“I’m not sure, but that Cabinet Meeting may have been the most entertaining one yet. Two hours of trump fighting off sleep, like the toddler he obviously is, while his minions heaped praise upon his barely coherent body.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
And, hello again from Occupied New Orleans. We’ve had cold rainy weather for quite some time. Perhaps it will wash aways some of the dirty ICE terrorizing the city. The stories get more horrific and we’re barely into the first week of it. The complete idiocy with which this administration operates is ruining the country and a lot of it brings unnecessary death. I only wish we had a Congress that would function the way it was designed and a much better press. Let’s dig in while my tea is still hot.
The latest maneuvering of RFK jr’s death panels is once more directed to childhood vacinations. Where are all these supposedly pro-life people when something other than a fertilized egg is involved. No one cares about actually breathing children? This is from the Washington Post. “CDC panel makes most sweeping revision to child vaccine schedule under RFK Jr.. The panel voted to eliminate a long-standing recommendation for every newborn to receive a hepatitis B shot, excluding those born to mothers testing negative.”
An influential vaccine advisory panel on Friday voted to lift a long-standing recommendation that all newborns receive a vaccine for hepatitis B, marking the most significant change to the childhood immunization schedule under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices approved the change despite fierce objections from medical groups who said the recommendation had proved a successful public health strategy, nearly eradicating the dangerous virus among U.S. children.
The committee voted 8-3 to eliminate a recommendation, dating to 1991, for every child to receive a first dose of a hepatitis B vaccine shortly after birth. The panel said the newborn shot is no longer necessary for babies born to mothers who test negative for the virus. They suggested parents of those children delay the first dose for at least two months and consult with their doctors about whether or when to begin administering the three-dose series.
Supporters of the change said the universal recommendation regardless of risk was overly broad and undermined informed choice. Retsef Levi, an ACIP panelist who voted to change the language, said he believes the intention is to push parents to consider whether they want to give another vaccine to their child.
“It’s actually suggesting a fundamental change in their approach to this vaccine and maybe more broadly,” said Levi, a professor of operations management at MIT.
The recommendation from the group of outside government advisers goes to the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for final approval.
Medical experts have argued that it’s important to vaccinate all newborns for hepatitis B, even if their mothers test negative, because babies are at risk of infection if their mothers receive a false negative or become infected after testing. Some of the dissenting panel members pushed back on the change — one called the revised guidance on hepatitis B unconscionable, while another said the move was rooted in “baseless skepticism.”
“We will see hepatitis B infections come back,” said panelist Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. “The vaccine is so effective, it does not make sense in my mind to change the immunization schedule.”
Select lawmakers were around yesterday for a hearing about the lastest, criminal act by our country against Venezuelan boats. The stories offered up by the Department of War were quite different than the story told by the film. This is from CNN. “Exclusive: Survivors clinging to capsized boat didn’t radio for backup, admiral overseeing double-tap strike tells lawmakers.”
The two men killed as they floated holding onto their capsized boat in a secondary strike against a suspected drug vessel in early September did not appear to have radio or other communications devices, the top military official overseeing the strike told lawmakers on Thursday, according to three sources with direct knowledge of his congressional briefings.
As far back as September, defense officials have been quietly pushing back on criticism that killing the two survivors amounted to a war crime by arguing, in part, that they were legitimate targets because they appeared to be radioing for help or backup — reinforcements that, if they had received it, could have theoretically allowed them to continue to traffic the drugs aboard their sinking ship.
Defense officials made that claim in at least one briefing in September for congressional staff, according to a source familiar with the session, and several media outlets cited officials repeating that justification in the last week.
But Thursday, Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley acknowledged that the two survivors of the military’s initial strike were in no position to make a distress call in his briefings to lawmakers. Bradley was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the strike and was the top military officer directing the attack.
The initial hit on the vessel, believed to be carrying cocaine, killed nine people immediately and split the boat in half, capsizing it and sending a massive smoke plume into the sky, the sources who viewed the video as part of the briefings said. Part of the surveillance video was a zoomed-in, higher-definition view of the two survivors clinging to a still-floating, capsized portion, they said.
For a little under an hour — 41 minutes, according to a separate US official — Bradley and the rest of the US military command center discussed what to do as they watched the men struggle to overturn what was left of their boat, the sources said
During that time, Bradley also consulted with the uniformed lawyer on duty during the operation, he told lawmakers, according to two of the sources. The JAG officer, or judge advocate general officer, assessed it would be legal to move forward with a second strike, the sources added.
Ultimately, Bradley told lawmakers, he ordered a second strike to destroy the remains of the vessel, killing the two survivors, on the grounds that it appeared that part of the vessel remained afloat because it still held cocaine, according to one of the sources. The survivors could hypothetically have floated to safety, been rescued, and carried on with trafficking the drugs, the logic went.
Another boat was targeted by the Pentagon in the Pacific. This is from The Guardian. “Pentagon announces it has killed four men in another boat strike in Pacific. Strike comes amid congressional turmoil over legality of US attacks on suspected drug smugglers.”
The Pentagon announced on Thursday that the US military had conducted another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, killing four men in the eastern Pacific, as questions mount over the legality of the attacks.
Video of the new strike was posted on social media by the US southern command, based in Florida, with a statement saying that, at the direction of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”.
“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the statement added.
The footage showed a large explosion suddenly overtaking a small boat as it moved through the water, followed by an image of a vessel in flames and dark smoke streaming overhead.
It is the 22nd strike the US military has carried out against boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, bringing the death toll of the campaign to at least 87 people since September, when the strikes began.
U.S Foreign and Military policy has become so incoherent, illegal, dangerous, and likely leaked to our country’s traditional enemies, that our European partners no longer trust us. This link was shared to me by BB this morning and comes from The Economist. “Donald Trump’s bleak, incoherent foreign-policy strategy. Allies may panic; despots will cheer.”
YOU MIGHT think that in Trumpworld a new National Security Strategy (NSS) would not count for all that much. John Bolton, a national security adviser in Donald Trump’s first term, frequently laments that his boss had no strategy at all. Instead, the president worked by impulse—and without the encumbrance of too many briefings. From one day to the next, he veered in opposing directions.
Despite that, the new NSS matters. Released, weirdly, in the dead of night on December 4th/5th, it will be pored over by soldiers, diplomats and advisers in America and around the world. It is the latest and fullest statement of what “America First” means in foreign policy. It sets the terms for a soon-expected review of military power, and lays out the priorities for all those trying to interpret the president’s wishes. And, for many of its readers, it will be profoundly alarming.
For the most part, the new NSS rejects the decades-old insight that a common set of values are what cement America’s alliances. It declares that it is “not grounded in traditional, political ideology” but is motivated by “what works for America”. Instead, it embraces what it calls “flexible realism”. That means being “pragmatic without being ‘pragmatist’, realistic without being ‘realist’, principled without being ‘idealistic’, muscular without being ‘hawkish’, and restrained without being ‘dovish’.”
If that sounds like a dog’s breakfast, that is because it is. Shorn of the enlightened values that have long anchored foreign policy, America First becomes a naked assertion of power that owes more to the 19th century than the world that America built after the second world war. And that leads to a document riven by contradictions.
In some parts of the world, in particular in Asia, Mr Trump expects countries to behave as willing allies. In most others they are to submit meekly to America’s economic and military will. In one place the NSS rejects the interventionist idea of urging countries to adopt “democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories”. That suits Russia, China and the monarchies of the Middle East. Yet in Europe, where MAGA worries about wokeism, migration and the dominance of liberal values, the NSS bluntly declares that “our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.”
When the NSS applies this formula to the world, region by region, the full consequences of this shift start to become clear.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the section covering the western hemisphere. “We want to ensure that the western hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States,” it reads. Governments in the Americas will be enlisted to control migration and curb drug flows. They are expected to grant America control of key assets, resources and strategic locations, or at least a veto over “hostile foreign” ownership of them—a clear warning to refuse Chinese investments that offer a sway over ports or such assets as the Panama Canal. Where law enforcement has failed to halt drug smuggling, America will use armed forces, the NSS warns.
This swaggering right of intervention is called a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. That is a deliberate tribute to the “Roosevelt Corollary”, President Theodore Roosevelt’s assertion of gendarme-like enforcement rights over the western hemisphere in 1904.
All this seems sure to provoke angry recollections of high-handed American interventions in the region in the 20th century, from military invasions and blockades to CIA-backed coups or security pacts that saw America arming and training autocracies guilty of extra-judicial murders and torture in the cold war. With its talk of conditioning aid and trade on co-operation from Latin American governments, the NSS signals a belief that resentment will not stop Latin Americans from doing as they are told.
In Asia, by contrast, allies will read the NSS with a mixture of immediate relief and long-term gloom. The passages on Taiwan could have been worse. The nightmare scenario for such allies as Japan, the Philippines and South Korea would have involved an NSS declaring that the fate of the democratically ruled island of Taiwan is not an existential interest for America.
Instead, the NSS restates America’s position that it “does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait”. True, there is nothing about Taiwan’s importance as a friendly, pro-Western democracy whose people overwhelmingly oppose coming under rule by China. But the strategy does make a cold-eyed realist case for Taiwan’s importance as a usefully-located redoubt in the middle of the “First Island Chain” that runs from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines, penning in China’s navies and air forces. In addition, the NSS nods to Taiwan’s importance as the largest source of advanced semiconductors.
Accordingly, America will sustain forces capable of deterring any attempt to take Taiwan or to control the sea lanes near that island, or in the South China Sea. Asian allies must also spend much more on their own defences and grant America more access to their ports and bases. In short, the NSS demands that Asian countries risk China’s wrath by helping America contain Chinese ambitions in the Indo-Pacific. But there is not a word of criticism for China’s (or indeed Russia’s) expansionist ambitions or their desire to overthrow the post-1945 legal and multilateral order.
The NSS spares its sharpest barbs for Europe. The old world, it says, is undergoing a profound crisis, and this is not so much about economic decline or military weakness as it is about the loss of national identity, leading to the “stark prospect of civilisational erasure”.
Warning that “it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” the NSS warns that “it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.” In other words, immigrants will corrupt the values of the societies they move to—a shocking assertion from a country that is itself built on immigration.
The NSS’s prescriptions for Europe flow from this assertion of Judeo-Christian nationalism. The NSS calls for “unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history”, encouraging the revival promoted by “patriotic European parties”. That is a reference to the populist right, including National Rally in France, Reform UK in Britain and Alternative for Germany, which the vice-president, J.D. Vance, embraced earlier this year when he spoke at a conference in Munich. If that is the Trump administration’s programme, how are the centrist governments in Europe, who see these parties as a grave threat, supposed to treat America as an ally?
When the NSS applies this rationale to Ukraine, it draws some devastating conclusions. Suggesting that most Europeans want peace even if it means surrendering to Vladimir Putin, and asserting that their governments are standing in the way, the strategy calls for a rapid end to the war in order to prevent escalation. It says that America should curb the sense in Europe that Russia is a threat and warns that NATO cannot be “a perpetually expanding alliance”. Alarmingly, it has nothing to say about the repeated aggression and hostility of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. To much of Europe, this sort of appeasement will only serve to set up the next conflict.
“In everything we do, we are putting America First,” reads the letter from Mr Trump to the American people that opens the NSS. But it is the preceding sentence that will be read by allies with gloom, and with glee by China and Russia, for it is hopelessly at odds with reality: “America is strong and respected again—and because of that, we are making peace all over the world.” Alas, that claim comes from an administration that is indeed feared, resented and obsessed over, but one that is less respected or trusted than any American government in decades.
If that doesn’t give you geopolitical goosebumps, I don’t know what will. Meanwhile, we’ve been experiencing press coverage that’s not providing us the information we need. This article is from The Nation. “A New Roosevelt Institute Report Confronts the Roots of Our Media Crisis—and Calls for Breaking Up Corporate Media.” Today’s journalism crisis wasn’t inevitable, but it’s time to free journalism from the straitjacket of turning a democratic obligation into a profit-maximizing business model.” Concentration in this market is dumbing up America big time. This story is reported by Bilal Baydoun, Shahrzad Shams, and Victor Pickard
The desire to attack and ultimately control the media is a through line of modern authoritarian governance across the globe. President Donald Trump’s reign as the defining political figure of the last decade has demonstrated how quickly that tactic can take hold here. In courtrooms, agencies, and White House briefings, Trump and his allies have sought to punish and delegitimize journalists. In the second Trump term, the bully pulpit has been turned into a battering ram, with open or implied threats to withhold the broadcast licenses or block the media mergers of insufficiently loyal companies. But a singular focus on state meddling has, ironically, obfuscated how authoritarians come to wield such great power over the media system in the first place, and why a free press must be protected from both state and commercial coercion.
What we’re experiencing now is a dangerous convergence of the two.
The truth is that the administration’s threats have rippled across a media ecosystem buckling under the weight of commercial pressures—pressures that existed long before that fateful golden escalator ride more than a decade ago. It’s these longstanding commercial imperatives that Trump knows how to weaponize to manipulate media institutions. He understands that newsrooms accountable first and foremost to investors will sell out their accountability function to survive. Likewise, media conglomerates pursuing mergers cannot afford to anger the administration holding the regulatory pen. When journalism is trapped inside a commercial straitjacket, it can’t fight back.
In our oligarchic age, where billionaires can decide which fledgling outlets live or die for pennies on the dollar and even themselves command powerful roles in government, the line between state-run media and state-aligned media through private means becomes vanishingly thin. A press dependent on the whims of the ultra-wealthy cannot claim meaningful independence from the political forces its owners serve. And even though our Constitution protects the press for democratic reasons, our policy regime assumes that news organizations should behave like profit-maximizing firms.
How did we get here? As we show in our new Roosevelt Institute report, today’s media crisis wasn’t inevitable, but the consequence of policymakers embracing a corporate libertarian approach to media policy. This framework treats our information ecosystem as an ordinary market, rather than vital democratic infrastructure, resulting in a media system riddled with structural deficits. The result is a media environment that’s vulnerable to pressure from every direction, from the White House to the C-Suite.
The consequences of this policy failure have been catastrophic. Newsrooms have been gutted as advertising revenue collapsed. Local papers have closed or been absorbed by vulture capitalists whose short-term incentives are fundamentally at odds with journalism’s public mission. More than 1,000 counties now lack the equivalent of a single full-time journalist; the number of journalists per 100,000 residents has fallen 75 percent since the early 2000s. Platforms dominate news distribution, leaving publishers dependent on algorithmic systems designed to maximize engagement rather than inform the public. A handful of billionaires can bend the flow of information with the proverbial push of a button, and conglomerates continue conglomerating: Just earlier today, after a major bidding war, Netflix beat out Paramount Skydance and Comcast in a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, resulting in a merger that will further concentrate cultural and informational power in fewer hands.
Today, most Americans, and even many policymakers, take these developments and the system that led to them for granted. As the late media scholar Robert McChesney argued, media policy has been rendered invisible, designed behind closed doors in the public’s name, but without the public’s consent—placing core questions related to our information ecosystem outside the purview of democratic contestation. This invisibility has given cover to a set of neoliberal assumptions that define the boundaries of what’s possible, empowering a small set of wealthy private actors to decide, for the rest of us, what our media system looks like, and whose interests it serves.
Such invisibility obscures how our media system’s design—and the many problems ailing it—is the result of policy decisions. Over the course of decades, policymakers diluted the meaning of the media’s public interest responsibilities, refashioning them into something more akin to consumer preferences. At the same time, the media market faced a series of re-regulatory structural moves that shifted power away from the public and into the hands of corporate actors. And well before Trump dismantled the CPB, Congress resisted meaningful public media investment. All these developments were in turn legitimized by a First Amendment media jurisprudence that prioritizes unbridled commercial speech over the public’s “right to know.” Combined, these constraints created a media system that treats commercial imperatives as natural law, and democratic obligations as optional.
I’ve probably over shared most of the excerpts and it will take you some time to get through them all. BB also wrote yesterday on the many ways our country is run by idiots with an angend American’s do not approve of and in a way that is beyond incompetent. Any of us in cities Occupied by the National Guard and Ice have horrors stories that sound more like NAZI Germany than your backyard. They have no incentive stop and they’re even ignoring court orders. This article is the view point of my home city by the BBC. “New Orleans residents in fear as immigration crackdown descends on their city.” The BBC’s North American Correspondent, Tom Bateman, is here and reports the story.
Two labourers stand on the roof of a house in Kenner, outside New Orleans, as US Border Patrol agents clamber up a ladder, getting closer.
As the agents move in, trying to arrest them, the men step to the roof’s edge, poised in an apparent act of resistance – but it’s too high to jump.
On the ground in the mostly Latino neighbourhood, an officer trains his weapon towards the rooftop while a sniper moves into position. Now, neighbours, activists, and crews of local press are gathering at the scene, watching in bewilderment: US President Trump’s new front line on immigration enforcement has just arrived.
It is day one of “Catahoula Crunch”, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has labelled its operation, taking its name from an American leopard dog known for being well-muscled, powerful and territorial.
“These people came to work today to provide for their families and themselves,” said Zoe Higgins, an activist documenting the Border Patrol operation in New Orleans.
“That they could just be abducted, removed from all stability – I can’t imagine how terrifying that is,” she said, shortly after the agents coaxed the men down and detained them.
According to DHS, its agents were conducting immigration enforcement this week when “several illegal aliens climbed on the roof of a residential home and refused to comply with agent commands”.
An “illegal alien” was arrested, DHS officials told the BBC, but they did not answer questions about the immigration status of the labourers involved, nor whether agents had a warrant to access the property.
None of this sounds lawful. I’m not a Constitutional lawyer, but I do know that everyone deserves their day in court. Disappearing people is criminal.
So, I’m going off today to see my doctor for just a normal check up. But my body tells me every day that it’s not coping well with any of this. I usually can drop my blood pressure by meditating. My skills are no longer up to this fight or fly response I feel continually. I just put my birth certificate in my purse. I still doing my whistle brigade thing. This country is not going doing on my watch. This city and every one in it is not going to be given the No Quarter treatment here; especially when they’re not really a threat to any of us in any way.
What’s on your Reading. Action and Blogging list today?
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“No one said it would be easy.” John Buss, @Repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Once again, we’ve been treated to the overtly unconstitutional view that Orange Caligula can run for a third term. Somehow, Steve Bannon managed to get airtime again, and the legacy media has gone wild with speculation. We’re also listening to more insane chatter about how mentally “healthy” #FARTUS is now that he’s had a supposed MRI at Walter Reed. All of these sideshows are undoubtedly trying to get the focus off the Epstein files, bombing hapless fishermen off coasts in South America, and the incredible price inflation in food, gasoline, and everything.
Can you believe this is our reality now? Here’s the headline from the New York Times from the story by Katie Rogers. “Trump Says a Recent M.R.I. Scan Was ‘Perfect,’ and He’d ‘Love’ a Third Term. President Trump made the comments on the second day of his trip to Asia. The Constitution limits presidents to two terms, but Mr. Trump has suggested he might try to circumvent it.”
President Trump said that he underwent magnetic resonance imaging earlier this month, telling reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday that the results had been “perfect” but declining to say why his doctors had ordered the scan.
Mr. Trump also reiterated that he was interested in serving a third term, saying that he “would love to do it” because of his popularity with his supporters. Mr. Trump, who spoke to journalists for about 30 minutes on a flight to Tokyo from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during his almost weeklong trip to Asia, seemed intent on presenting himself as fit to lead, if not run for the presidency again.
The Constitution sets a two-term limit for presidents, but Mr. Trump and his supporters have increasingly floated the possibility of finding a way to circumvent the 22nd Amendment, which states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice,” regardless of whether the terms are consecutive.
In discussing his health, Mr. Trump offered a small new detail about the tests that the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, said the president had received during a recent visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
“I gave you the full results,” Mr. Trump said, mischaracterizing the summary that was released by his physician. The summary did not say that Mr. Trump had an M.R.I. scan and had few details on what testing the president had undergone. When asked why he had undergone an M.R.I., the president said, “you could ask the doctors.” Magnetic resonance imaging, a noninvasive technology that creates detailed images of the inside of the body, is often used for disease detection and monitoring, or to detect bone or joint abnormalities.
Even the ladies on the view have a better handle on this nonsense than most of the news media. This is from MediaITE. “Trump’s 3rd Term Flirtation Triggers Five-Alarm Panic on The View: ‘Damn if He Isn’t a Dictator!’” I wouldn’t be so damned worried about this if it weren’t for the corrupt Supreme Court.
The co-hosts of The View sounded a full five-alarm warning on Monday over President Donald Trump’s musings about running for an unconstitutional third term.
Whoopi Goldberg began Monday’s show by declaring, “Well, you-know-who told us he was going to be a dictator on day one and, damn, if he isn’t a dictator!”
Goldberg referred to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’sclaim that Trump is “going to get a third term.”
On Air Force One on his way to Japan Monday, Trump gave a nebulous answer to a reporter’s question about whether he would pursue a third term.
“Am I not ruling it out? I mean, you’ll have to tell me,” Trump said.
Alyssa Farah Griffin said, “There’s certain people in Trump’s orbit who, when they tell you what they’re going to do, I listen. And I would put Steve Bannon on the top of the list. He has been one of the most senior advisers to Trump the first time he ran, predicted the events around January 6th, the efforts to overturn the election. And I feel crazy because I feel like a conspiracy theorist talking about this!”
Sunny Hostin said that Trump’s ballroom project indicates that he doesn’t plan to leave the White House.
“He is hooking up the White House because he doesn’t plan on leaving it. I don’t think he plans on leaving,” Hostin said.
“I told y’all that years ago, that he had — he was not going anywhere,” Goldberg added. “He said it. He said, ‘I want to be president for life.’ I heard him say it, I watched his lips move, and I thought, he means this!”
Ana Navarro claimed, “This is a guy who has got authoritarian envy. He goes around to these countries and he loves — he wants the parades, he wants the arches, he wants the ballrooms, he wants to be an emperor, he wants to be an authoritarian. Paying no attention to the Constitution, that’s the way Ortega does it, the way Chavez did it, the way Maduro does it, Putin does it.”
Perhaps we need a national GoFundMe for relieving Trump of his duties due to mental deficiencies. I always look to Ruth Ben-Ghiat for some rational and data-based explanations of our situation. Her blog, Lucid, is a very good place to start. “TINA (There Is No Alternative) and the Leader as “A Vehicle of Divine Providence, and my video on covering corruption and violence with an aura of holiness.” If there ever is a fascist movement, you can rely on the hyper-religious to be behind it.
In January 2016, when I forecast that Donald Trump would develop a formidable personality cult along the lines of Vladimir Putin’s and Silvio Berlusconi’s if he won the GOP presidential nomination, people called me an idiot and a clown. But Trump has developed a leader cult that conforms to my description from nine years ago:
Here’s the trick to cults of personality: the leader has to embody the people but also stand above them. He must appear ordinary, to allow people to relate to him. And yet he must also be seen as extraordinary, so that people will grant him permission to be the arbiter of their individual and national destiny.
Autocrats are always looking over their shoulders for rivals, and the claim of uniqueness is also designed to insulate the leader from the idea that others could do or have done his job better. It also silences dreaded talk of successors.
The history of autocrats suggests that the more corrupt, violent, and hated they become, the more they use TINA messaging as they seek to stay in office indefinitely. In 2008, when Putin was still consolidating his power, he agreed to have someone else (Dmitry Medvedev) serve as president, while he served as prime minister, due to a constitutional ban on an individual serving three consecutive terms. By 2020, following the large 2019 public protests over corrupted Moscow elections, vacating the presidency was no longer an option. So Putin staged a referendum to amend the constitution to stay in power until 2036. His argument? That looking for successors would jeopardize the stability that only he could offer.
Americans got a taste of TINA messaging on Oct. 19, the day after an estimated 7 million people participated in No Kings protests. Trump responded by posting an AI-edited video that advocates for him staying in office in 2036, 2048, and…forever (“Trump4Eva”).
There is no better way to give TINA traction than to proclaim the leader as in office by the will of God and spin his every action as the fruit of divine intention. This idea has the most credibility if religious leaders circulate it. Dictator Benito Mussolini, an atheist, knew this: he made the Lateran Accords with the Catholic Church and was rewarded by Pope Pius XI proclaiming him to be a “man of Providence.”
I really don’t want to be making you have nightmares tonight, but there needs to be some bud-nipping about his virality, sanity, and a third term right now. I’m getting tired of propaganda driving decisions for this country. Here’s some more news that should make you shiver. This is from AXIOS and written by Emily Peck. “The economy is in uncharted territory.” Literally.
Data went dark this month. The government shutdown is halting the collection and release of statistics tracking the job market, public health and crop production, as well as other economic indicators.
Why it matters: The numbers are critical for understanding what’s happening in the U.S., particularly at a moment of rapid change in both government policies and in the job market.
How it works: Businesses use gold-standard government data, like the jobs report, to set wages and make hiring, pricing and investment decisions.
Investors watch the numbers so closely that they can drive big stock reactions. Policymakers use the data to set minimum wage standards and increase food assistance or other important benefits.
Where it stands: Since the shutdown began on Oct. 1, government agencies have stopped collecting or releasing information about:
The labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics didn’t release a September employment report and hasn’t collected any data in October.
We don’t know the unemployment rate or how many jobs businesses are creating. Few companies appear to be hiring, and job anxiety is skyrocketing.
Public health. Weekly numbers that track how many Americans are coming down with the flu, RSV or COVID-19 haven’t been updated.
Local governments, doctors and Americans are in the dark about illnesses that lead to hospitalizations and the deaths of tens of thousands every year just as respiratory virus season typically kicks up.
Agriculture. The USDA’s weekly export sales report and daily sales announcements, and its monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates aren’t coming out. Farmers and commodity traders are left with little information at the peak of the harvest season and at a time when tariffs are driving much angst, Reuters reports.
Demographic information. The 2024 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample was supposed to be released on Oct. 16.
It’s one of the few publicly available datasets that allows for measurement of economic, demographic and housing trends across small geographic areas and small population subgroups.
Between the lines: This isn’t an all-inclusive list.
And though these should be temporary stops, there is other data that the Trump administration has walked away from permanently: on food insecurity and weather disasters.
Reality check: Some information was too important to skip. On Friday, the BLS released its Consumer Price Index, covering inflation in September — a measure tied to Social Security’s Cost of Living Adjustment, which the government said would be 2.8% next year.
But no data on October has been collected.
This is no way to run a modern economy. We’re now on the IMF warning list. This is via MSN but originally published at Euronews. “US borrowing expected to rival Europe’s most indebted states, says IMF.” This story is reported by Una Hajdari.
Global public debt is rising faster than at any point in modern history, and this time, it is not just the historically large spenders driving it.
The International Monetary Fund’s latest Fiscal Monitor warns that the public finances of major powers, led by the United States, have become a systemic global risk.
“Although the number of countries with debt above 100% will be steadily declining in the next five years, their share in world GDP is projected to rise,” the report stated.
This means that the collective or “global public debt is projected to rise above 100% of world GDP by 2029,” it said. In such a scenario, public debt would be at its highest level since 1948.
According to IMF calculations, this trajectory “reflects a higher and steeper path than projected before the pandemic”, signalling that governments have failed to stabilise their debt despite the recovery of global growth.
The US marks the steepest rise
The United States will see the steepest increase among major advanced economies when it comes to debt-to-GDP ratio, according to the IMF.
From 2023 to 2030, general government gross debt will climb from 119.8% of GDP in 2023 to 143.4% in 2030.
The institution noted that the United States will, for the first time this century, surpass Italy and Greece on this front — long viewed as the developed world’s most indebted states.
I’m not the least bit a deficit hawk, but this is really not good. You may read the analysis at the link.
"There is a clear mental health crisis going on in the Oval Office right now. He is detached from reality. Every politician and pundit, every journalist…knows this. It should be the biggest story in our media. But, shamefully, it isn’t."Me for 'First Draft':
This is from Mehdi’s Monday morning round-up, which can be found at the above Bluesky link.
Who was the president of the United States in 2020? Donald Trump, right? Obviously. We all know that.
Except perhaps… Donald Trump himself. For years now, Trump and his supporters have bizarrely behaved as if the first Trump presidency ended in 2019. They like to brag about the amazing state of the economy in 2019, while ignoring the soaring unemployment they left behind at the end of 2020. They complain about the COVID lockdowns in 2020, as if the president behind the lockdowns wasn’t… Donald John Trump.
On Friday, Trump went one step further. In fact, the president took a full step right into Crazytown with this post on his Truth Social website:
Got that? The president of the United States thinks ex-Special Counsel Jack Smith and former Biden DOJ alums Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco “cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election.” Back in 2020, to be clear, Merrick Garland was an appeals court judge, Lisa Monaco was a lawyer in private practice, and Jack Smith was the chief prosecutor at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
How, then, did they “rig” the 2020 election when they weren’t in government? Or did they, upon joining the Biden administration in 2021 and 2022, take a time machine and travel back in time to November 2020?
And, on Saturday, the mad king in the White House took a further step into Crazytown. He increased tariffs on Canada by 10% over current levels because – I kid you not – the Canadians hurt his feelings with a television ad. Yes, really!
“Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” he declaimed on – where else? – Truth Social, adding: “The sole purpose of this FRAUD was Canada’s hope that the United States Supreme Court will come to their ‘rescue’ on Tariffs that they have used for years to hurt the United States.”
How is this not a parody? How is this even legal? Does this sound like a sufficient national security argument for Trump bypassing congressional authority on tariffs? American families will now have to pay even more in taxes – as that is what tariffs are! – because their president got really mad over a foreign television ad. An ad which, as the New York Times pointed out, “faithfully reproduces Reagan’s words” from 1987, in which the Gipper denounced tariffs.
On Sunday, the King of Crazytown continued his demented and dangerous all-caps ranting online, insisting pregnant women not take Tylenol unless “ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY” and telling parents to avoid the MMR shot.
None of this is remotely normal. There is a clear mental health crisis going on in the Oval Office right now. He is detached from reality. Every politician and pundit, every journalist in the White House press corps, knows this. It should be the biggest story in our media.
But, shamefully, it isn’t.
I so miss Mehdi and Joy! I’m glad they can be found writing important things like this while the old school media folds to the Trump Regime like paper airplanes from Qatar.
Anyway, that’s enough depressing us for one day.
Is he dead yet?
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
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The news continues to be deeply disturbing as we find out how much the damage done by Doge and bumbling Trump Cabinet members has impacted the basic services provided by the Federal Government. We also continue to find how deeply criminal the mindset is in the administration. It’s hard not to notice the many agencies that have been corrupted by Project 2025 and Yam Tit’s fascist wet dreams. Also, get ready for Good Trouble on July 17th.
Andrew Goudsward, writing for Reuters, has this astounding story about the number of lawyers leaving the DOJ. “Two-thirds of the DOJ unit defending Trump policies in court have quit.”
The U.S. Justice Department unit charged with defending against legal challenges to signature Trump administration policies – such as restricting birthright citizenship and slashing funding to Harvard University – has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff, according to a list seen by Reuters.
Sixty-nine of the roughly 110 lawyers in the Federal Programs Branch have voluntarily left the unit since President Donald Trump’s election in November or have announced plans to leave, according to the list compiled by former Justice Department lawyers and reviewed by Reuters.
Reuters spoke to four former lawyers in the unit and three other people familiar with the departures who said some staffers had grown demoralized and exhausted defending an onslaught of lawsuits against Trump’s administration.
Critics have accused the Trump administration of flouting the law in its aggressive use of executive power, including by retaliating against perceived enemies and dismantling agencies created by Congress.
The Trump administration has broadly defended its actions as within the legal bounds of presidential power and has won several early victories at the Supreme Court. A White House spokesperson told Reuters that Trump’s actions were legal, and declined to comment on the departures.
“Any sanctimonious career bureaucrat expressing faux outrage over the President’s policies while sitting idly by during the rank weaponization by the previous administration has no grounds to stand on,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement.
The seven lawyers who spoke with Reuters cited a punishing workload and the need to defend policies that some felt were not legally justifiable among the key reasons for the wave of departures.
Three of them said some career lawyers feared they would be pressured to misrepresent facts or legal issues in court, a violation of ethics rules that could lead to professional sanctions.
All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics and avoid retaliation.
A Justice Department spokesperson said lawyers in the unit are fighting an “unprecedented number of lawsuits” against Trump’s agenda.
“The Department has defeated many of these lawsuits all the way up to the Supreme Court and will continue to defend the President’s agenda to keep Americans safe,” the spokesperson said. The Justice Department did not comment on the departures of career lawyers or morale in the section.
Some turnover in the Federal Programs Branch is common between presidential administrations, but the seven sources described the number of people quitting as highly unusual.
Reuters was unable to find comparative figures for previous administrations. However, two former attorneys in the unit and two others familiar with its work said the scale of departures is far greater than during Trump’s first term and Joe Biden’s administration.
I can’t get over what’s going on with the Epstein Case. It sounds like the chickens are coming home to roost. Lady Justice knows the victims need closure and peace. As an activist against the abuse of women and children since I was 17 years old, I can only say we still haven’t caught up with what would be proper Justice. However, if this is what ultimately splits the MAGA coalition into pieces, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings or sensibilities at all. If the heat hasn’t driven me to take multiple baths, this story has added to it. You know if Yam Tits is obsessively using his Truth Social Platform, that he certainly knows there’s damning evidence of it. The AG has his back, and it’s a disgusting place for a woman.
This is from The Hill. “Carlson: Bondi ‘made up a bunch of ludicrous’ Epstein files claims.” Yes, that is Carlson, as in Tucker Carlson. I guess all those years of inner hate and outer support have caught up with him.
Political commentator and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson blamed Attorney General Pam Bondi in a new interview for the intense scrutiny the Trump administration has faced over its handling of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In the NBC News interview published Monday, Carlson said he doesn’t believe the Department of Justice (DOJ) has “much relevant information about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes” that would satisfy those who have long called for the release of “Epstein files.”
“Rather than just admit that, Pam Bondi made a bunch of ludicrous claims on cable news shows that she couldn’t back up, and this current outrage is the result,” Carlson told the outlet.
Bondi has faced intense backlash after acknowledging last week there was no client list connected to Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking of minors and no evidence to suggest he didn’t die by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting sex trafficking charges.
President Trump has repeatedly defended Bondi and urged his supporters to move on from the Epstein case, but pressure has continued to mount among the president’s base to fire the former Florida attorney general.
Bondi said in a Fox News interview in February that an Epstein client list was on her desk to be reviewed and alleged that the DOJ had obtained hours of video related to the case. The White House in March invited 15 far-right influencers to an event, where they received white binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1,” but the display drew immediate backlash because the documents provided were already publicly available.
Bondi later claimed in another TV interview that she was duped into thinking she had all the files related to the government’s Epstein investigations and was seeking additional documents after hearing from an alleged “whistleblower.”
Bondi said last week that she was initially referring to documents related to the Epstein case — not a specific “client list,” and the footage she had mentioned was child sex abuse material that would not be released to the public. She said there was nothing else to be released from the case.
Boy, if only someone would have told Epstein everything was fake and a creation of Obama and the CIA and deep state, he wouldn’t have had to take his own life or have it taken by imaginary people
NBC News published this analysis of the Carlson interview! (Look, Mom! We’re a tabloid now!) The analysis is by Allan Smith. “Tucker Carlson leads MAGA’s worried warriors in questioning Trump. The former Fox News host and “America First” leader spoke with NBC News as MAGA influencers rebel over amnesty, Iran and the Epstein files.” Look who is trying to resurrect his career!
For years, many on the right — including some people who are now in the Trump administration — have called for the release of all government documents related to Epstein. Epstein died in custody in 2019, and a medical examiner ruled his death a suicide. He was facing sex trafficking and conspiracy charges.
Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo saying the Justice Department’s review turned up no “client list” of powerful men alleged to have participated in Epstein’s schemes, enraging the MAGA base, who are calling on her to be fired. Trump’s defense of Bondi and his attempts to tell his supporters to move on from the issue have done little to quell the furor.
On Saturday, Trump wrote “LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!” on Truth Social, adding the United States should “not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
In his NBC News interview, Carlson said he now believes the Justice Department actually doesn’t have “much relevant information about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes.”
“Rather than just admit that, Pam Bondi made a bunch of ludicrous claims on cable news shows that she couldn’t back up, and this current outrage is the result,” he said.
A Republican Senate aide thinks Carlson is actually having a bit of a “revival” as he carves out distinct space on the right.
“He’s more of a dissident figure now,” this person said. “For whatever else you’re going to say, Tucker is just kind of saying what he thinks.”
Back in the day!
Good luck rescuing that career, Tuckums! I’m not sure getting further in the pig trough with the big hogs is going to help, but then, I’m not a MAGA whisperer. Adam Gabbatt has more on this at The Guardian. “Trump encounters rare uproar from ardent rightwing allies over Jeffrey Epstein. White House claim it didn’t have list of Epstein’s alleged clients and that he wasn’t murdered has caused tumult even within administration.” Mudville is not a happy place.
Donald Trump managed something unusual last week. In his administration’s claim that it did not have a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged clients, and that the convicted sex offender was not murdered, it succeeded in upsetting the rightwing influencers and commentators – and reportedly even Trump’s deputy FBI director – people who typically champion his every move.
“This stinks. This just reeks,” was the verdict of Jesse Watters, the primetime Fox News host.
He added: “The feds spent decades investigating Epstein and have had total access to his property for years, they still cannot give us a straight answer? This is not anything new; the government has been keeping us in the dark for generations.”
Watters was careful not to criticize the Trump administration directly, blaming “the feds” as he described Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, as “great Americans”.
There was also tumult within the Trump administration. Dan Bongino, the deputy FBI director and former rightwing podcast host, spent years pushing Epstein conspiracy theories, and was reportedly very upset with Bondi over how the Epstein files were handled.
“Bongino is out-of-control furious,” a source close to Bongino told NBC News. “This destroyed his career. He’s threatening to quit and torch Pam unless she’s fired.” Axios reported that Bongino didn’t show up to work on Friday, and the row prompted Trump himself to step in.
Asked by reporters on Sunday if Bongino would remain in his position, Trump said: “Oh I think so … I spoke to him today. Dan Bongino, very good guy. I’ve known him a long time. I’ve done his show many, many times. He sounded terrific, actually.”
But within the rightwing, Epstein-curious sphere, others had continued to wade in.
“Pam Blondi [sic] is covering up child sex crimes that took place under HER WATCH when she was Attorney General of Florida,” wrote Laura Loomer, the 32-year-old conspiracy theorist whose influence over Trump has come under scrutiny.
Loomer accused Bondi of failing to pursue legal action against Epstein, despite lawsuits being filed against him in the Florida.
“She is afraid of that being discussed and brought to light. She needs to be fired. She has tainted the investigation,” Loomer concluded.
Let’s see. He’s losing Fox, Loomer, Patel, and Bongino. This might be fun to watch after all. Although I still think I’ll need a lot of baths.
“NO ONE IS BUYING THIS!! Next the DOJ will say ‘Actually, Jeffrey Epstein never even existed.’ This is over the top sickening,” Alex Jones, the rightwing commentator and conspiracy theorist, wrote on social media.
The lackluster release also left others, outside of the far right, dissatisfied. Andrew Schulz, the host of the Flagrant podcast, who interviewed Trump in October and said he voted for him, included the Epstein saga as part of his reason for feeling let down by the president.
“When you feel like the status quo will do nothing and change nothing, you have way more of a longer leash for the outsiders’ ideas than you do the status quo’s ideas,” Schulz said, talking about Trump’s appeal.
“And I think that was the idea with Trump, it was like: ‘Maybe he will stop these wars.’ No. ‘Maybe we will see what’s up with this Epstein shit.’ No.”
Trump, who once enjoyed a friendship with Epstein, said in the run-up to last year’s election that he would declassify files related to Epstein, although he added: “You don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phoney stuff in there, because there’s a lot of phoney stuff in that whole world.”
At a cabinet meeting this week, however, Trump expressed surprise that people were “still talking” about Epstein, suggesting that the president was, for once, out of touch with his Maga base. “This guy’s been talked about for years,” Trump said, describing Epstein as a “creep”.
That failed to quell the anger, however, prompting Trump to write a lengthy Truth Social post over the weekend, pleading for calm from his supporters.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”
He added: “One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”
The replies to Trump’s post, however, suggested his appeal had not worked.
“My wanting pedophiles to be punished for their crimes doesn’t make me less of a patriot, but more,” one user wrote. “I don’t understand the reason for your current attitude and frankly I’m beyond the point of caring. I do care about justice, wether [sic] you approve or not.”
Adam Wren and Dasha Burns of Politicohave this headline. “Playbook: Trump’s Epstein headache isn’t going away.” Guess I’ll need to stock up on my soap supply.
HERE TO STAY: At what should be the height of his political powers — having racked up signature wins in enacting his sprawling GOP megabill, bending U.S. allies to his will on defense spending, launching a successful and limited attack on Iran with no meaningful reprisals on U.S. forces — President Donald Trump is instead facing a fast-metastasizing MAGA rebellion over his administration’s handling of the files from the criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
First in Playbook: This morning, we have three threads of new reporting suggesting that this isn’t likely to go away any time soon.
1) A special counsel?: In an interview last night with Playbook, MAGA influencer and far-right activist Laura Loomer said “there should be a special counsel appointed to do an independent investigation of the handling of the Epstein files so that people can feel like this issue is being investigated, and perhaps take it out of [AG Pam Bondi’s] hands, because I don’t think that she has been transparent or done a good job handling this issue.”
2) MAGA allies press for presser: Playbook has also learned that at least one key figure in the extended MAGA universe, an ally supportive of the Trump DOJ’s handling of the Epstein case, has pitched senior White House officials on the idea of Bondi and Deputy AG Todd Blanche doing an all-questions-addressed news conference in an attempt to exhaust the press and put the story to bed.
3) Dems sense an opening: Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas), who is introducing legislation today that calls for the release of the Epstein files, shows Playbook how he’ll tie the “corruption and cronyism” of the handling of the Epstein case into a broader critique of Trump’s priorities. “I think he’s trying to protect some billionaire friend of his,” Veasey tells Playbook. “That’s what he lives for more than anything else in the world: protecting billionaires. Look at what he did with the so-called ‘big, beautiful bill.’”
WHAT MAKES THIS TIME DIFFERENT?: To a degree we have truly not seen over the past decade of Trump as a national political figure, his movement seems genuinely fractured. The Epstein case is fundamentally different from past divisions inside MAGA because it undercuts Trump’s self-styled brand as a speaker of uncomfortable truths, a slayer of sacred cows and a tribune of the people. This isn’t just a policy or ideological disagreement like, say, the MAGA unease over the Iran strikes; this cuts to the heart of his very political identity.
This is a problem partly of Trump’s own making. For years, many on the MAGA right alleged a massive governmental cover-up aimed at protecting Epstein, the convicted child sex offender and wealthy financier who circulated among the highest echelons of the rich and powerful. Trump and his allies were happy to amplify those whispers to their own political benefit.
These weren’t just allegations coming from anonymous cranks on the internet. JD Vance spoke publicly about an Epstein “client list” being kept secret by the government. Kash Pateldid the same. DittoDan Bongino. Earlier this year, asked about “releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients,” Bondi told Fox News “it’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”
Now? It’s a huge credibility problem. Vance, Patel, Bongino and Bondi — among others — effectively have to either acknowledge that they were not just wrong about the government covering up for Epstein, but actually making stuff up, or they come off like they’re part of a cover-up themselves.
To wit: In a new interview this morning, Tucker Carlson told NBC’s Allan Smith he now believes DOJ doesn’t actually have “much relevant information about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes.” And therein lies a problem: “Rather than just admit that, Pam Bondi made a bunch of ludicrous claims on cable news shows that she couldn’t back up, and this current outrage is the result,” Carlson says.
WHAT’S TRUMP TO DO? The president has limited and conflicting options.
More on this at the link. Heather Cox Richardson brings a historian’s perspective to her SubStack this morning.
For the first time ever, Trump got ratioed on his own platform, meaning that there were more comments on his post than likes or shares, showing disapproval of his message. According to Jordan King of Newsweek, by 10:45 this morning (Eastern Time) it had more than 36,000 replies but only 11,000 reposts and 32,000 likes.
Trump sounds panicked, not only over the Epstein issue itself, but also because he cannot control the narrative his followers are embracing. After stoking the fire of his followers’ anger against what they seemed to see as powerful men getting away with crimes against children, he is now being burned by it. His reflex is to return to his greatest hits, accusing Democrats of writing the Epstein files and then, as he always, always, always does, snapping back to the Russia scandal and calling it a hoax.
Over the weekend, attendees at a conference held by the right-wing Turning Point USA booed the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case. MAGA influencers kept up the drumbeat; Matt Walsh called the administration’s about-face on releasing information “obvious bullsh*t.” Natalie Allison of the Washington Post reported that even the Fox News Channel warned this morning that “[t]here has to be some explanation” and that questions about the way the administration is handling the Epstein files were “very valid.”
Musk, who controls the X social media platform preferred by the right wing, is amplifying the story. After Trump’s Saturday post, Musk wrote to his 222 million followers: “Seriously. He said ‘Epstein’ half a dozen times while telling everyone to stop talking about Epstein. Just release the files as promised.”
Trump appears to be planning to regain control of the narrative by persecuting his political opponents.
But it is not clear that will silence MAGA voters who backed Trump in part because they thought he would lead the fight against an elite group of pedophiles controlling the country. As Trump’s policies on the economy, immigration, tax cuts, firing of government employees, and gutting of disaster relief have soured Americans on his administration, loyalists stayed behind him. Now he has turned against their chief cause, giving them an off-ramp from a presidency that seems increasingly off the rails.
Mike Flynn, who served as Trump’s first national security advisor until forced to resign for lying about his contact with Russian operatives, posted on social media: “[President Trump] please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away. If the administration doesn’t address the massive number of unanswered questions about Epstein, especially the ABUSE OF CHILDREN BY ELITES (it is very clear that abuse occurred), then moving forward on so many other monumental challenges our nation is facing becomes much harder.”
Flynn concluded: “We cannot allow pedophiles to get away. I don’t personally care who they are or what elite or powerful position they hold. They must be exposed and held accountable!!!”
(🚨) MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: Trump Adviser Mike Davis Just Admitted That DOJ Is Withholding “Claims” About Crimes By Epstein Clients and Associates—Keep in Mind Trump Is An Epstein Associate—Because Trump and His Team Feel They’re Based on “Hearsay”Ruh roh.
President Donald Trump faces a fast-metastasizing MAGA rebellion amid fallout over his administration’s handling of the files from the criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
And some of his closest allies are cautioning the situation for the president will get worse before it gets better — even as it threatens to derail his megabill victory lap and continues to divide parts of his administration and, more broadly, his supporters.
Trump has tried twice in as many days to tamp down his base’s anger, posting to Truth Social Saturday that he didn’t “like what’s happening” among his own supporters. He also threw his support behind Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has taken the brunt of much of the right’s ire over the Epstein files. Several news organizations have also reported that Bondi clashed with Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino over the files.
After disembarking Air Force One Sunday at Joint Base Andrews, Trump faced a question about Bongino, who skipped work Friday. Trump insisted that he’s “a very good guy. … He sounded terrific, actually. No, I think he’s in good shape.”
Mike Davis, the MAGA legal brawler and occasional Oval Office visitor, has taken up defending Trump’s DOJ, said in an interview that “the Trump Justice Department wanted to be fully transparent, but can’t.” He added: “This is a case of no good deed going unpunished.”
Davis argues DOJ can’t release more, including that there is grand jury material involved, court records under seal, child pornography involved, the need to protect victims of “heinous crimes,” and “unsubstantiated, bogus claims, like we saw during the Kavanaugh proceedings, where you had double and even triple hearsay.”
A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment.
You may want to read Greg Sargent’s latest at The New Republic. “The Young GOPer Behind “Alligator Alcatraz” Is the Dark Future of MAGA. Sunshine State Attorney General James Uthmeier is the real brains behind this notorious migrant detention camp in the Everglades. The more barbarities that emerge, the brighter his star will no doubt shine.”
The other day, Stephen Miller went on Fox News and offered a plea that got surprisingly little attention given its highly toxic and unnerving implications. Miller urged politicians in GOP-run states to build their own versions of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the state-run immigration detention facility that officials just opened in the Florida Everglades.
“We want every governor of a red state, and if you are watching tonight: pick up the phone, call DHS, work with us to build facilities in your state,” Miller said, in a reference to the Department of Homeland Security. Critically, Miller added, such states could then work with the federal government by supplying much-needed detention beds, helping President Trump “get the illegals out.”
Keep all that in mind as we introduce you to one James Uthmeier.
Uthmeier, the attorney general of Florida and a longtime ally of Governor Ron DeSantis, is widely described in the state as the brains behind “Alligator Alcatraz.” Peter Schorsch, the publisher of Florida Politics, sums him up this way: “In Uthmeier, DeSantis found his own Stephen Miller.”
Uthmeier is indeed a homegrown Florida version of Miller: Only 37 years old, he brings great precociousness to the jailing of migrants. Like Miller, he is obscure and little-known relative to the influence he’s amassing. Also like Miller, he is fluent in MAGA’s reliance on the spectacle of inhumanity and barbarism.
“You don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter,” Uthmeier said of “Alligator Alcatraz” in a slick video he recently narrated about the complex, which featured heavy-metal guitar riffs right out of a combat-cosplay video game. “People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.”
Any migrant who dares escape just might get devoured alive by an animal—one animal eating another. Dehumanization is so thrilling!
The real-world “Alligator Alcatraz” is already gaining notoriety for its very real cruelties. After Democratic lawmakers visited over the weekend, they sharply denounced the scenes they’d witnessed of migrants packed into cages under inhumane conditions. Meanwhile, detainees and family members have sounded alarms about worm-infested food and blistering heat. And the Miami Heraldreports that an unnervingly large percentage of the detainees lack criminal convictions.
But Uthmeier is getting feted on Fox News and other right wing media for this new experiment in spite of such notorieties—or perhaps because of them. There’s good reason to think more red state politicians will seek to create their own versions of “Alligator Alcatraz” or get in on this action in other ways—and that more young Republican politicians will see it as a path to MAGA renown and glory.
I’ll let this Washington Monthly article by Jonathan Alter end this increasingly depressing news dump today. “America Is Now a Police State, The Medicaid cuts are terrible; the ICE expansions are even worse.”
If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you have $75 billion over four years in new funding for ICE, you—Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan—will use it to fund a huge domestic army to round up four million people in the next three years, put them in “detention centers” and deport them.
If these cruel men planned to go after criminals, as they claimed, they would have needed only a fraction of the money that Republican lawmakers just gave them. And ending the genuine shortfall in the Department of Homeland Security budget doesn’t require this kind of dough.
So with virtually unlimited funds, they’ll make up for lost time. We’re already witnessing swarms of masked agents grabbing people off the street. Within weeks, it’ll get a lot worse. The grandma who has been here for 30 years paying taxes; the Dreamer college student who has been thoroughly American since he was a toddler; the small business owner who gets a traffic ticket—3,000 of them a day will be ripped from their families, sent to a prison and shipped to a country where they don’t know anyone.
Count on it. The iron law of government budgeting is use-it-or-lose-it. Only bureaucratic fools have money left over at the end of the fiscal year. ICE will spend billions on meeting Chief Homan’s arbitrary and inhumane quotas—the same kind of arrest quotas that drive police states all over the world, as Ronan Farrow hasexplained.
And the thousands of new Border Patrol agents? They already bring to mind those old ads about the Maytag Repairman—waiting in vain for something to happen. With border crossings plummeting, it’s only a matter of time before they’re shifted north for an even heavier presence in blue urban America.
Before long, many of us won’t even notice the roundups, just as white Californians in 1942 didn’t pay much heed when their Japanese-American neighbors were whisked away to detention camps in the desert.
That was an inexcusable act, but the conditions in those camps, while spare and dehumanizing, were not as bad as in the “Alligator Alcatraz” that Trump is gloating over. These will be jails—not camps—built to be as close to the abusive Salvadoran model as the president can make them. And the scale of his migrant gulag is much larger. All told, about 120,000 Japanese were interned. The capacity of the new detention centers is planned to be roughly 120,000 per day.
With most detainees only weeks or months from deportation, that means millions of new migrants cycling through. Many will have done nothing worse than Trump’s German immigrant grandparents (and my Jewish grandmother) did a century ago, namely, overstaying their visas. Of course, if they happen to be employed at a golf course or hotel (exempted by Trump for obvious personal reasons), they wouldn’t be in jail in the first place. Here’s where we’re headed: If migrants work on farms or in slaughterhouses (lots of both in red states), or a kitchen (hospitality), they’re OK or maybe even headed for amnesty, as Trump—to the dismay of MAGA—hinted last week. But if they cut grass, clean houses, or work in other occupations unprotected by the Dear Leader, off to jail you go.
Where are the children being held?🚨 Children, handcuffed and chained, being moved out of the LA Federal Building.July 10 – ICE & CBP raided two Glass House Farms sites in Camarillo and Carpinteria. Up to 319 undocumented workers arrested. At least 10 migrant kids were found. The youngest was 14.
I should have no words, but I do, and all of them are surrounded by expletives. There are actions on July 17th in the spirit of Good Trouble and the late Congressman John Lewis. Do what you can to lift your voice against this reign of terror. If I can’t find an action or get there, I wear my No Kings T-shirt wherever I go, and I get attention on the St Claude Bus like you wouldn’t believe. I have signs in my front yard. I talk to people. I show up where I can. Keep on walking. Keep on talking, marching to Freedomland.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and ACTION list today?
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“The National Divorce is a difficult time for all of us.” John Buss, repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It seems uniquely American to be focused on the drama between two rich narcissistic men when so many things are going sideways in this country and this world. It’s embarrassing and depressing.
The current zeitgeist appears to be privileged, cis white men trying to get rid of their small penis energy by displaying a hypertoxic version of masculinity. The entire White House has a Lord of the Flies vibe about it. The press has totally gotten carried away with the narcissistic displays of abuse, seemingly jolting between adolescent bouts of testosterone overdose, middle-life crises complete with bright red Teslas, and male menopause.
Meanwhile, a coterie of women display Lady Macbeth levels of ruthlessness, ambition, and descent into madness and body dysmorphia with their clownish plastic surgery. This is a mad court worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy with policies worthy of a Sinclair Lewis novel. The level of ignorance on display is beyond description. I can’t believe the news all day yesterday was obsessed with the madness of Yam Tits and Musk. Let’s focus on the damage they’ve done and leave them to their latest reality show.
I think political cartoonists have a better take on this ordeal than any media outlet. Then there’s the silent majorities in Congress, saying nothing, and doing anything but the people’s business. Not since the Iraq war have I seen more shock and awe. They governed during Watergate. Are they all afraid of the cult that serves Yam Tits? Maybe we should flood their offices with copies of the Constitution with Sharpie instructions saying DO YOUR JOB!
I’m sitting here wondering if I should even start in on all the mainstream media articles and coverage about Musk and Trump. Way to feed two men with obvious narcissistic personality disorder and a side of antisocial personality disorder.
Right now, I’ll start with ProPublica, which has reliably searched out stories worthy of Upton Sinclair or Nellie Bly. Once again, our own government is doing wrong by our veterans. It’s quite sad. “DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts. DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts. We obtained records showing how a Department of Government Efficiency staffer with no medical experience used artificial intelligence to identify which VA contracts to kill. “AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this,” one expert said.” This bit of investigative journalism is by Brandon Roberts, Vernal Coleman, and Eric Umansky.
The more I know about AI, see its use, and am forced to sit in seminars to learn the Purdue way of dealing with it, the more I want to write a sci-fi book where their programs go mad. I do not trust bros with personality disorders, likely on the spectrum, to think with real human insight. It makes me long for Isaac Asimov.
As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them.
The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts “MUNCHABLE.”
The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.
The DOGE AI tool flagged more than 2,000 contracts for “munching.” It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled — the Trump administration’s decisions on VA contracts have largely been a black box. The VA uses contractors for many reasons, including to support hospitals, research and other services aimed at caring for ailing veterans.
VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts overall. Congressional Democrats have been pressing VA leaders for specific details of what’s been canceled without success.
We identified at least two dozen on the DOGE list that have been canceled so far. Among the canceled contracts was one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. Another was to provide additional tools to measure and improve the care nurses provide.
ProPublica obtained the code and the contracts it flagged from a source and shared them with a half dozen AI and procurement experts. All said the script was flawed. Many criticized the concept of using AI to guide budgetary cuts at the VA, with one calling it “deeply problematic.”
Cary Coglianese, professor of law and of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the governmental use and regulation of artificial intelligence, said he was troubled by the use of these general-purpose large language models, or LLMs. “I don’t think off-the-shelf LLMs have a great deal of reliability for something as complex and involved as this,” he said.
Sahil Lavingia, the programmer enlisted by DOGE, which was then run by Elon Musk, acknowledged flaws in the code.
“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”
Though Lavingia has talked about his time at DOGE previously, this is the first time his work has been examined in detail and the first time he’s publicly explained his process, down to specific lines of code.
Further technical information can be found in this follow-up article at ProPublica. “Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to “Munch” Contracts Related to Veterans’ Health.”
Sahil Lavingia, who wrote the code, told it to cancel, or in his words “munch,” anything that wasn’t “directly supporting patient care.” Unfortunately, neither Lavingia nor the model had the knowledge required to make such determinations.
“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months, in an interview with ProPublica. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made.”
It turns out, a lot of mistakes were made as DOGE and the VA rushed to implement President Donald Trump’s February executive order mandating all of the VA’s contracts be reviewed within 30 days.
ProPublica obtained the code and prompts — the instructions given to the AI model — used to review the contracts and interviewed Lavingia and experts in both AI and government procurement. We are publishing an analysis of those prompts to help the public understand how this technology is being deployed in the federal government.
The experts found numerous and troubling flaws: the code relied on older, general-purpose models not suited for the task; the model hallucinated contract amounts, deciding around 1,100 of the agreements were each worth $34 million when they were sometimes worth thousands; and the AI did not analyze the entire text of contracts. Most experts said that, in addition to the technical issues, using off-the-shelf AI models for the task — with little context on how the VA works — should have been a nonstarter.
Lavingia, a software engineer enlisted by DOGE, acknowledged there were flaws in what he created and blamed, in part, a lack of time and proper tools. He also stressed that he knew his list of what he called “MUNCHABLE” contracts would be vetted by others before a final decision was made.
Even the word “munchable” makes these guys sound like 7th graders. I don’t even know what to say about the University of Michigan. I was a 7th grader when anti-Vietnam War protests picked up, but I don’t recall anything like this.
However, all over our institutions are in the service of racist and xenophobic Big Brother. (I really wish I could stop using references to dystopian literature, but sadly, it works.) This is from The Guardian. “University of Michigan using undercover investigators to surveil student Gaza protesters. Revealed: security trailing students on and off campus as video shows investigator faking disability when confronted.”
The University of Michigan is using private, undercover investigators to surveil pro-Palestinian campus groups, including trailing them on and off campus, furtively recording them and eavesdropping on their conversations, the Guardian has learned.
The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out of the way, according to student accounts and video footage shared with the Guardian.
Students say they have frequently identified undercover investigators and confronted them. In two bizarre interactions captured by one student on video, a man who had been trailing the student faked disabilities, and noisily – and falsely – accused a student of attempting to rob him.
The undercover investigators appear to work for Detroit-based City Shield, a private security group, and some of their evidence was used by Michigan prosecutors to charge and jail students, according to a Guardian review of police records, university spending records and video collected in legal discovery. Most charges were later dropped. Public spending records from the U-M board of regents, the school’s governing body, show the university paid at least $800,000 between June 2023 and September 2024 to City Shield’s parent company, Ameri-Shield.
Among those who say they’re being regularly followed is Katarina Keating, part of Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (Safe), a local chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Keating said the surveillance has caused her to feel “on edge”, and she often looks over her shoulder since November, when she was first followed.
“But on another level it sometimes feels comedic because it’s so insane that they have spent millions of dollars to hire some goons to follow campus activists around,” Keating added. “It’s just such a waste of money and time.”
How’s this for government efficiency? The NYPD and ICE mistakenly arrest a Chilean woman on vacation in New York City. Police left her 12-year-old daughter on the street alone. This country is no longer safe from arbitrary arrest and detention by morans in law enforcement.
There appears to be a bit of a correction of the DOGE overreach in the Federal Government. This is reported in the Washington Post by Hannah Natanson, Adam Taylor, Meryl Kornfield, Rachel Siegel, and Scott Dance. That’s a lot of reporters for a lot of agencies. “Trump administration races to fix a big mistake: DOGE fired too many people. Across the government, officials are rehiring federal workers who were forced out or encouraged to resign.” Do you suppose all the Trump/Musk drama is just a distraction from the kind of news that’s falling off the front pages but should be screamed in front-page headlines? They fucked up folks! Let’s bury the lede!
Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.
Since Musk left the White House last week, he and Trump have fallen out bitterly, sniping at each other in public over the cost of Trump’s sweeping tax legislation and government subsidies for Musk’s businesses. But even before that, the administration was working to undo some of DOGE’s highest-profile actions.
Trump officials are trying to recover not only people who were fired, but also thousands of experienced senior staffers who are opting for a voluntary exit as the administration rolls out a second resignation offer. Thousands more staff are returning in fits and starts as a conflicting patchwork of court decisions overturn some of Trump’s large-scale firings, especially his Valentine’s Day dismissal of all probationary workers, those with one or two years of government service and fewer job protections. A federal judge in April ordered the president to reinstate probationary workers dismissed from 20 federal agencies, although a few days later the Supreme Court — in a different case — halted another judge’s order to reinstate a smaller group.
Some fired federal employees, especially those at retirement age or who have since secured jobs in the private sector, are proving reluctant to return. So the administration is seeking work-arounds and stopgaps, including asking remaining staff to serve in new roles, work overtime or volunteer to fill vacancies, according to interviews with 18 federal workers across eight agencies and messages obtained by The Washington Post. A Post review found recent messy re-hirings at agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, the IRS, the State Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. In some cases, the government is posting new online job listings very similar to positions it recently vacated, a Post review of USAJobs found
The ever-shifting personnel changes are yet another strain on a workforce already weary of Trump-induced uncertainty, said current and former employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“They wanted to show they were gutting the government, but there was no thought about what parts might be worth keeping,” said one FDA staffer who was fired and rehired. “Now it feels like it was all just a game to them.”
Notice they just had to point out the Trump/Musk WWE event just to distract you for even a moment. It seems we no longer have caped crusaders but black-robed ones. This is from The Harvard Crimson. “Judge Blocks Trump Proclamation Banning International Students From Entering U.S. on Harvard Visas.” I’m just seeing Trump failures everywhere. No wonder they needed a new reality show season.
A federal judge granted Harvard’s request for a temporary restraining order hours after the University asked her to block the Trump administration’s Wednesday proclamation banning international students from entering the United States on Harvard-sponsored visas.
The order was issued just four hours after Harvard filed an amended complaint accusing the Trump administration of retaliating against the University by preventing incoming international students from entering the U.S. to attend Harvard.
U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs also announced that the court would extend the TRO first granted to Harvard on May 23 — one day after the DHS revoked Harvard’s eligibility to host international students — until June 20, the date requested by the University. Burroughs had already agreed to extend the TRO once before, following a May 29 hearing.
Thursday’s TRO will reinstate international students’ ability to enter the country to attend Harvard until a June 16 hearing scheduled by Burroughs — but the University will need to file for a preliminary injunction to extend its ability to host international students until the court determines its legality in court.
In the amended complaint, Harvard wrote that Trump’s proclamation was “a transparent attempt to circumvent the temporary restraining order this Court already entered against the summary revocation of Harvard’s SEVP certification.”
It argued that — without urgent action — the proclamation would have dramatic costs for admitted students attempting to enter the U.S. and subject current students to fear they would be arbitrarily deported.
Burroughs, in an order published well after working hours Thursday night, deemed that Harvard had made a “sufficient showing” that it would sustain “immediate and irreparable harm” unless a TRO was granted.
But both the TRO — and a future preliminary injunction, if Harvard seeks one and Burroughs rules favorably — are only provisional protections.
CBSshows that the Yam Tits Administration still thinks getting every little thing to the Supreme Court will solve all of its problems. Melissa Quinn reports that “Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow mass layoffs at Education Department.
President Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to clear the way for it to continue with its efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and lay off more than 1,300 employees while a legal fight over the future of the department moves forward.
The Justice Department is seeking the high court’s intervention in a pair of disputes brought by a group of 20 states, school districts and teachers unions, which challenge Mr. Trump’s plans to unwind the Department of Education. The president signed an executive order in March directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to facilitate the department’s closure to the maximum extent allowed under the law.
As part of Mr. Trump’s pledge to get rid of the department, the administration canceled a host of grants and executed a reduction in force, or a layoff, that impacted 1,378 employees — roughly a third of the department’s workforce. Affected workers were placed on administrative leave and were to receive full pay and benefits until June 9.
Mr. Trump also announced that the Small Business Administration would take over the Education Department’s student-loan portfolio, and the Department of Health and Human Services would handle special education, nutrition and other related services.
In response to the lawsuits challenging Mr. Trump’s actions, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the administration from carrying out its layoffs, finding that the reduction-in-force was a unilateral effort to close the department, which would violate the separation of powers.
Okay, this is an update, and I just had to put it up
Oh, speaking of those delightful Republican Congress Critters, here’s a headline for you from The Guardian. “Republican senator employs aide fired by DeSantis over neo-Nazi imagery. Nate Hochman, staffer for Eric Schmitt, also peddled far-right conspiracy theories as experts decry rise in extremism.” Gosh, another Cis White Male Christian Nationalist for Adolf! What a surprise!
A staffer for Missouri Republican senator Eric Schmitt was previously fired from Ron DeSantis’s unsuccessful presidential campaign after making a video containing neo-Nazi imagery, and later peddled far-right conspiracy theories in a Marco Rubio-linked thinktank.
Nate Hochman’s job in the hard-right senator’s office, along with earlier Trump appointments to executive agencies, suggest to some experts there are few barriers to far-right activists making a career in Republican party politics.
The Guardian contacted Eric Schmitt’s office for comment.
Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian: “Hochman’s position shows once again that there are no guardrails against extremists in the GOP nowadays.”
She added: “Racism, antisemitism and other abhorrent beliefs don’t seem to stop extremists from appointments with far-right politicians, including in the highest office of the presidency.”
Hochman, 26, has worked for Schmitt since February, according to congressional information website LegiStorm, a development that was first noted on political newsletter Liberal Currents.
He has also posted dozens of times to X to publicize Schmitt’s initiatives, media appearances, and speeches.
The Guardian reported last September on Hochman’s previous job at America 2100, an organization founded in 2023 as a thinktank. The organization was founded by Mike Needham, who served as Marco Rubio’s chief of staff from 2018 to 2023 when Rubio was a senator and who is once again his chief of staff at the state department.
In that and subsequent reporting, it was revealed that Hochman’s work for America 2100 was focused on producing videos, some of which targeted Haitian migrants in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and others that rehearsed conspiracy theories about LGBTQ people and human rights organizations.
This was the latest in a string of scandals in the young operative’s political career.
In July 2023 he was fired from the presidential campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis after retweeting a pro-DeSantis, anti-Trump video.
As the Guardian reported, the video portrayed a “‘Wojak’ meme, a sad-looking man popular on the right, against headlines about Trump policy failures before showing the meme cheering up to headlines about DeSantis and images of the governor at work”, all to the tune of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.
Finally, it superimposed DeSantis on to ranks of marching soldiers and a Sonnenrad – a Norse symbol frequently appropriated by neo-Nazis.
As Hochman departed the campaign, Axios reported he had made the video but endeavored to make it “appear as if it was produced externally”.
The New York Times has a Guest Op-Ed up from two law professors about how the Trump administration is giving a loyalty test to anyone looking for a job within the Federal Government. How unconstitutional is that? “How to Stack the Federal Work Force With ‘Patriotic Americans’ Who Agree With Trump.”
The White House took a step last week that significantly undercuts the idea that federal employment should be nonpartisan. A May 29 memo from the Office of Personnel Management may seem technical, but the policy that it outlines has grave implications for how the government functions and creates an unconstitutional political test for federal hiring.
At heart, the new policy is about viewpoint discrimination: People applying for federal jobs whose views the Trump administration does not like will not be hired. This is the most recent of the administration’s actions to undermine the nonpartisan Civil Service and consolidate control over almost all federal employees in the White House.
In a densely worded, 12-page memo, Vince Haley, an assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Charles Ezell, the acting O.P.M. director, make fealty to the president’s agenda a criterion for hiring for most federal positions. Imposing such a litmus test for nonpolitical positions runs afoul of the nearly 150-year-old federal Civil Service law, the 1939 Hatch Act and the First Amendment.
Under federal law, about 4,000 federal jobs are filled by political appointees. These positions allow the president to appoint those who share his views and to remove those who do not support his policy priorities. Most remaining federal jobs are hired based on nonpartisan and objective assessments of merit, and the hiring criteria are tied to the job duties.
The recent memo would, in effect, dramatically expand that exception for political appointees to include everyone at what’s known as level GS-5 or above — a group that includes clerical positions, technicians for soil conservation and firefighters. The ideologies and views of these individuals should play no role in their potential hiring.
The policy announced in the memo requires every person applying for a position level GS-5 or above to submit four essays. One requires that the applicant address: “How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant executive orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.” Another prompt: “How has your commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the United States inspired you to pursue this role within the federal government? Provide a concrete example from professional, academic or personal experience.”
Imagine that someone applying to be a secretary or a soil technician or a firefighter were to answer with: I believe the founding principles of this country were racist and I do not adhere to them. Or: I will perform my job to the best of my abilities and will follow federal law, but I do not see my position as political in any way.
It’s hard to imagine that those people would be hired. And yet, the Civil Service was created in the 19th century precisely to avoid such politically based hiring. The prohibition on political considerations in hiring was strengthened by the Hatch Act, which was enacted at the behest of conservatives who worried that too many Democrats had been hired to staff New Deal agencies.
One more Op-Ed from Dana Milbank at the Washington Post before I close. “They are not good at this. Nearly five months into Trump’s new reign of error, his administration’s mistakes are multiplying.
On May 29, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem released a “comprehensive list of sanctuary jurisdictions.” She was “exposing these sanctuary politicians” because they are “endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens.”
But it immediately became clear that the list of more than 500 states, counties and cities was riddled with errors: misspellings, cities and counties mistaken for each other, and places that don’t exist. Cincinnati became “Cincinnatti,” Campbell County (Kentucky) became “Cambell” County, Greeley County (Nebraska) became “Greenley” County, Takoma Park (Maryland) became “Tacoma” Park, while “Martinsville County” (Virginia) was invented. And so on.
Worse, scores of the “sanctuary politicians” she called out turned out to be leaders of MAGA counties and towns with no sanctuary policies on their books. Complaints poured in from Trump allies across the country. “You don’t have that many mistakes on such an important federal document,” said Pat Burns, the Trump-backing mayor of the right-wing stronghold of Huntington Beach, California, mislabeled as a sanctuary city. He told the Associated Press that “somebody’s got to answer” for this “negligent” behavior.
Good luck with that. The only answer was to disappear the list this week, leaving behind a “Page Not Found” error.
Such a massive screwup hadn’t happened since … well, the previous week, when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went to the White House and released his ballyhooed “Make America Healthy Again” report full of citations of studies that don’t exist, the product of AI hallucinations.
This, in turn, was reminiscent of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff rollout, which targeted an island full of penguins and other unpopulated or sparsely populated corners of the globe — and raised taxes on most of the world based on a math error.
And these, of course, were on top of the “mistakes” that led Trump officials to share war plans with a journalist, to deport people protected by court order, to launch a destructive fight with Harvard University, to fire and then attempt to rehire thousands of crucial federal workers, to cancel and then reinstate various vital government functions, and to misstate, often by orders of magnitude, the alleged savings from its cost-cutting attempts.
Trying to make sense of any of this? Page Not Found.
It’s obvious Trump is not interested in the best and brightest. They give him facts and truth over what he wants to hear and do, and that’s not what his massive need for attention and ego-stroking requires. Oh, up to 4000 words, and I still have managed to do something other than cover the two biggest jerks in the world jousting for air and social media time.
As you know, my Dad bombed NAZIs. I’d like to think I’d be capable of doing something brave if I were called to duty. He made it back. Many others did not. I’d just like to close with a remembrance of D-Day. There are still some D-Day vets out there who returned to the field. This is from the AP. “D-Day veterans return to Normandy to mark 81st anniversary of landings.” I remember growing up in absolute awe of all the men and women I met in my life who helped free the world of Fascists. I do not understand why the country is failing to do that now.
COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France (AP) — Veterans gathered Friday in Normandy to mark the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings — a pivotal moment of World War II that eventually led to the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s regime.
Along the coastline and near the D-Day landing beaches, tens of thousands of onlookers attended the commemorations, which included parachute jumps, flyovers, remembrance ceremonies, parades, and historical reenactments.
Many were there to cheer the ever-dwindling number of surviving veterans in their late 90s and older. All remembered the thousands who died.
Harold Terens, a 101-year-old U.S. veteran who last year married his 96-year-old sweetheart near the D-Day beaches, was back in Normandy.
“Freedom is everything,” he said. “I pray for freedom for the whole world. For the war to end in Ukraine, and Russia, and Sudan and Gaza. I think war is disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.”
Terens enlisted in 1942 and shipped to Great Britain the following year, attached to a four-pilot P-47 Thunderbolt fighter squadron as their radio repair technician. On D-Day, Terens helped repair planes returning from France so they could rejoin the battle.
Let us forever be thankful for their service and sacrifice. May we also remember that we were not alone in these battles. We have allies. At least at this moment. This song by the Dropkick Murphys is about World War 1, but the sentiment is the same.
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Edvard Munch painted this portrait of his brother at age 12
We’re living in upside-down world–or something. This morning before reporting for his trial, Trump claimed that people are being “mugged and killed outside” the courthouse. Based on reports from people who have attended the trial, it has been quiet there, with very few protesters from either side. This man is clinically insane. He belongs in a psychiatric hospital. And yet, he is supposedly leading Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race.
Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.
The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
Many Americans put the blame on Biden for the state of the economy, with 58% of those polled saying the economy is worsening due to mismanagement from the presidential administration.
The poll underscored people’s complicated emotions around inflation. The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing. In reality, the rate of inflation has fallen sharply from its post-Covid peak of 9.1% and has been fluctuating between 3% and 4% a year.
In April, the inflation rate went down from 3.5% to 3.4% – far from inflation’s 40-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 – triggering a stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones index to a record high.
A recession is generally defined by a decrease in economic activity, typically measured as gross domestic product (GDP), over two successive quarters, although in the US the National Bureau of Economic Research (NEBR) has the final say. US GDP has been rising over the last few years, barring a brief contraction in 2022, which the NEBR did not deem a recession….
The only recent recession was in 2020, early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, the US economy has grown considerably. Unemployment has also hit historic lows, wages have been going up and consumer spending has been strong.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s public approval rating this month fell to its lowest level in almost two years, tying the lowest reading of his presidency in a warning sign for his reelection effort, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.
The four-day poll, which closed on Monday, showed just 36% of Americans approve of Biden’s job performance as president, down from 38% in April. It was a return to the lowest approval rating of his presidency, last seen in July 2022. While this month’s drop was within the poll’s 3 percentage point margin of error, it could bode poorly for Biden as he faces off with Republican Donald Trump in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Biden, a Democrat, has been largely tied with Trump in national polls asking voters how they will vote. But Trump has had slight leads over Biden in many polls in the states seen as most likely to determine the winner in the U.S. Electoral College.
The poll laid out Biden’s weaknesses as well as a few strengths. The state of the economy was seen as the top issue, picked by 23% of respondents as the most important problem facing the country. Some 21% saw political extremism as the top issue and 13% picked immigration.
Some 40% of respondents in the poll said Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, had better policies for the U.S. economy, compared to 30% who picked Biden, while the rest said they didn’t know or didn’t answer the question.
Who are these people, and what is wrong with them? Apparently lots of them don’t even follow the news or politics at all. This is from Will Bunch’s email newsletter (I don’t have an on-line link, unfortunately): “The voters Biden is losing don’t read the New York Times. Many don’t read anything.”
The constantly simmering fire on social media about how the mainstream news media covers — or doesn’t cover — President Joe Biden had a 55-gallon barrel of gasoline tossed onto it this weekend. It started on Friday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the very first time — the latest in an apparent economic winning streak for the 46th president — and it barely garnered a peep in either the New York Times or Washington Post.
Biden’s most online fans were still seething about that slight two days later when some were shocked to see the Post put a U.S. economy story at the top of the Sunday paper, with the headline: “Buying slows as gloom spreads.” So with the lowest unemployment since the 1960s, the record stock market, real growth in wages and in sectors like manufacturing, that’s what the paper went with? Gloom?
Veteran journalist Kevin Drum instantly pulled up a slew of data that contradict the Post’s glum but mostly anecdotal analysis and asked “why does the Post publish a jumble of misleading or outright incorrect economic statistics instead of just looking them up first?” That kind of question — asking why these elite newsrooms or cable news outlets like MSNBC and CNN are quick to play up Biden’s age or stylistic stumbles while ignoring his accomplishments, as he remains in a dead heat with four-times-indicted Donald Trump — epitomizes the deeply held thought that Biden’s struggles are perhaps largely due to the myriad failings of the mainstream media.
Critics are absolutely right to be furious. But at the same time, I don’t think the New York Times is the reason Biden isn’t clobbering an opponent who’s stuck in a Manhattan courtroom facing 34 felony charges. I think his real problem is the millions of Americans who wouldn’t open the New York Times if you dropped it on their lap with a slice of pizza tucked inside.
Painting by Michaelangelo, age 13
There are basically three clumps of voters in America. There are — praise the Lord — millions of diligent, civic-minded Americans who watch debates or read news, somewhere, to better understand the candidates. But there is also a large pool of what I would call the disinformed, who also pursue information but get it from propaganda sites like Fox News that twist reality, or worse. Many of them liked Trump in 2016 and like him even more now.
The group where Biden used to do OK but is now struggling is a third bloc I’d call the uninformed. Either by choice or by the realities of working multiple jobs or going to school or raising kids, millions of Americans get no news other than the snippets that pop up on TikTok or somehow interrupt the football game. These folks don’t know the New York Times, but also no one at the New York Times knows these folks — until their odd views show up in the polls and everyone is shocked.
For all the deserved carping about negative portrayals of Biden and overly positive coverage of Trump in print, a recent NBC News poll found that among the dwindling number of Americans who identify newspapers as their primary news source, the incumbent Democrat is winning by landslide proportions, 70% to 21%. NBC also found Biden leading with the millions who still watch nightly news on the traditional networks. These viewers, like newspaper readers, tend to be older — and, yes, Biden leads among senior citizens. Maybe because they are better informed?
Conversely, I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that when ranked by news consumption, Trump’s biggest lead is with voters who say they don’t follow the news at all. In the NBC poll, one in seven reported they don’t follow politics — and they are supporting Trump by a solid 53-27% margin. This category is also the most likely to pick a third-party candidate like Robert F.Kennedy Jr., or Cornel West, or Jill Stein, and also most likely not to vote at all.
So basically, we’re fucked unless some of these no-nothings figure out that we’re headed for a dictatorship and decide maybe they’d like to keep some of their rights. Unfortunately, some of these no-nothings appear to be Supreme Court justices.
Everyone is waiting to see what the United States Supreme Court will do with Donald Trump’s outlandish claim he should be given absolute immunity from prosecution for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Oral arguments indicated that even the conservative justices have some concerns about that stance, but we’ve now learned that Justice Samuel Alito seems pretty on board with Trump’s coup attempt.
It’s yet another ethics scandal for the Court, and it’s a reminder that the right-wing justices operate in a realm of complete unaccountability.
Last week, the New York Times broke news that on January 17, 2021 — 11 days after Trump exhorted his supporters to storm the Capitol and three days before President Joe Biden’s inauguration — an upside-down American flag hung outside the Alito home in Alexandria, Virginia. Hanging the flag upside down is literally prohibited by the flag code, save for “as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” There’s a long tradition of upside-down flags being flown by protesters on the left and the right, but by January 17, 2021, it was widely known as a symbol used by “Stop the Steal” supporters.
How long the upside-down flag hung at the Alito home isn’t clear. The Times reviewed a January 18, 2021, email from a neighbor that said that it had been upside down for a number of days by that point. Several neighbors spoke to the Times about it but requested to remain anonymous, in part because they feared reprisal. Alito made a brief email statement to the Times, and while the statement succeeded in throwing his wife under the bus, it didn’t do much else. Alito said he “had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag” as it was “briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on lawn signs.”
Even if one takes this statement at face value, it falls far short of an explanation. Several days after an attempted insurrection, a Supreme Court justice let his wife hang a well-known symbol of that attempted insurrection because she got into a spat with the neighbors? Even if the lawn signs were “personally insulting” to the Alitos in some way, how is flying an upside-down flag a legitimate response?
Painting by Salvador Dali, age 4 or 6
Alito was more expansive with conservative Fox News correspondent Shannon Bream, but even in that friendly atmosphere, he couldn’t come up with a convincing explanation. He told Bream a neighbor had put up a sign that said “Fuck Trump,” and it was 50 feet from a children’s bus stop. Mrs. Alito decided to talk with those neighbors, but according to Alito, the conversation didn’t go well, and then those neighbors put up a sign that attacked his wife and blamed her for January 6.
Then, when the Alitos were taking a neighborhood stroll, Mrs. Alito got into an argument with one of the residents of that property, who called her “the c-word.” After that, she was distraught and decided to make what Fox News characterized euphemistically as “some sort of statement” by hanging the flag upside down. Notably, when the Washington Post spoke with a neighbor who described the content of the offending signs, they said they did not even mention the justice directly.
None of these additional details makes Alito or his wife look any better. The most charitable reading is that after a neighbor accused Mrs. Alito of being an insurrection enthusiast, she reacted by hoisting a symbol of support for insurrection. A Supreme Court justice’s wife is busy acting out the Matt Bors comic where a MAGA type reacts to hearing someone say Trump fans are racist by going full Nazi.
Needham goes on to explain why nothing will be done about this. I recommend reading the whole thing.
More insanity from Trump:
You probably heard that Judge Aileen Cannon unsealed some more DOJ documents yesterday, and the MAGA crowd discovered that when the FBI executes a search warrant, they are routinely authorized to use force if necessary. Now Trump is claiming that Joe Biden wanted the FBI to assassinate him when they searched Mar-a-Lago. Never mind that Trump was in New Jersey at the time and everyone–including the FBI–knew that.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has screwed up the Mar-a-Lago case in so many ways it defies easy categorization. Her slow rolling of the trial is obviously her single gravest sin. But there’s another layer of malfeasance going on here that came more clearly into view yesterday.
Over the objection of Special Counsel Jack Smith, Cannon ordered the unsealing of previous filings in the case. In some of those filings, it’s becoming apparent, Trump has tucked in information about the case that he wants to seed in the public imagination and use as fodder for his presidential campaign and for fighting the criminal charges outside of court.
Cannon has given him a green light to do so, and the results became apparent yesterday.
In one of the filings, Trump drew attention to the FBI’s deadly force policy, which was in effect during the search of Mar-a-Lago, as it is in every FBI field operation. As soon as the filing was unsealed, right-wing news outlets seized on it and accused Biden of being responsible for gunning for Trump.
Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE. NOW WE KNOW, FOR SURE, THAT JOE BIDEN IS A SERIOUS THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. HE IS MENTALLY UNFIT TO HOLD OFFICE—25TH AMENDMENT!
Of course none of this is true. The same deadly force policy that is in effect for every FBI operation was in effect for the Mar-a-Lago search. The FBI doesn’t need special authority to use deadly force; it has standing authority to use deadly force when circumstances warrant it. This is a standard operating policy, and Biden had nothing to do with its promulgation in general or its application in the Mar-a-Lago search in particular.
But you can see the dynamic plainly from what I just had to do to explain this to you: Trump wants to use the criminal justice process to generate more disinformation, Cannon facilitates him doing so with her rulings, right-wing media go apeshit, Trump gooses the reaction some more, and then a day later I come along and try to unpack it all for you, including the underlying falsity, with a put-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube futility. The FBI issued an unusual statement in similarly futile fashion.
This is all bad enough, but there’s another even darker layer here: It feeds the right-wing animosity toward federal law enforcement that has already led to two attacks on FBI field offices in the past two years.
Donald Trump on Tuesday falsely claimed in a campaign fundraising email that President Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” during a 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents, an extraordinary distortion of a standard FBI policy on the use of deadly force during such operations.
Painting by Pablo Picasso, age 8
Trump appeared to be referring to a law enforcement document, released Tuesday in court filings in the classified documents case, that describes the FBI’s plans for a court-authorized search on Aug. 8, 2022, at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club. FBI agents recovered classified material from Trump’s time in the White House — which the former president is now charged with illegally retaining. One page in the document includes a “policy statement” on the use of deadly force, which says officers may resort to lethal force only when the subject of such force poses an “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury” to an officer or another person.
Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, and some of his allies suggested Tuesday that this was evidence that Biden’s Justice Department was prepared to fatally shoot him. In fact, Trump was not at his Florida property the day of the search. FBI agents specifically sought to avoid a confrontation with Trump, choosing a day when Trump would not be at the property and giving the Secret Service a heads-up, The Washington Post previously reported.
A former president falsely accusing his successor and rival of posing a threat to his life is without precedent in modern U.S. history. The comments marked a sharp escalation of Trump’s baseless attacks on Biden, as the former president faces 88 criminal charges across fo perur indictments in federal and state courts. Trump has frequently accused Biden of weaponizing the legal system against him in coordination with the Justice Department and local prosecutors. There is no evidence of such coordination.
A Tuesday evening fundraising email from the Trump campaign that was signed in the candidate’s name arrived with the subject line, “They were authorized to shoot me!” and said of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
Trump also wrote Tuesday on his social media site, Truth Social, that “Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their Illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL) FORCE.”
The horrifying thing is that at least 30 percent of people probably believe this.
The task before Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the classified documents case of Donald Trump, is not easy. She must protect Mr. Trump’s constitutional rights while also ensuring the prompt and fair administration of justice.
Still, it is inexcusable that she is utterly failing to keep the case moving along in a fair but timely manner. And unfortunately, there isn’t much that the special counsel in the case, Jack Smith, can do about it.
While working as an attorney in the C.I.A.’s Office of General Counsel, I developed an expertise in Espionage Act prosecutions similar to the one pending against Mr. Trump, who is accused of illegally taking classified state documents from the White House after he left office and then obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them. I know firsthand that cases like this can be quite complicated and lengthy.
Self-Portrait by Albrecht Dürer, age 13
But outside of the unique issues raised by Mr. Trump’s status as a former president (for example, immunity and the Presidential Records Act), the prosecution against him is actually not particularly complex. The volume of classified records subject to discovery is not outside the norm, and if the defendant were not Donald Trump, this would be a relatively routine Espionage Act prosecution for unlawful retention of classified records.
With a competent and determined judge, Mr. Trump’s due process rights could have been well protected and the trial could have reasonably been set for this summer. However, this is not the first time Judge Cannon — a Trump appointee — has granted delay after delay, and thanks to a recent schedulingorder, it’s now all but certain that the case will not go to trial until after Election Day.
If Mr. Trump wins the election, the case will be effectively over. The Trump Justice Department would almost certainly dismiss the indictment at his behest when the clock strikes noon on Jan. 20, 2025.
Informed voters know all this, of course, but the uniformed people who respond to polls may not even know that Trump stole hundreds of highly classified documents and stored them in a bathroom and on a stage in large hall at his private club.
One way of taking a measure of how Judge Cannon has failed is by looking at the progress of pretrial litigation, which started soon after Mr. Trump was indicted in June 2023. In a criminal trial, the purpose of pretrial litigation is threefold: to ensure the defense gets access to all discoverable material; to resolve “dispositive” motions that could result in dismissal of the case if granted, like Mr. Trump’s presidential immunity assertion; and to determine what the trial will look like. The latter is an especially important task here given that Mr. Trump is charged with illegally mishandling some of our most closely guarded secrets, which could be further compromised depending on how they are used at a public trial.
Measured against these goals, Judge Cannon has made almost no progress over the past 11 months. That is shocking and indefensible.
On the scope of discovery, Judge Cannon has failed to rule on Mr. Trump’s motion — filed four months ago — to compel additional discovery from the government. Under her new schedule, she may not rule on it until July. A ruling granting Mr. Trump’s motion could result in months of additional delays.
The discovery and use of classified information is one of the thornier issues in cases of this nature. Here, too, the judge has made almost no progress, and her inexperience is showing. She has ruled on just one substantive motion with respect to Mr. Trump, which was filed by the government in December and applied to only a sliver of the classified information at issue in the case. Under her new scheduling order, the next phase of litigation involving classified information won’t begin until mid-June. Judge Cannon won’t even begin to address the difficult questions about how classified information will be used and disclosed at trial until August at the earliest, even though Mr. Trump’s team has had access to over 90 percent of the classified discovery since last fall.
On efforts to dismiss the case, in February, Mr. Trump made seven such motions, and so far Judge Cannon has ruled on only two. Some of them are plainly frivolous, but she has insisted on extensive hearings for each one, some of which have not been held yet.
I feel sick just reading this. There’s more at the link.
That’s about all I can take today; I’m going to have to take some deep breaths and do something other than read or watch the news for awhile. Before I go, here are some links to interesting stories:
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.
Select lawmakers were around yesterday for a hearing about the lastest, criminal act by our country against Venezuelan boats. The stories offered up by the Department of War were quite different than the story told by the film. 
Another boat was targeted by the Pentagon in the Pacific. This is from 
U.S Foreign and Military policy has become so incoherent, illegal, dangerous, and likely leaked to our country’s traditional enemies, that our European partners no longer trust us. This link was shared to me by BB this morning and comes from 
If that doesn’t give you geopolitical goosebumps, I don’t know what will. Meanwhile, we’ve been experiencing press coverage that’s not providing us the information we need. This article is from 
I’ve probably over shared most of the excerpts and it will take you some time to get through them all. BB also wrote yesterday on the many ways our country is run by idiots with an angend American’s do not approve of and in a way that is beyond incompetent. Any of us in cities Occupied by the National Guard and Ice have horrors stories that sound more like NAZI Germany than your backyard. They have no incentive stop and they’re even ignoring court orders. This article is the view point of my home city by the
None of this sounds lawful. I’m not a Constitutional lawyer, but I do know that everyone deserves their day in court. Disappearing people is criminal.
Even the ladies on the view have a better handle on this nonsense than most of the news media. This is from 
Perhaps we need a national GoFundMe for relieving Trump of his duties due to mental deficiencies. I always look to Ruth Ben-Ghiat for some rational and data-based explanations of our situation. Her blog, 
I really don’t want to be making you have nightmares tonight, but there needs to be some bud-nipping about his virality, sanity, and a third term right now. I’m getting tired of propaganda driving decisions for this country. Here’s some more news that should make you shiver. This is from AXIOS and written by Emily Peck. “The economy is in uncharted territory.” Literally.
This is no way to run a modern economy. We’re now on the IMF warning list. This is via
I can’t get over what’s going on with the Epstein Case. It sounds like the chickens are coming home to roost. Lady Justice knows the victims need closure and peace. As an activist against the abuse of women and children since I was 17 years old, I can only say we still haven’t caught up with what would be proper Justice. However, if this is what ultimately splits the MAGA coalition into pieces, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings or sensibilities at all. If the heat hasn’t driven me to take multiple baths, this story has added to it. You know if Yam Tits is obsessively using his Truth Social Platform, that he certainly knows there’s damning evidence of it. The AG has his back, and it’s a disgusting place for a woman.
Let’s see. He’s losing Fox, Loomer, Patel, and Bongino. This might be fun to watch after all. Although I still think I’ll need a lot of baths.
Adam Wren and Dasha Burns of
More on this at the link. Heather Cox Richardson brings a historian’s perspective to her 
You may want to read 
I’ll let this 
I’m sitting here wondering if I should even start in on all the mainstream media articles and coverage about Musk and Trump. Way to feed two men with obvious narcissistic personality disorder and a side of antisocial personality disorder. 
Further technical information can be found in this follow-up article at 
There appears to be a bit of a correction of the DOGE overreach in the Federal Government. This is reported in the 
Notice they just had to point out the Trump/Musk WWE event just to distract you for even a moment. It seems we no longer have caped crusaders but black-robed ones. This is from 
CBS 
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