Mostly Monday Reads: War and Pieces

Posted: March 2, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: #We are so Fucked, Anti-War, Corruption and Criminal Insanity, Crimes against Children, Follow the Money, Middle East War Israel Iran United States | Tags: , , , , | 7 Comments

“Pete Hegseth’s Department of War days ago shot down one of Kristi Noem’s border protection drones, while the USS Gerald R. Ford is experiencing a massive toilet failure on deployment. What else could go wrong?…” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

We’ve been dutifully following the release and blowback from the Epstein Files here. If Orange Caligula wanted center stage back and the headlines to shift from that, he certainly is accomplishing his goal.  He now has dead school children, dead American troops, and attacks on numerous American Assets and countries in the Middle East on his nasty orange hands. We’re in there for real now, just like we were with the last bumbling Republican idiot in that office. I thought we’d learned our lessons on regime change back then.

The questions now are what’s next and what’s the actual goal here?  Then how the hell do we get out with the least amount of carnage and destruction? Unfortunately, the folks who started this have no clue. Planning and follow-through are not their strong points. It’s one big show to distract from other failures. Let’s review the headlines this morning and hope there are some adults somewhere in the State Department and the aptly-named Department of War.

This Reuters headline sums up the idiocy that we’re being spoonfed minute by minute. Two old fascist codgers with scandals and lawsuits just teamed up to create a needless slaughter fest and economic disaster. “Pentagon tells Congress no sign that Iran was going to attack the US first, sources say. This is reported by  Phil Stewart and Humeyra Pamuk.

Trump administration officials acknowledged in closed-door briefings with congressional staff on Sunday that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran planned to attack U.S. forces first, two people familiar with the matter said.

The United States and Israel launched their most ambitious attacks on Iran in decades on Saturday, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sinking Iranian warships and hitting more than 1,000 targets so far, officials say.

But Sunday’s remarks to Congress appeared to undercut one of the key arguments for the war made by senior administration officials.

They told reporters the day before that President Donald Trump decided to launch the attacks in part because of indicators that Iranians might strike U.S. forces in the Middle East “perhaps preemptively.

“Trump, one of the officials said, was not going to “sit back and allow American forces in the region to absorb attacks.

All this was happening while Trump was at a big donor fundraising gala in Florida, utilizing a small hut with curtains as the War Room. This is from CNN.  “Hunkered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump makes his club a makeshift Situation Room.”  I guess an easel is the latest technology they have down there at Mar-a-Lago.

As gala-goers in gowns and tuxedos were dancing the night away inside Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom Friday evening, a very different scene was unfolding on the other side of the rambling estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

Out the gilded doors, past layers of security and behind a set of black curtains, the country’s top national security officials were convening in anticipation of a long night.

The CIA director, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense had all slipped in earlier, unseen by the crowd sipping cocktails by the pool. So had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose map of the Middle East showing the locations of American assets — along with Iranian targets — was set up on an easel.

By the time President Donald Trump touched down, the space was running as a makeshift Situation Room from which he would oversee the start of a sustained attack on Iran.

First, though, the ballroom summoned.

“Have a good time, everybody,” Trump called out to the black-tie crowd gathered for a charity gala after briefly jerking his arms around to his anthem, “God Bless the USA.”

“I gotta go to work.”

Behind the black curtains, photos released by the White House showed Trump, tieless and wearing a white hat emblazoned with “USA,” watching the unfolding action, which would include the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Raw Story‘s Robert Davis delves deeper into the prior TV News reports that the U.S. has a weapons shortage from already from all the prior attacks made on targets by the Trump Regime. “US troops in Iran racing against the clock before running out of ammo: report.”  There is absolutely nothing this regime knows about planning, strategy, and follow-through. I bet the generals that Trump ousted last year are beside themselves with worry and rage.

U.S. troops in Iran are staring down a difficult situation in the wake of strikes that killed Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a new report.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that U.S. troops are racing to destroy Iran’s ballistic and nuclear missile facilities before they run out of interceptors to defend from Iranian retaliatory strikes. The exact size of the military’s ammunition base is classified, but analysts and former officials who spoke to The Journal said the stockpile has been diminished after repeated conflicts in the region.

At the same time, military troops are working to fend off a series of retaliatory strikes from the Iranians. U.S. Central Command said on Saturday that they mounted a “largely successful defense against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks,” according to the report.

“One of the challenges is you can deplete these really quickly,” Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told The Journal. “We’re using them faster than we can replace them.”

Troops are also running low on sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles and aircraft-launched weapons following the operation last year to take out Yemen-based Houthi militants, according to the report.

“Eventually it boils down to numbers,” Jonathan Conricus, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told The Journal. “How many interceptors will we have versus how many launchers will they be able to field and fire.”

Axios follows up on the number of attacks and results Orange Caligula has chalked up during his Regime of Terror. Zachary Basu reports this story. “Trump’s lethal presidency.”

No president in the modern era has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries as Donald Trump.

  • He’s attacked seven nations, three of which — Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela — had never been targeted by U.S. military strikes. He authorized more individual air strikes in 2025 than President Biden did in four years.

Why it matters: Trump explicitly ran as the anti-war candidate. The White House argues he still is — that he always exhausts diplomacy before acting, and that projecting overwhelming force is itself a path to lasting peace.

  • The death of three U.S. service members in the first 24 hours of Trump’s Iran strikes is putting that argument to its most brutal test.
  • “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is,” Trump said in a video statement Sunday. “But we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case,” he added, vowing to “avenge their deaths.”

The big picture: Trump’s strikes are historically distinctive not just in number but in kind.

  • President Bush’s post-9/11 campaigns and President Obama’s drone wars were massive in scale — but concentrated in inherited or congressionally authorized theaters.
  • Alongside traditional counterterrorism efforts, Trump has opened new fronts — a Christmas Day strike in Nigeria, drug boats sunk in the Caribbean, Nicolás Maduro snatched from Caracas.
  • His preferred model is consistent: no boots on the ground, no lengthy entanglements, overwhelming force applied quickly and framed as essential to defending American interests.

He’s like a walking stereotype for all the complaints every country has ever had about us. We are truly Ugly Americans. Judd Legum follows the money at Popular Information. As we’ve learned, that’s the central role of getting to this level of destruction and lunacy. We used to call it the military industrial complex, abetted by bribed politicians. “The money behind the new Iran War.”

In private calls over the last several weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) reportedly urged President Trump to attack Iran. Iran is a top regional rival of Saudi Arabia, and MBS had become concerned about Iran’s growing military capabilities.

The lobbying campaign achieved success on Saturday, when Trump announced he had begun “major combat operations in Iran.” Trump launched a war even though U.S. intelligence assessed that Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States. In June 2025, Trump publicly declared that more limited strikes “completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.”

MBS’s influence with Trump has grown as the Saudi government has invested billions in projects that personally enrich Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Despite the glaring conflicts-of-interest, Trump installed Kushner as a top negotiator with Iranian officials. Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff participated in a mediation session with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva on Thursday, billed as a last-ditch effort to avoid war.

The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the largest investor in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners. PIF invested $2 billion in Affinity Partners in 2021, even though the PIF committee that screens investments recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal, citing “inexperience” and “excessive” fees. The committee’s recommendation was overruled by MBS, who heads PIF’s Board of Directors.

PIF pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, or $25 million, annually. The Senate Finance Committee estimates that Kushner will be paid $137 million in management fees from PIF by August 2026. Further, in September 2025, PIF, Affinity Partners, and others jointly acquired Electronic Arts, the publisher of iconic video games like The Sims and Madden NFL, for $55 billion. The deal, which is the largest leveraged buyout in history, will likely be very lucrative for Kushner.

After raising billions for the Saudis and other foreign governments, Kushner dismissed concerns about conflicts of interest, pledging he would not be involved in Trump’s second term. In February 2024, Axios’ Dan Primack asked Kushner whether his business relationship with foreign governments would make it “very difficult… to do any sort of foreign policy work” moving forward. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner replied. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.”

Yet, after Trump took office, Kushner resumed his central role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. In an October 2025 interview on 60 Minutes, Kushner argued that financial conflicts made him and Witkoff more effective. “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner said.

CNN reported that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE lobbied Trump to strike Iran. Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE has significant financial ties to Kushner and Trump.

The UAE is another major backer of Affinity Partners, directly investing about $200 million with Kushner’s firm. Additional money came via Lunate, a supposedly private Abu Dhabi investment firm that is financed by government money and tied to the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds.

Witkoff is the co-founder of the crypto firm World Liberty Financial (WLF) and retains an 8-figure stake in the company. Trump and his family also own significant pieces of the company. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security advisor and head of the country’s largest sovereign wealth fund, purchased 49% of WLF days before Trump’s inauguration. Of the $250 million paid up front by the UAE, $187 million was directed to Trump family entities and $31 million to the Witkoff family. In May 2025, MGX, a company controlled by Tahnoon, purchased $2 billion of crypto tokens from WLF.

Following the conclusion of the mediation on Thursday, Kushner and Witkoff “ominously issued no statement,” and the pair was reportedly “disappointed“ by the Iranian negotiating position. After presumably being debriefed by Kushner, Trump said, “we’re not thrilled with the way they’re negotiating.” According to Trump, it would be “wonderful” if the Iranians “negotiated in … good faith and conscience but they are not getting there so far.”

The new Iran War comes weeks after PIF financed a $7 billion development deal in Saudi Arabia with the Trump Organization. Under the agreement, Dar Global, a developer with close ties to the Saudi government, will build a “Trump-branded hotel and golf course,” along with “500 mansions, priced between $6.7 million and $24 million.” The project is part of Diriyah, a $63 billion development funded entirely by PIF.

Only Trump could make Nixon look good. You can read a lot more about the money trail at the links above. Meanwhile, “fog of war” actions look pretty bleak for as many mistakes are being investigated.  The Hill reports that “Kuwait mistakenly’ shoots down 3 US F-15s: Pentagon.” Tara Sutter reports the story.

Kuwait “mistakenly” shot down three U.S. F-15 fighter jets on Sunday after strikes were launched against Iran one day earlier, according to U.S. Central Command (Centcom).

Centcom said in a statement that the fighter jets were downed in Kuwait shortly after 11 p.m. EST Sunday.

The jets “were mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses,” according to the statement.

The six service members who were on board the jets “ejected safely,” Centcom added, and are “in stable condition.”

“Kuwait has acknowledged this incident, and we are grateful for the efforts of the Kuwaiti defense forces and their support in this ongoing operation. The cause of the incident is under investigation. Additional information will be released as it becomes available,” its statement said.

Here’s another example of bad planning and big lies from Politico.  “Pentagon offers no evidence to support claim it attacked Iran in defense. The Trump administration’s effort to construct a case for war after shots started flying has few historical parallels.”  Again, there really was no case for this regionwide war we have created with Israel.

The Trump administration is making the case that it ordered expansive, deadly strikes to stop an imminent threat from Tehran, but is providing no evidence Iran had such plans.

The White House, amid the largest military buildup in the region in decades, has yet to explain to the public or to Congress what Iranian threat prompted the massive attacks that have upended the region and could draw the U.S. into another Middle East war.

The administration first tested out its justification more than 12 hours after the U.S. began bombarding Iran with missiles, drones and long-range artillery. A senior Trump administration official told reporters Saturday that the U.S. had determined American troops would have suffered far more casualties by waiting for an impending Iranian strike. In the same briefing, two other officials said the president ordered the strikes after he determined Iran would not agree to stop uranium enrichment altogether.

But the administration’s efforts to construct a case for war only after the shots have started flying has few historical parallels. The Pentagon has held no briefings nearly 36 hours after the U.S. military strikes, bucking a practice of doing so after attacks that goes back to the Vietnam War. And unlike past presidents embarking on major military campaigns, Trump made little effort to drum up support from Congress, U.S. allies or the American people. The administration did not try to convince the Senate to authorize the war, as President George W. Bush did in Iraq, or plead to the United Nations, as George H.W. Bush did to build a coalition against Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait.

“Whatever imminent threat they’re posing was likely in reaction to our unprecedented military buildup in the region,” said Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.). “This is an example of the president deciding what he wanted to do, and then making his administration go and find whatever argument they could make to justify it.”

The administration briefed some Hill staffers Sunday on the operation. But officials did not present clear evidence the Iranians were preparing an imminent attack on U.S. troops, said two people who attended. They, like others in this report, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe will give an Iran briefing to House members on Tuesday, according to four people with direct knowledge of the meeting. They will also meet with senators, according to two people familiar with the plans.

This gives the idea of ‘going off half-cocked’ an entirely new meaning. This was basically an impulsive decision that will cost us plenty. But as we can see, some folks will make lots of money from the death and destruction. We are also far beyond flintlocks with hammers.

I really am at a place where I just can’t deal with this anymore. There’s far too much at stake, and there will be blowback for all of us. If they can bomb a girls’ school and not really talk about it, where the fuck are we?  This is from the New York Times. “Strike on Girls’ School Kills at Least 175, Iranian State Media Says. Videos and images verified by The New York Times showed that at least half of the school was destroyed. It was not immediately clear why the school was hit, or which country’s forces had fired at it.”

At least 175 people, most of them likely children, were killed in a strike on a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran on Saturday, health officials and Iranian state media said.

The search for survivors in the rubble of the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in the southern town of Minab ended Sunday, according to Mohammad Radmehr, the governor of Minab, Iranian state media reported. It appeared to be the deadliest attack in the ongoing American-Israeli bombing campaign.

Several videos and images verified by The New York Times showed that at least half of the two-story school was destroyed in the explosion. Emergency workers with the Red Crescent could be seen alongside families desperately combing through the rubble, which was littered with schoolbooks and book bags covered in blood and ashes. Portions of the building jutted out from the rubble, with bits of colorful murals visible on what were once the walls of the school. Desks were piled with debris.

In other verified videos, rescue workers retrieved a severed arm from the rubble. Victims were laid out in body bags at the scene, where throngs of people were gathered among ambulances and rescue workers.

“The Minab school incident has no comparison with any other incident,” said Pirhossein Kolivand, the head of Iran’s Red Crescent, in a video posted on social media on Sunday.

“Even in Gaza,” he added, there had not been such a high number of students killed simultaneously, calling the attack “a unique and bitter incident.”

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

Mostly Monday Reads: License to Kill

Posted: July 21, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked, Crimes against Children, Criminal Justice System | Tags: , , , , , | 7 Comments

“There you go.!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

No one could possibly have any more doubts about the addled and deranged brains of#FARTUS. (Felon, Adjudicated Rapist of the United States) He’s devised another distraction from the Epstein files, and it’s a doozy. Good luck to Congressional Republicans in the attempt to normalize this beahavior. This comes from this morning’s New York Times. Matthew Mpoke Bigg has the story. “Trump posts a fake video of Obama being arrested in the Oval Office.” When in doubt, return to the scene of the original crime.

President Trump reposted a fake video showing former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office, as Trump administration officials continue to accuse Mr. Obama of trying to harm Mr. Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election, and the president seeks to redirect conversation from the Epstein files.

The short video, which appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence and posted on TikTok before being reposted on Mr. Trump’s Truth Social account on Sunday, comes days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued the latest in a series of reports from the Trump administration trying to undermine the eight-year-old assessment that Russia favored the election of Mr. Trump.

The video appears to be manipulated footage of an Oval Office meeting that took place in November 2016 between Mr. Obama, then the president, and Mr. Trump, who days earlier had defeated Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, in the election.

The fake video purports to show F.B.I. agents bursting into the meeting, pushing Mr. Obama into a kneeling position and putting him in handcuffs as Mr. Trump looks on smiling, while the song “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People plays. Later, the fake video shows Mr. Obama in an orange jumpsuit pacing in a cell. The start of the video shows a compilation of actual footage of Democratic leaders, including Mr. Obama and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr, saying, “no one is above the law.”

Mr. Obama’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the video.

Mr. Trump regularly reposts A.I.-generated or mocked-up videos and photographs on his Truth Social account.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said last week that the latest report released by her offices showed a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by top Obama administration officials to harm Mr. Trump. She said she would make a criminal referral to the F.B.I. based on recently released documents.

A link to real video footage from an interview that Ms. Gabbard gave to Fox News on Sunday on the subject was also posted to Mr. Trump’s social media.

Democrats have denounced the administration’s effort to discredit Mr. Obama as politically motivated and riddled with errors, and contradicting previous reviews of the assessment.

The latest document, issued last week, did not show Russian manipulation of the election, and instead reinforced the view of intelligence officials who found no evidence that Russia hacked voting systems to change votes.

Democrats have cited reports by intelligence agencies and Senate investigators who found that, while Russian hackers probed election systems to see if they could change vote outcomes and extracted voter registration data in at least two states, there was no evidence that they attempted to change votes.

The Obama administration’s assessment also did not say that Russian hackers manipulated votes.

Mr. Trump has been trying to change the conversation among his supporters, after the Justice Department walked back its promise to release the full collection of files about Jeffrey Epstein, a multimillionaire financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison in 2019.

That decision angered some of the president’s most ardent supporters. Some have questioned Mr. Trump’s judgment on the matter, causing strife within the MAGA movement that powered Mr. Trump to two presidential election victories.

“Oops!” John Buss, @repeat1968

Tulsi is still trying to get out of the doghouse, so she’s even reaching back for stale, old conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, there are enough disgusting stories about ICE going around that we hardly need anything totally invented out of a bunch of the brains of sickos. This is from The Guardian. “Migrants at Ice jail in Miami made to kneel to eat ‘like dogs’, report alleges. Incident in which migrants were shackled with hands tied one of succession of alleged abuses at jails in Florida.”  If it’s news about something creepy, sadistic, and inhumane, it’s got to be from either Florida or Texas. The story comes from Richard Luscombe in Miami.

Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.

The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) operated jails in the state since January, chronicled by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.

Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.

“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.

Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers, or adequate food.

The jail was so far beyond capacity, some transferring detainees reported, that they were held for more than 24 hours in a bus in the parking lot. Men and women were confined together, and unshackled only when they needed to use the single toilet, which quickly became clogged.

“The bus became disgusting. It was the type of toilet in which normally people only urinate but because we were on the bus for so long, and we were not permitted to leave it, others defecated in the toilet,” one man said.

“Because of this, the whole bus smelled strongly of feces.”

When the group was finally admitted into the facility, they said, many spent up to 12 days crammed into a frigid intake room they christened la hielera – the ice box – with no bedding or warm clothing, sleeping instead on the cold concrete floor.

There was so little space at Krome, and so many detainees, the report says, that every available room was used to hold new arrivals.

“By the time I left, almost all the visitation rooms were full. A few were so full men couldn’t even sit, all had to stand,” Andrea, a female detainee, said.

At the third facility, the Broward transitional center in Pompano Beach, where a 44-year-old Haitian woman, Marie Ange Blaise, died in April, detainees said they were routinely denied adequate medical or psychological care.

Some suffered delayed treatment for injuries and chronic conditions, and dismissive or hostile responses from staff, the report said.

In one alleged incident in April at the downtown Miami jail, staff turned off a surveillance camera and a “disturbance control team” brutalized detainees who were protesting a lack of medical attention to one of their number who was coughing up blood. One detainee suffered a broken finger.

All three facilities were severely overcrowded, the former detainees said, a contributory factor in Florida’s decision to quickly build the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” jail in the Everglades intended to eventually hold up to 5,000 undocumented migrants awaiting deportation.

Immigration detention numbers nationally were at an average of 56,400 per day in mid-June, with almost 72% having no criminal history, according to the report.

The daily average during the whole of 2024 was 37,500, HRW said.

The groups say that the documented abuses reflect inhumane conditions inside federal immigration facilities that have worsened significantly since Trump’s January inauguration and subsequent push to ramp up detentions and deportations.

“The anti-immigrant escalation and enforcement tactics under the Trump administration are terrorizing communities and ripping families apart, which is especially cruel in the state of Florida, which thrives because of its immigrant communities,” said Katie Blankenship, immigration attorney and co-founder of Sanctuary of the South.

“The rapid, chaotic, and cruel approach to arresting and locking people up is literally deadly and causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come.”

These are the kinds of stories that make me think my country has been flushed down a dirty toilet. I can’t imagine any previous modern president doing this. The closest thing from history that was this barbaric was when Andrew Jackson sent the Cherokee to Oklahoma via The Trail of Tears. There was also Wounded Knee, where hundreds of the Lakota people were murdered for their land. We think that the Civil War ended slavery and that we began making a better Union for all of us. It’s so alarming that it’s been dismantled so quickly by so few. Wounded Knee happened in 1890. The last horrid act of attempted mass termination of our indigenous nations was in 1956.

The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was one law among others through the 1940s and 1950s that are referred to as Indian Termination. It was an effort by the U.S. government to hasten the assimilation of American Indians. Some scholars have characterized the law as an attempt to encourage people to leave Indian reservations for urban areas, which resulted in poverty, joblessness, homelessness for many in the new urban environment.

The next major ICE assault on an American city will happen in New York. Politico reports that “ICE will ‘flood the zone’ in NYC. Trump administration officials said they’d increase staffing after getting blocked from opening an office in the city’s jails.”  If this doesn’t feel like living under Hitler’s SS, I don’t know what would. What group of people will be on their next assault?

The Department of Homeland Security will “flood the zone” with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New York City after the City Council blocked federal law enforcement agencies from opening an office in the city jails, President Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Monday morning.

Homan joined DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other Trump administration officials to deliver that message at One World Trade Center after an off-duty federal customs officer was shot by an undocumented immigrant in an attempted robbery Saturday night, Noem said.

“You don’t want to let us in the jails to arrest a bad guy in the safety and security of a jail. You want to release him into the street, which makes it unsafe for the alien, because anything can happen in an on-street arrest,” Homan said. “So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna put more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy. So sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want: more agents in the community.”

The alleged shooter entered the country illegally in 2023 during then-President Joe Biden’s tenure and had been arrested and released four times in the years since, Noem said. She blamed the shooting on New York’s sanctuary city policies that limit the city’s cooperation with civil immigration enforcement and Mayor Eric Adams for not changing the policies, despite his good relationship with the Trump administration.

Adams has said he wants to cooperate with federal authorities on immigration more but blamed the left-leaning City Council for not letting him. “I have nothing to do with the rules that are put in place. I just carry out the rules,” Adams said at an unrelated press conference Monday when asked to respond to Noem.

Adams said he welcomes more ICE agents in the city if they’re going to help the city go after “dangerous people” like the alleged shooter, but said that “if it’s going to be to go after everyday individuals who are trying to complete the path, who are trying to be a citizen, I don’t think we should do that.”

I still don’t understand how property crimes can be lumped in with major crimes like sexual assault, murder, or battery, but then I don’t consider my car an extension of my genitalia.  I also don’t understand how any American president can get away with defying judicial orders. Again, it seems we are on a fast, downward spiral to banana republic status. This is from the Washington Post. “Trump officials accused of defying 1 in 3 judges who ruled against him.  A comprehensive analysis of hundreds of lawsuits against Trump policies shows dozens of examples of defiance, delay, and dishonesty, which experts say pose an unprecedented threat to the U.S. legal system.” Justin Jouvenal has the lede.

President Donald Trump and his appointees have been accused of flouting courts in a third of the more than 160 lawsuits against the administration in which a judge has issued a substantive ruling, a Washington Post analysis has found, suggesting widespread noncompliance withAmerica’s legal system.

Plaintiffs say Justice Department lawyers and the agencies they represent aresnubbing rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence, quietly working around court orders and inventing pretexts to carry out actions that have been blocked.

Judges appointed by presidents of both parties have often agreed. None havetaken punitive action to try to force compliance, however, allowing the administration’s defiance of orders to go on for weeks or even months in some instances.

Outside legal analysts say courts typicallyare slow to begin contempt proceedings for noncompliance,especially while their rulings are under appeal.Judges alsoare likely to be concerned, analysts say, that the U.S. Marshals Service — whose director is appointed by the president — might not serve subpoenas or take recalcitrant government officials into custodyif ordered to by the courts.

The allegations against the administrationare crystallized ina whistleblower complaint filedto Congress late last monththat accused Justiceofficials of ignoring court orders in immigration cases, presenting legal arguments with no basis in the law and misrepresenting facts. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor also chided the administration, writing that Trump officials had “openly flouted” a judge’s order not to deport migrants to a country where they did not have citizenship.

The Post examined337 lawsuits filed against the administration since Trump returned to the White House and began a rapid-fire effort to reshape government programs and policy. As of mid-July, courts had ruled against the administration in 165 of the lawsuits. The Post found that the administration is accused of defying or frustrating court oversight in 57 of those cases — almost 35 percent.

Legal experts said the pattern of conductis unprecedented for any presidential administration and threatens to undermine the judiciary’s role as a check on an executive branch asserting vast powers that test the boundaries of the law and Constitution. Immigration cases have emerged as the biggest flash point, but the administration has also been repeatedly accused of failing to comply in lawsuits involving cuts to federal funding and the workforce.

Ed Maza, writing for HuffPo, has this story. “‘Reeks Of A Cover-Up’: Ex-Trump Official Suspects ‘Embarrassing’ Info In Epstein Files. Miles Taylor predicted that Trump will create distractions to keep people from talking about the Epstein case.”

President Donald Trump has backtracked on his promise to release files related to late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and one former official from his first term thinks he knows why.

There might be “embarrassing” details about Trump in those documents, according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security chief of staff in 2019.
MSNBC’s Alex Witt asked Taylor about a report that Attorney General Pam Bondi pressured FBI Director Kash Patel into getting 1,000 employees to sort through 100,000 Epstein records and flag any mention of Trump.

“This data point, to me, reeks of a cover-up,” Taylor said Sunday.

If the report is true, he said, that doesn’t necessarily mean there was criminal behavior, but the agents could have uncovered information that the president doesn’t want made public.

“Again, it doesn’t have to be criminal,” he said. “It could just be embarrassing.”

He pointed to a report in The Wall Street Journal of a strange birthday letter Trump allegedly sent to Epstein as an example of something that’s not criminal but “very embarrassing.”

Trump has denied sending the latter and is suing over it.

“The keyword searches looking for Trump’s name, I think, strongly suggest that somewhere, something could have been found that has affected his behavior in this case,” he said, and warned that the case could consume the president in the same way that the Russia investigation did during his first term.

The good news, he said, is that it might keep Trump distracted and unable to follow through on some of the most extreme parts of his agenda.

“The bad news is it’s going to make Donald Trump desperate to create other distractions because he doesn’t want people to focus on this,” he said.

The AP reports that Israeli forces are pushing farther and farther into Gaza. “Israeli forces push into parts of a central Gaza city that the war had largely spared.” It appears that Netanyahoo is using the massive amount of chaos created by Trump’s irrational Foreign Policies to conquer the country and expel its rightful citziens.  This area is also a staging ground for groups providing aid. Trump has lost interest in the region since he’s so involved with Epstein reports.

Israeli ground troops for the first time Monday pushed into areas of a central Gaza city where several aid groups are based, in what appeared to be the latest effort to carve up the Palestinian territory with military corridors.

Deir al-Balah is the only Gaza city that has not seen major ground operations or suffered widespread devastation in 21 months of war, leading to speculation that the Hamas militant group holds large numbers of hostages there. The main group representing hostages’ families said it was “shocked and alarmed” by the incursion, which was confirmed by an Israeli military official, and demanded answers from Israeli leaders.

Israel says the seizure of territory in Gaza is aimed at pressuring Hamas to release hostages, but it is a major point of contention in ongoing ceasefire talks.

The U.N. food agency, meanwhile, accused Israeli forces of firing on a crowd of Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid over the weekend. Gaza’s Health Ministry called it one of the deadliest attacks on aid-seekers in the war that has driven the territory to the brink of famine.

Well, they’ve got a lot of days left to kill off more of us. Let’s see how it goes. Down here in Lousyana, they’re just killing us off with not much excuse at all.  A large Coastal restoration project that was funded by the Gulf Oil Spill settlement has been shut down by our crazy governor and the swampbillies in the legislature. There’s an incredible heatwave here for the next three days, and I’m just trying to stay as dry and cool as possible, but I have a feeling I’ll be cold, bathtub-bound for most of that time.  This is from our local TV station, WDSU. “Louisiana officially cancels state’s largest coastal project.”  Just write death by MAGA’s love of oil in my obit if I don’t make it.

Louisiana has officially canceled the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

The project was the largest single ecosystem restoration effort in U.S. history and the cornerstone of the state’s own Coastal Master Plan.

Gov. Jeff Landry has been a critic of the project, saying it’s costing taxpayers $30 to $50 million a year, claiming it’s destroying Grand Isle, and impacting drinking water for several parishes.

Supporters of the program say it is crucial to restoring the coast.

Restore the Mississippi River Delta issued the following statement:

“In a complete abandonment of science-driven decision-making and public transparency, Governor Jeff Landry and his administration have pulled the plug on a fully funded, permitted, and under construction project designed to rebuild tens of thousands of acres of our collapsing coast. The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion represents decades of research, public engagement, and bipartisan support.

Thursday’s announcement by the TIG was the culmination of a year-and-a-half-long campaign of misinformation and political arm-twisting by Gov. Jeff Landry and his coastal team to undermine and finally kill the state’s largest ecosystem restoration project.

Mid-Barataria is more than a project — it represents a generational investment, paid for with the penalties of an environmental disaster. These dollars were meant to restore the coast, not settle a cancellation of contracts behind closed doors. The project’s cancellation means the state is throwing away more than $618 million intended to be spent to protect the coast’s culture, residents, and businesses.

The state has recently resurrected the idea of a smaller diversion near Myrtle Grove as a substitute, but that project was previously dropped from the state’s master plan years ago due to poor performance in early modeling.

A stopgap project with no data is not a solution. We need diversion designs backed by science — not politics.

Coastal Louisiana is still in an accelerated land loss crisis, and the science remains clear: sediment diversions are essential to building and sustaining wetlands at scale. Any alternative must be grounded in rigorous evaluation, transparent public engagement, and a commitment to outcomes — not opinions and optics.

I think they want all of us dead. It’s the only explanation I have.

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

Monday Reads: A bit of this and that!

Posted: July 25, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Crimes against Children, Discrimination against women, Domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, religious extremists, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Justice, Reproductive Rights, Republican Code Words and Concepts, Republican presidential politics, right wing hate grouups, Treason and Sedition Republican Style, Trump Trash, white nationalists, Women's Rights | Tags: | 24 Comments

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fränzi in front of Carved Chair, 1910.

Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!

There are a lot of long-form articles up today that are worth a read.  I’m going to start with a few on the abortion issue since Kansas has a significant vote today. Kansas is the first state to have a Post-Roe vote.  This is from The New York Times: “‘Everybody Is Dug In’: Kansans Fiercely Debate the First Post-Roe Vote on Abortion. The Aug. 2 ballot question will decide whether the State Constitution will allow legislators to ban or further restrict the procedure.”

Kansas voters will decide next week whether to remove protections of abortion rights from their State Constitution, providing the first electoral test of Americans’ attitudes on the issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The election could give the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature authority to pass new abortion limits or to outlaw the procedure entirely, potentially reshaping the map of abortion access in the nation’s center. The vote, which has been planned since last year but took on far higher stakes after the federal right to abortion was eliminated, is expected to send a message far beyond Kansas as politicians nationwide weigh new abortion measures and watch for signs of how the public is reacting.

“Kansas is the bull’s-eye of the United States in terms of its geography, but it’s also the bull’s-eye where all the energy that has emerged from the Supreme Court decision has now focused,” said Pastor Randy Frazee, who leads a large church in suburban Kansas City, and who like many clergy members supports giving legislators the power to restrict abortions.

“Complementary Yellow Twin Sisters,” unknown artist

A good deal of my family is still in the Kansas City area. One of my great grandfathers was a Methodist circuit rider back in the day when Kansas had a healthy abolitionist movement. We’ll see if the old Kansas idea of Christian social justice is still there.  FiveThirtyEight discusses “How The Fight To Ban Abortion Is Rooted In The ‘Great Replacement’ Theory.”  It’s also firmly rooted in the idea that men own women and whatever activities they can do.  This analysis was written by Alex Samuels and Monica Potts.

Throughout colonial America and into the 19th century, abortions were fairly common with the help of a midwife or other women and could be obtained until the point that you could feel movement inside, according to Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a historian of early-20th-century women’s rights and public health. Most abortions were induced through herbal or medicinal remedies and, like other medical interventions of the time, weren’t always effective or safe.

But the dynamics surrounding the procedure changed by the mid-19th century, as America’s elites began to fear a rising tide of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and other European countries (people often viewed as “inferior”), suffragists seeking new freedoms and recently freed Black people, whom these elites feared were reproducing at higher rates than the white population. Laws limiting abortion, it was believed, would ultimately force middle- and upper-class white women — who had the most access to detect and terminate unwanted pregnancies — to bear more white children.

“There were concerns that these other groups were demographically outpacing white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant women. And so they thought to limit the bodily autonomy of white women and limit access to contraception in order to force them to have children. That they felt would keep up with the demographic birth rate,” said Alex DiBranco, the co-founder and executive director of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism.

It took time for the anti-abortion movement to attract supporters, and unlike today, religious groups were not originally an active part of it. Still, momentum built as a small but influential number of physicians began arguing that licensed male doctors — as opposed to female midwives — should care for women throughout the reproductive cycle. In the late 1850s, one of the leaders of the nascent anti-abortion movement, a surgeon named Horatio Robinson Storer, began arguing that he didn’t want the medical profession to be associated with abortion. He was able to push the relatively new American Medical Association to support his cause, and soon they were working to delegitimize midwives and enforce abortion bans. In an 1865 essay issued by order of the AMA, Storer went so far as to say of white women that “upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”

The Family (John Gruen, Jane Wilson and Julia), Alice Neel, 1970

There’s a lot more in the article if you can stand to read all the misogyny, racism, and basic WASP nationalism. From Cameron Joseph, at VICE we learn exactly how deep the Republican Party’s hatred of women has become.  “JD Vance Suggests People in ‘Violent’ Marriages Shouldn’t Get Divorced. The Ohio Republican Senate nominee claimed people “shift spouses like they change their underwear,” and that it had damaged a generation of children.”

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said.

“And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages,” Vance continued. “And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”

Vance was responding to a moderator who referenced his grandparents’ relationship before asking, “What’s causing one generation to give up on fatherhood when the other one was so doggedly determined to stick it out, even in tough times?” And those comments came immediately after he brought up his grandparents’ relationship and how it differed from his parents’ generation. He described their marriage as “violent” in his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy,” though they’d reconciled by the time he came along and helped raise him, giving him a sense of safety and stability his mother was unable to provide.

“Culturally, something has clearly shifted. I think it’s easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s. My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the 70s or 80s,” he said.

Terrace in Balcic, Nutzi Acontz, 1930

How about once women actually get choices, where they can take care of themselves and their families, that makes the horrid man in their life irrelevant?  I endured one marriage of 20 years and believe me, never again. He’s working on his third btw.

So, one more topic I want to cover today is how the Republicans are trying to form a new kind of servitude on everyone but white Christian men and billionaires. First up from The Daily Beast: “The Four Stages of Republican Misinformation. The right has a tested formula to brainwash its base. From the Big Lie to attacking a 10-year-old rape victim, here’s how they do it.”  This is written by Wajahat Ali.

The entire right-wing ecosystem unleashed its full arsenal to discredit the 10-year-old girl as a liar, intimidate her physician, demonize liberals, and continue its march backward, undeterred, in its quest to make Handmaid’s Tale cosplay a reality—in an America that subordinates and punishes women for having the audacity to control their own bodies.

To achieve its goal, the right uses a now familiar four-part strategy.

First, Republicans use any means necessary to achieve power and promote their unpopular, extremist, counter-majoritarian agenda.

Second, they create and promote disinformation and lies to frighten their base and Jedi mind-trick them into believing they are being oppressed by the actual victims.

Third, they create a specific villain, target them, and then attack them through scapegoating, smearing, and intimidation.

Fourth, they never apologize or back down once their lie is exposed, but instead, they double down, and in times of doubt, always pivot towards racism and fear-mongering.

To illustrate the strategy, look no further than the GOP’s rationalization of the Jan. 6 insurrection and embrace of the Big Lie—which gave them the successful blueprint to promote their hateful anti-abortion policies.

First, Donald Trump deliberately promoted lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud conducted by Democrats. Instead of accepting his defeat, he unleashed a premeditated, coordinated strategy to engage in a failed coup, which eventually resulted in thousands of his supporters overtaking the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn a free and fair election.

To get to the point where a 10-year-old rape victim has to cross state lines for an abortion, look to the GOP’s four-decade effort to kill Roe v. Wade. Republicans finally got their wish by packing the Supreme Court with right-wing extremists in black robes handpicked by the Federalist Society. Sen. Mitch McConnell stole Merrick Garland’s seat by refusing to hold a confirmation hearing, citing the need to wait until after the 2016 election. Then, he went against his own bullshit precedent and bum-rushed Justice Amy Coney Barrett on to the Court after millions of votes had already been cast in the 2020 election. That’s how they got a right-wing majority to dutifully overturn Roe, which led to Republican-controlled states imposing draconian laws that are punishing women and their health-care providers.

Second, the right-wing media ecosystem continues to amplify the Big Lie and fuel conspiracy theories, which has since resulted in a majority of GOP voters falsely believing Biden was not fairly elected. More than 100 Republicans who have won their recent primaries support the Big Lie, which has transformed into a MAGA litmus test for aspiring GOP candidates.

Anxiety, Edvard Munch,1894

There’s more.  It’s a brutally factual and honest assessment. This leads to a story sent to me last night by BostonBoomer.  This is from The Atlantic: “America’s Self-Obsession Is Killing Its Democracy. The U.S. still has a chance to fix itself before 2024. But when democracies start dying—as ours already has—they usually don’t recover.”  It’s written by Brian Klaas.  I hate to be a Debbie Downer, but we must wake everyone up to all of this.

American democracy is dying. There are plenty of medicines that would cure it. Unfortunately, our political dysfunction means we’re choosing not to use them, and as time passes, fewer treatments become available to us, even though the disease is becoming terminal. No major prodemocracy reforms have passed Congress. No key political figures who tried to overturn an American election have faced real accountability. The president who orchestrated the greatest threat to our democracy in modern times is free to run for reelection, and may well return to office.

Our current situation started with a botched diagnosis. When Trump first rose to political prominence, much of the American political class reacted with amusement, seeing him as a sideshow. Even if he won, they thought, he’d tweet like a populist firebrand while governing like a Romney Republican, constrained by the system. But for those who had watched Trump-like authoritarian strongmen rise in Turkey, India, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Venezuela, Trump was never entertaining. He was ominously familiar.

At issue was a classic frame-of-reference problem. America’s political culture is astonishingly insular. Turn on cable news and it’s all America, all the time. Other countries occasionally make cameos, but the story is still about us. (Poland is discussed if Air Force One goes to Warsaw; Iran flits into view only in relation to Washington’s nuclear diplomacy; Madagascar appears only in cartoon form, mostly featuring talking animals that don’t actually live there.) Our self-obsession means that whenever authoritarianism rises abroad, it’s mentioned briefly, if at all. Have you ever spotted a breathless octobox of talking heads on CNN or Fox News debating the death of democracy in Turkey, Sri Lanka, or the Philippines?

That’s why most American pundits and journalists used an “outsider comes to Washington” framework to process Trump’s campaign and his presidency, when they should have been fitting every fresh fact into an “authoritarian populist” framework or a “democratic death spiral” framework. While debates raged over tax cuts and offensive tweets, the biggest story was often obscured: The system itself was at risk.

Even today, too many think of Trump more as Sarah Palin in 2012 rather than Viktor Orbán in 2022. They wrongly believe that the authoritarian threat is over and that January 6 was an isolated event from our past, rather than a mild preview of our future. That misreading is provoking an underreaction from the political establishment. And the worst may be yet to come.

This is another long read, but please check it out! I think I’ve saddled you with enough angst and anxiety for a while.  Oh, and sorry, but I am on a Queen binge recently. So enjoy the killer lyrics and solo guitar by Brian May, the Freddie vocals, and the artwork that is this video.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

While the sun hangs in the sky and the desert has sand
While the waves crash in the sea and meet the land
While there’s a wind and the stars and the rainbow
‘Til the mountains crumble into the plain
Oh, yes, we’ll keep on tryin’
Tread that fine line
Oh, we’ll keep on tryin’, yeah
Just passing our time
While we live according to race, colour or creed
While we rule by blind madness and pure greed
Our lives dictated by tradition, superstition, false religion
Through the aeons, and on and on
Oh, yes, we’ll keep on tryin’
We’ll tread that fine line
Oh-oh, we’ll keep on tryin’
‘Til the end of time
‘Til the end of time
Through the sorrow, all through our splendour
Don’t take offence at my innuendo
You can be anything you want to be
Just turn yourself into anything you think that you could ever be
Be free with your tempo, be free, be free
Surrender your ego, be free, be free to yourself
If there’s a God or any kind of justice under the sky
If there’s a point, if there’s a reason to live or die
If there’s an answer to the questions, we feel bound to ask
Show yourself, destroy our fears, release your mask
Oh, yes, we’ll keep on trying
Hey, tread that fine line
Yeah, we’ll keep on smiling, yeah (yeah, yeah)
And whatever will be, will be
We’ll keep on trying
We’ll just keep on trying
‘Til the end of time
‘Til the end of time
‘Til the end of time

Monday Reads: It’s always the same Nonsense!

Posted: April 25, 2022 | Author: | Filed under: Crimes against Children, Psychopaths in charge, public education, Putin’s War, religion, Republican Code Words and Concepts, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, Russia, Russia-Ukraine War, Stock Market, Ukraine | Tags: | 20 Comments

Seated Female Clown (Mlle Cha-U-Kao), 1896 Wall Art, Henri
de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Met

Good Day Sky Dancers!

BB is the authority on this, but I’d just like to say if you want any of the best examples of projection as an ego defense mechanism, choose any Republican.  The Encyclopedia of Britannica sums it up nicely. “Projection is a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, where they then appear as a threat from the external world.”  From the existence of Pedophiles to Cancel Culture, Republican sloganeering puts a target on something “liberal” and then focuses on getting the attention off the incredible number of instances of it that appear in the Republican Party domain.

A few days ago, I put this Newsweek article up down the thread. “GOP Senator Ray Holmberg Resigns Chair After Texts to Child Porn Suspect.”   The details of anything other than the texts aren’t known right now, but it sure seems a lot of Republicans are overly intrigued with pedophiles these days.  Of course, we know of many recent Republican officeholders–most notably Denny Hastert, the former Speaker of the House– that were actual pedophiles. A judge referred to him as a “serial child molester” after determining he had been molesting boys he coached over decades.  We also have the examples of MagaRats Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan.  There’s an awful lot of deflecting and projecting dealing with that horrid behavior.

And who could forget this one from a few weeks ago? From Vanity Fair: “TED CRUZ WARNS DISNEY PROGRAMMING WILL SOON DEPICT MICKEY AND PLUTO F–KING.”

In an extremely weird set of remarks, even for him, the Texas lawmaker opined at a live recording of his podcast, Verdict With Ted Cruz: “I think there are people who are misguided, trying to drive, you know, Disney stepping in, saying, you know, in every episode now they’re gonna have, you know, Mickey and Pluto going at it. Like, really? It’s just like, come on guys, these are kids, and you know, you could always shift to Cinemax if you want that. Like, why do you have—it used to be, look, I’m a dad. You used to be able to put your kids on the Disney Channel and be like, alright, something innocuous will happen.”

And then there’s this: “Kellyanne Conway Knew Of ‘Sexual Allegations’ Against Nebraska Candidate Months Ago. The former White House adviser and Donald Trump are working for Charles Herbster’s election as governor despite allegations he groped eight women.”  This is from HuffPo, as reported by Mary Papenfuss.

Former Trump administration White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said she heard last year about “some kind of sexual allegations” against GOP Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster — but she’s working to get him elected anyway.

Conway alleged on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that groping allegations raised by eight women, including a Republican state senator, were somehow cooked up by current Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, who does not support Herbster, a corporate CEO who has never held office.

…

Ricketts “got in my face” 10 months ago vowing to “destroy Charles Herbster,” said Conway. She offered nothing else in the way of proof that Ricketts is behind the assault accusations.

A key accuser is GOP state Sen. Julie Slama. She said in an emotional radio interview earlier this month that she was “in shock” at what she called an “assault” by Herbster at a Republican dinner in 2019.

As I was … walking to my table, I felt a hand reach up my skirt, up my dress and the hand was Charles Herbster’s,” Slama said, her voice shaking, in an interview on News Radio KFAB in Omaha. “I was in shock. I was mortified. It’s one of the most traumatizing things I’ve ever been through.”

Slama added: “I watched as five minutes later he grabbed the buttocks of another young woman. … This was witnessed by several people at the event.”

You may read more about the allegations at the link.  And here’s my cartooning friend from Nebraska on the Pornhusker candidate. By the way, Ricketts also graduated from our High School!  ICK!!!!

We have more on the orange snot blob and his crime syndicate family as I’m writing this.  This is fresh off the virtual presses from the New York Times. “Judge Holds Trump in Contempt Over Documents in New York A.G.’s Inquiry. Former President Donald J. Trump was ordered to turn over materials sought by Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and will be fined $10,000 per day until he does so.”

A New York judge on Monday held Donald J. Trump in contempt of court for failing to turn over documents to the state’s attorney general, an extraordinary rebuke of the former president.

The judge, Arthur F. Engoron, ordered Mr. Trump to comply with a subpoena seeking records and assessed a fine of $10,000 per day until he satisfied the court’s requirements. In essence, the judge concluded that Mr. Trump had failed to cooperate with the attorney general, Letitia James, and follow the court’s orders.

“Mr. Trump: I know you take your business seriously, and I take mine seriously,” remarked Justice Engoron of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, before he held Mr. Trump in contempt and banged his gavel.

Alina Habba, a lawyer for Mr. Trump, said she intended to appeal the judge’s ruling.

Still, the ruling represents a significant victory for Ms. James, whose office is conducting a civil investigation into whether Mr. Trump falsely inflated the value of his assets in annual financial statements.

Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone

So a few more stories about other thuggish clowns.  Wherever you see a thuggish clown, there will be a thuggish religious figure to give him a messianic complex.  This is by Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic. “Putin’s Unholy War. Putin, the Patriarch, and the corruption of Orthodox Christianity.”

For most of the Christian world, Easter is over. For Orthodox Christians, however, Easter week has just begun—and Russia, the largest Orthodox country in the world, is still relentlessly pursuing the invasion and barbaric destruction of its mostly Orthodox neighbor, Ukraine. In fact, the renewed Russian offensive in the Donbas, replete with day and night bombardment of mostly Orthodox, mostly Russian-speaking areas in eastern Ukraine, began just after Russians and Ukrainians observed Palm Sunday.

I note this because I, too, am an Orthodox Christian, and I am watching one nominally Orthodox nation try to slaughter another.

In most of my comments on the Russian war against Ukraine, I’ve tried, as best I can, to provide you with dispassionate analysis. But I hope this week you’ll allow me a few personal observations as I head toward Easter. I realize that sometimes the cold equations of political analysis can seem far removed from our emotions, and so I thought I would share with you some of my own.

Although my career was mostly spent as a scholar and Russia expert, it is difficult for any area specialist to be completely objective about the countries they study, because our lives end up unavoidably connected to the subject of our profession.

…

Nonetheless, whether friend or enemy, I have spent my life trying to understand Russia and its people. Now, like everyone, I am disgusted by Russian savagery. Fury grows in me each time I see the mutilated corpses and leveled homes—not only because of the sadistic violence, but also because I know that the Russian regime, in trying to destroy the Ukrainian nation, has destroyed a chance, at least for some years to come, for a better world.

And for what?

For the messianic dreams of a small man, a frightened and delusional thug leading a criminal enterprise masquerading as a government, who believes that he is doing God’s will.

You might be surprised at the last sentence, but Vladimir Putin really believes this. He thinks he’s on a mission. I’ll come back to this in a moment, but it’s a reality that too many in the West have either overlooked or chosen to ignore. And as much as I’d like to lay all of this mayhem on Putin’s shoulders alone, we now have to accept that his butchery of innocent people is either tacitly or openly supported by millions of Russians. Yes, there are brave Russians who have risked their lives to protest this war, but there is no way, any longer, to deny that Putin enjoys more support than any decent nation should give to such horror.

And so I grieve not only for Ukraine, but for the knowledge that no matter how this war ends, the era of hope that began in 1989 is over. Ukraine is now the scene of the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. NATO and Russia are openly enemies again. Nuclear war, for a time a forgotten abstraction, is a real danger.

Putin’s messianic madness is magnified by the blessings of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church leader for the invasion of Ukraine. This has split the church.  (Via WAPO)  This so reminds me of all the evangelicals who see Trump as some kind of messiah.  White Patriarchal Nationalism is just a potent poison wherever it manifests itself.

Whether warning about the “external enemies” attempting to divide the “united people” of Russia and Ukraine, or very publicly blessing the generals leading soldiers in the field, Patriarch Kirill has become one of the war’s most prominent backers. His sermons echo, and in some cases even supply, the rhetoric that President Vladimir Putin has used to justify the assault on cities and civilians.

“Let this image inspire young soldiers who take the oath, who embark on the path of defending the fatherland,” Kirill intoned as he gave a gilded icon to Gen. Viktor Zolotov during a service at Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral in mid-March. The precious gift, the general responded, would protect the troops in their battles against Ukrainian “Nazis.”

One more clown to send in today.

If you haven’t gotten the idea that my post today is all about the clowns who want money and power and will do any schtick to get it, well, you know now.  Now, this has nothing to do with Musk’s diagnosis of having Autism Spectrum Disorder but I think we can see more than a bit of Narcissism in all the folks we read about today. I will leave Twitter if the Orange Cheeto and his hateful cult are allowed back on.  Free speech isn’t about lying or harassing people and calling them ugly names. I use my block and report button continually because I prefer not to see hateful people try to take over a discussion.

Twitter is said to be nearing a deal to sell itself to Elon Musk, according to The New York Times and other outlets, 11 days after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO shocked the industry by offering to buy the company in a deal valuing it at more than $41 billion.

A deal could be finalized as soon as Monday, according to the Wall Street Journal. Twitter declined to comment on the reports.

Reports that a deal is imminent come after Musk revealed last week he had lined up $46.5 billion in financing to acquire the company. Twitter’s board met Sunday to evaluate Musk’s offer to buy all the shares of the company he does not currently own for $54.20 a piece, a source familiar with the deal confirmed to CNN. The source said that discussions about Musk’s bid have turned serious.

Musk appeared to hint at the completion of a deal on Twitter on Monday when he tweeted, “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”

The potential sale agreement caps off a whirlwind news cycle that began less than a month ago, when Musk revealed he had taken a more than 9% stake in the company and ramped up calls for changes to the social media platform.

I just want quick access to breaking news as reported by the reporters.  Oh, well.  To me, there are critics and then there are damn liars with a mean ax to grind.  I want none of the latter.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?