is one of the most diverse states in the country, and national polls show Democrats surging back in support among young and nonwhite voters — and especially Hispanic voters.
On paper, these national demographic trends ought to send Texas racing toward the left and into contention. Add in Mr. Paxton’s nomination and you can start to see how Democrats could flip Texas this fall.
After a decade of big talk from Democrats about Texas, it’s understandable that people could harbor some doubt about flipping the nation’s largest red state. Judging by presidential election results, Democrats barely made any progress at all: President Trump won Texas by almost 14 percentage points in 2024.
But beneath the state’s stable Republican voting record, extraordinary demographic shifts have put Texas Republicans in a much more vulnerable position. To an extent few would have imagined a decade ago, Texas’ status as a reliably Republican state now depends on elevated levels of support among Hispanic voters.
Read more at the gift link.
Let’s face it. Democrats have to take back the House if we are to have any hope of impeaching Trump. They need to take the Senate too, but even if that happens, they won’t have the votes to remove him. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to impeach him. Democrats need to do everything in their power to weaken Trump, because he obviously has no plans to leave the White House unless he is dragged out or carried out on a stretcher.
Iran war news:
The Trump administration and the Iran government disagree about what is in their supposed peace agreement.
Iranian state television on Wednesday released what it said were details of “an initial, unofficial document” outlining the framework for an agreement between Iran and the United States that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic.
The White House immediately dismissed the report as a “complete fabrication,” and it was not clear whether the United States and Iran were any closer to an agreement.
Iran’s state broadcaster, IRIB, said that under the framework, Iran would allow shipping to resume through the strait in return for an end to the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports. For days, the two sides have been alternating between renewing hostilities and issuing positive signals.
In its framing of the draft, the broadcaster presented it as a broad victory for Iran while cautioning that it was not final.
The report said that, under the agreement, commercial marine traffic would return to prewar levels within a month of the framework’s implementation. It also said that Iran would handle the strait’s management in cooperation with the Gulf state of Oman, a U.S. ally.
A bit more:
The reopening of the strait was the only one of the five main sticking points in negotiations that was mentioned in the brief report. The waterway is a crucial route for the world’s oil and gas that Iran has effectively closed since March. There was no reference to the future of Iran’s nuclear program and its stockpile of enriched uranium
The report said the framework included a U.S. pledge to “withdraw its military forces from the areas surrounding Iran” without specifying the geographic area included. The United States has a number of military sites in neighboring Iraq and nearby Gulf countries.
“Whether this includes forces newly deployed to the region or only permanent base personnel remains subject to negotiation,” the report said.
Trump called a cabinet meeting to discuss the situation.
The administration’s new plan would also keep U.S. citizens who might have been exposed to Ebola out of the country, according to two of the people with knowledge of the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
A few dozen Public Health Service officers are now being trained to deploy to Kenya to provide medical care to Americans who are deemed at high risk of developing Ebola. The initial plan was to monitor those Americans in Kenya, but to move anyone who started to show symptoms for treatment in Europe.
Because we no longer have a real CDC, and Trump, Musk, and RFK, Jr. fired all the disease experts.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asked staff to volunteer for urgent deployment to support Ebola screening at the country’s entry points, according to an email seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
CDC Acting Director Jay Bhattacharya said in the email that the agency had activated a Level 2 emergency response on May 18 to an outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, and was expanding recruitment beyond its usual emergency responder pool as screening of selected international arrivals ramps up.
Level 2 is an intermediate level of emergency response. It indicates a need for substantial additional staffing to meet response demands, according to the CDC’s website.
The CDC said enhanced screening operations are already under way at several port health stations and will require additional personnel. Staff across roles, including public health advisers, emergency specialists and licensed medical providers, are being asked to support the effort, subject to supervisor approval.
Volunteers could be tasked with monitoring incoming travelers for signs of illness, checking temperatures and referring suspected cases for further assessment, according to the email.
Unbelievable. Ebola remains dormant for weeks after exposure. What if people don’t report exposures or don’t realize they’ve been exposed? We’re going to have a lot of Ebola cases here, aren’t we?
Construction is under way on the White House lawn for an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) arena that will host a cage match next month to mark the US’s 250th anniversary and Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.
The mixed martial arts fight is planned for 14 June.
Photos of cranes and other construction equipment on the White House lawn on Tuesday showed the beginnings of the temporary construction. Trump has said that the finished project will feature “a 5,000-seat arena right outside the front door of the White House”.
Online renderings depict what the completed, wire-mesh-fence-ringed fight space is expected to look like. The octagon-shaped cage will be ringed by a red, white and blue stage under a towering arch featuring stars and stripes patterns and two large screens carrying the action live.
The cage and stage will themselves be surrounded by thousands of temporary seats, including ringside space for a full marching band that can set the entire scene to blaring music.
In December, Trump said the White House event would host “eight or nine championship fights – the biggest fights they’ve ever had”. But like the size of the crowd, the number of fights expected to be held on the White House
lawn has shrunk. The fight card includes two title fights: a lightweight championship fight between Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje in the main event, and an interim heavyweight title fight between Alex Pereira and Ciryl Gane.
This is beyond disgusting. I feel like I’m going to throw up.
I’ll end there, even though there are plenty more Trump messes that someone will have to clean up. Hang in there everyone. We can and will survive!
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“Meanwhile… at the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC. Not everyone in Trumpland is impressed with the latest distraction. MAHA!”John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
There actually is some good news from the Supreme Court Today. I’m not holding my breath that it will stand, however. It’s hard to hold your breath on anything. The Straight of Hormuz is still an active battlefield, no matter what Orange Caligula tells the press. People are dying in ICE custody as ICE has not been paying for medical care for 7 months. All of our allies are moving closer to Europe and farther from us, no matter where they are in the world. We’re a shithole country. We might as well face up to it.
Just breaking: news from the Supreme Court. NBC News reports that “Supreme Court temporarily restores full access to abortion pill. “The decision means mifepristone remains available nationwide without an in-person meeting required while litigation continues.” I read this headline after taking Temple for a walk and found a bunch of stickers on the neutral ground. Of course, I picked them up, and Temple and I will be plastering them at all the local bars later today.
This seems a little karmic, doesn’t it? Lawrence Hurley and Aria Bendix have the lede.
The Supreme Court on Monday provisionally blocked a lower court decision that would have limited availability nationwide of the abortion pill mifepristone.
In two brief orders, Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court’s conservatives, said the decision by the New Orleans-based5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would remain on hold until at least May 11. Alito issued the order because he is the justice who handles emergency issues arising from that appeals court, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
The temporary pause gives the high court time to consider next steps in the case as it weighs separate emergency requests filed by drug makers Danco and GenBioPro.
The nationwide availability of mifepristone was cast into jeopardy on Friday when the appeals court granted Louisiana’s request to void Biden administration rules that allowed the drug to be administered without an in-person meeting, meaning it can in theory be mailed anywhere in the country, even in states with strict abortion bans.
Alexis McGill Johnson, president of abortion rights group Planned Parenthood Action Fund, welcomed the decision.
“While mifepristone access returns to where it was on Friday morning, the whiplash and chaos that patients and providers are navigating have already had real consequences for real peoples’ lives and futures,” she said in a statement.
Anti-abortion groups have been pushing for years to reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement, alleging that taking mifepristone at home can be dangerous — despite studies that have found it to be safe and effective.
Danco makes Mifeprex, the brand name version of mifepristone, while GenBioPro makes a generic version.
Alito ordered Louisiana to file its response to the company’s request by the end of the day on Thursday.
This is the latest deadly weirdness from NBC News. Once again, we see Trump cannot be trusted, and that Hegseth is probably drunk bombing. “U.S. denies Iranian claim that it hit American warship as Trump launches mission to reopen Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. said two American-flagged commercial vessels transited the critical waterway Monday as part of the new “Project Freedom.” This story is reported by Yuliya Talmazan and Courtney Kube.
The U.S. military on Monday rejected Iranian claims to have struck an American warship trying to enter the Strait of Hormuz and said the first commercial ships had transited the critical waterway as part of President Donald Trump’s new mission to guide stranded vessels.
Meanwhile, the South Korean government confirmed earlier reports that explosion and fire had occurred on a South Korean-operated cargo ship on Monday.
Iran signaled an aggressive response to this latest bid to break its stranglehold over the strait, which has left global shipping at an effective standstill and sent energy prices spiraling.
Tehran issued a new map and a flurry of statements that sought to reassert its control. Early Monday, it claimed to have stopped U.S. destroyers from entering the strait.
After the U.S. warships ignored several radio warnings, cruise missiles, rockets and combat drones were fired near them, army public relations said in a statement carried by the semi-official Tasnim news agency.
Iranian state media had earlier claimed that two missiles had hit a U.S. ship near the entrance to the strait, but the U.S. military denied this.
“No U.S. Navy ships have been struck. U.S. forces are supporting Project Freedom and enforcing the naval blockade on Iranian ports,” Central Command said in a post on X.
A U.S. official also denied to NBC News that any U.S. Navy ships were prevented from accessing the strait on Monday by Iran.
It really does sound like we’re the bad guys now, doesn’t it? Washington Monthly‘s Paul Glastic has this interesting bit of analysis today. “Why the U.S.-led Liberal World Order is Only Mostly Dead.”
Even before Donald Trump launched his ill-advised war on Iran, America’s allies were already pronouncing the end of the era of U.S. leadership of the free world. “The West as we knew it no longer exists,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in April of 2025 as she tried to rally governments in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe to counter massive tariffs that Trump had recently imposed. “The old order is not coming back,” declared Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney this past January in a widely reported speech at Davos after fresh attempts by Trump to seize Greenland.
But in the wake of Trump’s cavalier attack on Iran and the global economic pain that has resulted, even some of America’s most vocal and influential champions of U.S. supremacy seem ready to throw in the towel. The neoconservative national security scholar Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution recently penned a requiem in The Atlantic for eight decades of Pax Americana:
Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.
Such declarations of the end of the U.S.-led international order are understandable. In a sense, they are a simple recognition of what Trump writes every day in ALL CAPS in his Truth Social posts, and of what his second-term government has been doing for 16 months. Just as Trump burned through his inherited wealth in a series of failed real estate ventures in his younger years, so is he now squandering decades of accumulated U.S. power in a mad attempt to overthrow the post-war system of alliances and institutions that was the means of acquiring that power. And he still has more than two-and-a-half years left in his presidency. Who knows how much more damage he will do? There is no reason to think he will abandon his beliefs that our allies are parasites, that international institutions are for losers, and that strongmen like him and Vladimir Putin should rule their spheres without constraint.
Countries across the globe are now recognizing that their past reliance on Washington for everything from advanced weaponry to sea lane protection has made them vulnerable to a leader like Trump. Consequently, they are looking for ways to give themselves some “strategic autonomy” from the United States—by, for instance, tilting towards China, or crafting a new coalition of “middle powers,” as Carney suggested in Davos, or creating a “European NATO” in which the U.S. no longer plays a leading, or perhaps any, role.
Given the circumstances, countries are wise to pursue these new arrangements. But they are poor substitutes for the U.S.-led liberal international order that Trump is dismantling. A better strategy is to rebuild that order in some form as soon as Trump leaves office. That might seem like wishful thinking, but it is not. Rather, it is the probable course of events if (as also seems likely) a Democrat wins the White House in 2028.
According to numerous polls, Democratic voters remain staunch supporters of Ukraine, NATO, and international institutions generally. They profoundly oppose Trump’s gunboat diplomacy in Venezuela and Iran. To win the presidential primary, any Democratic candidate must adhere to these views and, if successful in the general election, follow through in office to remain popular with the base. That shouldn’t be a problem if Democrats also control both houses and support a more internationalist foreign policy. Agencies gutted by Trump, such as USAID and the State Department, could be refunded and even expanded via reconciliation, thus requiring no GOP votes.
Some Republican lawmakers, free of Trump, might also be willing to support a more traditional foreign policy approach. In April, when Trump threatened to pull out of NATO if the allies didn’t help open the Strait of Hormuz, GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there was little appetite in his caucus to support Trump in that effort. “We got an awful lot of people who think that NATO is a very critical, incredibly successful post-World War II alliance. And I think in the world today, you need allies,” Thune told reporters. Additionally, a NATO in which member states have raised their defense spending and taken increased responsibility for aiding Ukraine is an alliance that more conservative Americans can get behind without feeling like suckers.
Many supporters of traditional U.S. multilateralism fear that, because of Trump’s nationalist and extortionist policies, other countries can no longer trust us. After all, American voters elected Trump not once, but twice. That’s a fair point. But it’s also true that American voters threw Trump out of office once and, in virtually every election over the past year-plus, have signaled their unhappiness with the state of the country under his leadership. Moreover, all advanced democracies have far-right authoritarian political movements that could take over their governments. We can’t trust their voters any more than they can trust ours. We may all be fated to oscillate between liberal and illiberal governments, as Hungary has, until we address the working-class economic distress that is the root cause of the problem. As I have argued, it’s easier to do that multilaterally than separately.
These days, it’s easy to see why all of these countries have given up on us. Many of us here in the country feel that way, too. It’s so important to make sure the midterms flip the House and the Senate. If not, I may be writing future blog posts from Lima, Peru. Alison Quinn, writing for The Daily Beast, has the perfect observation. ” We’ll have to ask Dr. BB for confirmation, but I believe lack of sleep can increase the level of madness in a mentally ill person. “Truth of Trump’s Wild Sleepless Nights Exposed. LOSING HIS MIND. Joanna Coles and Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty dive into a jaw-dropping investigation revealing the president’s relentless late-night posting habits.”
A third of Donald Trump’s social media posts now come in the middle of the night when the soon-to-be 80-year-old president should be sleeping, raising urgent new concerns about his mental health as he navigates war.
Joanna Coles and Daily Beast executive editor Hugh Dougherty break down a shocking investigation that puts Trump’s late-night posting habits on stark display, revealing a disturbing pattern between those baffling posts fired off in the dead of night and the awkward moments in the Oval Office when the president has been caught appearing to doze off.
“It is an extraordinary, extraordinary piece of work. Josh Fiallo, our brilliant reporter, counted up all the times that Donald Trump posted on Truth Social in April and then he looked at when he was posting and he looked between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. and we discovered that there were only five days in April when the president did not post on Truth Social between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.,” Dougherty said on The Daily Beast Podcast.
“Eighty percent of nights when he could be sleeping, he’s posting,” he said.
While Trump’s often bizarre Truth Social posts have in many ways become a hallmark of his time in office, there was something quite different about them in the month of April: They appeared to become more frantic, disjointed, and more incendiary, as Trump’s political troubles multiplied, leading to foul-mouthed tirades and threats of war crimes that shocked even his own MAGA base and prompted some of his own allies to sound the alarm. It was no longer just Democrats questioning his fitness for office, but former advisers and much of the American public.
A Fox News poll conducted April 17-20 found that 55 percent of respondents felt Trump did not have the “mental soundness” to be an effective leader.
Well, at least the majority of us can see clearly. So that’s it for me. I got a smoker grill and intend to sit in what will become the new backyard of the kathouse and eat some very delicious food this summer. That’s mostly because I’m having the kitchen completely redone soon, so I have to cook somewhere else. It will be like a Girl Scout camp trip soon!
Please take care of yourselves, be kind to yourselves, and remember we’re always here for each other!
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
“Don’t gobblefunk around with words.” ― Roald Dahl, The BFG.
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“The Attorney General of the United States showed her true colors.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Just when you think the Circus of Incompetence and Evil has wound down, another one of the players finds a way to the stage to make a hash of reality. The Epstein files and the illegal ICE raids have pretty much taken center stage, but other atrocities are happening within the Trump Regime. I’m going to focus on the Testimony given by Pam Bondi and the entire Epstein mess that has alerted us to exactly how many people with money and power have ruined the lives and the innocence of children.
I must issue trigger warnings here because none of this is easy to see or read.
I will start with this analysis by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate. “Pam Bondi Is Not Practicing Law. The attorney general’s testimony before Congress revealed what a farce this is.”
The release of the Epstein files—the slow-drip revelations of a web of privileged (mostly) men trading gifts, access, favors, and sickening child predation as casually as Pokémon cards—has been deliberately parsed out through 2026 as to both be buried itself and bury other horrific news coming out of the Trump administration. But this misses a critical point: The Epstein file dump is not simply playing out as a backdrop against which other acts of American lawlessness are occurring. The Epstein story is also the template and the proof text for all that is happening in Minnesota; at dangerous detention centers; in efforts to punish members of Congress for lawful speech; for crypto scams; and for measles outbreaks. It is an ongoing road map for an administration that lives out the reality that they are rich and powerful and famous enough to be above the law each day, and wishes for the rest of us to ultimately learn and accept that fact.
And it is equally true that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick could bring his children and their nannies to a bespoke lunch on Epstein’s island in 2012, long after he allegedly broke off contact with the sex predator, precisely because Lutnick’s children and their nannies were not the types of children or women who would be abandoned there to be raped and threatened. He is also a walking infomercial about whom the law protects and whom it leaves broken and invisible, behind. Lutnick’s testimony this past week, like Bondi’s, is thus operating as a still life in what happens when the law becomes inert. On the one hand, it is not relevant as a restraint to those who need not rely on it; on the other, it is not protective for those who do.
Liz Plank, on her Substack, describes the nausea and disorientation felt by women realizing this past week that we had all been gaslit yet again. Those of us who cannot even begin to imagine a permission structure that allowed and encouraged passing young girls around, trading insults and articles about them (“your littlest girl was a little naughty”), and bonding over the hysteria of #MeToo can barely comprehend why it was that this class of men always took the gift and the freebie and the shitty watch and the plane trip, because access to yet more of the same somehow became the coin of the realm. What Plank describes as “trust bias”—the psychological tendency to assume that others are operating within the same moral and ethical universe as yourself—means that we are all, once again, annihilated by the fact that America’s shared moral universe is a collective fiction, one that constrains one class of people and merely titillates another.
We err when we call what is being done by ICE officials to citizens and noncitizens on the streets of American cities “law,” just as we err when we call what has thus far been afforded the Epstein survivors “justice.” Indeed, the word law is too generous to contain the plea deals and the willing ignorance and the prison transfers that were granted to Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators at every turn. And the word injustice is far too small to describe the spectacle of hundreds of survivors who have still not been given a reckoning or a measure of genuine accountability, whose unredacted names appeared in public documents and who had never been contacted by the Department of Justice.
Pam Bondi may be in charge of many officials and many investigations and many legal things at the DOJ, but what she is protecting is neither justice nor law. And that means that what Plank describes as a trust bias is also an exquisitely American “law bias,” and we should dispense with the notion that we are all in some group compact to protect and preserve the same things. The law is neither protecting the vulnerable nor constraining the Epstein class. And perhaps we should stop referencing that word to mean either project, much less deploying it to describe both.
One of Maria Farmer’s works of art was released from the Epstein Files.
Continue to read this excellent piece at the link. Meanwhile, a friend of mine sent this link to a site with a Link to the Justice Department. The link provides a window into the artwork from Jeffrey Epstein survivor Maria Farmer, found in the Epstein files. CNN reported on Farmer during the first wave of releases. This is from December 19,2025. “Epstein files vindicate a survivor who reported him in the 1990s, but others are still seeking answers.” Everyone is still seeking answers, and all we get are performances like Bondi’s and distractions.
The Justice Department’s partial release of its files related to Jeffrey Epstein on Friday marked a moment of triumph for Epstein survivor Maria Farmer and her sister Annie, who have said for years that Maria had filed one of the first complaints against Epstein in the 1990s.
An FBI document released Friday included a 1996 description of a criminal complaint against Epstein related to child pornography.
While the name of the complainant is redacted in the document, Maria Farmer’s lawyer, Jennifer Freeman, confirmed on CNN that the complaint was in fact made by her client.
The “facts of complaint” part of the document says that the woman — who describes herself as a professional artist — had taken photos of her underage sisters for her own personal artwork.
“Epstein stole the photos and negatives and is believed to have sold the pictures to potential buyers,” the document reads. “Epstein at one time requested (redacted) to take pictures of young girls at swimming pools.” It continued: “Epstein is now threatening (redacted) that if she tells anyone about the photos he will burn her house down.”
Examining these photos is difficult. It is, however, one way we can give voice to these survivors. These paintings have returned to the conversation about who exactly should be brought to justice for this massive child sex trafficking travesty.
Maria’s painting shows many familiar faces. Take a look.
It appears that DHS will shut down this weekend. This is from the AP. “What to know about the Homeland Security shutdown starting this weekend.”
Another shutdown for parts of the federal government is expected this weekend as lawmakers debate new restrictions on President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.
Funding for the Department of Homeland Security is set to expire Saturday. Democrats say they won’t help approve more funding until new restrictions are placed on federal immigration operations after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis last month.
The White House has been negotiating with the Democrats, but the two sides failed to reach a deal by the end of the week, guaranteeing that funding for the department will lapse.
Unlike the record 43-day shutdown last fall, the closures will be narrowly confined, as only agencies under the DHS umbrella — like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — will be affected. Still, depending on how long the shutdown lasts, some federal workers could begin to miss paychecks.
Services like airport screening could also suffer if the shutdown drags on for weeks.
At the Transportation Security Administration, about 95% of employees are deemed essential. They will continue to scan passengers and their bags at the nation’s commercial airports. But they will work without pay until the funding lapse is resolved, raising the possibility that workers will being calling out or taking unscheduled leave. Many TSA workers already faced financial stress last year.
“Some are just now recovering from the financial impact of the 43-day shutdown” said Ha Nguyen McNeill, a senior official performing the duties of TSA administrator. “Many are still reeling from it.”
This is breaking news from theWashington Post. “Much of DHS set to shut down as Democrats demand new restraints on ICE. Democrats are pushing for new policies requiring agents to wear body cameras and get judicial warrants for raids.”
The Department of Homeland Security is expected to shut down early Saturday as congressional Democrats and the White House remain at an impasse over new restrictions on federal immigration agents.
The shutdown beginning at 12:01 a.m. Saturday would impact about 13 percent of the federal civilian workforce, including the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard.
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection — the main targets of Democrats’ outrage — would be able to continue immigration enforcement efforts due to an influx of funding from the Republican tax and spending law passed this past summer.
Despite the stalemate, both chambers of Congress have already left Washington and do not plan to return until Feb. 23 after a scheduled week-long recess that includes, for some senators, a trip to the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
State governments are fighting to keep the Election Clause of the U.S. Constitution real. This is from Democracy Docket‘s Matt Cohen.
The Democratic chief election officials of six states are denouncing two new voter suppression bills making their way through Congress — underscoring how the legislation would place a huge burden on voters and election administrators just as midterm election season kicks off.
“These bills would place a massive burden on American eligible voters, require unfeasible overhauls of state systems while preparations for the 2026 midterm elections are well underway, and create unfunded mandates for already under-resourced states and municipalities,” the secretaries wrote. “American voters will be the ones paying for this — by paying more in taxes, spending more time jumping through bureaucratic hoops, or losing access to the ballot box altogether.”
The House passed the SAVE America Act late Wednesday evening in a 218-213 vote, with every present Republican — along with one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas — voting in favor of the sweeping voter suppression bill. The bill — along with the MEGA Act, which was introduced earlier this week — stands to disenfranchise millions by imposing strict requirements for voters to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote, and to provide photo ID when casting ballots.
While the secretaries highlight that both bills “would make it harder for eligible voters to both register and cast their ballots,” they also call attention to the reality that GOP lawmakers have yet to address: Making such extensive changes to the voting process so close to an election would create chaos for election administrators.
Some states, like North Carolina, have already started with early voting, and any attempt to overhaul requirements for voters to register and cast ballots would be extremely costly to both states and voters, according to the secretaries.
“A series of sweeping overhauls to the nation’s voter registration and election administration laws, when some states are weeks or months away from conducting their primary elections, is not a serious effort at improving the democratic process,” the letter said. “Election administrators already face significant challenges in educating voters on registration requirements, especially considering the significant mis- and dis-information on the issue coming out of Washington, D.C.”
Democracy backsliding is real. One more surreal headline from about the HHS Secretary who admits to snorting coke from bathroom toilets. This is from The Hill’s Joseph Choi. “HHS shaking up top personnel to push Trump, MAHA priorities ahead of midterms.”
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday announced a reshuffling of top staffers in his department as the Trump administration looks to shore up health wins that can boost GOP success in the upcoming midterms.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Deputy Administrator Chris Klomp will be chief counselor at the HHS.
John Brooks, CMS deputy administrator and the chief policy and regulatory officer, will now be CMS senior counselor. Kyle Diamantas, deputy commissioner for human foods at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Grace Graham, FDA deputy commissioner for policy, legislation, and international affairs, have been named as senior counselors for the FDA.
As CNN reported, current HHS chief of staff Matt Buckham will also move to a senior counselor role. Administration officials who spoke with the outlet said the changes came as a result of conversation between the HHS and the White House.
“In just over a year, we have driven historic progress on President Trump’s health care priorities and delivered real, measurable change,” Kennedy said in a statement.
“We are restoring accountability, challenging entrenched interests, and putting the health of the American people first. I am proud to elevate battle-tested, principled leaders onto my immediate team—individuals with the courage and experience to help us move faster and go further as we work to Make America Healthy Again.”
Kennedy’s support for President Trump helped deliver a bloc of voters long critical and suspicious of the medical establishment. But many observers have noted this support is tenuous.
As Jeff Hutt, a spokesperson for the MAHA PAC, recently told The Hill “Make America Health Again” voters aren’t necessarily those who show up strongly for the GOP during midterms.
Can you believe anyone still believes this guy?
Anyway, with that , I have to get ready to go get a mammogram. Have a great weekend! It’s total Mardi Gras Crazy down here! It’s also Friday the 13th.
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“The Orangeutan is full-bore flinging poo to distract from the Epstein Trump Files.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers
My outrage today at the latest, least presidential Truth Social Post that I may have ever seen knows no bounds. And yet, the boundless insanity of the “Press Secretary” tells me it’s fake. Don’t you just hate it when some Clairol MAGA Blonde bimbo tries to tell you how you feel? Here’s the headline at the New York Times. I’d share the Washington Post headline, too, but Jeff Bezos is busy ripping all the vital organs of that once great newspaper. “Trump Posts Video Portraying Obamas as Apes. The White House press secretary dismissed criticism of the clip’s racist content, shared by the president’s Truth Social account, as “fake outrage.” What an international disgrace of a country we’ve become!
Erica L. Green and Isabella Kwai share the lede.
President Trump posted a blatantly racist video clip portraying former President Barack Obama and the former first lady Michelle Obama as apes, the latest in a long pattern by Mr. Trump of promoting offensive stereotypes about Black Americans and others.
The brief clip, set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was spliced near the end of a 62-second video that promoted conspiracy theories about anomalies in the 2020 presidential election.
The depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Obama as apes perpetuates a racist trope, used historically by slave traders and segregationists to dehumanize Black people and justify lynchings and other atrocities. A spokeswoman for Mr. Obama declined to comment.
Mr. Trump has a history of making degrading remarks about people of color, women and immigrants. And in his second administration, official posts from the White House, Labor Department and Homeland Security Department have posted images and slogans that echo white supremacist messaging.
In response to questions about the clip, which Mr. Trump posted Thursday during a late-night spree on social media, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said criticism of the video was “fake outrage.”
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” she said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina — the Senate’s only Black Republican — wrote on X that he hoped the post was fake “because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it.”
The latest clip appeared to have been taken from a video that was shared in October by a user on X with the caption “President Trump: King of the Jungle,” and an emoji of a lion.
In that video, several high-profile Democrats — including former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former vice president Kamala Harris — were shown as various animals, while Mr. Trump was depicted as a lion. The Obamas, in the clip, were shown as apes. The video ended with the animals bowing down to Mr. Trump.
NBC News‘ Rebecca Shabad has further information on the disgusting post. “Trump shares racist video depicting the Obamas as monkeys. The White House defended Trump’s post, saying it was “from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle.”
The roughly minute-long video otherwise focused on false election fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, but at the very end it suddenly flashed to a clip of the Obamas’ faces superimposed on the heads of cartoon apes as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” by The Tokens played in the background.
The imagery, which evokes long-standing racist tropes against Black people, comes during Black History Month, which honors the accomplishments and contributions of Black Americans. Barack Obama made U.S. history as the first Black president.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to NBC News’ request for comment Friday morning with a statement: “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King. Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
The video the White House referred to appeared to have been posted initially by an X user in October and shows the Obamas as apes in the beginning and other Democrats’ faces as the heads of other African animals as the song continues to play. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is depicted as a warthog and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker as an elephant, for example, while Trump is presented as a lion.
Representatives for the Obamas didn’t immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
Trump’s repost drew strong criticism on social media, including from Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who sharply denounced the president on X. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House. The President should remove it,” he said.
The President continues to do despicable things to immigrant families and to communities that stand up to his reckless and unconstitutional policies. This is from MPR News, located in the Twin Cities area. Regina Medina reports the story. “DHS has requested expedited deportation proceedings against family of Liam Conejo Ramos.”
The federal government has filed a motion seeking to end asylum claims for the family of Liam Conejo Ramos, according to the lawyer representing the family. The 5-year-old returned home this week after he was detained with his father on Jan. 20 and sent to a detention center in Texas.
The Department of Homeland Security filed a motion Wednesday to expedite deportation proceedings in the family’s case, said immigration attorney Danielle Molliver with Nwokocha & Operana Law Offices.
A hearing is scheduled for Friday, although Molliver is requesting more time to respond. She said she thought the motion was “retaliatory.”
“It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It’s not very common,” Molliver said.
Molliver said the federal government may not deport them to Ecuador, their home country. Instead, the family could apply for asylum in a third country.
Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, said they don’t know what will happen to them.
“The government is moving many pieces, it’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so that they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear too,” Conejo Arias said. The interview was conducted in Spanish and translated by MPR News.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
I truly believe that the more he goes after this family, the more his polls will fall, and he will pull Republicans down further as the Midterm elections near. What is also clear is that the Washington Post will not be up to doing any kind of real reporting on any of this. Ruth Marcus of The New Yorker has this analysis. “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post. The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline.”
On September 4, 2013, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos held his first meeting with the staff of the Washington Post, the newspaper he had agreed to purchase a month earlier from the Graham family, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. It had been a long and unsettling stretch for the paper’s staff. We—I was a deputy editor of the editorial page at the time—had suffered through years of retrenchment. We trusted that Don Graham would place us in capable hands, but we did not know this new owner, and he did not know or love our business in the way that the Graham family had. Bezos’s words at that meeting, about “a new golden era for the Washington Post,” were reassuring. Bob Woodward asked why he had purchased the paper, and Bezos was clear about the commitment he was prepared to make. “I finally concluded that I could provide runway—financial runway—because I don’t think you can keep shrinking the business,” he said. “You can be profitable and shrinking. And that’s a survival strategy, but it ultimately leads to irrelevance, at best. And, at worst, it leads to extinction.”
To look back on that moment is to wonder: How could it have come to this? The paper had some profitable years under Bezos, sparked by the 2016 election and the first Trump term. But it began losing enormous sums: seventy-seven million dollars in 2023, another hundred million in 2024. The owner who once offered runway was unwilling to tolerate losses of that magnitude. And so, after years of Bezos-fuelled growth, the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred, and cost the Post some of its best writers and editors. Then, early Wednesday morning, newsroom employees received an e-mail announcing “some significant actions.” They were instructed to stay home and attend a “Zoom webinar at 8:30 a.m.” Everyone knew what was coming—mass layoffs.
The scale of the demolition, though, was staggering—reportedly more than three hundred newsroom staffers. The announcement was left to the executive editor, Matt Murray, and human-relations chief Wayne Connell; the newspaper’s publisher, Will Lewis, was nowhere to be seen as the grim news was unveiled. In what Murray termed a “broad strategic reset,” the Post’s storied sports department was shuttered “in its current form”; several reporters will now cover sports as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.” The metro staff, already cut to about forty staffers during the past five years, has been shrunk to about twelve; the foreign desks will be reduced to approximately twelve locations from more than twenty; Peter Finn, the international editor, told me that he asked to be laid off. The books section and the flagship podcast, “Post Reports,” will end. Shortly after the meeting, staffers received individualized e-mails letting them know whether they would stay or go. Murray said the retrenched Post would “concentrate on areas that demonstrate authority, distinctiveness, and impact,” focussing on areas such as politics and national security. This strategy, a kind of Politico-lite, would be more convincing if so many of the most talented players were not already gone.
Graham, who has previously been resolutely silent about changes at the paper, posted a message on Facebook that pulsed with anguish. “It’s a bad day,” he wrote, adding, “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.” As for himself, Graham, who once edited the sports section, said, “I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s.”
Tech Bros and MAGA have ruined our democracy. Paul Krugman, however, argues that “American Decency Still Lives. When pushed far enough, Americans will do the right thing.” This is posted on his SubStack. I have found this to be true here in New Orleans. Even more so, I watch the city where I lived before moving here show the earnest Lutheran social justice so famously known as Minnesota nice. It has a yin and a yang, believe me.
If you want to accomplish anything in politics, you have to have realistic expectations about voters. Ordinary people aren’t deeply informed about policy or politics. They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. A large proportion of voters don’t have strong ideological preferences — not because they’re “moderates,” but because they don’t think ideologically at all. Instead, they think pragmatically – they think about things like the price of eggs and the cost of health insurance. And because the average voter isn’t a policy or data wonk, they are often misled – for example, by claims that crime is rising even when it’s actually falling.
Granted, some voting behavior is motivated by ugly biases. Racism and sexism, homophobia and transphobia, are still important factors in politics. But there’s a difference between political realism and nihilistic cynicism.
Many of my readers are probably aware of the famous confessional by the German pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
I don’t know if Stephen Miller has ever seen these words. But if he has, he has taken them not as a warning but as operating instructions. MAGA’s ethnic cleansing plans — because that’s what they are — were clearly based on the cynical assumption that native-born white Americans wouldn’t rise to the defense of civil liberties and rule of law if state violence was directed at people who don’t look like them.
And for much of Trump’s first year in office many Democrats were reluctant to challenge his immigration policies, because their defeat in 2024 was widely seen as in part a response to surging immigration during the Biden years. Until recently, Democrats tried to keep the national conversation focused on affordability and Trump’s obvious failure to deliver on his promises to bring grocery prices way down.
While the Democratic strategy was an understandable response to a shattering electoral defeat, it rested on a cynical and nihilistic view of American voters: that they couldn’t be trusted to vote against a party that reveled in inflicting cruelty and injustice as long as the price of gasoline fell.
But recent events refute this nihilistic cynicism. Yes, Americans still name the economy as the most important political issue. But moral outrage over the Trump administration’s brutality (and its corruption, but that’s a subject for another post) has exploded as a political force over the past two months.
There was substantial resistance to ICE’s attempts to intimidate Los Angeles and Chicago. But the response since the invasion of Minneapolis (and now all of Minnesota) began in December has been on another level, a mass nonviolent uprising reminiscent of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the color revolutions in the former Soviet empire.
MPR News reports that nearly 30,000 Minnesotans have been trained as constitutional observers, with another 6,000 volunteers registered to deliver food, give at-risk families rides, and so on. This is time-consuming, exhausting, dangerousactivism. Yet ordinary Americans in large numbers are willing to do it.
Cell phone cameras and whistles can’t completely stop ICE’s brutality and lawlessness. For some reason I’m especially troubled by tales of the many cars found abandoned in the middle of the street, their windows smashed and their occupants obviously abducted. But the resistance is throwing sand in the gears and producing acute frustration among the masked thugs, who have repeatedly been filmed drawing guns on citizens doing nothing but observing them.
And the public is not on the side of the thugs.
Profanity-laden anti-MAGA chant erupts at major pro-wrestling event
Plus, once again, a major nation is turning to China for its trade initiatives because our #FARTUS is too stupid and stuck-up to recognize that his economic policies are dooming a lot of our industries and jobs. This is from the AP. I cannot believe we keep repeating obvious mistakes from the past because no one in Congress will do their fucking job! “Facing high Trump tariffs, Africa’s leading economy says it’s close to a new trade deal with China.” Just think, a few years ago, we were on target to keep them in second place.
China and South Africa signed a framework agreement for a new trade deal on Friday as Africa’s leading economy looks to other options following the high import tariffs imposed on it by the U.S. and its diplomatic fallout with the Trump administration.
South Africa’s Ministry of Trade and Industry said the agreement would start negotiations over a deal that would give some South African goods, such as fruit, duty-free access to the Chinese market. The ministry said it expected the trade deal to be finalized by the end of March.
In return, the trade ministry said China will get enhanced investment opportunities in South Africa, where its car sales have seen rapid growth.
The U.S. slapped 30% duties on some South African goods under U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs policy — one of the higher rates applied across the world. South Africa has said it is still negotiating with the U.S. for a better deal.
The China-South Africa deal follows others looking for alternatives to U.S. partnership in the face of Trump’s aggressive trade policies.
The announcement on the negotiations between China and South Africa came days after Trump issued a short-term renewal of a longstanding free-trade agreement between the U.S. and African nations. The U.S. extended the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which South Africa is a major beneficiary of, just until the end of the year and indicated it would be modified to fit the administration’s America First policy.
China is already South Africa’s largest trade partner for both imports and exports, while Chinese economic influence across the African continent continues to grow and it dominates in the extraction of Africa’s critical minerals that are key components for new high-tech products.
“South Africa looks forward to working with China in a friendly, pragmatic and flexible manner,” the trade ministry said.
The Stupid. It hurts.
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As usual, there is just too much news for anyone to deal with. I’m going to focus on the death of a great newspaper, the torture of an American city, the efforts of a vain and ignorant “president” to grab power and steal elections, and his obsession with building monstrosities. Here’s what’s happening.
The Washington Post told employees on Wednesday that it was beginning a widespread round of layoffs that are expected to decimate the organization’s sports, local news and international coverage.
The company is laying off about 30 percent of all its employees, according to two people with knowledge of the decision. That includes people on the business side and more than 300 of the roughly 800 journalists in the newsroom, the people said.
The cuts are a sign that Jeff Bezos, who became one of the world’s richest people by selling things on the internet, has not yet figured out how to build and maintain a profitable publication on the internet. The paper expanded during the first several years of his ownership, but the company has sputtered more recently.
Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said on a call Wednesday morning with newsroom employees that the company had lost too much money for too long and had not been meeting readers’ needs. He said that all sections would be affected in some way, and that the result would be a publication focused even more on national news and politics, as well as business and health, and far less on other areas.
“If anything, today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape,” Mr. Murray said. “And after some years when, candidly, The Post has had struggles.”
Mr. Murray further explained the rationale in an email, saying The Post was “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product” and that online search traffic, partly because of the rise of generative A.I., had fallen by nearly half in the last three years. He added that The Post’s “daily story output has substantially fallen in the last five years.”
“Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” he said.
The Post’s sports section will close, though some of its reporters will stay on and move to the features department to cover the culture of sports. The Post’s metro section will shrink, and the books section will close, as will the “Post Reports” daily news podcast.
Mr. Murray told the staff that while The Post’s international coverage also would be reduced, reporters would remain in nearly a dozen locations. Reporters and editors in the Middle East were laid off, as well as in India and Australia.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special. The Post has survived for nearly 150 years, evolving from a hometown family newspaper into an indispensable national institution, and a pillar of the democratic system. But if Bezos and Lewis continue down their present path, it may not survive much longer.
Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future. This morning, executive editor Matt Murray and HR chief Wayne Connell told the newsroom staff in an early-morning virtual meeting that it was closing the Sports department and Books section, ending its signature podcast, and dramatically gutting the International and Metro departments, in addition to staggering cuts across all teams. Post leadership—which did not even have the courage to address their staff in person—then left everyone to wait for an email letting them know whether or not they had a job. (Lewis, who has already earned a reputation for showing up late to work when he showed up at all, did not join the Zoom.)
The Post may yet rise, but this will be their enduring legacy.
Ashley Parker
What’s happening to the Post is a public tragedy, but for me, it is also very personal. When my parents’ basement recently flooded, amid the waterlogged boxes of old photos and vinyl records, we found my younger sister’s baby book. There, on a page reserved for memories from the month she was born—news about visits from doting grandparents, perhaps, or descriptions of her mewling gurgles—my dad had filled the lines with news from our hometown paper, The Washington Post.
“Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).” “Irangate.” “The Bork nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.” “The NFL went on strike.” “Wall Street had the worst day since 1929!!!” “The U.S. was having a garbage crisis, i.e.; running out of disposal sites, esp. in the northeast.” (To be fair, he worked in waste management. But also … welcome to the world, Baby Girl!)
Which is to say: The Washington Post feels like a part of my family’s DNA, imprinted on our earliest memories, memorialized among clippings of our hair and other, more traditional, recollections (first diaper blowout, first word)….
The Post was also how I fell in love with journalism. Every newspaper lover has the section they read first—Sports, Comics, Metro—and mine was Style. The section, which debuted in 1969, was like nothing that had come before it, or what has come since: a newspaper that gave its writers the time and space and freedom and voice to produce narrative long-form journalism that was must-read, holding its own against the New Journalism magazine greats of the era. And for me, it was a chance to commune with giants—to read people such as Libby Copeland, Robin Givhan, Paul Hendrickson, Sally Quinn, David Von Drehle, Gene Weingarten, Marjorie Williams—and puzzle over how they’d done it.
Then, in 2017, I arrived at the Post as a reporter to cover the Trump White House, and I stayed for eight magical years. I had planned to stay forever. So what is happening at the Post right now—what has been happening there for a while—is personal. But it is also so much larger than me or any single person.
The least cynical explanation is that Bezos simply isn’t paying attention. Maybe—like so many of us initially—he was charmed by Lewis’s British accent and studied loucheness that mask an emperor whose bespoke threads are no clothes at all. Or maybe, as many of us who deeply love the Post fear, the decimation is the plan.
Bezos is killing the Post. I’m not sure if he just wants it to die or he wants it to become a propaganda arm of the Trump adminisration.
The morning her father called to say that he had been detained on a snowy Minneapolis road, Xochitl Soberanes was seized by an urgent and inescapable feeling. At 16 years old and the eldest of four, she would suddenly have to become the backbone of the family.
Their mother had died of pneumonia less than a year ago, so it was Xochitl who convinced her 4-year-old brother that their father was working late as they packed up belongings to go stay with a nearby aunt. That January night, a cousin found all four siblings curled up asleep in the same queen bed — cradled by Xochitl, who lay on the edge.
“We just wanted to be close together,” she said.
Xochitl cut her younger siblings’ breakfast into bite-size pieces.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
For weeks, the Minneapolis area has been a landscape of intense turmoil as federal immigration agents face off against furious citizens. But there is a quieter upheaval taking place behind closed doors as the city’s youngest residents attempt to grasp the altering of their neighborhoods, their schools, their sense of security.
Regardless of what they might understand about the politics embedded in their surroundings, some things are clear: The adults in their lives are weary and overwhelmed. Neighbors are scared to leave the house. Bomb threats have been called in to schools. Events have been canceled. Friends are missing from classrooms. And parents have been taken.
“I was just thinking, ‘What are we going to do without him?’” Xochitl said about the day her father, Victor, did not come home. She began to insist to her aunt that she could finish her final exams and be available to help with her siblings. Within a week, her friend, a U.S. citizen, was also detained and later released.“It’s like living in fear all the time,” Xochitl said.
It is a sentiment that many children in the area speak of — this fear that now feels innate and will continue to linger in ways they cannot yet comprehend. They live in a world where a barrage of honks and whistles signal that immigration agents are in their midst, and that something bad could happen soon.
It is not unusual for them to see agents dressed in riot gear and carrying rifles stationed on their streets. And those who have found themselves swept up unwillingly into altercations have been left to endure the aftereffects.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said on Wednesday that the federal government would immediately withdraw 700 law enforcement officers from Minneapolis, scaling down the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the area.
Tom Homan
The change comes after the Trump administration sent thousands of federal officers and agents to Minnesota, a deployment that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said was the agency’s “largest operation to date.” About 2,000 officers and agents would be left in the state, Mr. Homan said.
Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said on Wednesday that the federal government would immediately withdraw 700 law enforcement officers from Minneapolis, scaling down the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the area.
The change comes after the Trump administration sent thousands of federal officers and agents to Minnesota, a deployment that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said was the agency’s “largest operation to date.” About 2,000 officers and agents would be left in the state, Mr. Homan said.
“This is smart law enforcement, not less law enforcement,” he added.
I’ll believe that when I see it.
Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, a Democrat, said in a statement that the reduction in officers was “a step in the right direction” but that 2,000 federal officers in the region was still “not de-escalation.”
“My message to the White House has been consistent — Operation Metro Surge has been catastrophic for our businesses and residents. It needs to end immediately,” he said, referring to the name of the federal crackdown in the city.
Mr. Homan also emphasized that immigration officers would focus on more targeted enforcement operations that prioritize arresting criminals who pose public safety threats. Last week, Mr. Homan said that was “the way we’ve always done it,” but that “we got away from it a little bit.”
Still, he said that any immigrants residing in the country illegally would not be exempt from enforcement operations.
“If you are in the country illegally, you are not off the table,” Mr. Homan said.
“I want to see elections be honest, and if a state can’t run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office after signing legislation to end a partial government shutdown, with Republican lawmakers surrounding him.
“Because if you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections,” the president continued. “I don’t know why the federal government doesn’t do ’em anyway.”
He added, “But when you see some of these states, about how horribly they run their elections, what a disgrace it is, I think the federal government [should get involved].”
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting in at least 15 places,’” Trump said. “The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
In the Oval Office on Tuesday, the president referenced Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta — all Democratic-run cities — as places where “horrible corruption on elections” is occurring.
President Trump’s declaration that he wants to “nationalize” voting in the United States arrives at a perilous moment for the relationship between the federal government and top election officials across the country.
While the executive branch has no explicit authority over elections, generations of secretaries of state have relied on the intelligence gathering and cybersecurity defenses, among other assistance, that only the federal government can provide.
But as Mr. Trump has escalated efforts to involve the administration in election and voting matters while also eliminating programs designed to fortify these systems against attacks, secretaries of state and other top state election officials, including some Republican ones, have begun to sound alarms. Some see what was once a crucial partnership as frayed beyond repair.
They point to Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election, his continued false claims that the contest was rigged, the presence of election deniers in influential government positions and his administration’s attempts to dig up evidence of widespread voter fraud that year, even though none have ever been found.
The worry, these election officials say, is that Mr. Trump and his allies might try to interfere in or cast doubt on this year’s midterm elections. The president is urgently trying to defend the Republican majorities in Congress, and the political environment has appeared to grow less friendly to his party.
Of all the threats we face, the threat that Donald Trump will use ICE and Border {atrol agents to suppress the vote calls for a response by the Senate in the pending budget bill. By word and deed, Trump has shown an intent to do all he can to subvert a free and fair election this November. He must be stopped.
Who would bet $5 that Donald Trump, the man who staged an attempted coup and urged a Governor to “find” 11,000 votes, is not going to interfere with the ability of Americans to cast their votes this November? Who thinks that his “moral code,” the only thing that he says restricts him, will prevent him from using his massive ICE private army from suppressing the vote in Democratic precincts? Who thinks Steve Bannon is kidding when he says Trump will use federal agents to screen voters?
Donald Trump represents the largest threat to free and fair voting in American history since Jim Crow. He has demonstrated time and again, his willingness to subvert our democratic norms. His recent extortion note to Minnesota and his seizure of Georgia ballots are clarion calls for action to stop him from using ICE to suppress the vote.
Think about the private voter suppression army he has entirely at his disposal, an organization purportedly in existence to deal with immigration, but which could be used for Trump’s best survival tool, the suppression of votes in Democratic precincts in competitive districts and states.
Unless something changes, what we have seen in Minneapolis is just the harbinger to the use of ICE and the Border Patrol as a massive and strategically planned voter suppression campaign, surrounding polling places with intimidating federal agents.
By separating the Homeland Security budget from the rest, the dedicated Senate Democrats now have a chance to put roadblocks in Trump’s path.
Fulton County in Georgia took legal action on Wednesday demanding that the federal government return ballots and other election materials from the 2020 presidential contest that the F.B.I. seized last week.
The motion was filed under seal in federal court in Georgia, according to Jessica Corbitt, a spokeswoman for Fulton County. The motion also seeks the unsealing of the affidavit that was filed in support of the search warrant that allowed F.B.I. agents to conduct an extraordinary search of the county’s election headquarters.
At a news conference on Wednesday morning, Robb Pitts, the chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, cast the legal action as a means of upholding the Constitution, as well as the rights of Fulton County voters.
“We will fight using all resources against those who seek to take over our elections,” he said. “Our Constitution itself is at stake in this fight.”
The move follows a chaotic week in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta and is Georgia’s most populous county, after F.B.I. agents conducted an extraordinary search and took away pallets of ballots and other materials.
Local officials were particularly alarmed and confused by the presence of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, whose agency’s involvement in elections traditionally pertains only to foreign influence. The day after the search, she met with some of the agents who had participated and called Mr. Trump on her cellphone, The New York Times reported on Monday. After initially not picking up, he called back and spoke to them on speakerphone, asking them questions and praising and thanking them, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting.
President Donald Trump is planning to install a statue of Christopher Columbus on White House grounds, according to three people with knowledge of the pending move,in his latest effort to remake the presidential campus and celebrate the famed and controversial explorer.
In 2020, demonstrators targeted monuments deemed symbols of racism, colonialism, and oppression.
The statue is set to be located on the south side of the grounds, by E Street and north of the Ellipse, two of the people said, although they cautioned that plans could change. The three people spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak on private discussions. The piece is a reconstruction of a statue unveiled in Baltimore by then-President Ronald Reagan and dumped in the city’s harbor by protestersin 2020 as a racial reckoning swept the country.
A group of Italian American businessmen and politicians, working with local sculptors, obtained the destroyed pieces and rebuilt the statue with financial support from local charities and federal grant funding.
Bill Martin, an Italian American businessman who helped recover the remnants of the original sculpture and organize a campaign to rebuild it, said the statue is expected to be transferred from a warehouse on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to the Trump administration in coming weeks.
The White House declined to comment on its plans but praised the 15th-century explorer.
“In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” spokesman Davis Ingle said in a statement. “And he will continue to be honored as such by President Trump.
Trump celebrated his $400 million project on social media, posting that it will be the “Greatest of its kind ever built!!”
A rendering of President Donald Trump’s ‘New East Wing’ at the White House, including his nearly 90,000 square foot ballroom (The White House)
He wrote on Truth Social Tuesday that the new building “replaces the very small, dilapidated, and rebuilt many times, East Wing, with a magnificent New East Wing.” He also said that the new structure will be taller than the White House’s Executive Mansion.
“If you notice, the North Wall is a replica of the North Facade of the White House,” he wrote in the post.
The new rendering is generally similar to previous drawings of the upcoming ballroom shared by Trump.
The ballroom is projected to be approximately 90,000 square feet, and the attached “New East Wing” complex will include a new office for the First Lady, a new movie theater, and a commercial kitchen.
Trump’s decision to demolish the historic East Wing for a ritzy ballroom has been met with severe criticism, particularly from historic preservationists.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued the Trump administration in December in an effort to force the president to submit his plans for the ballroom to several review bodies, including Congress and the public. The lawsuit asked a court to pause his construction project until those demands are met.
Construction at the site has not been ordered to stop and Trump’s Department of Justice is moving to try to ensure that doesn’t change.
A DOJ filing on Monday asked a federal judge overseeing the lawsuit to stay any injunction into the construction over alleged “national security” concerns, ABC News reports.
That’s all I have for today. I hope you find something of interest here.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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Tech Bros and MAGA have ruined our democracy. 
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