It’s Memorial Day weekend, and there’s not a whole lot of exciting news today. We’re still dealing with the most corrupt president and cabinet in history. Trump is still evil and certifiably insane. Here’s what’s happening today.
Trump snubbed his eldest son by refusing to attend his wedding this weekend. He usually spends his weekends playing golf and was scheduled to go to his golf club in New Jersey his weekend; but after the announcement that he wasn’t going to the wedding, trump decided to stay in DC.
President Donald Trump has returned his eldest son’s wedding RSVP with only a day’s notice, announcing to Truth Social that he will not attend.
Trump, 79, officially snubbed Donald Trump Jr. in a Friday afternoon post—then quickly changed his weekend schedule to show he was no longer planning on golfing in New Jersey as his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., says “I do.”
“While I very much wanted to be with my son, Don Jr., and the newest member of the Trump Family, his soon to be wife, Bettina, circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so,” Trump claimed. “I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time. Congratulations to Don and Bettina!”
A public schedule for the president initially said he intended to spend the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey—more than 200 miles away from the White House. However, Axios reported shortly after Trump’s announcement that he will now spend the holiday weekend in Washington.
Don Jr. and Bettina Anderson, who began dating after the younger Trump dumped Kimberly Guilfoyle in late 2024, will tie the knot on a private island in the Bahamas on Saturday in front of a small group of family and friends.
Sprung with a question about the wedding in the Oval Office on Thursday, the president hinted that he could not make the trip because of the war with Iran.
“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small little private affair, and I’m going to try and make it, I’m in the midst—,” Trump said before cutting himself off. “I said, ‘You know, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.’”
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, married socialite Bettina Anderson on Thursday in West Palm Beach, Florida, according to Palm Beach County records.
A private wedding celebration is expected to take place Saturday in the Bahamas, Page Six reported. President Donald Trump indicated Thursday that he will not be in attendance, saying the date “was not good timing for me,” citing the ongoing war in Iran and other presidential matters. The president was initially scheduled to be in Bedminster, New Jersey, this weekend but is now expected to be at the White House….
Anderson comes from a prominent Palm Beach family. Her father is Harry Loy Anderson Jr., a banker and philanthropist.
Is Trump actually planning military actions this weekend? He has been threatening more strikes in Iran and is suggesting the possibility of regime change in Cuba.
President Trump was in the Oval Office on Friday morning with his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, in what appeared to be a review of military options for potentially resuming the bombing campaign against Iran.
The existence of the meeting was revealed by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a graduation ceremony at the Naval Academy. While he said nothing about the substance of the meeting, the timing was notable, as negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and its blockage of the Strait of Hormuz appear to have hit a dead end.
There is no shortage of targets, should Mr. Trump, in coordination with Israel, decide to resume the assault on Iran that paused on April 8. There are energy facilities left untouched after about 38 days of bombing, the deep underground nuclear storage site at Isfahan where Iran’s supply of near-bomb-grade uranium is already under rubble, and missile sites that were attacked back in March but appear to have been dug out.
And after weeks of declaring that an agreement was near, and then that the Iranians were “dangling” him, negotiations seem to be at a standstill. Mr. Trump announced on Friday that he was skipping the wedding this weekend of his son and namesake, Donald Trump Jr., because of “circumstances pertaining to the Government, and my love of the United States of America.” [….]
Now he has to deal with the reality that after five weeks of war and six weeks of cease-fire, he has failed to force Iran’s leaders to relent. Mr. Trump frequently notes — accurately — that Iran’s navy has been sunk and its air force destroyed, and that many of its missile sites and military bases have been reduced to rubble or badly damaged. But the destruction has not translated into victory.
Crucially, the near-bomb-grade nuclear uranium remains where it has been since Mr. Trump ordered a bombing raid on three nuclear sites nearly a year ago, deep underground at Isfahan. Iran’s missile capability has been degraded, but not destroyed. And the Strait of Hormuz has fallen under Iran’s control, even as the U.S. Navy intercepts shipments headed into or out of Iranian ports.
If Mr. Trump orders new combat operations, the political risks are high. Already gas prices are over five dollars a gallon in some parts of the country, and renewed military activity could send them even higher. Popular sentiment is clearly against the war, a range of public opinion polls show, and Mr. Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted to around 37 percent.
You can use the gift link to read about Trump’s options for military action in Iran.
Washington is also warning that a peaceful agreement with the Caribbean nation is unlikely, while Cuba says the US is using a “fraudulent case” to justify military intervention….
Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has made clear his desire to change Havana’s leadership and has openly mused that Cuba is “ready to fall”.
In March, he suggested the country was in “deep trouble” as he threatened a “friendly takeover”.
There has been no announcement of plans for any military intervention but Cuba is on edge, especially as surveillance activity in the Caribbean increases.
Leaving the flight transponders on “is likely deliberate”, said UK drone expert Dr Steve Wright, with the US intending to send “a clear message it has eyes in the sky to maintain the squeeze”.
It also quoted a US official who said the intelligence – which it characterised as a potential pretext for US military intervention – suggested Iranian military advisers were in Havana.
When CIA Director John Ratcliffe visited Havana last week for a rare meeting with senior Cuban officials, he brought along one of the operators involved in the U.S. mission to capture then-Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, multiple people familiar with the matter told CBS News.
Venezuela and Cuba were allies before Maduro’s arrest, and the Cuban government has said 32 of its military and police officers were killed in the January operation to extract Maduro.
Ratcliffe made a point of introducing the paramilitary leader to the Cubans as the one who killed their people in Venezuela, several sources said.
The presence of a paramilitary officer who was involved in capturing a key partner of the Cuban government just months earlier may have been intended to send a signal….
Ratcliffe’s visit followed months of pressure on Cuba. The administration has threatened steep tariffs on any countries that export oil to the island nation, leading to severe fuel shortages.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the country needs to make fundamental economic and political reforms, and President Trump has floated a “friendly takeover” of the island, which has vexed U.S. administrations since Cuba’s communist movement rose to power in 1959.
Hours after the Maduro raid, Rubio pointed to Cuba’s ties to Venezuela, telling reporters that Venezuela’s “whole spy agency” was “full of Cubans.”
“If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned, at least a little bit,” he said.
Here’s hoping there won’t be any US bombs dropped anywhere this weekend.
More foreign intervention news: Trump is still meddling in Greenland. Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, who is also Trump’s “envoy” to Greenland showed up there this week.
President Donald Trump’s envoy to Greenland says he got a warm welcome on his first visit this week. But the mood on the Arctic island was decidedly frostier, with one of its most prominent lawmakers calling the visit “appalling” and “offensive.”
Pipaluk Lynge, who chairs Greenland’s foreign and security policy committee, slammed Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s trip as “a clear attempt to divide us” during the sensitive negotiations on the future of the semi-autonomous Danish territory.
She singled out his attempts to offer chocolate chip cookies to a group of Greenlandic children, seen by some as a surreal effort to win approval despite grown-up Greenlanders saying no to American advances.
“I think it’s remarkable that they feel welcome even though they weren’t invited,” Lynge said in an interview with NBC News.
Trump has caused outrage in Greenland and Europe by suggesting he could use force to seize the island, which has vast mineral resources and is strategically positioned in a region increasingly contested between the United States, Russia and China. Most officials and experts agree that were the U.S. to invade a fellow NATO member, it would spell the end of the troubled military alliance.
While Trump has rowed back these explicit militaristic threats, his designs on Greenland have not gone away. Arriving this week, Landry said his mission was to “make friends” but also that it was time for Washington “to put its footprint back” on the Arctic territory.
There was little evidence of any friendliness on the street, with the governor being heckled by people shouting “Don’t come here” and others giving him the finger.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleges that the “anti-weaponization” fund creates a politically discriminatory process that excludes individuals like the plaintiffs, who say they were mistreated by Republican officials and administrations.
“By its own terms, the Anti-Weaponization Fund is available only to claimants who assert that they were targeted by ‘Democrat’ administrations, even though the current administration has weaponized the awesome power of the federal government against its perceived political opponents like no other administration before it,” the suit states.
“First, hundreds of people attacked the foundation of an ordered society by trying to stop the results of a free and fair election—committing serious assaults on law enforcement and other crimes as they did so,” Floyd said in a statement, referring to the failed effort by Trump supporters to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Then, this administration pardoned them — removing the accountability that had been hard earned by victims, witnesses, law enforcement, and prosecutors and imposed by impartial jurors and judges. Now they are asking taxpayers to illegally reward them for their crimes,” he said.
Another plaintiff is Cal State Channel Islands professor Jonathan Caravello, who was acquitted of an assault on law enforcement charge over an incident last summer in which he picked up a tear gas canister that had been deployed by federal agents during a protest against an immigration raid at a California cannabis farm.
The city of New Haven, the National Abortion Federation and the watchdog group Common Cause also joined the suit. All the plaintiffs are represented by Democracy Forward, a progressive nonprofit legal group that filed more than 150 lawsuits in the first year of Trump’s second term.
Read more details about the lawsuit at the NBC link.
The Justice Department has removed press releases detailing the charges against hundreds of individuals who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot from its website, the department confirmed Friday.
“Nothing ‘quiet’ about it,” the DOJ Rapid Response X account said in a post replying to allegations that the Justice Department had deleted press releases related to Jan. 6.
“We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration,” the post continued. “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”
A review by NBC News found that the vast majority of press releases pertaining to Jan. 6 defendants have been removed from the DOJ website as of Friday evening.
The move to wipe hundreds of press releases from the official government site is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to reframe the Jan. 6 siege and to paint the rioters who participated in it as victims.
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump mass pardoned the rioters. Soon after, Justice Department officials and FBI agents who were a part of the Jan. 6 investigation and prosecutions were fired.
After acting Attorney General Todd Blanche did not rule out Jan. 6 rioters’ eligibility to be paid by the fund, outrage swelled from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
It appears that Trump is losing support among Senate Republicans after announcing this naked attempt to steal nearly $1.8 billion from US taxpayers. Acting AG Todd Blanche met with GOP Senators yesterday, and it did not go well.
Screaming, yelling and accusations of self-dealing.
That’s how Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on Friday described a closed-door meeting with Senate Republicans and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that’s drawn bipartisan opposition.
On his podcast “Verdict with Ted Cruz,” the Texas senator described the meeting as “one of the roughest meetings I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate.”
“Fiery does not begin to cut it,” Cruz said. “My guess is there’re probably 45 senators in the room, at least half of them were blasting the attorney general, and they were pissed.”
Senate Republicans met with Blanche on Thursday to discuss the fund, which ultimately derailed a vote on a Republican bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, NBC News previously reported.
Cruz said several of his GOP colleagues felt that they could not politically defend the fund because it appeared as though President Donald Trump “cut a deal with himself.”
“There were multiple senators yelling at the attorney general, saying this feels like self-dealing,” Cruz said.
“I got to tell you, the Republican senators were pissed — people were the entire meeting. They were screaming at the acting attorney general, and he was trying to lay out the legal basis,” Cruz said, adding “the legal basis is quite sound.”
A bit more:
Cruz said on his podcast that if the Senate had gone forward with planned series of votes pertaining to the ICE and Border Patrol bill Thursday night, roughly half of the Republican caucus would have voted with Democrats in favor of amendments seeking to rein in the fund.
He emphasized “the degree of the jailbreak of Republicans who were bolting, who were saying we’re going to vote with the Democrats.”
Cruz warned that if the administration does not modify the anti-weaponization fund by the time Congress comes back into session, “they’ve got a full-on revolt in the Senate.”
Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s secretary of commerce, made a $5 million donation last month to a committee supporting House Republicans, an unusually large contribution for a sitting cabinet secretary.
Mr. Lutnick gave the money to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main super PAC behind House Republicans and Speaker Mike Johnson, according to a new filing made public on Thursday. Mr. Lutnick has recently been a major Republican donor, but this was his first contribution since being named commerce secretary. It ties his largest-ever federal donation, $5 million he gave to Mr. Trump’s super PAC in 2024….
Federal employees are permitted to make donations, but it is rare to see such a high-ranking official donate such a significant amount. Mr. Lutnick is the first Trump cabinet official to make a seven-figure disclosed federal donation after being confirmed to a post, according to a review of federal election filings.
The closest analogue in Mr. Trump’s administration was the role played by Elon Musk during his stint as a part-time government employee, during which he continued to donate millions to conservative causes.
Lutnik should be fired.
Before I wrap this up, here are two significant immigration stories:
A federal judge on Fridaydismissed the Justice Department’s human-smuggling case against Kilmar Abrego García, ruling that the Trump administration improperly brought it to punish him for successfully challenging his illegal deportation last year.
U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. in Tennessee wrote that “evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power.”
The decision delivered an extraordinary defeat for the administration, which marshaled the resources of multiple federal agencies to publicly malignAbrego after court rulings concluded that officials had unlawfully deported him to his native El Salvador, in violation of a 2019 immigration court order.
Crenshaw’s ruling also marked the first time a judge validated what has become an increasingly common defense raised by high-profile defendants targeted by the Justice Department in Trump’s second term: the claim that they are being prosecuted not in pursuit of justice but rather for political revenge.
In a decision released Friday afternoon, the judge acknowledged the incredibly high bar defendants must meet to warrant a case’s dismissal on those grounds. It requires defense attorneys to prove that charges would not have been brought but for improper, vindictive motives on the part of government attorneys.
Crenshaw, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, wrote that in Abrego’s case, itwas clear that the investigation into him was tainted “with a vindictive motive.”
Foreigners in the U.S. who want a green card will need to leave and apply in their home country, the Trump administration announced Friday, in a surprise change to a longstanding policy that sowed confusion and concern among aid groups, immigration lawyers and immigrants.
For over half a century, foreign nationals with legal status have been able to apply for and complete the entire process for permanent residence in the United States — including individuals married to U.S. citizens, holders of work and student visas, and refugees and political asylum seekers, among others.
The announcement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said foreigners who are in the U.S. temporarily and who want to apply to become lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, have to return home and apply there, except in “extraordinary circumstances.” USCIS officers would decide whether applicants meet those.
“Nonimmigrants, like students, temporary workers, or people on tourist visas, come to the U.S. for a short time and for a specific purpose. Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over. Their visit should not function as the first step in the Green Card process,” the agency said in a statement.
That isn’t true. People have always been able to apply for Green Cards here in the US. For example, there are probably thousands of people working in important jobs at universities waiting to get Green Cards. These people are making valuable contributions to society. They may have married US citizens and had children. And now they are supposed to leave their jobs and families in order to get a Green Card? Back to the NPR story:
It is the latest step by the Trump administration making legal immigration more difficult for foreigners already in the U.S. and for those hoping to come here.
Hundreds of thousands apply for green cards from the U.S. each year
“The goal of this policy is very explicit. Senior officials in this administration have said over and over that they want fewer people to get permanent residency because permanent residency is a path to citizenship and they want to block that path for as many people as possible,” said Doug Rand, a former senior advisor at USCIS during the Biden administration, who added that about 600,000 people already in the U.S. apply each year for a green card.
USCIS did not say when the change would come into effect, whether individuals would be required to remain in another country throughout the entire process, or whether the policy impacts foreigners whose green card applications are already underway.
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Barney Frank, the brassy, lightning-quick former Massachusetts representative who for decades was the most prominent gay politician in the country and who was an author of the most significant overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations since the Great Depression, died on Tuesday at his home in Ogunquit, Maine. He was 86.
His friend James Segel confirmed the death. Mr. Frank said last month that he had entered hospice care with congestive heart failure.
Mr. Frank, a liberal Democrat who represented a diverse suburban Boston district for 32 years, starting in 1981, was the first gay member of the House to come out voluntarily; others had been outed in scandals. His public declaration of his sexual orientation in 1987 — spurred by a fear of being outed, by the death of a closeted colleague and by his own determination to show that homosexuality was nothing to be ashamed of — helped normalize being openly gay in public life.
“Prejudice is based on ignorance,” Mr. Frank told The Boston Globe in 2011, as he prepared to retire. “And the best way to counterbalance it is with a living example, with reality.”
A Harvard-trained lawyer, Mr. Frank bristled with intellectual firepower, acidic turns of phrase and a zest for verbal combat.
Barney Frank
His shivs were often cloaked in wit. Referring to the Moral Majority, the conservative Christian organization that opposed abortion but also opposed child nutrition programs and day care, Mr. Frank said in 1981: “From their perspective, life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Of the flawed intelligence behind the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that led to nearly a decade of combat, he said the problem “is not so much the intelligence as the stupidity.”
In Washingtonian magazine’s annual poll of Capitol Hill staffers, he was frequently voted the “brainiest,” “funniest” and “most eloquent” member of the House.
His most significant legislative achievement was in the realm of financial regulation. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which he sponsored with Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, tightened rules on the financial industry as part of the government’s response to the housing crisis of 2007 and the global financial meltdown the next year.
Signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, the measure sought to prevent the nation’s biggest banks from engaging in excessively risky behavior and to protect consumers from unfair practices by banks and lenders. Congress watered it down in 2018, chiefly by exempting smaller and midsize banks from stricter oversight, but it remained largely intact.
Mr. Frank was also known for championing gay rights, civil rights and women’s rights. He did so by force of personality and by example. He insisted that his male partner be invited to all events to which the spouses of other representatives were invited. In 2012, at age 72, he married Jim Ready and became the first sitting member of Congress to wed someone of the same sex.
He also worked quietly behind the scenes to advance his causes. In one of many examples, according to his memoir, “Frank: A Life in Politics From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage” (2015), he helped persuade President Bill Clinton not to appoint Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia as secretary of state because of his track record of homophobia.
Barney Frank, the quick-witted Massachusetts congressman and liberal lion who helped overhaul Wall Street regulations after the 2008 financial crisis and made history as one of the first openly gay members of Congress, died Wednesday, his sister confirmed to NBC Boston.
He was 86. He had entered hospice care at his home in Maine last month.
“He was, above all else, a wonderful brother. I was lucky to be his sister,” Frank’s sister Doris Breay told NBC Boston.
Frank represented southern Massachusetts in the House for 32 years and established himself as a leading voice in debates over banking, affordable housing and LGBTQ rights. He chaired the Financial Services Committee amid the 2008 meltdown and co-authored the milestone Dodd-Frank Act, a sweeping law that sought to put Wall Street firms under tougher scrutiny.
He blazed a trail for other openly gay American elected officials, and in 2012, he became the first member of Congress to enter into a same-sex marriage, tying the knot with his longtime partner, Jim Ready.
“It was life-changing, lifesaving for me,” Frank told NBC News in a phone interview in last month.
“I think the key to our having made the enormous progress we made in defeating anti-gay prejudice had to do with us all coming out and people discovering the gap between our reality and the way we were painted,” he added.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the former House speaker, who served with Frank for more than 25 years, described him as progressive and an idealist in an interview with NBC News last month.
“He has been about idealism and pragmatism to get the job done,” said Pelosi, who was speaker when Frank shepherded Dodd-Frank through Congress. Frank called Pelosi last month to inform her that he was receiving hospice care, she said.
“He was a real mentor to so many of us here,” Pelosi said. “I was with him” on the Banking Committee “in the beginning. I learned so much.”
What a contrast he was to the bunch of crooks we’re dealing with today.
A couple of days ago, the White House announced a “settlement” of Trump’s $10 million lawsuit against his own IRS. He created an “anti-weaponization fund” to pay out reparations to the thugs who attacked the Capital on January 6, as well as anyone who thinks they were wrongly prosecuted during Joe Biden’s presidency. Then yesterday we learned that, as part of the “settlement,” Trump and his entire family are forever exempt from past IRS investigations. This is obviously illegal, unconstitutional and most likely an impeachable offense, but so what? Trump does whatever he wants.
The president did so in a way to avoid any judicial oversight of his or the Justice Department’s actions. It is hard to imagine a situation more susceptible to fraud, grift, corruption and abuse. And the lawsuit itself was probably unconstitutional to begin with.
The lawsuit came after a report from The New York Times revealed that Trump had only paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017. The complaint against the IRS, filed by Trump, two of his adult sons and the Trump Organization, said the leak caused the plaintiffs “reputational and financial harm” and “public embarrassment.”
Judge Kathleen Williams
The judge assigned in the case, Kathleen Williams of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, issued an order last month pointing out the strange nature of the lawsuit and expressing fear that it did not exhibit the type of “adversity” that is typically an essential ingredient of any federal lawsuit, a requirement of the U.S. Constitution.
Citing relevant and consistent precedent on this point, she wrote that a “key characteristic of the case or controversy requirement” in the Constitution “is the existence of adverseness, or ‘a dispute between parties who face each other in an adversary proceeding.’” She noted that there must be an “‘an honest and actual antagonistic assertion of rights by one individual against another, which is neither feigned nor collusive.’” She added: “It is unclear to this Court whether the Parties are sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy Article III’s case or controversy requirement.” [….]
…Judge Williams asked the parties to submit their written arguments to the court by May 20, 2026, and indicated she would hold a hearing on this question on May 27, 2026.
Whether this means the settlement will not face legal challenge remains to be seen. For now, the administration appears poised to create a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund set up by the administration and capitalized with taxpayer dollars. It will be administered by individuals chosen only by the administration, outside any sort of review.
The Justice Department on Tuesday expanded the just-announced settlement of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the leaking of his tax returns to include a pledge that the IRS will no longer pursue any claims it may have against Trump, his family members and his companies over unpaid taxes.
The nine-page settlement agreement DOJ released Monday, setting up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of alleged weaponization of law enforcement, did not mention any resolution of disputes over Trump’s tax returns, which he has repeatedly claimed were under protracted audits by the IRS.
However, a one-page document posted on the DOJ website early Tuesday includes a sweeping release under which the IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “examinations” of Trump, “related or affiliated individuals,” and related trusts and businesses.
The waiver specifically encompasses “tax returns filed before the effective date” of the settlement, which was Monday.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed the addendum, dated Tuesday. It does not bear the signature of any representative of the IRS or any current Trump lawyers. Metadata attached to the document indicates it was prepared or scanned at 7:50 a.m. Tuesday.
Blanche did not sign the original settlement agreement, which was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, IRS CEO Frank Bisignano and Trump attorney Daniel Epstein….
“This is only with respect to existing audits, not future,” the DOJ statement added.
John Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said the expanded settlement set a “terrible precedent” that could effectively generate a windfall for Trump.“It makes you wonder what the President has to hide in those tax returns. He’s apparently been actively trading in the stock market and, since he knows a lot more about situations than the average investor, he’s probably generated significant taxable earnings,” he said in an emailed statement. “Not auditing his returns is the same as giving him an easy way to, in effect, receive money from the government.”
Danny Werfel, the former IRS commissioner from 2023 to 2025, said he was “unaware of a single precedent where the IRS has agreed in advance to permanently forgo examination of previously filed tax returns for a specific person or business.”
There is corruption. And then there is the second Trump administration.
Monday night I wrote to you about kleptocracy. This evening, we pick up the same thread. It has to do with the $1.776 billion slush fund we discussed last night (get it? so cute that number, 1776; such an homage to the Founding Fathers). That fund, the money that Trump is trying to “give” to his most vociferous, even violent, supporters, was created to settle the lawsuit he brought against the IRS. Today, there is more news about the terms of that settlement. Kleptocracy. Corruption.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche
Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General, testified before the Senate today. In one remarkable exchange, Delaware Senator Chris Coons asked Blanche:
“Has it ever happened that a sitting president sued his own government for $10 billion dollars and then directed the settlement of the case and the establishment of a payout fund?”
Blanche responded: “No, but there’s a lot of things that President Trump is the first of.”
Another one of those firsts happened today. Not a good one. Without fanfare, DOJ posted a settlement document on its website in the case. It was unexpected, because we’d already seen a settlement agreement in this case, the one we looked at last night. There was no reason to expect anything additional would be forthcoming. When it showed up, the addendum came without any title, just a date at the top….
It’s a pardon on steroids for Trump, Trump’s family, and Trump businesses. The government agrees in this document, signed by Blanche, that it will never prosecute or pursue any civil claims against any of the Trumps, “whether presently known or unknown” that could have been brought as of the date of the settlement agreement. That date is yesterday. The IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “examinations” of Trump, “related or affiliated individuals,” and related trusts and businesses. Any proceeding over “tax returns filed before the effective date” of the settlement is now off limits. Any crimes committed before Monday, whether prosecutors were aware of them or not, are off the table. It’s a virtual get-out-of-jail-free card, and also a get-out-of-debt one.
I’ve seen a lot of settlement agreements, but never one like this where the government is giving the store away and getting nothing in return. As we discussed last night, the underlying lawsuit was on life support, most likely about to be dismissed because of legal flaws. Now, it’s become a vehicle for protecting Trump from all problems, criminal and civil, and not just tax matters—the subject of the lawsuit—but all matters. Any sins he may have committed or debts he owed but didn’t pay before now are forgiven.
You can read the rest along with the previous post at Civil Discourse.
Antony Vo was at a friend’s house on Monday morning when a fellow pardoned Jan. 6 rioter sent a message: The Trump administration had just created a fund to benefit people who believed they had been wronged by the federal government — including those, like him, who had stormed the Capitol five years ago.
Mr. Vo, who briefly fled the country to avoid his prison sentence stemming from the riot, said he did not know at first that the fund had come about as part of a larger deal by President Trump to withdraw an extraordinary lawsuit filed against the Internal Revenue Service. But the origins of the fund, he said, were less important than how it made him feel: surprised, relieved and grateful all at once.
“I’m glad it turned into something,” he explained, “that could help people who have been hurting for quite a while now.”
That reaction, it turns out, appeared typical among the so-called Jan. 6ers who have long joined Mr. Trump in claiming that the efforts to hold them accountable for disrupting the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election amounted to mistreatment by the criminal justice system.
Some felt that the fund validated their self-image as victims of the government. Others felt elated — albeit somewhat stunned — at the prospect of a payout. And not a few felt a bit confused at how the process of filing claims and receiving checks could play out.
The possibility that people who ransacked the Capitol, smashing windows and fighting with the police, could get money from the same federal government they attacked was the latest head-spinning twist in the effort to rewrite the history of Jan. 6. At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, did not rule out violent rioters receiving payouts from the fund.
It has not been lost on many Jan. 6ers that by deeming them worthy of reparations, the most powerful officials in the country have effectively validated their claims of having been wronged by the federal government — claims that, in many instances, were roundly rejected by the judges of both parties who oversaw their cases.
“This is the UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE acknowledging the possibility that Americans were targeted through political abuse of government power,” Tommy Tatum, a Mississippi man who was charged with civil disorder for interfering with the police on Jan. 6, wrote on Monday in a post on social media. “That is historic.”
It’s obvious at this point. Trump is going to pay these people to do it again. He has no intention of leaving in 2029. If the second insurrection doesn’t work, then he’ll barricade himself in the basement of his precious ballroom.
Senate Republicans are greeting the Justice Department’s announcement of a new “Anti-Weaponization Fund” with concern, confusion and questions — and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is offering up little clarity on how it will work.
At a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing Tuesday morning, Blanche fielded queries from members of both parties about the logistics of the $1.8 billion account, who would have oversight and whether it could function as a “slush fund” for individuals who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Democrats are, predictably, enraged by the terms of the settlement for President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the government for the leak of his tax information, which resulted in the creation of this account to benefit targets of “weaponization and lawfare.”
“There is no level below which these folks will not go,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I) said in an interview. “It is just disgusting, having come off Law Enforcement Week, to have set up a slush fund to pay off people who attack police officers.”
But Republicans are also signaling deep discomfort with the arrangement, as well as frustration that they weren’t given the answers they were looking for.
“I’ve got more questions than I’ve heard answers for, and … I didn’t hear anything that gave me certainty in terms of how this all comes together,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), after attending the hearing with Blanche. “Can the president just say $1.87 billion? … I don’t know enough about it to feel comfortable.”
Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Jerry Moran of Kansas — the top Republicans on the full Appropriations committee and the panel that oversees DOJ funding, respectively — both pressed Blanche at the hearing to explain how payouts from the fund would be managed and who might receive them.
If Democrats can manage to win he House and Senate, the first order of business must be to impeach and remove Trump. We can’t allow him to remain in office for the rest of his term, or we’ll never get rid of him.
“A government of laws, not of men,” read the quotation from John Adams, the second president.
The quotation was shown over one of the large banners of President Donald Trump that were set up in February at the Justice Department headquarters, known as “Main Justice.”
Stacey Young, a former Justice Department employee who founded the group Justice Connection, which projected the phrase onto the building, told NBC News that the “$1.8 billion slush fund” was “appalling.”
“We are standing up for department’s integrity and the rule of law,” Young said outside the building. The Justice Department is operating “as an arm of the White House” and doing Trump’s bidding by protecting his allies and going after his enemies, she said.
“That is an extraordinary abuse of power, and it’s a sign that the rule of law is crumbling before our eyes,” Young said.
Police officers who came under attack by rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to halt President Donald Trump’s plan to set up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of “weaponization” and “lawfare.”
In the new lawsuit, former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Metropolitan Police Department Officer Daniel Hodges contend that Trump intends to use the massive bankroll to pay people who organized and participated in the riot.
“Dunn and Hodges did not back down on January 6. Instead, they held the line to defend democracy and the rule of law. They bring this case to do so once again,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington, argues that the fund violates the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on use of federal money to “pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”
The officers’ complaint also alleges that the Justice Department has no legal authority to create the fund, announced Monday as part of a settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed over the leak of his tax returns during his first term..
The Justice Department will likely argue that the officers don’t have standing to bring the suit. The complaint contends that Dunn and Hodges have faced ongoing harassment, including death threats, from participants in the riot. The officers allege that they have a personal stake in the dispute over the fund because it will be used to provide financial support that is likely to fuel that sort of harassment in the future.
That’s all I have for today. What’s on your mind?
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I’m sick and tired of wars. I’m even more sick and tired of Trump and his cabinet full of stupid idiots. I came of age during the Vietnam war. After that disaster finally ended, I really thought our leaders would stay out of unnecessary wars. But it didn’t happen. These men (goddess forbid we elect a woman president!) just have to prove their “manhood” by attacking other countries. I’m just plain sick of it.
It also appears that Trump and his gang of idiots didn’t plan for the obvious results of their war–rising prices and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. In addition, Trump’s “Secretary of War” is advocating for war crimes. That’s where things stand so far.
For Batoul Hamdan and her two children, seven-month-old Fatima and Jihad, three, Monday’s iftar, the evening meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan, was special.
For a week, they had eaten to the sounds of bombs in their home in Arab Salim. Hamdan eventually decided to leave for Al-Nimiriya, the sleepy town where she had grown up. Surrounded by her parents and siblings in the family home, she hoped they could finally enjoy the festive mood of Ramadan.
They had just finished their meal when the bomb fell. The Israeli airstrike collapsed the two-storey building instantly, killing all eight members of the Hamdan family: grandparents Ahmad and Najib, their children, including Batoul, and grandchildren Fatima and Jihad – three generations wiped out in a moment.
On Thursday, only snarled rebar and broken concrete remained of the Hamdan family home. The fragments of their lives – a certificate of achievement from the children’s schooldays, cutlery from their cabinet, frayed purses – had been ejected by the force of the blast and now littered the ground.
“There was no warning before the strike. My own two kids started to cry, I picked them up and started to run away from the explosion when it happened,” said Qassem Ayoub, a neighbour and town police officer, as he stared at the wreckage. “Why were they targeted? I don’t know, ask the Israelis.”
Batoul and her loved ones were among the 773 Lebanese people – including more than 100 children – killed by Israel’s campaign in Lebanon since 2 March. They join a growing list of families completely wiped out by Israeli bombings, in a conflict whose death toll is rising faster than in any previous war in Lebanon.
Forty-one people were killed by Israeli airstrikes in Nabi Chit in the Bekaa valley in only five hours last Saturday, and 18 people died in a single night in the town of Sir el-Gharbiyeh on 8 March. The pace of death has stunned Lebanese people and left them struggling to keep up.
Do you think Netanyahu will stop these attacks on Lebanon if Trump calls off his war in Iran. I don’t.
BEIRUT (AP) — Fatima Nazha slept on the street for two days after she and her family fled their home in Beirut’s southern suburbs following an Israeli mass evacuation order.
All of the schools the government turned into shelters were full, and the family couldn’t afford a hotel or an apartment, so she and her husband eventually moved into a tent in the country’s biggest stadium while their kids and grandchildren found shelter near the southern coastal city of Sidon.
In just 10 days, more than 800,000 people in Lebanon have been displaced by war, just over a year since the last conflict uprooted over a million Lebanese from their homes. That’s one in every seven people in the tiny country, according to humanitarian organization the Norwegian Refugee Council. Many don’t have a place to stay, and the cash-strapped government has only been able to accommodate roughly 120,000 people as it scrambles to open shelters and bring in more supplies.
Nazha, who uses a wheelchair, said being forced from her home has been far more difficult this time than when Israel and Hezbollah were last at war more than a year ago. The strikes targeting the Iran-backed militant group have been more intense and unpredictable, and Israel’s evacuation order came abruptly, leaving her unable to gather all her belongings.
“The strikes used to target a specific area, but now they’re hitting all the areas,” she said, taking a drag off her cigarette. Lebanon’s Health Ministry said Friday that more than 700 people, including 103 children, have died in the war.
Israel is planning to significantly expand its ground operation in Lebanon, aiming to seize the entire area south of the Litani River and dismantle Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, Israeli and U.S. officials say.
Why it matters: This could be the largest Israeli ground invasion of its northern neighbor since 2006, dragging Lebanon to the epicenter of the escalating war with Iran.
“We are going to do what we did in Gaza,” a senior Israeli official said, referring to the flattening of buildings Israel says Hezbollah uses to store weapons and launch attacks.
The big picture: An operation of this size and scale could lead to a prolonged Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon.
Lebanon’s government is deeply alarmed that the renewed war — triggered by Hezbollah’s decision to launch rockets at Israel — will devastate the country.
The Trump administration backs a major Israeli operation to disarm Hezbollah, but is also pressing to limit the damage to the Lebanese state and pushing for direct Israel-Lebanon talks on a postwar agreement.
Driving the news: Until days ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was still trying to contain the Lebanon escalation in order to stay focused on Iran, according to Israeli officials.
That calculus changed Wednesday when Hezbollah launched more than 200 missiles in a massive coordinated attack with Iran, which fired dozens of its own.
“Before this attack we were ready for a ceasefire in Lebanon, but after it there is no way back from a massive operation,” a senior Israeli official said.
State of play: The IDF has had three armored and infantry divisions on the Lebanese border since the start of the Iran war, with some ground forces conducting limited incursions over the past two weeks.
By Kim Haskins
And what is Jared Kushner up to now that he got Trump to help Netanyahu with his bloodthirsty plans?
Jared Kushner, one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, is trying to raise more money for his private equity firm from governments in the region.
Mr. Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has spoken with potential investors in recent weeks about raising $5 billion or more for Affinity Partners, his investment firm, according to five people with knowledge of the talks who were not permitted to speak publicly about the discussions.
As part of the fund-raising effort, Affinity’s representatives have already met with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which invests the proceeds of the kingdom’s vast oil reserves, two of the people briefed on the discussions said. PIF is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has formed close ties with Mr. Kushner and the Trump administration.
PIF, which is already the largest and earliest investor in Affinity, invested $2 billion soon after the first Trump administration ended.
As part of that deal, the Saudis must be given the first chance to invest during any subsequent attempts by Affinity to raise funds, the two people said. Other Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds that invested earlier in Affinity, including those in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, are also expected to be asked for more, the people said.
Mr. Kushner’s fund-raising is expected to stretch on for the better part of this year.
The efforts show the blurring of the lines between public service and private profit-seeking during Mr. Trump’s second term. Only a few weeks ago, in his role as Mr. Trump’s “peace envoy,” Mr. Kushner met in Geneva with Iran’s foreign minister. The U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran began shortly after those meetings concluded without a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.
Meanwhile, Kushner is not actually an employee of the Federal government. The corruption is breathtaking.
And what’s happening in in Iran these days? Well, it appears that the Trump gang didn’t plan for what to do if Iran cut off shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz–something they were warned about.
Of all the risks the global energy system has long faced, none was bigger or better known than the potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The narrow passageway out of the Persian Gulf is both vital — serving as the only gateway to the rest of the world for huge amounts of oil and natural gas — and extremely vulnerable to attacks.
But despite being widely recognized as a potential choke point, the strait remains the only way to export most of the energy produced in the region. That has come into sharp relief in the second week of the war in the Middle East, as the near-closure of the waterway sent oil prices soaring above $100 a barrel for the first time in almost four years.
The reason there is no true alternative comes down to a combination of geography, political tensions and economic competition among the region’s oil powers. There have been efforts to circumvent the strait, notably by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But the pipelines through those countries can carry only a small fraction of the energy produced in the Persian Gulf.
By Mathias Hauser
For many other energy-producing countries in the region, the only way to avoid the strait would be to lay a pipeline across a neighboring country — an expensive and politically fraught endeavor. Take Qatar, one of the world’s biggest natural gas exporters. Its only land border is with Saudi Arabia — a country that cut off diplomatic ties and closed that border during a regional spat resolved five years ago. Plus, any pipeline would itself be vulnerable to Iranian attacks.
“There’s nothing which is totally secure here,” said John Browne, a former chief executive of the London-based oil giant BP, once known as the Anglo-Iranian oil company. “In the end, someone with bad intention can do all sorts of things to oil and gas infrastructure.”
Some oil analysts also assumed that, if the time came, the United States, which has a keen interest in keeping energy markets stable, would use its military might to keep the strait passable.
Oh really? I guess these “analysts” didn’t consider the fact that Donald Trump is a psychopath who couldn’t care less about anyone but himself and his childish needs. Use the gift link if you want to read more.
Now that the shit has hit the fan, and prices on gas and just about everything else are rising rapidly, Trump has decided to send in some more troops.
About 2,500 Marines aboard as many as three warships are heading to the Middle East from the Indo-Pacific region, as Iran increases its attacks on the Strait of Hormuz, two U.S. officials said.
The shift, earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal, comes as Iran’s response to nearly two weeks of aerial bombardment and long-range artillery strikes has proved more resilient than Trump administration officials anticipated.
The Marines will join more than 50,000 American troops in the region. The new deployment comes as Iran’s attacks on and near the strait have choked maritime traffic through the essential waterway, rocking the global economy. It was unclear how the new deployment would be used….
Last week, President Trump said he might order Navy warships to escort merchant ships through the crucial oil supply route, which U.S. forces did for a period of time in the late 1980s during similar tensions with Iran.
U.S. forces have carried out “large-scale” strikes on Kharg Island, a critical hub of Iran’s Gulf oil operations, with the country responding by threatening to strike U.S. allies’ oil facilities if any of its infrastructure is damaged.
U.S. Central Command said Saturday that naval mine storage facilities and missile storage bunkers were among targets destroyed in the “precision strike” on the island, hitting “90 Iranian military targets” while “preserving the oil infrastructure.”
Kharg Island, a tiny but strategic island 15 miles off the coast of Iran in the Persian Gulf, is home to an oil terminal that ships 90% of the country’s oil exports. There are also military capabilities there, including air defenses and mines buried underground.
Announcing the strike in a post on Truth Social late Friday, President Donald Trump said that U.S. forces had “totally obliterated every MILITARY target in Iran’s crown jewel, Kharg Island.”
Trump just loves that word “obliterated.”
The island’s oil terminal has so far been unscathed in the war, according to oil market research firm Energy Intelligence, and the president said the island’s oil infrastructure was spared in Friday’s attack, but could be struck down the road.
“Should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision,” Trump said, as Iran has actively interfered with shipping in the strait for several days.
A missile struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, two security officials said.
The projectile landed within the embassy’s boundaries after the Green Zone, the heavily fortified district in central Baghdad that houses Iraqi government institutions and foreign embassies, added the security officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they are not authorized to speak with the press.
Video obtained by The Associated Press showed smoke billowing from inside the compound.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran openly threatened a neighboring country’s non-U.S. assets for the first time Saturday, warning people to immediately evacuate the busiest port in the Middle East and two others in the United Arab Emirates as the U.S.-Israel war with Iran entered its third week.
By Rudi Hurzlmeier
A missile struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, and debris from an intercepted Iranian drone hit an oil facility in the UAE, further increasing global anxiety about oil supplies.
Iran threatened to attack cities in the UAE, home to Dubai and one of the world’s busiest airports, saying the U.S. used “ports, docks and hideouts” there to launch strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island, without providing evidence. It urged people to evacuate areas where it said U.S. forces were sheltering, naming Dubai’s Jebel Ali port — the Mideast’s busiest — as well as Abu Dhabi’s Khalifa port and Fujairah port.
Iran has fired hundreds of missiles and drones at Arab Gulf neighbors during the war, but it said it was targeting U.S. assets, even as hits or attempts were reported on civilian ones such as airports and oil fields.
Back here at home, Pete Hegseth is in favor of committing war crimes. He’s already committed war crimes with his fishing boat strikes. His troops also committed a war crime when they sank Iranian ships and failed to attempt to rescue survivors. Then yesterday he said advocated for another war crime.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth offhandedly made a remark about the Trump administration’s attack on Iran during his speech on Friday that experts warned, if he’s serious, could be a war crime — even just for him to say out loud.
“No quarter, no mercy for our enemies,” said Hegseth. “Yet some in the press just can’t stop. More fake news from CNN reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran war’s impact on the Strait of Hormuz. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
The phrase “no quarter” is often used colloquially in a political setting, but in a military context, it means any enemy combatants will be killed with no allowance for surrender — something that, as experts on X and Bluesky were swift to point out, is a violation of both international law and the U.S. military code.
“Went largely unnoticed but Hegseth on Iran said the U.S. would provide ‘no quarter, no mercy for our enemies’ during his press conference today,” wrote Wall Street Journal national security reporter Alex Ward. “‘No quarter’ is a violation of international humanitarian law.” He provided a link to the relevant provisions of the Geneva Convention.
“Today, Hegseth said: ‘No quarter, no mercy for our enemies.’ But the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual (pp. 209-210) says: ‘It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given,'” wrote Claremont McKenna College professor Jack Pitney.
“Former USG war crimes lawyer here,” wrote International Crisis Group senior adviser Brian Finucane. “Apropos of SecDef’s remarks this morning: Denial of quarter — even the declaration of no quarter — is a war crime. And recognized as such by the US Government. From DoD’s Manual for Military Commissions.” He screenshotted the section of the manual, which stated denial of quarter is punishable by up to life in prison.
“Declaring that no quarter will be given is straightforwardly prohibited under international humanitarian law,” wrote Stanford law professor Tom Dannenbaum. “When done to threaten an adversary, the declaration itself amounts to a war crime.”
“Yet another thing to put in our back pocket,” wrote Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect. “‘Ship em to the Hague’ is a completely valid option for a long and growing list of people who need to be dealt with.”
Donald Trump is lost in his fog of war. He compounds confusion with improvised fabrications as his naive expectation of a lightning victory has been sunk in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, he felt certain, would easily follow the “perfect scenario” of Venezuela, accede to naming a leader who would instantly do his bidding, and there would be no disruption of the oil markets – “a strong game plan”, stated Karoline Leavitt, his White House press secretary, who defends each of his changeable excuses with equal ferocity.
By Kim Haskins
There may be few if any facts underlying the delusions upon which Trump constructs his vapid explanations and evanescent strategies. The belief that coherent sense can be made out of Trump’s shuffling words is a weakness of the rational mind that refuses to accept the impulses of the inveterate demagogue for what they are. Searching for reason in the jungle of Trump’s tales may compel hopelessly sensible people to superimpose logic where there is none in order to satisfy the need for some semblance of soundness.
Trump’s erratic efforts to reframe his rationale further expose his incompetence and unintelligibility, utterly predictable but now lethal on a global scale. His stream of sputtering remarks has, however, clearly established the ground that should be explored by congressional inquiries into the war’s origins, planning and conduct.
Trump is also at war with the English language. His war is not a war, he insists, but a “short-term excursion”, a semantic dodge to skirt congressional and international accountability. Then, when asked whether it’s an excursion or a war, he replied: “Well, it’s both. It’s an excursion that will keep us out of a war.” His rhetorical legerdemain is the equivalent of René Magritte’s painting of a pipe with the caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” – “This is not a pipe.” The title Magritte gave to his painting was The Treachery of Images. Orwell or Magritte? Propaganda or surrealism?
Trump has declared he will force “regime change” or negotiate with some unnamed personage in the regime who happens to have been recently killed. “Most of the people we had in mind are dead,” he said. Trump demands “unconditional surrender” or he declares the war “very complete” after an hour-long conversation with Vladimir Putin, after Putin pledged “unwavering support” to the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khomeini, the 56-year-old son of the assassinated 86-year-old supreme leader, about whose ascension Trump said he was “not happy” and called him a “lightweight”.
I hope you’ll go read the rest. Blumenthal is good.
That’s all I have for today. I hope you’re enjoying your weekend, despite the ugly war news.
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With Trump/Epstein back in the news, here’s a snippet from a cartoon I drew a few days ago. ” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Some of my friends have been blaming the craziness I’ve been feeling lately on the huge Mercury Retrograde that started on the 9th. It’s really unnerving to read the unbelievably scattered graft and madness coming out of Orange Caligula’s regime, which seems like peak madness, too. I’ve spent the last two days trying to talk people down, as well as crying over a friend whose essential surgery just got cancelled because his insurance company refused to pay for it. Then, there are all the Epstein headlines. I’m glad to get glimpses of justice, but it’s also tough to deal with all the stories of abuse and indifference that always come from the way men treat women and children like junk in their toy box.
This story in HuffPoabsolutely tore my heart to pieces this morning. It’s reported by Ron Dicker. This may trigger you, so please take this trigger warning seriously. “Epstein Email About Giving Girlfriend To Trump Enrages Model’ Groped’ By Him. The former Sports Illustrated model said Epstein, whom she dated in the early 1990s, “delivered” her to Trump.”
A newly released email in which Jeffrey Epstein bragged about giving a girlfriend to Donald Trump angered a former model who dated Epstein and claimed he once “delivered” her to the future president to be “groped” by him.
The note showed how “deeply misogynistic” the two men were, Stacey Williams told CNN on Thursday. (Watch the video below.)
Williams, who was featured in several Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues in the ’90s, appeared on “Erin Burnett Outfront” after numerous emails involving the late sexual predator Epstein were shared this week. Congress is poised to vote on the release of files unviewed by the public, but Trump has continued to push back at what he now calls a “hoax.”
“It screams about, you know, the mindset of these men,” Williams said. “You know, the same two men who did what they did to me when Jeffrey Epstein walked me into Donald Trump’s office to be groped by him. Clearly, we are these objects, these trophies, and it’s deeply misogynistic. It’s horrifying.”
Burnett also mentioned Williams’ previous account claiming Trump molested her as Epstein watched at Trump Tower, and how their smiling at each other revealed the pair’s “weird and twisted game.”
Williams added, “I clearly was delivered there for the groping.” She said that she had a reputation for standing up to inappropriate men, so “when I froze and didn’t respond, you know, I think Jeffrey got very upset about it. He expected a fight.”
Trump was the only male friend Epstein consistently talked about, according to Williams. “It’s just so maddening to me that Donald Trump ran on, you know, cleaning up the swamp,” she continued, “and all this time and energy is being spent on covering up information about the biggest swamp monster who’s ever existed.”
From the halls of Mar-a-Lago to the ruins of Ukrainian hospitals, the toxic bond between Trump, Putin, and Epstein may have reshaped the world and cost the lives of countless children…hartmannreport.com/p/did-epstei…
Even the Queen of the Fox News Bleached Blondes, a mother of teenagers, couldn’t show kindness, awareness, and sympathy to victims of Trump and Epstein’s Ephebophilia, which is the preference for mid-to-late adolescents. This is from Mother Jones as reported by Julianne McShane. “Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define. When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”
Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for.
There was her insistence that Santa Claus is white, for example, and her claim that wearing blackface used to not be so bad (that one got her fired from NBC News). Wednesday, on her eponymous SiriusXM show, Kelly picked another hill to die on: She implied, in conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t quite fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was “into the barely legal type” of minors—which Kelly appallingly defines as “like, 15-year-olds”—who look like they could be legal adults. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, and the Department of Justice said he abused and exploited dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14.
But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows “somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything,” and “this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”
Kelly continued: “This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”
Kelly said the characterization from her unnamed source—that Epstein was “not a pedophile”—”is what I believed…until we heard from [Attorney General] Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged…child sexual abuse material on his computer that for the first time, I thought, ‘Oh, no, he was an actual pedophile.’ I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. [Bondi has] never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.”
“Or anything else,” added Ungar-Sargon.
“Yeah,” Kelly replied, “so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, ‘I was eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I first came within his purview.’ You can say that’s a distinction without a difference.”
“No, it’s not,” Ungar-Sargon says.
“I think there is a difference,” Kelly continues, “there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”
In fact, we don’t know.
Gaslighting is a Fox News feature. It’s also a hallmark of MAGA surreality.
We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.
That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion.
Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.
The administration has justified its violence against undocumented immigrants by insisting those they round up are violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” That claim is increasingly exposed as a lie, and Americans are pushing back.
Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica reported on the September 30 raid on an apartment complex in Chicago in which federal agents stormed the complex in a helicopter and military-style vehicles, broke into apartments, and marched individuals outside, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members and filming them for a video the administration circulated that portrayed them as criminals.
Government agents arrested 37 people in the raid but ultimately claimed that only two of them were gang members. The journalists spoke to one and found he had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone arrested in the raid. Instead, the journalists observed in immigration court that government lawyers never mentioned criminal charges or gang membership. Judges simply ordered them deported or let them leave voluntarily, which would enable them to apply to return to the U.S., a sign they are not actually seen as a threat to the country.
On Tuesday, Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported on the administration’s targeting of individuals who, until now, were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. President Barack Obama established DACA for those brought to the U.S. as children until Congress could pass legislation to give those “Dreamers” a path to legal residence. Thanks to the program, Dreamers by the hundreds of thousands gave the U.S. government their personal information in exchange for a promise they would not be deported. But Congress never acted, and now, in its quest to reach 3,000 deportations a day, the administration is targeting the DACA recipients, whose adherence to the rules the government established makes them easy to find and target.
Yesterday, Robert Tait of The Guardian noted that Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a group that monitors human rights in Latin American, report that the Veneuzelans the Trump administration sent to the infamous CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador endured systematic torture, including beatings and sexual violence. Only 3% of those the U.S. rendered to El Salvador had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S.
As immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.”
The cruelty of Orange Caligula and his psychopathic sidekicks knows no bounds. This is from the source of authentic investigative journalism, ProPublica. “Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts, The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.”
On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”
Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.
The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.
No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.
The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.
Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.
“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.
“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.
Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”
“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.
Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”
As in everything recent, we’ve seen this administration chant, once again, it’s the Democrats’ fault. This is from the New York Times. “Trump Administration Live Updates: President Wants Federal Inquiry Into Epstein’s Ties to Prominent Democrats.” You’d think this approach would’ve grown old and stale already.
President Trump announced on Friday that he wanted the Justice Department to investigate high-profile Democrats — including former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the venture capitalist and megadonor Reid Hoffman — who he alleged had ties to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump blasted Democrats for “using the Epstein Hoax” to distract from the recent government shutdown, and said that federal law enforcement would order investigations into members of their party, who he insinuated were involved in Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking of girls.
“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his “Island.” Stay tuned!!!”
Mr. Trump said that he would be asking Attorney General Pam Bondi, “and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI,” to conduct the investigation into the “involvement and relationship” between Mr. Epstein and the Democrats.
Mr. Trump also wrote that it would also include “J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions.”
The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
If you want to punish your eyes by reading all the released Epstein items, COURIERhas a link to the entire, searchable dump provided by the U.S. House Oversight Committee. Paul Krugman’s SubStack post today turns its eyes to the Heritage Foundation. It’s an interesting read. “The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation. Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable.”
There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.
As many readers know, Tucker Carlson recently invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories, onto his podcast. This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.
So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?
It was clearly a surprise to Roberts that his defense of Carlson provoked a widespread backlash. And displaying the complete refusal to accept responsibility we’ve come to expect from leading conservatives, Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.” He explained his ignorance by saying “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. I consume a lot of sports.”
Yeah, right.
Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites — despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.
Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.
Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.
There are so many of these things posted as a memeorandum today that I can’t possibly fit them all into one short post. We are seriously and truely fucked if we do not get all these criminals out of government and other pubic institutions.
What’s on your reading, action, and blogging list today?
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I don’t know if anyone is reading this. I’ve had quite a disturbing day so far. My phone suddenly stopped working and I was unable to make or receive calls. I spent a couple of hours messaging back and forth with tech support, and they finally got things working. Somehow I got thrown off the network and couldn’t get back on. But the guy finally figured it out and I can phone and text again. Fortunately, I got a very kind and patient representative who hung in there with me all that time.
Dakinikat wondered if the problem could have something to do with the solar storm that made the northern lights visible all the way down South. I guess it’s possible. The phone was working yesterday until around 1PM. I didn’t realize there was a problem until later though. Anyway, enough of my boring life.
Almost 15 years ago, I was in bad shape. I was divorced, broke, drinking too much, and living in a dated walk-up next to a noisy bar. (It was only minutes from my young daughter, it had a nice view of the bay here in Newport, and I could afford it.) The local veterinary hospital was a few doors down; they always kept one or two adoptable animals in the window. One day, a gorgeous black cat, with a little white tuxedo patch and big gold-green eyes, showed up in a small cage. I stared at her for a while. She stared back patiently.
Tom NIchols with Carla
I wasn’t taking very good care of myself at that moment, so I decided I couldn’t take care of a cat. I walked on. For weeks, the cat sat there. For weeks, we stared at each other. One day, as I was deep in my cups, I took a walk with a friend and co-worker who also happened to be my next-door neighbor. “You look at that damn cat every day,” he said. “Just go in and get it.”
So I did.
The cat was called “RC” and she was a stray, but her preexisting spaying and good health showed that she’d once had a home. Now she was the queen of the animal clinic: Because of her gentle temperament, the staff would let her out of the cage after hours, and she would sit on their desks while they did their paperwork.
I picked her up. She looked at me as if to say: Yeah, I recognize you. You’re the doofus who stared at me for weeks. I signed the papers and took her home. She was fluffy and black-haired, so I decided I would name her after Carla Tortelli from the show Cheers; thus, she became Carla T. Nichols. She explored the apartment quietly for a day or two, and then, one afternoon, I found her on my bed, stretched out on her back, paws up, purring. Yep, she was saying. This will do.
I was still deeply depressed, but every night, Carla would come and flake out over my keyboard as I struggled to work. That’s enough of that,she seemed to say. And then we would go into the living room, where I would sit in a chair and Carla would sit on the armrest. (We’ve now both seen almost every episode of Law & Order.) Slowly, she added routine to my life, but mostly, we had lots of hours of doing nothing—the quiet time that can feel sort of desolate if you’re alone, but like healing if you have the right company.
Soon, I started to see daylight. I met a woman named Lynn. I laid off the booze. I got help of various kinds.
Lynn started to come to the apartment more often, but Carla gave her a full examination before bestowing approval: That cat was not going to let some newcomer waltz in and wreck the careful feline therapy she’d been providing. Finally, Carla climbed on the pillows one morning and curled up around Lynn’s head. Okay, she was saying. Lynn can stay.
That was the beginning of the turnaround. I hope you’ll go read the rest. It’s a wonderful description of what can happen when you welcome a special animal into your life.
Former President Donald Trump used a dubious accounting maneuver to claim improper tax breaks from his troubled Chicago tower, according to an IRS inquiry uncovered by ProPublica and The New York Times. Losing a yearslong audit battle over the claim could mean a tax bill of more than $100 million.
The 92-story, glass-sheathed skyscraper along the Chicago River is the tallest and, at least for now, the last major construction project by Trump. Through a combination of cost overruns and the bad luck of opening in the teeth of the Great Recession, it was also a vast money loser.
But when Trump sought to reap tax benefits from his losses, the IRS has argued, he went too far and in effect wrote off the same losses twice.
The first write-off came on Trump’s tax return for 2008. With sales lagging far behind projections, he claimed that his investment in the condo-hotel tower met the tax code definition of “worthless,” because his debt on the project meant he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, ProPublica and the Times found.
Emile Munier, A small child reading to a cat
There is no indication the IRS challenged that initial claim, though that lack of scrutiny surprised tax experts consulted for this article. But in 2010, Trump and his tax advisers sought to extract further benefits from the Chicago project, executing a maneuver that would draw years of inquiry from the IRS. First, he shifted the company that owned the tower into a new partnership. Because he controlled both companies, it was like moving coins from one pocket to another. Then he used the shift as justification to declare $168 million in additional losses over the next decade.
The issues around Trump’s case were novel enough that, during his presidency, the IRS undertook a high-level legal review before pursuing it. ProPublica and the Times, in consultation with tax experts, calculated that the revision sought by the IRS would create a new tax bill of more than $100 million, plus interest and potential penalties….
The reporting by ProPublica and the Times about the Chicago tower reveals a second component of Trump’s quarrel with the IRS. This account was pieced together from a collection of public documents, including filings from the New York attorney general’s suit against Trump in 2022, a passing reference to the audit in a congressional report that same year and an obscure 2019 IRS memorandum that explored the legitimacy of the accounting maneuver. The memorandum did not identify Trump, but the documents, along with tax records previously obtained by the Times and additional reporting, indicated that the former president was the focus of the inquiry.
A sex discrimination lawsuit against Donald Trump’s campaign has triggered new accusations that Trump’s lawyers have intentionally covered up settlement payments to women, in violation of federal law.
On Friday, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, demanding an investigation into the alleged cover-up. The complaint cites new allegations from 2016 Trump campaign aide A.J. Delgado, which she lodged in a sworn court declaration earlier this week as part of her ongoing discrimination suit against Trump’s political operation.
Delgado’s filing presented evidence of top Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz openly admitting that the campaign wanted to use a law firm to cover up a potential settlement payout in 2017. The arrangement, as Delgado described it, appears specifically designed to evade the consequences of federal disclosure laws that require campaigns to publicly report the identities of payment recipients.
“In other words, the payment would be routed through a middleman, to hide the fact that the Campaign had settled, from the public and the FEC,” Delgado stated. “I thus have direct, personal experience with the Defendant-Campaign hiding settlement payments to women, routing them through a ‘middleman law firm,’ which to the public would only appear as payments ‘for legal services.’”
Delgado also claimed to have “information and reason to believe” that other campaign payments have hidden settlements with women “who raised complaints of gender discrimination, pregnancy discrimination, and sexual harassment.” Those payments, she said, are related to the $4.1 million that flowed to Kasowitz’s law firm over a two-month period immediately following the November 2020 election, as well as millions in mysterious legal reimbursements to the campaign’s compliance firm, Red Curve Solutions, which The Daily Beast first reported earlier this month, prompting a federal complaint.
The declaration is particularly significant in that it captures a direct admission of the campaign’s actual intentions behind this middleman arrangement—to keep the existence of a settlement from the public, and, by doing so, from the FEC itself.
A new Washington Post report that Trump made explicit policy promises to a roomful of Big Oil executives—while urging them to raise $1 billion for his campaign—is a powerful story in part because it wrecks what’s left of that mystique. In case you didn’t already know this, it shows yet again that if Trump has employed that aforementioned knowledge of elite corruption and self-dealing to any ends in his public career, it’s chiefly to benefit himself.
James Pelham, little girl reading with her cat
That counter narrative is a story that Democrats have a big opportunity to tell—if they seize on this news effectively. How might they do that?
For starters, the revelations seem to cry out for more scrutiny from Congress. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who has been presiding over hearings into the oil industry as chair of the Budget Committee, says it’s “highly likely” that the committee will examine the new revelations.
“This is practically an invitation to ask more questions,” Whitehouse told me, describing this as a “natural extension of the investigation already underway.”
There’s plenty to explore. As the Postreports, an oil company executive at the gathering, held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last month, complained about environmental regulations under the Biden administration. Then this happened:
Trump’s response stunned several of the executives in the room overlooking the ocean: You all are wealthy enough, he said, that you should raise $1 billion to return me to the White House. At the dinner, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted, according to people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people.
Obviously industries have long donated to politicians in both parties in hopes of governance that takes their interests into account, and they explicitly lobby for this as well. But in this case, Trump may have made detailed, concrete promises while simultaneously soliciting a precise amount in campaign contributions.
For instance, the Post reports, Trump vowed to scrap Biden’s ban on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports “on the first day.” He also promised to overturn new tailpipe emission limits designed to encourage the transition to electric vehicles, and he dangled more leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, “a priority that several of the executives raised.”
“The phrase that instantly came to mind as I was reading the story was ‘quid pro quo,’” Whitehouse told me. He also pointed to a new Politico report that oil industry officials are drawing up executive orders for Trump to sign as president. “Put those things together and it starts to look mighty damn corrupt,” Whitehouse said.
FAIRHOPE, Alabama — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told attendees at a judicial conference Friday that he and his wife have faced “nastiness” and “lies” over the last several years and decried Washington, D.C., as a “hideous place.”
Thomas spoke at a conference attended by judges, attorneys and other court personnel in the 11th Circuit Judicial Conference, which hears federal cases from Alabama, Florida and Georgia. He made the comments pushing back on his critics in response to a question about working in a world that seems meanspirited.
Jan Steen, Children want to teach a cat reading
“I think there’s challenges to that. We’re in a world and we — certainly my wife and I the last two or three years it’s been — just the nastiness and the lies, it’s just incredible,” Thomas said.
“But you have some choices. You don’t get to prevent people from doing horrible things or saying horrible things. But one you have to understand and accept the fact that they can’t change you unless you permit that,” Thomas said.
Thomas has faced criticisms that he accepted luxury trips from a GOP donor without reporting them. Thomas last year maintained that he didn’t have to report the trips paid for by one of “our dearest friends.” His wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas has faced criticism for using her Facebook page to amplify unsubstantiated claims of corruption by President Joe Biden, a Democrat.
He did not discuss the content of the criticisms directly, but said that “reckless” people in Washington will “bomb your reputation.”
“They don’t bomb you necessarily, but they bomb your reputation or your good name or your honor. And that’s not a crime. But they can do as much harm that way,” Thomas said.
His reputation is already shot to hell. Why doesn’t he just resign and get out of Washington if he hates it so much?
Less than six months out from the presidential contest, leading Republicans, including several of Donald J. Trump’s potential running mates, have refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, signaling that the party may again challenge the outcome if its candidate loses.
In a series of recent interviews, Republican officials and candidates have dodged the question, responded with nonanswers or offered clear falsehoods rather than commit to a notion that was once so uncontroversial that it was rarely discussed before an election.
The evasive answers show how the former president’s refusal to concede his defeat after the 2020 election has ruptured a tenet of American democracy — that candidates are bound by the outcome. Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans are now emulating his hedging well in advance of any voting.
For his part, Mr. Trump has said he will abide by a fair election but has also suggested that he already considers the election unfair. Mr. Trump frequently refers to the federal and state charges he is facing as “election interference.” He has refused to rule out the possibility of another riot from his supporters if he loses again.
“If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” Mr. Trump said last month when asked by Time magazine about the prospect of political violence. “It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
The authors go on to list several prominent Republicans who have refused to say if they will accept the election results. Read the rest at the NYT.
I’m going to end there. I’m really stressed out by my phone issue and a think I need a nap. Take care everyone.
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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.
Even the Queen of the Fox News Bleached Blondes, a mother of teenagers, couldn’t show kindness, awareness, and sympathy to victims of Trump and Epstein’s Ephebophilia, which is the preference for mid-to-late adolescents. This is from
Gaslighting is a Fox News feature. It’s also a hallmark of MAGA surreality.
The cruelty of Orange Caligula and his psychopathic sidekicks knows no bounds. This is from the source of authentic investigative journalism, 
As in everything recent, we’ve seen this administration chant, once again, it’s the Democrats’ fault. This is from the 
If you want to punish your eyes by reading all the released Epstein items,
peej
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dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
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skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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