“The new White House Press Secretary is a hoot!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m pretty sure this craziness with our neighbors to the north is more tap dancing to get our minds off the Epstein files, the failed Israeli/US war on Iran, and basic affordability. Look at dat! Look at dat! Look over there with jazz hands isn’t flying with most of us. Who the hell still believes all this? But it tends to distract the mainstream media, which is really bad. Very bad stuff is hiding behind all of this. Let me show you today.
If you’ve known me long enough, you know I have a serious love affair with our nation’s National Parks. I’ve camped and hiked around more than I can remember, but that’s only because some of the big ones are so amazing they took this little girl’s heart to the point she still reminds me what it means to see wild animals in the wild and breathtaking views. As I got older, my sketchbook filled with every place we camped and explored. They also remind you of our indigenous peoples and the glory of endless wilderness.
That’s why my blood pressure took off when I read this. “Trump’s Quietly Working to Give Part of Yosemite to a Private Developer. The National Park Service is under pressure to make an unprecedented deal that cedes a quarter-mile strip of the park.” The article can be found atNOTUS and is written by Anna Kramer. Yosemite is one of the nations’ oldest and most glorious examples of American landscapes. He’s totally dedicated to the idea of selling stuff off to support his Trumpify every historical place in the District.
For more than a year, the National Park Service has been quietly working to fulfill an unprecedented directive from Trump officials: Parcel off a corner of Yosemite National Park to give to a private developer.
National Park Service staff in California and Washington, D.C., are trying to arrange a land exchange between a Nevada-based company and the federal government, according to four people directly familiar with discussions, as well as agency documents reviewed by NOTUS.
Since the spring of 2025, the Trump administration has been looking into ways it could cede a roughly quarter-mile strip of land inside Yosemite to a company that, through a web of limited-liability companies, is operated by real-estate developer and investment firm Kingsbarn Realty Capital. Officials are proposing the Park Service give up the land or “interest” in the land in the form of an easement, and in return receive land of equal value somewhere in California that has yet to be decided.
The private developers own an 83-acre plot of land just outside the western boundaries of Yosemite, about five miles from one of the park’s defining ancient sequoia groves. Jeff Pori, the CEO of Kingsbarn, wants to build a short road connecting the property to one of Yosemite’s central thoroughfares. The new road would give the land exceptionally rare private access to a park that is otherwise almost entirely buffered by national forests.
The property’s current access road is more than 10 miles from an entrance to the park, and much further from Yosemite’s most iconic sights. Without a new road, visitors to the property — whether it be developed into a hotel, resort or private residence — would need to drive an hour and a half in a circuitous route to reach the popular Yosemite Valley.
This is an unprecedented move and a dangerous one.
If the deal goes through, the Trump administration would be breaking with 150 years of American precedent at the birthplace of the national park system. The federal government has historically strived to expand the crown-jewel national parks, not give up land within them.
“The national park idea started in Yosemite with Abraham Lincoln’s preservation of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias,” said Cicely Muldoon, a 40-year veteran of the Park Service who served as Yosemite’s superintendent for about five years. Muldoon retired from Yosemite shortly after President Donald Trump took office in 2025.
“Our basic purpose in the national parks is to preserve these places unimpaired for future generations, not letting go of that for the purpose of private profit,” she said Interior’s advocacy for the deal is a significant reversal of a pledge Secretary Doug Burgum made in his 2025 confirmation hearing: “The national parks, absolutely we need to support and protect every single inch of those,” he said.It also contravenes the presidential message Trump shared on Aug. 24 of this year, to announce the beginning of National Park Week: “My Administration is committed to protecting every acre of our lands and preserving the cleanest air and water in the world.”And it goes against the agency’s past position on this specific piece of land. The Park Service has received this privatization request before, and it has rejected it repeatedly for over two decades.
Don’t even get me started on Trump trying to rename Lake Ontario. But you don’t have to take my word on it try this at Business Insider. The internet has gone into full meme mode over Trump’s Lake Ontario name change. The story is reported by Joshua Nelken-Zitser.
President Donald Trump renamed Lake Ontario as Lake America, and it’s making waves on the internet.
After tense trade talks between the US and Canada collapsed and the US imposed new 50% tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of Canadian goods, Trump turned to another tool in his arsenal: rebranding.
On Thursday, Trump issued an executive order to rename Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes that straddles the US-Canada border, as Lake America. As the Canadian Prime Minster Mark Carney wrote on X, the name predates the Confederation of Canada and the US Declaration of Independence. “The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘”the lake is beautiful, the lake is big’,” he wrote.
The name change follows a similar move Trump made last year when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, a change that Mexico and other countries, including the UK and China, have refused to adopt.
After Thursday’s executive order, it didn’t take long for the internet to respond with memes. Here are the 10 best.
Go check them out!
Trump tries over and over again to remove all the settled cases against him. Most courts remain firmly on the side of the settled case based on settled law. Here’s yet another Trump failure to ditch responsibility for all his crimes. This is from local TV station Spectrum News NY1. “Trump loses again in bid to erase his N.Y. hush money conviction.” You may remember that this is the payment to Stormy Daniels.
A federal judge on Friday once again spurned Donald Trump’s effort to erase his hush money conviction, rejecting the president’s bid to move the state court case to federal court and have it dismissed on presidential immunity grounds.
Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein reiterated his earlier finding against Trump, saying that the reasons Trump cited for renewing his request were “neither new nor legally sufficient.”
The judge added: “He has failed to show good cause and diligence.”
It is the third time Hellerstein has blocked Trump from having the U.S. District Court in Manhattan seize control of the case from the New York court where he was tried and convicted.
And, like before, Trump will appeal, according to a spokesperson for his legal team who called Hellerstein’s ruling “baseless and lawless.”
“The Supreme Court’s historic decision on Immunity, the Federal and New York State Constitutions, and other established legal precedent mandate that the Witch Hunt perpetrated by the Manhattan DA be removed to federal court, and immediately overturned and dismissed,” a statement issued on behalf of the legal team said. “President Trump will be filing a powerful appeal, and will continue defeating Democrat weaponization at every turn.”
The guilty verdict, reached in May 2024 while Trump was between terms, made him the first former — and now current — U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. Trump is also challenging his conviction through the state court appellate process, which is pending.
Hellerstein’s decision came after a federal appeals court last year ordered him to reconsider his prior denial. The judge previewed his ruling during oral arguments in February, slamming Trump’s lawyers for legal maneuvers that amounted to taking “two bites at the apple.”
State prosecutors did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Stormy and E. Jean are high on my list of tough and amazing women for see these cases through. We can only hope we get the Epstein files released and we see more women damaged by Trump receive justice and compensation. And speaking of the Stormy case, this headline yesterday from Raw Storyis an eye opener. There most be a line as wide as big as the country itself of co-criminals waiting for Trump Pardons. “Explosive motive unmasked by DOJ insiders as Michael Cohen crawls back to Trump: report.” Travis Gettys has the story.
The Department of Justice has discussed using former attorney Michael Cohen – who has seemingly come crawling back – as a witness to build new criminal cases against President Donald Trump’s legal adversaries, according to a new report.
Zeteo’s Asawin Suebsaeng, who has a personal history with Cohen, the president’s longtime personal attorney and fixer, reported that Trump administration officials are hoping to leverage his testimony to bring criminal prosecutions against New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg – both of whom successfully battled Trump in court.
“Bragg’s case, of course, is the reason Trump became America’s first felon president, a label Trump bitterly resents,” Suebsaeng wrote.
That’s why the president wants revenge against them both, Suebsaeng said, and he’s apparently dangling a pardon to Cohen as leverage for his testimony.
“Cohen had previously posted on Substack that he felt ‘pressured and coerced’ to be those prosecutors’ star witness against Trump, though Cohen has been publicly very coy about claiming whether he was ‘coerced’ to give false testimony,” Suebsaeng wrote.
DOJ does have the authority to charge prosecutors with coercing false testimony, although that almost never happens, but Trump officials are considering it now.
The headlines from independent media sources never fail to amaze. Even local government officials have trouble with Trump’s ignorance of how things are done in American. He abuses his position and ignores well-settled law over and over.This is from the New York Times. “Wyoming Governor Objects to ‘Very Odd’ D.O.J. Election Monitoring. Governor Mark Gordon, a Republican, said he was concerned by the behavior of election observers who visited a polling station in Cheyenne.” This story comes from the keyboard of Tim Balk.
Mr. Trump has often returned to such conspiracy theories in his second term, arguing that widespread fraud could affect this year’s elections. As president, he has deployed the resources of the federal government, notably the Justice Department’s, to investigate his unsubstantiated claims, sowing more doubt in the nation’s elections and raising alarm among state officials about whether he will try to intervene if Republicans lose their congressional majorities in November.
Governor Gordon, a low-key, term-limited Republican who leads one of the country’s most conservative states, said at a meeting with state election officials on Wednesday that he had been concerned by the behavior of the election observers.
“I feel very strongly about the federal government coming in and taking our guns — I don’t like that,” Mr. Gordon said at the meeting. “And I don’t like the federal government coming in and taking our votes, either.”
The monitors ultimately visited six polling places, showing their credentials only when asked for them, Mr. Gordon said in the interview, describing their behavior as “very odd.” He said he had asked the state attorney general, Keith Kautz, to investigate the matter.
The observers had cited statutes related to the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Act, Mr. Gordon said.
This year, the Justice Department’s observers have visited polling places in other states, including politically tense regions such as the Minneapolis area. The agency said on Tuesday that it had sent 80 monitors to seven states during primary season.
But the requests to interview voters and gain access to machines in Wyoming were unusual. And they come at a moment when the Justice Department has been locked in an intense legal battle with roughly 30 states, demanding their private, unredacted voter rolls in a hunt for evidence of noncitizen voting.
Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump is still convinced that noncitizens vote. Most allegations turn out to be baseless. There has to be something sketchier in Trump’s election interference. It’s more likely he’s trying to ‘monitor’ polls to intimidate certain classes of voters not known to vote Republican. He is hot for voter suppression.
This is my favorite headline for the day. It comes via from Public Notice. “Are voters finally realizing GOP presidents are disasters? Michael Tomasky makes the case that they are.” I could make the case easily for their economic policy. I’m pretty certain that others in other areas could do that as well. Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson share the lede.
“Trusting the Republicans more on the economy at this point is like trusting Sean Combs to be your babysitter,” writes Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, in his recent piece headlined, “At Long Last, Americans Are Starting to See the Truth About the GOP.”
“For decades now, the Republican Party has built its electoral success on myths and lies,” Tomasky adds. “Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president who your average person would say left the country better off than he found it.”
One could quibble about the legacy of George H.W. Bush, but it’s hard to dispute that the last two Republican presidents easily rank among the worst in American history. Their successors have each been handed a flaming bag of economic and cultural ruin and did commendable jobs putting out the fire, only to hand the reins to the man who will unequivocally go down as our worst president of all time (so far!), Donald J. Trump — whose second term is shaping up to be even more disastrous than the one that ended with mass death amid a pandemic he badly mismanaged.
Tomasky argues Democrats are missing a golden opportunity by not campaigning more aggressively on the obvious truth that from the presidency on down, the Republican Party has a cataclysmic record when it has power, especially in the 21st century. But messaging aside, he says he’s heartened by recent polling showing voters may finally be seeing the light.
“Jobs are just one factor. The performance of the stock market under Democrats is much, much stronger than under Republicans. The increases in median household income and amount by which they’ve reduced the deficit are much greater,” Tomasky told Public Notice. “The comparisons aren’t close, but you never hear any Democrats talk about it.”
“Why this is changing now is really simple and straightforward: The economy is bad, and there’s a Republican president,” he added.
Trump has basically wrecked the idea that Republicans are better at foreign policy and wars. There’s no way any of his health policies via the nuts he put in Health and Human Services can be seen as anything but charlatans. And, the DOJ is a laugh. So much for law and order. Since the Republic party continues to enable all of this mess, I can’t understand that anyone other that a member of the Orange Caligula Cult could tolerate what’s going on these days.
Okay, this is my last suggested read for the day. It comes from Balls and Strikes and is written by Jay Willis. “The Trump DOJ Is Running Out of Ways to Humiliate Itself In Public. Another week, another argument from your federal government that would be kind of embarrassing if a high school sophomore tried to make it.” Sounds about right.
For some time now, I have been tracking the Justice Department’s alarminglyrapidtransformation from one of the legal profession’s most prestigious employers into a clubhouse for semiliterate dunces whose primary qualification for the job is a willingness to sign their names to legal filings that resemble lightly edited Truth Social posts. This week’s addition to the canon comes in the course of President Donald Trump’s relentless pursuit of what is somehow among the highest-priority items on his second-term policy agenda: slapping his name on the Kennedy Center before his time in office runs out.
The legal fight began back in December 2025, when the Kennedy Center’s Trump-aligned board of trustees first tried to shoehorn the words “THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND” above existing Kennedy Center signage. A federal court ordered the removal of Trump’s name in June, but the board remains committed to fulfilling the president’s wishes. Its latest proposal would append a “RENOVATED AND RESTORED BY PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP” inscription to the side of the building, beneath the Kennedy Center signage this time around. The board also wants to name the grounds on which the Kennedy Center sits the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza,” like an enterprising NFL team selling a secondary set of stadium naming rights to whichever corporate behemoth is desperate enough to pay for it.
In a new court filing, the Trump Justice Department is warning about what might happen if its client does not get his way: According to Brantley T. Mayers, a lawyer in the Civil Division, prospective donors will not open their wallets unless the renovation plans include “prominent recognition” of Trump’s involvement. And without those renovations, Brantley says, the “dilapidated” and “crumbling” Kennedy Center will “deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure,” and may even have to be “taken down” in order to avoid “collapse or calamity.” In other words, the Justice Department’s official position is that without the addition of an (apparently load-bearing) “RENOVATED AND RESTORED” inscription, the Kennedy Center will be at risk of falling down and killing everyone inside.
“The Board recognizes that President Trump’s efforts and prestige provide the sole hope for the Center’s financial survival, and structural renewal,” Brantley writes. “The Trump Administration, and President Donald J. Trump, should, therefore, be given the respect and dignity of acknowledgement.” (All weird comma placements in original.)
How is this even a legal issue? Anyway, this country is so fucked-up under Trump that it’s hard to recognize. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
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Yes, it’s me today! Thankfully, JJ stepped in for me yesterday when a huge truck taking something out of the Navy Base project took down my entire cable line. I was without it and was looking at student time during the first week of class at 5 p.m. So, I called Cox and was given a time for later on today, after another class started up. Needless to say, I was pretty panicked.
Since Cox was so unhelpful, I went over to the construction site, which was even more insulting, as I was shown a map indicating that trucks were allowed on my avenue. It was a truck route. Tell it to the City Council, which drew the maps. Needless to say, these trucks are far bigger than what I’ve ever seen coming and going the 25 years I’ve lived here, which includes when the Navy base was open and military equipment for the shock and awe attack on Iraq was being taken off the railroad line there and driven by trucks to the merchant marine ships waiting on the Mississippi River to take them to the Middle East.
So, with two strikes out with Big Corporations, I headed to my neighbor’s house across the street to talk to the couple who live there. Luckily, one of them works at home, like I do, and the other was at City Hall, working for the City Council. I’m like, good to see you, but I really need your husband. He called hubby immediately for me and explained my situation. So, guess what, New Orleans City Hall worked. I called my Councilman’s office, and my neighbor contacted the regional Cox bigwigs. About three o’clock, a Cox bucket truck pulled up with the most skilled technician I’ve ever seen, who got it done right before some severe weather kicked in. All of the guys really went to work to help me, while I’m thinking that if I miss the first two days of a fall semester, I’ll never teach again.
So, again, JJ came to my rescue while I spent the enter afternoon chasing all these folks down. I did my thing and went to bed early. It’s nice to know my local government works when everything else is MAGA chaos. So, since I was raised in the Beef state and the Corn state, and I’m an economist with all degrees in agriculture states, riddle me this. How does importing more beef to this country help American ranchers and farmers who are in financial trouble right now? And if every import is subject to tariffs, how does this help households? Trumps been giving all the tariff revenue to big businesses and my guess is they don’t pass the cash forward. This keeps making me glad I’m mostly doing finance things these days although it blows my mind that a sitting president and his family might get a bank just for having crypto which is a risky asset and not real money. Trying to teach econ during this regime is like reading fairy tales while trying to teach about data-based reality.
So, I’m going to dive right in with the economic mess we’re in and the policies making it worse. He must be so secure in the idea that he can rig elections that he’s not even concerned about his own base. This is from the New York Times. “G.O.P. Lawmakers Rebuke Trump on Plan to Increase Beef Imports. Republicans who have mostly refrained from criticizing the president’s actions have been vocal in opposition to the move, which they say will harm their constituents.” Catie Edmondson has the story.
Congressional Republicans are leveling some rare and uncharacteristically harsh criticism of President Trump for his decision to increase imports of ground beef at a lower tariff rate, warning that the move will hurt American ranchers.
The decision, announced late last week, appeared to be a bid to lower costs across the country before the midterm elections in which Republicans are fighting to preserve their narrow majorities. But it has drawn dissent from even reliable allies of Mr. Trump, many of them from states and districts with large cattle-raising areas, who fear that the move could harm another important constituency: the producers they represent.
“Americans want U.S. beef on the table — not foreign imports,” Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Republican, said in a statement on Monday. “Wyoming ranchers produce the highest-quality beef in the world. Our ranchers don’t ask for special treatment. They simply want a fair marketplace.”
Senator Tim Sheehy, Republican of Montana, said in a lengthy statement that he had “advised President Trump against this course of action for a year because American ranchers have been struggling against the packer monopoly for decades, and this will further harm them.”
“Most of whom are MAGA Republicans,” he added.
The cascade of statements — including from Senators Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Steve Daines of Montana and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi — amounted to an unusual chorus of protest from Republicans who have otherwise routinely deferred to Mr. Trump on nearly every major issue, from the war with Iran to his trade wars.
This major Trade War with Canada is equally stupid. This is from Greg Sargent writing for The New Republic. “How Trump’s Crazed Fury at Canada Is Already Backfiring Badly for Him. The escalating trade war with Canada will hit hard in the Midwest—right where some of the most important contests in the midterms will be decided.” Pack the West Wing and the Oval office with idiots and this is what you get.
Here’s a bit of poetic justice for you: The Democratic bid for control of Congress just might end up running right through the very heart of Trump country. We’re talking about parts of the Midwest that helped drive Donald Trump’s two successful presidential bids—states like Iowa and Ohio, which he drove deeper into the red column, and states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, which Trump flipped outright twice.
That reality explains why Trump’s extended eruption of fury at Canada—he has now redoubled trade hostilities with our longtime ally—is very bad news for the GOP. Trump’s new trade war with Canada threatens fresh harms to local economies in the Midwest—and it’s handing Democrats a weapon in the homestretch of these contests to win over rural Americans and others who are experiencing all this endless derangement in very concrete ways.
“It’s a really dangerous time to be a farmer in the Midwest,” Josh Turek, the Democrat who is challenging Representative Ashley Hinson for the open Senate seat in Iowa, told me.
On Monday, Trump exploded wildly at Canada over the implosion of trade negotiations between the two countries. That collapse in talks over the weekend unleashed 50 percent tariffs by the United States on a large range of Canadian goods, and Canada will now retaliate with tariffs on targeted American exports. Talks are reportedly suspended until after the midterms.
What triggered Trump is that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had refused to be cowed by the American threat of tariffs. So Trump threatened yet more tariffs on still more Canadian goods next year, raging: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!”
Whether we “need” Canada or not, the fact remains that a lot of trade currently takes place between the two countries. You know who actually can’t afford for all this to be upended right now? Republican incumbents and candidates in the Midwest, that’s who. So “we” may not “need” Canada, but Republicans in the region really “need” Trump to not rupture trade relations with our ally for the next two months.
Here’s why: Control of the House will turn in no small part on three very competitive House races in Iowa, one in Wisconsin, and three or four in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Turek is locked in a dead heat in the Iowa Senate race, and winning there could be pivotal to a Democratic Senate takeover. So could a win by Sherrod Brown, who leads slightly in Ohio. And anything that helps Abdul El-Sayed keep the highly contested Michigan Senate seat blue will also be critical.
These areas will very likely feel the political impact of Trump’s new trade war. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs are expected to hit American exports of agricultural machinery, and that could hit Iowa manufacturers. The state’s very competitive 2nd congressional district, for instance, includes facilities run by John Deere, Altorfer (which deals in Caterpillar products), and other farm equipment concerns.
“Tariffs don’t just hurt our farmers, they hurt our manufacturers, as well,” Lindsay James, the Democratic candidate in that district, told me. She added that her GOP opponent, businessman Joe Mitchell, will be a “rubber stamp” for Trump’s trade wars, which she labeled “impulsive.”
Such messages could land disproportionately in Iowa because Trump’s trade wars have already given the state’s agricultural economy a thorough pounding.
Turek, meanwhile, also singled out the coming impact of trade hostilities on farm equipment manufacturers. He noted that tariffs are contributing to a perfect storm in Iowa, which also includes Trump’s war on Iran, which is driving up fertilizer and diesel prices, and his effort to reduce beef prices by importing huge amounts of it, which will undercut American producers.
“You talk to farmers, and they’ll tell you it’s one gut punch after another,” Turek told me, adding that he constantly hears Iowans tell him: “This is betrayal.”
I can only imagine what kind of hit to the owner of what once was my Dad’s small town Iowa Ford Dealership would be. I like to remind everyone that the sale of Ford F-150s basically funded my school and young life. Those trucks were all over eastern Iowa doing farm and ranch work all the time. My youngest daughter’s son-in-law was the grandson of the biggest Pig Ranch in the area. Guess who he used to buy his trucks from? This will really go straight to the heart of every small midwestern town. Most John Deere Tractors are built in this country. I’m sure most of you have never heard of Waterloo, Iowa but you can crush a small town like that when you ruin business for the factory that keeps the town on the map.
So, this is some real nonsense in a situation where trade really defines countries ability to survive. This is from the Washington Post. “Trump says U.S. could rename Lake Ontario as Lake America amid Canada trade war. The president cited his tariff fight in a social media post, saying the United States doesn’t expect to be “doing much business with Ontario any longer.” How petty and stupid is that? Who actually thinks this is funny? You may see how consequential renaming the Gulf of Mexico was to map makers and everyone else. This is another middle finger fight rather than real policy. Sammy Westfall has the lede.
President Donald Trump said he is considering changing the name of Lake Ontario, the easternmost of the Great Lakes spanning the U.S.-Canada border, to Lake America, as the U.S.-Canada trade fight escalates.
The threat adds to a long list of things — bodies of water, mountains, cultural centers, battleships, transit hubs, federal agencies — the Trump administration has renamed or proposed to rebrand.
“The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer,” he wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday morning.
Over the weekend, Canada and the United States were thrown into a heated trade war after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from negotiations over tariffs — a rare example of a foreign leader telling Trump “enough,” after the U.S. demanded what Carney said was a mounting list of concessions.
“An attitude at the negotiation table that Canada is a subsidiary of the United States … that’s not something we’re going to accept,” Carney said in a statement posted Tuesday.
So, here’s an interesting fact for you from USA Facts. We’re basically creating chaos with the two countries that send us oil and of course, there is the current war between Israel and the United States on Iran with its control of the Straights of Hormuz. Wow, am I glad I don’t rely on a car. The St Claude Bus and Street car look better to me every day.
Top Oil Exporters to the US
Canada: Supplies about 57% of total U.S. petroleum imports.
Mexico: Ranks second, providing roughly 6% of imports.
Saudi Arabia: Accounts for about 4% of U.S. petroleum imports.
Most importantly is this bit of fact posted today on Politico. “Canada has one important edge in the North American trade war. Canadians are united in standing up to Trump’s tariffs. The reverse cannot be said for the U.S.”
President Donald Trump is threatening Canada with economic destruction amid an escalating trade war. He’s not factoring in one key U.S. disadvantage.
Americans are not nearly as gung-ho for a tariff stand-off as their northern neighbors, who have been seething for months over Trump’s rhetoric against their country.
“The U.S.A. will always be far bigger, richer, and stronger than Canada,” Trump wrote in a second Truth Social post. “Someone should get these clowns to ‘fall in line’ or, the consequences for Canada will be far WORSE!
The U.S. economy certainly dwarfs its northern neighbor’s. And while Ottawa has managed to support big sectors such as aluminum and forestry to keep them afloat amid tariffs Trump launched last year, it’s not clear how long the Canadian government can support small and medium-sized businesses in a prolonged tariff tit for tat. But poll after poll shows Canadians across the political spectrum are willing to accept those impacts in order to stand up to the U.S. government.
The opposite is true in the U.S., where even many in the president’s own party oppose Trump’s trade agenda — particularly his tariffs on Canada. And unlike Carney, the president faces a voter referendum in November, in the form of midterm elections.
As the two countries settle in for a long-term standoff, the outcome is likely to be defined by each government’s ability to endure pain: economic in Ottawa and political in Washington.
“I think right now the U.S. has more to lose because we have the election coming up in November, where the economy and tariffs are already an issue,” said one former official at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks. “If it spirals, Congress would be the one to feel the impact.”
But again, I believe he’s thinking he’s got the ability to rig the election and it may be somewhat true. Especially, with the Supreme Court on his side. This analysis is from “Balls and Strikes” and the keyboard of Jay Willis. “The Supreme Court Thinks You Are Stupid. The conservative justices are reserving for themselves the power to decide whether Trump can hijack the 2026 midterms.”
A key component of President Donald Trump’s plan for preserving the Republican Party’s power and influence is making it as difficult as possible for Democrats to vote. As the 2026 midterms approach, he is still pushing the unhinged lie that widespread fraud both cost him the 2020 presidential election and also explains every Republican loss in every election since.
This delusion is partially responsible for his obsession with mail-in voting. In March, Trump told Republican lawmakers that passing legal restrictions on mail-in voting would “guarantee the midterms.” Their failure to do so, he continued, would mean “big trouble.”
That same month, Trump did his part, issuing an executive order that would impose onerous requirements on states that allow their residents to vote by mail. And in an unsigned opinion on Monday, the Supreme Court did him yet another favor, turning away a legal challenge that had temporarily blocked the order from taking effect.
The result in Trump v. California does not give Trump everything he wants. But it shows just how far this six-justice conservative supermajority is willing to go to help its favorite president’s political movement—all while reserving for itself the right to decide how much of the Constitution remains in place for the midterms, and how much Trump gets to rewrite as he sees fit.
Trump’s order seeks to do three main things. First, it requires the Department of Homeland Security to provide states with lists of voters whom the federal government has “confirmed” as eligible to vote. Second, it directs Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department to “prioritize” investigations of state officials who provide ballots to anyone who is not eligible to vote. Finally, it orders the U.S. Postal Service to propose a rule that would require states to send mail ballots in a particular type of envelope and with a special barcode, ostensibly for the purposes of “tracking” the ballot. Trump’s order specifically requires that the Postal Service’s rule prevent the agency from processing a ballot—as in, submitting it for counting—unless a voter has been “enrolled” by the Postal Service first.
This is admittedly confusing, because the order is kind of an executive power matryoshka doll: Instead of directly requiring the Postal Service to refuse to deliver certain mail ballots, it adds a step, requiring the Postal Service to come up with an administrative rule for when it will refuse to deliver those ballots. Perhaps even the Trump brain trust understood that a president ordering an agency with a statutory obligation to provide “prompt, reliable, and efficient services” to “all communities” to simply ignore votes in blue states would be, legally speaking, not a good look.
That said, given that Trump’s order prescribes the content of the Postal Service’s “proposal” in exacting detail, the real-world impact is the same. Under the Constitution, states have the power to administer elections. If Trump gets his way, his federal government would be deciding who does and does not get to vote.
Lisa Needham of Public Notice puts it this way. “John Roberts sticks two more knives in democracy’s back. The mail voting and ballroom decisions are a travesty.”
President Trump is catastrophically, comprehensively, wrecking our democratic order, but he couldn’t do it without the Worst Chief Justice of All Time, John Roberts, and the rest of the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority.
Trump should probably send the nation’s highest jurists a fruit basket or something as a wee bit of thanks for their latest gifts: the right to wreck the midterm elections and the right to keep building the bribe-funded ballroom.
The former is courtesy of the Court’s six conservatives, but the latter is a solo Roberts joint. Put another way, the mail-in ballots case is a shadow docket travesty, while the ballroom is an administrative stay travesty. Both are corrosive to democracy.
Up first: teeing up letting Trump screw with the midterms in an extremely unconstitutional fashion, because of course Trump will suffer immense harm if he can’t get his way.
First, let’s be clear about a smallish silver lining here: the mail-in ballots decision is both reprehensible and a mess, but it doesn’t quite do what some of the reporting says it does. It doesn’t mean that the US Postal Service Final Rule, promulgated last Friday, goes into effect. A different case, brought by the League of Women Voters, still enjoins the administration from implementing that rule, and as Steve Vladeck notes, the litigation on that is yet to come.
But that doesn’t really make things better, at least as far as the whole constitutional crisis part goes. That’s because the Court’s right-wingers continue to swallow the Trump administration’s laughable lies about what they are doing, lies that contradict both their own public statements and the dictates of logic.
Okay, this is certainly way too long but the chaos continues in so many places. It’s important we know the where, when, and how of it all.
Have a good week! I hope the weather is being better to you than us. I’ve never seen such heat except when I visited Arizona in August. Plus, the humidity down here is beyond description. Even Temple, who loves her walkies, wants to cut them short these days. So, be safe out there!
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“Meanwhile, early this morning somewhere near Nashville…” John Buss, repeat1968,
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The headlines are yet another mash-up of feelings run amok and logic gone awry. Another week has passed, and I don’t regret getting rid of cable and most forms of TV news. It’s just all one big tabloid of rampant stupidity. Here’s a great headline from The Intercept about our nation’s FBI Director. “Kash Patel Got Arrested for Public Urination After a Night of Drinking. The FBI director was arrested twice in his youth for alcohol-related incidents that he said were “not representative of my usual conduct.”
It’s another sign of why Republicans never do any due diligence when running committee hearings to affirm Federal Office holders in the highest offices in the nation. They’re a psychiatrist’ nightmare.
Eventually, some independent news agency catches up to them, and we read about it on the internet news stream, which is a hash of conspiracy theories and the hard work of a few good reporters. This story is reported by Trevor Aaronson.
FBI Director Kash Patel was twice arrested in incidents involving alcohol, once for public intoxication and once for public urination after leaving a bar, he admitted in a 2005 letter about disclosures on his Florida Bar application.
The letter obtained by The Intercept was part of Patel’s personnel file at the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, where he once worked. The document, written “per instructions of my employer,” describes incidents of alcohol-related indiscretions not uncommon for those in their teens and twenties.
Two decades later, as Patel pushes back against allegations that drinking is impairing his leadership of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, these arrests show how Patel’s alcohol use has been subjected to scrutiny before in his professional life.
One incident recounted by Patel occurred in 2005, about four months before he wrote the letter. At the time, he was a law student at Pace University in New York celebrating with friends.
“We went to a few of the local bars and consumed some alcoholic drinks,” he wrote.
When they walked home, they made a bad decision.
“In a gross deviation from appropriate conduct, we attempted to relieve our bladders while walking home,” Patel said in the letter. “Before we could even do so, a police cruiser stopped the group. We were then arrested for public urination.”
Patel paid a fine after the incident, he wrote in the letter.
That’s still nothing compared to the stories we heard about dead animals and RFK Jr. This is from one of last week’s editions of The Guardian. I suppose I no longer need to explain that when I write these blog posts, they are surrounded by political cartoons, not beautiful artwork or actual photos anymore. I prefer animated Scheudenfrade. “RFK Jr once cut penis off ‘road-killed raccoon’ in New York, new book reveals. Health secretary in a diary entry said his kids were in the car as he cut off animal’s genitals in 2001 to ‘study them later’.”
Don’t worry, I’ll keep this brief. Buddha bless the entire Guardian staff that had to work on this one.
Robert F Kennedy Jr once cut the penis off a road-killed raccoon in an incident that is just one of several involving dead animals that the controversial US health secretary has been involved in.
A new book called RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise was published this week and reveals a diary entry for Kennedy that describes the prominent vaccine critic and leader of the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement stopping his car on a New York highway on 11 November 2001.
“I was standing in front of my parked car on I-684 cutting the penis out of a road killed raccoon, thinking about how weird some of my family members have turned out to be,” Kennedy wrote in the journal.
He added: “My kids waited patiently in the car.”
Isabel Vincent, the author of the new book, told People that he took the raccoon’s genitals so he could “study them later”.
Kennedy has long had a fascination for animal bodies, especially those he finds dead which he sometimes collects and studies. Elsewhere in the book, the author notes that a journalist traveling with Kennedy in Long Island in 2001 reported that he was fascinated by dead seagull corpses.
“I’d like to pick up some of these dead seagulls for my skull collection,” the book quotes Kennedy as saying, though his schedule on the day did not allow him to pause his journey and harvest the bones.
There have been numerous stories involving Kennedy and his treatment of dead animals.
Environmental groups were outraged over a story which revealed the former presidential candidate once severed the head of a washed-up deceased whale with a chainsaw and strapped it to his car’s roof. He also once confessed to dumping a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park, attempting to make it look like the creature was killed by a bicyclist.
Meanwhile, hardworking, competent Federal officials get the nuisance-lawsuit treatment. This is from the Associated Press. “Justice Department drops criminal probe of Fed chair Powell, likely clearing the way for Warsh.” It’s really difficult to see how normal people stay sane and hold their offices in this environment.
The Justice Department has ended its investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, clearing a major roadblock to the confirmation of Kevin Warsh as his successor.
U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeannine Pirro said on X on Friday that her office was ending its probe into the Fed’s extensive building renovations because the Fed’s inspector general would scrutinize them instead.
The move could lead to a swift confirmation vote by the Senate for Warsh, a former top Fed official whom President Donald Trump, a Republican, nominated in January to replace Powell. Powell’s term as chair ends May 15. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, had said he would oppose Warsh until the investigation was resolved, effectively blocking his confirmation.
Republicans praised Warsh during a Tuesday hearing even as Democrats questioned his independence from Trump, the lack of transparency around some of his financial holdings, and what they said was his flip-flopping on interest rates. Still, Trump’s previous appointment to the Fed’s board of governors, Stephen Miran, was approved by the full Senate just 13 days after his nomination.
Investigation lacked evidence, a court says
The probe was among several undertaken by the Justice Department into Trump’s perceived adversaries. For months it had failed to gain traction as prosecutors struggled to articulate a basis to suspect criminal conduct. Other efforts by the department to prosecute Trump’s adversaries, including New York state Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, and former FBI Director James Comey, have also been unsuccessful.
A prosecutor handling the Powell case conceded at a closed-door court hearing in March that the government hadn’t found any evidence of a crime, and a judge subsequently quashed subpoenas issued to the Federal Reserve. The judge, James Boasberg, said prosecutors had produced “essentially zero evidence” to suspect Powell of a crime. Boasberg branded prosecutors’ justification for the subpoenas as “thin and unsubstantiated.”
Speaking of the Republican-based press, base, and politicians peddling one conspiracy theory after another, we see that Tucker Carlson may have gone one too far. I would have never thought that possible, given their depths of depravity and idiocy. This is from The Hill. The analysis and opinions are provided by Matt Lewis.”Trump lived by the conspiracy theory — now he pays the price.” This is basically a class in Karma 101.
A truism of life — right up there with “don’t read the comments” — is that what goes around comes around. Put another way, if you live by the sword, you will eventually die by the sword.
For more than a decade, these maxims didn’t seem to apply to President Trump — a man who once strongly suggested that Barack Obama had not been born in America, that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating dogs and cats, just to name a few of his whoppers.
To be sure, Trump defenders will note that Democratic conspiracy theories (“Russia-gate,” for example) have also been aimed at Trump. Yes, but Trump legitimately invited scrutiny, and credible analyses rejected the most extreme conclusions anyway — for example, the existence of a “pee tape” or the notion that Russia somehow manipulated election results or otherwise rigged the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
Regardless, we have entered a new and possibly ironic phase of the timeline: Trump is finally discovering what it’s like to be on the losing end of a conspiracy theory.
Trump’s failure to release Epstein files was probably the inflection point. But more recently, the conspiratorial thinking about Trump has metastasized.
After Trump cast himself as Jesus on a Truth Social post, some corners of his own political ecosystem began speculating that he might instead be the Antichrist.
Tucker Carlson, for example, went on his podcast and asked, “Could this [Trump] be the Antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion: Who knows?”
Others settled on demonic possession, which in internet discourse is considered the moderate position.
Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, has the Tucker story. This from her is an Op-Ed today. “The Conspiracy Theory Behind Tucker Carlson’s Apology.” Who among us ever thought the word apology and Tucker Carlson would appear in the same headline?” He must need money or something.
Tucker Carlson, you might have heard, is sorry. Early this week he posted a long conversation with his brother, Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, in which they tried to make sense of the wreckage of the second Donald Trump presidency.
“We’re implicated in this, for sure,” said Tucker. A few moments later, he added: “It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
For those of us who have spent the past 10 years horror-struck at the mass delusion that Trump is a great man rather than a singularly rapacious and volatile charlatan, Carlson’s words might seem cathartic.
Over the past decade, conservatives have been angrily insisting that our mad emperor is elegantly clothed rather than obscenely naked. Now, finally, there’s growing agreement about his obvious unfitness. Indeed, some former Trump superfans are suddenly wondering if he might be the Antichrist.
I’m all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause. But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it’s clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America’s derangement, they’re developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away.
Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States. On Tucker’s podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran.
“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”
Can any of you come up with an explanation or some elucidation on WTF is going on here? My vote goes for the rats are leaving the ship. So what better mission for the insane Orange Caligula to come up with during these headlines than yet another way to fuck up yet another National Monument of the utmost historical importance?
Will the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool be his next act of cultural devastation? This is from NBC News. “Trump says he’ll renovate ‘filthy’ reflecting pool on National Mall. At an Oval Office event, the president said he’s planning to pour a new surface for the 2,000-foot reflecting pool, giving it an “American flag blue” hue.” Well, at least it isn’t piss gold. Kyla Guilfoil has the lede.
President Donald Trump touted plans Thursday to coat the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool in an “American flag blue” hue, one of his latest construction efforts to refashion government buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C.
Trump said he was inspired to oversee renovations after a friend visited from Germany and noted its decay.
“He said, ‘it’s filthy, dirty. The water is disgusting looking. It’s not representative of the country,'” Trump recalled during a White House event Thursday on drug prices.
He posted a video speaking about the renovation of the more than 2,000-foot-long pool on Truth Social, shortly before his White House event with reporters.
“Right now, it’s got no water in it because it was in terrible shape. It was filthy, dirty, and it leaked like a sieve for many years,” Trump said in the video. “So I actually went over, went with Secret Service and a group of people, and I took, took a look at it.”
The president said there were initial plans to remove the granite in the pool and replace the stone, but that process would have cost $300 million and taken more than three years to complete.
Once again, I sit at my desk and shake my head. It’s a good thing day-drinking was never my thing.
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“So, since Trump has defeated Venezuela and Iran. Is the Vatican after Cuba, or is that Greenland? So hard to keep track.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’d like to thank JJ again for covering for me on Monday. I’m not sure what’s been going on with my stomach, but the daily news sure doesn’t help! Today’s biggest headline for me is a decision that will impact Louisiana and likely any part of the country where big oil continues to wreck the environment and sicken and murder people with their business practices. It’s a discouraging decision. I have always thought my own bout with an extremely rare form of cancer was due to oil leaking into the drinking water in Ponca City, Oklahoma, where I was born.
This story is from the Washington Post. “Supreme Court hands win to Chevron, Big Oil in environmental damage case. The decision puts into question a $745 million judgment against Chevron to help restore coastal wetlands in Louisiana that were damaged as long ago as World War II.” As you may know, the damage to the wetlands down here is immense, and it’s one of the reasons hurricane season is quite frightening. The industry is deadly for all forms of life. Julian Mark reports on the decision.
This decision seems to say that if they did what they did for a war the government ran, then it’s okay if they ruin our lives. That’s pretty frightening in my estimation. What other things could this apply to? What would it have done to the Agent Orange victims in our military?
The Supreme Court on Friday sided with oil giant Chevron, ruling that it can fight an environmental damage lawsuit in federal court — a decision that could affect the outcomes of nearly a dozen other lawsuits that make similar allegations about the oil and gas industry.
The unanimous decision puts into question a $745 million state court judgment against Chevron to help restore coastal wetlands in Louisiana that were damaged as far back as World War II. Chevron had asked the Supreme Court to order the case moved to federal court.
At the heart of Chevron’s case was the argument that during World War II, the firm’s predecessors played a key role in the refinement of aviation gas, or avgas, to meet the demands of the war. Because the work was on behalf of U.S. government interests, the company and its backers have argued, claims regarding the actions at the time should be heard in a federal court rather than at the state level. The high court agreed.
“In this all-hands-on-deck, wartime context, Chevron needed to produce more crude oil as quickly as possible to facilitate more avgas refining, including its own,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority.
Chevron applauded the decision. “As the Court recognized, the plaintiffs’ claims are related to activities that Chevron and other energy companies performed under federal supervision during World War II,” company spokesman Bill Turenne said in a statement. “Those claims are flawed as a matter of both state law and federal law, and Chevron looks forward to litigating these cases in federal court, where they belong.”
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. did not participate in the case. Shortly before arguments in January, he recused himself, citing financial interests in ConocoPhillips, the parent of Burlington Resources Oil & Gas, a party in a related case.
Just a side note: ConocoPhillips was responsible for all the oil that leaked into my small Oklahoma hometown. This story is breaking, so be sure to follow up later as more analysis becomes available.
Lots of weirdness is happening in Congress this week as Democrats put a toe in the water to test the chances of yet another impeachment process. However, there is more afoot. Heather Cox Richardson discusses some of these issues on her Substack today.
Congress is back in session, and there is a frantic feel in the air. Republicans appear to be assessing the fall of Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior along with his abysmal job approval numbers, rising prices, and an unpopular war in Iran that currently does not appear to have a solution that will not result in the U.S. losing face.
In Hungary, incoming prime minister Péter Magyar is setting a bar as he appears to want no part of playing business as usual with Orbán’s cronies. A center-right politician, Magyar appeared as a guest on state television after his party’s dramatic win—Orbán’s state media had not let him appear on it before the election—and said he intended to suspend the station’s news service because state media does not provide the journalism that the country deserves. He said that he would end the state subsidies for Orbán’s right-wing-allied university and that Hungarian president Tamas Sulyok, a close ally of Orbán, was “unfit to serve as the guardian of legality” and “must leave office immediately.”
Republicans appear to be trying to grab all the turf they can before the midterm elections.
Today the Senate passed House Joint Resolution 140, a bill that overturns a 20-year mining ban upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) in Minnesota. Representative Pete Stauber (R-MN) introduced the measure, which passed the House in January. It clears the way for a subsidiary of Chilean mining giant Antofagasta to engage in copper-sulfide mining, which produces sulfuric acid, above the pristine BWCA. Those waters include 1,175 lakes and over 1,200 miles of rivers and streams. According to outdoor writer Wes Siler, about 165,000 people visit the BWCA annually, generating $1.1 billion in economic activity and supporting 17,000 jobs.
The Republicans’ attack on the BWCA for the benefit of a foreign billionaire feeds President Donald J. Trump’s ongoing crusade against Minnesota. Trump’s secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, is targeting New York today as well, saying that the federal government will withhold $73.5 million from the state because it has refused to review the commercial driver’s licenses of almost 33,000 immigrants. New York officials say they are complying with federal law.
Trump is also continuing to try to exert his personal power over the government, threatening again to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, whose term as chair ends in May but who has said he will continue on the board until the administration drops its trumped-up criminal investigation of him over alleged cost overruns on the renovations of Federal Reserve* buildings.
As Jacob Rosen and Olivia Gazis of CBS News noted, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is supporting Trump’s attacks on those he perceives to be his enemies by sending to the Department of Justice two criminal referrals yesterday. One is for the former government official who was the whistleblower over the July 2019 phone call in which Trump told Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky he would release money the U.S. Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s 2014 incursion…but only after Zelensky did him the “favor” of smearing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
The whistleblower told the intelligence community inspector general: “I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”
Gabbard’s second referral is for the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who found the complaint “credible” and “urgent” and set in motion the process of sharing it with the congressional intelligence committees, which led to Trump’s first impeachment.
As Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, noted, the effort to criminalize whistleblowing from 2019 for what was Trump’s well-established behavior is most likely an attempt to chill future whistleblower complaints.
There certainly appears to be concern on the part of MAGA loyalists that they are in danger of losing power, and that might mean legal repercussions. Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee today, Director of Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought denied that he had held back funds Congress had appropriated. Doing so is called “impoundment,” and it is illegal, but the administration has been engaged in it since it took office in January 2025.
There is a hell of a lot more in this piece, and it’s worth reading. I’m fairly jaded by now, so I don’t think it will actually amount to much. I’m still relying on voters. to come through. I’m into more election-related victories, including this one in New Jersey reported in Politico. “Progressive Analilia Mejia coasts to victory in New Jersey special House election. The Democratic will fill the seat held by Gov. Mikie Sherrill.” Madison Fernandez has the analysis.
Progressive organizer Analilia Mejia will succeed Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District, adding to a run of party victories that suggest voter dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump ahead of the midterms.
Mejia defeated Republican Randolph Township Councilmember Joe Hathaway in Thursday’s special election, according to the Associated Press.
In a victory speech, Mejia labeled her opponent and Republicans such as Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson, as well as billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, “radicals who are willing to upend our democracy, subvert our Constitution and act with impunity.”
“We must stop them,” she said. “These radicals will watch Rome burn with all of us within, and they are simply cowards — cowards unwilling to stand up to this madness. But we stand up, we resist, we will not allow it to continue.”
Hathaway conceded defeat but said he intends to challenge her again since there will be a regular primary in June and general election in November. He said he will keep a close eye on her voting record in the meantime and “will continue fighting for affordability, public safety, accountable government, and I will continue to stand up for the families of NJ-11.”
Mejia entered as the favorite for the affluent, blue-leaning North Jersey seat after an unexpected victory in February’s Democratic primary — a race that featured nearly a dozen candidates, including many who spent more and had higher name ID than Mejia.
In the primary, hefty outside spending from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee against former Rep. Tom Malinowski in part helped propel Mejia to a win. But outside groups on both sides of the aisle largely stayed out of the special general election — money that could have otherwise made the race more competitive.
Republicans — who are looking to rebuild after brutal losses in the state last year — tried to make the argument that Mejia was too far to the left of the district. Sherrill, a moderate Democrat, first flipped the seat in 2018 and won reelection handily in the years after that; former Vice President Kamala Harris won by around 9 points in 2024. Like in other races across the country, the GOP was eager to refer to Mejia as a “socialist” — a label she did not identify with — and compare her to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
But that message didn’t land among the electorate, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 60,000. Mejia also garnered support from Democrats across the ideological spectrum in her general election campaign.
Yesterday, in my social feeds, I started seeing references to a "Rape Academy" that's recently been exposed. This feels like something that should be a top headline at every news outlet. Completely inadequate news coverage of it. But at least some with a big audience are writing/speaking about it.
Turnout is always key. Also, I have a feeling women voters will be hitting the polls hard between the Epstein files and the rampant misogyny in the Republican line-up. It’s likely why our votes are threatened by the Save America Act. Here’s some analysis by Al Jazeera. “What is Trump-backed SAVE America Act and what could it mean for US vote? Senate resumes debate on controversial bill requiring more proof of citizenship, which Trump calls top priority.” Yes, it attacks all immigrants, but it also threatens women who can’t document the name changes from birth to marriage(s).
Here’s what to know.
What would the SAVE America Act do?
The version of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act passed by the House in February would require voters to provide proof of citizenship – a birth certificate or passport – when registering to vote. It would also implement stricter voter identification requirements for individuals casting ballots, whether by mail or in person.
Under the US Constitution, states administer elections, and currently have different processes for registering voters and confirming citizenship. Voting by noncitizens is already illegal, and all people registering to vote attest they are US citizens under threat of perjury.
The bill does not provide any funding for the new verification processes, which would be effective immediately upon the bill being signed into law.
The legislation would also require all states to run their voter rolls through a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) “Alien Verification Eligibility” system to identify potential noncitizens already enrolled.
What has Trump said about the SAVE Act?
The US president has long maintained that elections in the country are marred by widespread fraud, including noncitizen voting, despite there being no evidence to support these claims.
Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has influenced many of Trump’s policies, has found only exceedingly rare instances of voter fraud over decades of US elections.
Trump’s focus on election administration dates back to his 2020 loss to former US President Joe Biden, which he continues to maintain was the result of the vote being “stolen”. Again, no evidence has emerged to back those claims.
The president has called the SAVE America Act “one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself”.
Screenshot
Pete Hegseth is letting his freak fly over the incredible amount of negative media and public response to the Iran War. This is from NBC News. “Pete Hegseth attacks ‘unpatriotic’ media and compares reporters to Jewish biblical group. The defense secretary has frequently attacked the media over Iran war coverage.” It’s really surprising to me how Orange Caligula and his weirdo cabinet members seem to think they know biblical texts better than anyone else, including the Pope. This analysis is written by Rich Schapiro. Also, aren’t the Pharisees supposed to be the bad guys in the Jesus story? At least, that’s what the Presbyterians taught me.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth escalated his attacks on the media Thursday, comparing reporters covering the Iran war to the Pharisees, the biblical Jewish group that opposed Jesus.
The comments came at a Pentagon press briefing in which Hegseth first described the American media as “incredibly unpatriotic.”
“I just can’t help but notice the endless stream of garbage, the relentlessly negative coverage you cannot resist peddling, despite the historic and important success of this effort and the success of our troops,” Hegseth said, referring to the Iran war.
“Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what side some of you are actually on,” he added.
Since the fighting began in late February, Hegseth, who is Christian, has frequently used religious rhetoric at news conferences and attacked the media over its coverage. But he went further Thursday by doing so with religious overtones.
Hegseth said he was at church on Sunday when his pastor read a Bible passage that described Jesus healing a man in front of the Pharisees, “the so-called and self-appointed elites of their time.”
“Our press are just like these Pharisees — not all of you, not all of you, but the legacy Trump-hating press. Your politically motivated animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors,” he said.
Hegseth added: “The Pharisees scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative. The hardened hearts of our press are calibrated only to impugn. I would ask you to open your eyes to the goodness, the historic success of our troops, the courage of this president.”
Hegseth was a member of the media — a Fox News host — before President Donald Trump tapped him to lead the Defense Department. Like some other members of the Trump administration, his use of Christian rhetoric in public statements is a departure from the language used by his predecessors.
In celebration of my goal of better emotional and mental health, I have canceled my cable TV news subscription. I can no longer stand to watch any of these idiots speaking and moving around like they’re live human beings or something. I’m strictly sticking to the places where I can get a timeline without sacrificing my eyes and stomach. I’m hoping this helps the tummy and the budget, which is tighter than I’ve ever had it.
Wiredis one media outlet that is on my keep list. David Gilbert writes this analysis today. “MAGA Is Increasingly Convinced the Trump Assassination Attempt Was Staged. Conspiracy theories about the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting have ramped up in recent weeks as once steadfast Trump supporters turn on the president.”
Are they really waking up? Finally?
In recent weeks, as criticism of President Donald Trump from his own supporters has reached a fever pitch, a new conspiracy theory has taken hold: Some of the president’s biggest supporters are now claiming, without evidence, that Trump staged the assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 and is covering it up.
During an open-air campaign rally on July 13, 2024, Trump survived an attempted assassination when a bullet fired by a 20-year-old on a roof nearby clipped the top of his ear. Corey Comperatore, a Trump supporter sitting near the president, was shot and killed. The shooter was later killed by Secret Service agents. Conspiracy theories around the Butler assassination quickly permeated the internet, but for many Trump supporters, his survival was seen as a sign from God that he was the chosen one.
As Trump’s hold over MAGA has waned, though, an increasing number of his supporters have begun to push the narrative that the entire incident was staged.
“I think that maybe it was staged,” Tim Dillon said on his show last weekend about the assassination attempt. Dillon, who was previously a staunch Trump supporter, went on to share that Trump should now come out and say, “Some people are going to be upset by this, but we staged the assassination attempt in Butler to show people how important it was to vote for me and how far I was willing to go for them.”
Some of these claims began months ago. In November, former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson promoted the idea that the FBI was somehow involved in covering up the shooting, writing on X that the “FBI lied” about the shooter’s online footprint.
A day later, conservative pundit Emerald Robinson went further, posting on X that the FBI “did it.” (In the same post, Robinson claimed that the agency was responsible for everything from the January 6 attack on the Capitol to “Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail tapes” and the “Gov. Whitmer fake kidnap plot.”)
But the claims that Trump had staged the entire thing really picked up steam when former US National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent appeared on Carlson’s podcast last month, one day after he resigned from his position over the Iran war.
During the interview, Carlson and Kent discussed the failure of the Trump administration to provide more details about the Pennsylvania shooter. Kent claimed, without providing any evidence, that investigations into the shooting had been shut down before they finished.
Kent also claimed that this vacuum of information about the incident would lead to more conspiracy theories. “If you don’t want to address that question, then you just go silent and say you can’t ask that question,” he said. “Which then creates people who come out of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions.” (This is in fact, experts say, one basic dynamic behind conspiracy theorizing.)
“If you cannot look at this story and use critical thinking skills and have at least some questions, you are the problem and we need you to snap out of it,” Trisha Hope, a GOP national delegate from Texas and former Trump supporter, posted on X about Butler this week.
As usual, more to read at all the links!
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So, let’s start with Melania Dearest, who insists she had no ties to Jeffrey Epstein, even though she was not under oath to tell the truth, you have to wonder if a Congressional Committee will ask for a repeat performance.. William Kristol, writing at The Bulwark, suggests she threw hubby under the bus. “What Melania Didn’t Say.”
Standing behind a podium bearing the presidential seal, speaking at the White House Cross Hall where so many presidents have addressed weighty matters of state, and where her husband last week spoke to the nation about Iran, the first lady read a six-minute statement about her and Jeffrey Epstein.
Melania’s focus was on . . . Melania. She began, “The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today.” Her purpose, she said, was to defend “my reputation,” to clear “my good name.” (Emphasis mine.)
And so she asserted that “I have never been friends with Epstein” and that “I . . . was never on Epstein’s plane.” She also claimed that “My email reply to [Epstein’s imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine] Maxwell cannot be categorized as anything more than casual correspondence.1My polite reply to her email doesn’t amount to anything more than a trivial note.”
Left unsaid, but not unimplied, was that none of these claims could be made about her husband. He was a pal of Epstein’s. He was on Epstein’s plane. His relationship with Epstein, as exemplified for example in his contribution to Epstein’s birthday book, was more than “casual” or “trivial.”
Melania also chose to express concern for Epstein’s victims, something her husband has conspicuously not done.
And she went on to say that
Now is the time for Congress to act. Epstein was not alone. Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized. Of course, this doesn’t amount to guilt, but we still must work openly and transparently to uncover the truth.
So the Epstein investigation is not, as her husband has asserted, a “hoax.” Nor is it yet time, as her husband has said, to move on. The truth hasn’t yet been uncovered, and we need to uncover it. And if doing so leads more “prominent male executives” to resign, so be it. One wonders: Could Melania have one prominent male chief executive in mind?
Melania chose not to include in her statement any assertion of her husband’s innocence of complicity in the Epstein affair.
Melania is perhaps not a deep thinker, but she’s no fool. Since immigrating to the United States three decades ago, Melania Knauss has done well for herself. She’s shown that she has a shrewd sense of how to operate in her adopted country. She’s risen to the top, while mostly avoiding being directly engulfed in all the scandals that have raged around her.
There is surely a lot of evidence suggesting she knew him well. But, with the Iran War being waged like a lethal version of mud wrestling, let’s see if the due diligence will be done by the press. This topic really skates on Slut Slamming, but it’s hard to cover earnestly. Emptywheel has an interesting story on the mostly out-of-view First Lady. “Melania’s Immigration Witness, Paolo Zampolli, Asked to Get His Baby Mama Deported.” I wonder if she’s worthy of any Congressional questions.
The biggest denial may be this one:
I met my husband by chance at the [sic] New York City party in 1998. This initial encounter with my husband is documented in a detailed [sic] in my book, Melania.
The entire stunt seemed like a response to Michael Wolff. After all, when Melania listed the people who’ve had to retract claims — James Carville, The Daily Beast, and Harper Collins, in conjunction with a biography of the Andrew formerly known as Prince — she did not mention Wolff (or Hunter Biden), whom she has been threatening to sue for some time, with whom she has been stuck in litigation for months.
She has threatened Wolff in the past, who has made claims about how she met Trump, whether Epstein had fucked Melania before Donald did, and whether Donald and Melania first fucked on his plane. But thus far that litigation remains pending, and she didn’t mention him (or Hunter Biden, whom she also threatened to sue) in this appearance.
Wolff has many recordings about what Epstein told Wolff, whether Epstein’s claims were true or not.
But I’m more interested in another detail.
Melania cites her own book for the definitive account of how she met Donald (she has done this in past lawsuits).
Why would she do that? She has a witness to some of this: Paolo Zampolli, the agent who imported her on the same Einstein visa scam as Epstein used for his victims.
Zampolli not only remains in the Trump circle, but he flew to Hungary to do errands for Russia with JD Vance this week.
…
Epstein survivors had plenty to say about the performance. This is from The Guardian. Shrai Popat has the story. “Survivors of Epstein’s abuse accuse Melania Trump of ‘shifting burden’ onto victims, Outrage from survivors follows first lady’s statement calling on Congress to hold public hearings with victims of Epstein’s abuse.”
More than a dozen survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse have accused Melania Trump of “shifting the burden” onto them after she called on Congress to hold public hearings with victims of Epstein’s abuse.
“Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony,” said a group of 13 people and the brother and sister of the late Virginia Giuffre, who was one of the most vocal Epstein accusers, in a statement. “Asking more of them now is a deflection of responsibility not justice.”
Their response came after the first lady delivered a surprise statement in which she said denied that she ever had a relationship with Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. She also said that she was not a victim of Epstein, had no knowledge of his crimes, and said that the late convicted sex offender did not introduce her to her husband, Donald Trump.
“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” she said, adding that “numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me have been calculating [sic] on social media for years now”.
It remains unclear what specific accusations prompted her remarks. Her senior adviser, Marc Beckman, told Reuters that she “spoke out now because enough is enough. The lies must stop”.
During her statement, the first lady also urged Congress to hold public hearings and take sworn testimony from survivors of Epstein’s crimes.
In their statement on Thursday evening, the group of Epstein survivors said the first lady “is now shifting the burden onto survivors under politicized conditions that protect those with power: the Department of Justice, law enforcement, prosecutors, and the Trump administration, which has still not fully complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act”.
“It also diverts attention from Pam Bondi, who must answer for withheld files and the exposure of survivors’ identities,” they said. “Those failures continue to put lives at risk while shielding enablers.”
“Survivors have done their part,” the statement concluded. “Now it’s time for those in power to do theirs.”
It appears that the majority of the country is suffering under the impact of the Iran War. CNBC’s Jeff Cox has this headline. “Consumer sentiment hits record low, inflation fears rise amid Iran war.”
Consumer confidence plunged to a record low in April as fears mounted over rising energy prices and the broader impact of the Iran war, according to a University of Michigan survey Friday.
The university’s headline index of consumer sentiment tumbled to 47.6, down 10.7% from the March survey to its lowest on record. Current conditions and expectations indexes also saw double-digit monthly declines.
The drop in sentiment coincided with a sharp spike in inflation expectations, with respondents seeing prices up 4.8% in a year from now, a full percentage point rise from the March reading to its highest since August 2025. The one-year outlook in April 2025 was 6.5% following President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement.
Survey comments “show that many consumers blame the Iran conflict for unfavorable changes to the economy,” said the survey’s director, Joanne Hsu.
However, Hsu also noted that most of the interviews were completed before the April 7 ceasefire. The survey, then, primarily reflects conditions from March.
“Economic expectations will likely improve after consumers gain confidence that the supply disruptions stemming from the Iran conflict have ended and gas prices have moderated,” she said.
The ceasefire President Donald J. Trump announced Tuesday night fell apart almost immediately. Israel complained that it hadn’t been consulted, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Israel did not accept an end to its bombardment of southern Lebanon as a way to dislodge Iran-backed Hezbollah militants. Steven Scheer of Reuters noted today that Israel has been under a state of emergency that halted the work of the judicial system, but with the end of the war, Netanyahu’s trial for corruption is scheduled to begin again on Saturday.
Iran has been permitting certain ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, but responded to Israel’s continued bombing by closing the strait again.
Vice President J.D. Vance said there was a “legitimate misunderstanding” about whether the ceasefire included Lebanon. “We never made that promise,” he said. But in fact, Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif, who posted the terms of the ceasefire on Tuesday, noted that the agreement did include a ceasefire in Lebanon. He tagged Vance in the post.
As more information about the achievement of the ceasefire became known, it reflected poorly on Trump. Humza Jilani, Abigail Hauslohner, and Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times reported yesterday that while Trump claimed Iran was begging for a deal to end hostilities, it was actually the Trump administration that was pushing Pakistan to broker a deal with Iran. Tyler Pager and Katie Rogers of the New York Times reported that the White House was helping to craft Sharif’s social media statements, suggesting Trump “was actively looking for a way out of the crisis” as his own imposed deadline drew closer on Tuesday evening.
Although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims the U.S. has had a “historic and overwhelming victory” that achieved “every single objective,” David S. Cloud of the Wall Street Journal wrote yesterday that Iran saw the ceasefire as a “triumph” because it had survived a 38-day barrage from the United States and Israel and because it had gained control over the Strait of Hormuz, inflicting deep damage on the U.S. economy. Iran claimed the U.S. had suffered “an undeniable, historic, and crushing defeat.” Iran’s new leadership is even more anti-Western than the previous leadership, killed in the early days of the U.S.-Israeli strikes.
Yesterday the president posted his own interpretation of the terms of the agreement, but they were aspirational and asked for Iran to agree to terms that were less advantageous for the U.S. than the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that President Barack Obama negotiated in 2015 and Trump tore up in 2018.
The actual terms of the ceasefire agreement were murky. On Wednesday, Iran released its version of the points of the agreement; the White House said those points weren’t the basis for the ceasefire.
Also yesterday, Trump suggested the U.S. was considering joining the Iranians in demanding tolls for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it,” he told journalist Jonathan Karl. But today Trump posted: “There are reports that Iran is charging fees to tankers going through the Hormuz Strait—They better not be and, if they are, they better stop now!” Hours later, he added: “Iran is doing a very poor job, dishonorable some would say, of allowing Oil to go through the Strait of Hormuz. That is not the agreement we have!”
I’d like to think I have the vocabulary to describe how I feel about all these idiotic, powerplay antics, but I really don’t. We are clearly dealing with people who don’t have a clue and don’t care to understand our democratic republic. This article from The Guardian blew me away. “Pete Hegseth’s holy war: the militant Christian theology animating the US attack on Iran.” This article deserves a full read from us. We should never forget Hegseth’s weird diatribe.
Nine months and six days before a Tomahawk missile tore through the gaily decorated classrooms of the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, ripping apart the bodies of schoolchildren, teachers, and parents, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s personal pastor delivered a sermon at the Pentagon.
“There’s a temptation to think that you’re actually in control and responsible for final outcomes, especially for those who issue the commands and do the aiming and the shooting,” preached Brooks Potteiger, Hegseth’s closest spiritual adviser, at the first of what have become monthly Christian worship services at the Department of Defense. “But you are not ultimately in charge of the world.”
Citing a verse from Matthew 10, Potteiger told the gathered leaders of the US military: “If our Lord is sovereign even over the sparrow’s fallings, you can be assured that he is sovereign over everything else that falls in this world, including Tomahawk and Minuteman missiles …
“Jesus has the final say over all of it.”
The available evidence and a preliminary investigation by the US military all suggest that the US was responsible for the 28 February school bombing that killed more than 175 people, most of them children, but neither Donald Trump nor Hegseth has taken any responsibility, nor have they expressed any remorse.
Instead, Hegseth has persisted in framing the war in Iran, which reached a temporary ceasefire on Tuesday after six weeks of fighting, as divinely sanctioned, repeatedly invoking “God’s almighty providence” and expressing surety that God is on the side of the US military. Amid boasts about the US’s superior firepower and theatrical disdain for “stupid rules of engagement”, the defense secretary has promised to give “no quarter” to the “barbaric savages” of the Iranian regime and called on the American people to pray for victory “in the name of Jesus Christ”.
Hegseth’s distinct combination of piety and bloodlust was most prominently on display at the 25 March worship service at the Pentagon, the first since the war in Iran began, when he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. The prayer was so shocking that it appears to have provoked a direct rebuke from Pope Leo, who preached on Palm Sunday that God ignores the prayers of those whose “hands are full of blood” from making war.
Hegseth will hardly mind harsh words from the head of the Catholic church, however. The 45-year-old US army veteran and former Fox News host is a member of an obscure, deeply Calvinist wing of evangelical Christianity – John Calvin broke from the Catholic church during the 16th-century Protestant Reformation – that rejects the pope’s authority and is rooted in a belief in predestination.
“They believe that nothing happens that isn’t in God’s will,” said Julie Ingersoll, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, who researches this branch of Reformed Christianity. “They believe that God directs everything that happens.”
Even a bomb falling on an elementary school full of children?
I really just want to cry.
Have a good and peaceful weekend. Try not to give up hope.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
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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.
That’s why my blood pressure took off when I read this. “Trump’s Quietly Working to Give Part of Yosemite to a Private Developer. The National Park Service is under pressure to make an unprecedented deal that cedes a quarter-mile strip of the park.” The article can be found at NOTUS and is written by Anna Kramer. Yosemite is one of the nations’ oldest and most glorious examples of American landscapes. He’s totally dedicated to the idea of selling stuff off to support his Trumpify every historical place in the District.
This is an unprecedented move and a dangerous one.
Don’t even get me started on Trump trying to rename Lake Ontario. But you don’t have to take my word on it try this at Business Insider. The internet has gone into full meme mode over Trump’s Lake Ontario name change. The story is reported by Joshua Nelken-Zitser.
Stormy and E. Jean are high on my list of tough and amazing women for see these cases through. We can only hope we get the Epstein files released and we see more women damaged by Trump receive justice and compensation. And speaking of the Stormy case, this headline yesterday from Raw Story is an eye opener. There most be a line as wide as big as the country itself of co-criminals waiting for Trump Pardons. “Explosive motive unmasked by DOJ insiders as Michael Cohen crawls back to Trump: report.” Travis Gettys has the story.
Despite evidence to the contrary, Trump is still convinced that noncitizens vote. Most allegations turn out to be baseless. There has to be something sketchier in Trump’s election interference. It’s more likely he’s trying to ‘monitor’ polls to intimidate certain classes of voters not known to vote Republican. He is hot for voter suppression.
Trump has basically wrecked the idea that Republicans are better at foreign policy and wars. There’s no way any of his health policies via the nuts he put in Health and Human Services can be seen as anything but charlatans. And, the DOJ is a laugh. So much for law and order. Since the Republic party continues to enable all of this mess, I can’t understand that anyone other that a member of the Orange Caligula Cult could tolerate what’s going on these days.
This major Trade War with Canada is equally stupid. This is from Greg Sargent writing for The New Republic. “How Trump’s Crazed Fury at Canada Is Already Backfiring Badly for Him. The escalating trade war with Canada will hit hard in the Midwest—right where some of the most important contests in the midterms will be decided.” Pack the West Wing and the Oval office with idiots and this is what you get.
I can only imagine what kind of hit to the owner of what once was my Dad’s small town Iowa Ford Dealership would be. I like to remind everyone that the sale of Ford F-150s basically funded my school and young life. Those trucks were all over eastern Iowa doing farm and ranch work all the time. My youngest daughter’s son-in-law was the grandson of the biggest Pig Ranch in the area. Guess who he used to buy his trucks from? This will really go straight to the heart of every small midwestern town. Most John Deere Tractors are built in this country. I’m sure most of you have never heard of Waterloo, Iowa but you can crush a small town like that when you ruin business for the factory that keeps the town on the map.
So, here’s an interesting fact for you from USA Facts. We’re basically creating chaos with the two countries that send us oil and of course, there is the current war between Israel and the United States on Iran with its control of the Straights of Hormuz. Wow, am I glad I don’t rely on a car. The St Claude Bus and Street car look better to me every day.
But again, I believe he’s thinking he’s got the ability to rig the election and it may be somewhat true. Especially, with the Supreme Court on his side. This analysis is from “Balls and Strikes” and the keyboard of Jay Willis. “The Supreme Court Thinks You Are Stupid. The conservative justices are reserving for themselves the power to decide whether Trump can hijack the 2026 midterms.”
Lisa Needham of Public Notice puts it this way. “John Roberts sticks two more knives in democracy’s back. The mail voting and ballroom decisions are a travesty.”
That’s still nothing compared to the stories we heard about dead animals and RFK Jr. This is from one of last week’s editions of The Guardian. I suppose I no longer need to explain that when I write these blog posts, they are surrounded by political cartoons, not beautiful artwork or actual photos anymore. I prefer animated Scheudenfrade. “RFK Jr once cut penis off ‘road-killed raccoon’ in New York, new book reveals. Health secretary in a diary entry said his kids were in the car as he cut off animal’s genitals in 2001 to ‘study them later’.”
Meanwhile, hardworking, competent Federal officials get the nuisance-lawsuit treatment. This is from the Associated Press. “Justice Department drops criminal probe of Fed chair Powell, likely clearing the way for Warsh.” It’s really difficult to see how normal people stay sane and hold their offices in this environment.
Speaking of the Republican-based press, base, and politicians peddling one conspiracy theory after another, we see that Tucker Carlson may have gone one too far. I would have never thought that possible, given their depths of depravity and idiocy. This is from The Hill. The analysis and opinions are provided by Matt Lewis.”Trump lived by the conspiracy theory — now he pays the price.” This is basically a class in Karma 101.
Michelle Goldberg, writing for the New York Times, has the Tucker story. This from her is an Op-Ed today. “The Conspiracy Theory Behind Tucker Carlson’s Apology.” Who among us ever thought the word apology and Tucker Carlson would appear in the same headline?” He must need money or something.
Can any of you come up with an explanation or some elucidation on WTF is going on here? My vote goes for the rats are leaving the ship. So what better mission for the insane Orange Caligula to come up with during these headlines than yet another way to fuck up yet another National Monument of the utmost historical importance?
Just a side note: ConocoPhillips was responsible for all the oil that leaked into my small Oklahoma hometown. This story is breaking, so be sure to follow up later as more analysis becomes available.
There is a hell of a lot more in this piece, and it’s worth reading. I’m fairly jaded by now, so I don’t think it will actually amount to much. I’m still relying on voters. to come through. I’m into more election-related victories, including this one in New Jersey reported in Politico. “Progressive Analilia Mejia coasts to victory in New Jersey special House election. The Democratic will fill the seat held by Gov. Mikie Sherrill.” Madison Fernandez has the analysis.
In celebration of my goal of better emotional and mental health, I have canceled my cable TV news subscription. I can no longer stand to watch any of these idiots speaking and moving around like they’re live human beings or something. I’m strictly sticking to the places where I can get a timeline without sacrificing my eyes and stomach. I’m hoping this helps the tummy and the budget, which is tighter than I’ve ever had it.
o, let’s start with Melania Dearest, who insists she had no ties to Jeffrey Epstein, even though she was not under oath to tell the truth, you have to wonder if a Congressional Committee will ask for a repeat performance.. William Kristol, writing at The Bulwark, suggests she threw hubby under the bus. “What Melania Didn’t Say.”
There is surely a lot of evidence suggesting she knew him well. But, with the Iran War being waged like a lethal version of mud wrestling, let’s see if the due diligence will be done by the press. This topic really skates on Slut Slamming, but it’s hard to cover earnestly. Emptywheel has an interesting story on the mostly out-of-view First Lady. “Melania’s Immigration Witness, Paolo Zampolli, Asked to Get His Baby Mama Deported.” I wonder if she’s worthy of any Congressional questions.
Epstein survivors had plenty to say about the performance. This is from The Guardian. Shrai Popat has the story. “Survivors of Epstein’s abuse accuse Melania Trump of ‘shifting burden’ onto victims, Outrage from survivors follows first lady’s statement calling on Congress to hold public hearings with victims of Epstein’s abuse.”
It appears that the majority of the country is suffering under the impact of the Iran War. CNBC’s Jeff Cox has this headline. “Consumer sentiment hits record low, inflation fears rise amid Iran war.”
There’s no good news coming out of the Iran War. This is Heath Cox Richard’s take on her Substack today.
I’d like to think I have the vocabulary to describe how I feel about all these idiotic, powerplay antics, but I really don’t. We are clearly dealing with people who don’t have a clue and don’t care to understand our democratic republic. This article from The Guardian blew me away. “Pete Hegseth’s holy war: the militant Christian theology animating the US attack on Iran.” This article deserves a full read from us. We should never forget Hegseth’s weird diatribe.
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