“He does have a sense of humor.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The top headline today from Public Notice sums it up nicely. “Crime is down. But Trump’s authoritarian power grabs are escalating. Random street crimes are being used as pretexts for repression.” Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden is one big tacky cement patio bedecked with tacky patio furniture and yellow umbrellas that look like a field of dildos. The Oval Office is bedecked with gold spray-painted Baroque Cherubs and has the feel of a tacky brothel mimicking Versailles. These changes are about as necessary as tariffs. The worst of it will be a ballroom with the same tacky aesthetic. Meanwhile, the Big Budget-Busting bill will leave people starving, ill, and homeless. I smile at a young black man with a loaded shopping cart, as he heads down Burgundy Street this morning to the various homeless encampments at the abandoned Navy Base bordering the canal and the Mississippi. Once again, VooDoo Economics takes its toll. Then, there are the tariffs and the dearth of tourists this season.
Justin Glawe writes the story behind the headline.
The White House has seized on two unrelated incidents of street crime as a pretext for a federal government power grab at a time when violent crime has, in fact, dropped across the country.
The attempted carjacking of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine in Washington DC and a street brawl in Cincinnati are the latest cause célebrè on the American right, which has long supported Donald Trump’s plans for military and law enforcement crackdowns in largely Democratic cities. Both incidents are being used as anecdotal evidence of out-of-control crime across the country — a narrative that is necessary for Trump and Republicans to maintain their grip of fear on their MAGA base.
And it’s worked: a Gallup poll in October found that 64 percent of Americans believed crime had gone up in 2024, but new data from the FBI shows that is not the case. In fact, 2024 saw the lowest levels of violent crime since 1969, with violent crime down 4.5 percent across the country, including a 14.9 percent drop in murders.
The events being seized upon by the White House and Republicans as evidence of surging crime have little to do with one another save for the fact that the victims are white. In the case of the brawl in Cincinnati, those “victims” may not be entirely innocent: two white men faced off against a largely Black crowd on July 26, with one of the men spewing a racial slur. The other white man involved may have been a willing combatant in the melee, slapping a Black man in the face and squaring off to fight, as seen in videos circulating online. (Police have disputed that the slap was the impetus of the brawl.)
While the exact cause of the brawl isn’t entirely clear, videos of the incident have gone viral, framed by right-wing media as a “Black mob” beating innocent whites. On her show last Thursday night, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked a victim in the attack whether it was “racially motivated in any direction.” Neither Ingraham or the guest noted the use of the racial slur.
Vice President JD Vance and other prominent Republicans have politicized the incident, using it as an opportunity to call for everything from replacing judges to increasing funding for police.
At the same time, Trump, Elon Musk, and others have used the alleged carjacking of Coristine as justification for a federal takeover of Washington DC. Last week, Trump threatened to “FEDERALIZE” Washington, sharing a photo of a bloodied Coristine on Truth Social. Later, Trump reiterated the threat and called for juveniles to be charged as adults. He’s holding a news conference this morning to announce some sort of takeover of DC amid reports that hundreds of National Guard troops will be deployed to the city this week.
“Somebody from DOGE was very badly hurt last night. A young man who was beat up by a bunch of thugs in DC,” Trump said last Tuesday. “And either they’re gonna straighten their act out in terms of government and in terms of protection or we’re gonna have to federalize.”
This morning’s Washington Post describes Trump’s response thusly. “Trump orders federal moves on D.C. crime, takes over D.C. police. The president is planning to flex his law enforcement power over Washington, declaring that he would clear the city of homeless people and crack down on crime.” Am I the only one who sees the pandering to power in this headline?” This hardly compares to the violence, destruction, and crimes that happened on January 6.
President Donald Trump announced Monday that he was placing the D.C. police under direct federal control and will deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington to fight crime, an extraordinary flex of federal power that stripped city leadership of its ability to make law enforcement decisions andcould expose residents of the nation’s capital to unpredictable encounters with a domestically deployed military force.
The decision totake over the Metropolitan Police Department anddeploy 800 National Guard troops comes as the president has been slamming America’s cities as places where crime is out of control, despite two years of declines that have brought homicide levels in many major cities to their lowest levels in decades.
The administration has already mobilized FBI agents in recent days in overnight shifts to help local law enforcement prevent carjackings and violent crime, officials said. Because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has unusually sweeping powers to intervene over the objections of its residents and leaders, giving the president an opportunity to use it as a laboratory for a militarized approach to urban crime-fighting.
Trump portrayed a sweeping vision of law enforcement on the streets of Washington, declaring that federal agents, D.C. police and the National Guard would use physical force to intimidate
“They fight back until you knock the hell out of them, because it’s the only language they understand,” Trump told reporters at a White House news conference. “It’s a disgusting thing.”
“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness, and we’re getting rid of the slums, too,” Trump added. “I know it’s not politically correct.https://www.facebook.com/ You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we’re getting rid of the slums where they live.”
Trump has portrayed crime in the nation’s capital as spiraling upward. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has noted repeatedly that violent crime has declined for the past two years after a sharp post-pandemic spike in 2023.
All this is happening while the majority of Americans are like me. How the hell am I going to buy groceries this week? This headline is from Forbes Magazine. “Almost 90% of Americans Are Worried About The Cost Of Groceries. The story is written by Mary Whitfill Roeloffs.
Almost 90% of American adults say they’re stressed about the cost of groceries, a new poll out Monday shows, as the price of food rises and items like poultry, ground beef and eggs see the biggest cost jumps.
Key Facts
More than half of Americans (53%) see grocery prices as a major source of stress and another 33% see it as a minor source of stress, according to a new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
More people were concerned about grocery prices than any other financial concern brought up in the poll, but more than half of respondents also said they were at least somewhat stressed about their salaries, the cost of housing, the amount of money they have saved, their credit card debt and the cost of health care.
The Consumer Price Index shows the price of food has risen 3% in the last 12 months—groceries have risen 2.4% while dining out is 3.8% costlier than it was 12 months ago.
From June 2024 to June 2025, groceries got more expensive in every category tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: meats, poultry, fish and eggs rose in price by 5.6% (egg prices alone rose 27.3%); nonalcoholic beverages are 4.4% more expensive; fruits and vegetables rose in price by 0.7%; and both cereals and bakery products and the index for dairy products rose 0.9%.
At 3%, the cost of food is rising faster than the overall inflation rate as measured by the Consumer Price Index, at 2.7%.
After groceries, the price of housing had the highest number of people reporting it as a major stressor in Monday’s poll (47%), followed by the amount of money saved (43%), salary (43%) and the cost of health care (42%).
81 cents. That’s how much the price of chicken breast increased, per pound, from July 2024 to July 2025, according to NBC News, making it the largest price hike among the six staple items tracked by the outlet. The cost of ground beef increased 67 cents per pound, while eggs grew 64 cents more expensive per dozen.
Are we great again yet?
With American Foreign Policy out to lunch, Bibi Netanyahu has expanded his genocidal and authoritarian attack on Gaza. This is the latest step taken by the accused War Criminal. This is from The Guardian. “Anas al-Sharif, prominent Al Jazeera correspondent, among five journalists killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza. Israel admits deliberate attack on the journalist, known for frontline coverage, in a strike on a tent outside al-Shifa hospital.” How are we falling back into 20th-century fascism when so many of us have been thoroughly educated on both World Wars?
A prominent Al Jazeera journalist who had previously been threatened by Israel has been killed along with four colleagues in an Israeli airstrike.
Anas al-Sharif, who was one of Al Jazeera’s most recognisable faces in Gaza, was killed while inside a tent for journalists outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Sunday night. His funeral was held on Monday morning.
Seven people in total were killed in the attack, including al-Sharif, Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal and Moamen Aliwa, according to the Qatar-based broadcaster.
The Israel Defense Force admitted the strike, claiming the reporter had “served as the head of a terrorist cell in the Hamas terrorist organisation and was responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF forces”.
It claimed it had intelligence and documents found in Gaza as proof but rights advocates said he had been targeted for his frontline reporting on the Gaza war and that Israel’s claim lacked evidence.
Calling al-Sharif “one of Gaza’s bravest journalists,” Al Jazeera said the attack was “a desperate attempt to silence voices in anticipation of the occupation of Gaza.”
Last month Israeli IDF spokesperson Avichai Adraee shared a video of al-Sharif on X and accused him of being a member of Hamas’ military wing. At the time the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, Irene Khan, called it “an unsubstantiated claim” and a “blatant assault on journalists”.
What passes for US foreign policy is the usual lovefest between Putin and Yam Tits. This is from The Bulwark. This story is reported by Cathy Young. “Alaska Summit: Trump and Putin Planning to Carve Up Ukraine. It’s hard to see anything good coming from the meeting of the president and his hero.”
REMEMBER WHEN, A FEW WEEKS BACK, commentators suddenly started talking about Donald Trump’s “pivot” or “dramatic shift” on Ukraine and Russia? The promises of aid to the one and scary sanctions against the other? Trump’s tough talk about the “bullshit thrown at us” by Vladimir Putin and the “nice phone calls” followed by bombings of Ukrainian cities? The fifty-day deadline to make peace or else, which then abruptly became a ten- to twelve-day deadline that expired over the last few days?
Well, guess what. The pivot seems to have fully unpivoted. We’re back to more diplomacy for dummies by Trump’s real estate pal and golf buddy Steve Witkoff, who went on another trip to Moscow and had—as Trump announced with a straight face on Truth Social—a “highly productive meeting” with Putin. So productive, in fact, that it took a while to figure out exactly what sort of deal Putin offered Witkoff, since Witkoff initially reported a garbled—and more attractive—version of the offer. (Witkoff did get to consume a monster-sized cheburek meat pie which greatly excited the Russian media, so it wasn’t a total loss. Oh, and he brought back an Order of Lenin that Putin gave him for a CIA deputy director whose son was killed in the Donbas last year fighting for the Russians. Is Putin trolling Trump at this point?)
And now, Trump and Putin are set to have a summit in Alaska (of all places!) this coming Friday. Trump’s initial proposal for a three-way summit with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has quietly fallen by the wayside; Vice President JD Vance has told Fox News that “we’re trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that” for the three to meet. So Zelensky may yet get invited to Alaska, but it’s not clear if he will ever be in the same room with Putin. At least for now, it looks like the summit will be a blatant violation of a principle repeatedly proclaimed by Western leaders, from Joe Biden to former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg: “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Or, in as Russian-Ukrainian political scientist Vladimir Pastukhov, currently a scholar at University College London, put it in an interview: “Two mob bosses decided to sit down and have a chat about the capitulation of Ukraine.”
Of course, we don’t know at this point what the final version of the proposed settlement will look like. Trump has talked about “some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.” Presumably, this means that Ukraine will be expected to cede territory that Russia wants but hasn’t managed to seize in exchange for other Ukrainian territory illegally occupied by Russia. But even that, it turns out, is unlikely to happen: Russia is demanding unilateral land concessions in exchange for a peace agreement or a temporary truce. Zelensky has already rejected such concessions, as he has consistently done since the invasion.
But whatever the outcome of the summit, its mere fact already hands Putin a huge win—unless, of course, Trump should decide that after Zelensky’s disgraceful Oval Office humiliation in February, it’s Putin’s turn for an internationally televised verbal beatdown. (Right. And then he’ll give Ukraine a shipment of alien superweapons from a super-secret vault in Area 51.)
I really don’t know what to make of this headline. Maybe this is how Trump plans to pay for his extensive wrecking of the White House. “U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China. In a highly unusual arrangement with President Trump, the companies are expected to kick 15 percent of what they make in China to the U.S. government.” And of course, this cost gets passed forward from the businesses to the consumers. This is reported by the New York Times.
Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are expected to pay the United States 15 percent of the money they take in from selling artificial intelligence chips to China, as part of a highly unusual financial agreement with the Trump administration.
The deal, which was described by three people familiar with the agreement who spoke anonymously because they didn’t have permission to discuss it publicly, comes a month after Nvidia received permission to sell a version of its artificial intelligence chips to China.
While the Trump administration publicly said a month ago that it was giving the green light to Nvidia to sell an A.I. chip called H20 to China, it did not actually issue the licenses making those sales possible.
On Wednesday, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, met with President Trump at the White House and agreed to give the federal government its 15 percent cut, essentially making the federal government a partner in Nvidia’s business in China, said the people familiar with the deal. The Commerce Department began granting licenses for A.I. chip sales two days later, these people said.
Though Mr. Huang has led negotiations with the White House, Nvidia isn’t the only company that sells A.I. chips to China. AMD has an A.I. chip called the MI308 and in April the Trump administration also banned sales of it to the Chinese.
There are few precedents for the Commerce Department agreeing to grant licenses for exports in exchange for a share of revenue. But the unorthodox payments are consistent with Mr. Trump’s increasingly interventionist role in international business deals involving American companies. In June, the administration approved investment by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, in U.S. Steel in a deal that included a so-called golden share in the company, a rarely used practice where the government takes a stake in a business.
The administration is also using tariffs as a stick to bring manufacturing to the United States. Last week, Mr. Trump said that tech companies would have to pay a 100 percent tariff on semiconductors made abroad, unless they invested in the United States.
The deal agreed to last week could funnel more than $2 billion to the U.S. government. Nvidia was expected to sell more than $15 billion worth of its H20 chip to China through the end of the year, and AMD was expected to sell $800 million, according to Bernstein Research.
The Commerce Department, White House and AMD didn’t provide comment on Sunday.
Ken Brown, a spokesman for Nvidia, said that the company follows the U.S. government’s rules for sales abroad. “While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide,” he said.
Okay, so tell me the one about “free markets” again. I’ll end with this opinion piece in the Guardianby Steven Greenhouse. “Trump is losing his foolish trade war. This will cost ordinary Americans greatly. Trump’s trade war has pushed up inflation, slashed US job gains, slowed economic growth and caused the manufacturing sector to sputter.” I started my study of economics back on the cusp of the Carter/Reagan years. I absolutely thought we’d learned the lessons of what not to do by that time. It’s amazing that the “Voodoo Economics” of that period and the resulting stagflation is back here in the future. It’s being replayed by the same, but much older group of idiots.
The ever-bombastic Donald Trump has boasted repeatedly of his trade victories, while White House news releases trumpet his “historic trade wins”. The Wall Street Journal echoed Trump’s triumphalism with a headline saying, “Trump is Winning His Trade War”, and last week the New York Times used the exact same words in a headline. That must have been music to the president’s ears.
Forgive me for being a spoilsport, but I don’t see where the victory is or how Trump is winning. I keep reading how Trump’s trade war and tariff machinations have pushed up inflation, slashed US job gains, slowed economic growth and caused the manufacturing sector to sputter.
The rate of job growth plunged by over 70% in the three months after Trump unveiled his 2 April “liberation day” tariffs that filled corporate executives with uncertainty and dread. Trump is palpably impatient for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, but the higher prices resulting from his tariffs are likely to delay the rate cuts he desperately wants. So can someone please tell me where is the victory here?
Trump further proclaims that his tariffs are wondrous because, he says, they will generate trillions of dollars in revenue for the US Treasury. But those revenues will come out of the hides of tens of millions of American consumers who will pay Trump’s taxes on imports. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the price increases caused by Trump’s tariffs will cost the typical US household $2,400 in 2025. As a result of the tariffs, the budget lab says, apparel prices will soar 37% and shoe prices 39%. What Trump boasts as a win is a loss for millions of typical Americans.
Some economists are warning that Trump’s tariffs will bring back stagflation, a dangerous combination of rising prices and slowing growth last seen in the 1970s. Pointing to signs of stagflation, BMO Economics wrote: “Economic activity and job growth are sputtering under the weight of higher tariffs, increasing inflation and rising economic policy and trade uncertainty.” Doesn’t look as if Trump’s trade war is winning there.
Trump recently said on CNBC’s Squawk Box that “people love the tariffs”, but evidently the people he’s talking about aren’t the American people. A recent Fox News poll of registered voters found that Americans overwhelming disapprove of Trump’s tariff policies by 62% to 36%. Ben May, a forecaster at Oxford Economics, said his tariffs will hurt US families because “they are obviously raising prices … and squeezing household incomes”.
Many days it seems that Trump tries to dominate the news cycle with some tariff announcement or other: 50% on Brazil, double India’s tariffs to 50%, impose a 100% tariff on semiconductors. (Even some Maga folks probably think he uses tariff announcements to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.) This week the White House dismayed the world by announcing that Trump would impose tariffs, ranging from 15% to 50%, on 90 countries effective Thursday. As a result of Trump’s tariff craze, the average effective tariff rate on imports into the US will be 18%, up from 2.3% last year – the highest level since the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 worsened the Great Depression.
Yes, it’s Make the Great Depression Great Again time!
I need a few stories with a cute baby hippopotamus and a few other cuddly creatures. It’s really hard to face this news daily. I do not understand how this lived experience isn’t hitting more people in the head. Well, the billionaires are getting a tax cut in perpetuity.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
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?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
“I think White House Goebbels cracked a smile.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
It’s another record-breaking heat and humidity day in the Big Easy. I’m doing my part of taking it easy by hanging out under a ceiling fan and a tower fan. I always feel like I should be growing gills on days like this as an evolutionary measure. It’s hard to be in climate change denial down here, but I still see folks thinking it’s just a bit of odd weather. Summers are always hot, you know. While checking for other headlines, I found this one at The Guardian. I wanted to put it up top here before I get carried away by the L.A. protests. “Trump’s EP to claim power-plant emissions ‘not significant’ – but study says otherwise, US power sector would be world’s sixth largest emitter of planet-heating greenhouse gas if it were a country – study.”
Donald Trump’s administration is set to claim planet-heating pollution spewing from US power plants is so globally insignificant it should be spared any sort of climate regulation.
But, in fact, the volume of these emissions is stark – if the US power sector were a country, it would be the sixth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reportedly drafted a plan to delete all restrictions on greenhouse gases coming from coal and gas-fired power plants in the US because they “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” and are a tiny and shrinking share of the overall global emissions that are driving the climate crisis.
However, a new analysis shows that the emissions from American fossil-fuel plants are prominent on a global scale, having contributed 5% of all planet-heating pollution since 1990. If it were a country, the US power sector would be the sixth largest emitter in the world, eclipsing the annual emissions from all sources in Japan, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Canada, among other nations.
“That seems rather significant to me,” said Jason Schwartz, co-author of the report from New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity. “If this administration wants to argue only China has significant emissions they can try to do that, but a court will review that, and under any reasonable interpretation will find that US power plant emissions are significant too.”
Fossil fuel-derived electricity is responsible for the second largest source of emissions in the US, behind transportation. No country in history has caused more carbon pollution than America, and while its power sector’s emissions have declined somewhat in recent years, largely through a market-based decline in heavily-polluting coal, it remains a major driver of the climate crisis.
The cocktail of toxins emitted by power plants have a range of impacts, the NYU analysis points out. A single year of emissions in 2022 will cause 5,300 deaths in the US from air pollution over many decades, along with climate impacts that will result in global damages of $370bn, including $225bn in global health damages and $75bn in lost labor productivity.
“We were surprised when we ran the numbers just how quickly these deaths start tallying up,” said Schwartz. “All of these harms stack up on top of each other. Climate change will be the most important public health issue this century and we can’t just ignore the US power sector’s contribution to that public health crisis.”
Last night, I watched BBC Live again for decent coverage of the L.A. Riots. I haven’t been this reliant on UK-based media since the Nixon Days. I woke up to lots of complaints on social media posts about the coverage of the Cable News presentation. I luckily found BBC Live after seeing reruns of old news programs on both MSNBC and CNN. The main channels had sporadic coverage. It was old-fashioned style coverage where the reporter at the scene reported, and the guy or girl in the chair asked questions. Reporters from the UK (Nick Stern), Xinhua, China, and Australia were hit. Australian Reporter Lauren Thompson from 9News was on air when a police officer aimed and fired at her legs.
US correspondent Lauren Tomasi was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet fired by a police officer who was standing guard in the city’s downtown district.
It happened on the third day of violent protests that erupted in the US’s second-most populous city in response to sweeping arrests of alleged illegal immigrants.
Tomasi was struck as she reported live near the front line of the protests surrounding the city’s metropolitan detention centre.
Just seconds after she wrapped up a live cross to Australia, one of the officers turned his gun towards Tomasi and fired at her from close range.
She yelled in pain before the camera turned away. Tomasi was left sore but otherwise unharmed.
You may watch their footage at the link. Several reporters at the scene have complained that the L.A. Police had targeted them even though they were clearly wearing clothing and helmets identifying them as press. Yam Tits sent the California National Guard to the scene even though neither Mayor Bass or Governor Newsome had asked for the Guard to be activated. There are clear legal problems with this, and the Governor is acting on them.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Monday post that California will sue President Trump, saying he “illegally acted” to federalize the National Guard during protests against federal immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.
The big picture: Trump on Saturday signed a memorandum calling in the National Guard — despite opposition from the state’s and the city’s Democratic leadership.
Driving the news: Newsom, after saying Sunday that the Golden State would be taking Trump to court, wrote in a Monday X post that the president had “flamed the fires.”
He added, “The order he signed doesn’t just apply to CA. It will allow him to go into ANY STATE and do the same thing. We’re suing him.”
Trump’s order cited “[n]umerous incidents of violence and disorder” and “violent protests” but did not specifically mention California or the Los Angeles area.
The other side: “Gavin Newsom’s feckless leadership is directly responsible for the lawless riots and violent attacks on law enforcement in Los Angeles,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement provided to Axios.
Jackson continued, “Instead of filing baseless lawsuits meant to score political points with his left-wing base, Newsom should focus on protecting Americans by restoring law and order to his state.”
Friction point: Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and other Democrats have argued Trump’s deployment of the National Guard was an unnecessary escalation, while Trump administration officials have railed against their leadership.
Border czar Tom Homan did not rule out arrests for Democratic officials in the state should they impede law enforcement or harbor undocumented immigrants in a Saturday interview with NBC News, but said he does not believe Bass had “crossed the line yet.”
“Come and get me, tough guy,” Newsom wrote in response.
Homan, in a Monday morning interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” argued the NBC report was “dishonest.”
“I was clear they haven’t crossed the line,” Homan said Monday. “But they’re not above the law either.”
“I was clear they haven’t crossed the line,” Homan said Monday. “But they’re not above the law either.”
Zoom in: Hegseth in his Monday post included a clip from an interview with commentator Brian Tyler Cohen in which the governor described Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as “a joke” and characterized Trump as “unhinged.”
“This is a preview for things to come,” he said. “This isn’t about LA, per se. It’s about us today, it’s about you, everyone watching, tomorrow.”
Context: Trump’s Saturday memorandum, which called into federal service some 2,000 National Guard personnel for 60 days, cited rarely used federal powers and sidestepped Newsom.
“That move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions,” Newsom said in a statement.
David R Lurie–writing at the Substack Public Notice–has this headline this morning. “A felon in the White House is making crime legal. Meanwhile, he’s creating fake crimes to punish the law-abiding.”
Trumpists have resorted to inventing new offenses so as to transform law-abiding immigrants into criminals. For example, Trump has declared slivers of land along the border to be “military zones” for the sole purpose of charging migrants with trespassing. The administration has also declared that undocumented immigrants have an obligation to “register” with the government so they can be indicted for failing to do so. They’re jailing immigrants who legally entered the United States under a Biden-era asylum law by retroactively declaring the program to be “illegal.”
Most tellingly, and insidiously, ICE agents desperate to meet the increasing quotas the White House has set for deporting “illegals” have taken to targeting the most vulnerable immigrants: Those intent on following the law and engaging in productive work.
As Sen. Markwayne Mullin put it on CNN yesterday, “regardless of what they may be doing right now” — including whether they are abiding by the law and are gainfully employed — undocumented persons “are illegal and they are criminals.”
It’s become routine for gangs of ICE goons to gather at immigration courts and arrest immigrants who are following the law by showing up for hearings. Immigration judges, cowed into facilitating Trump’s mass deportation schemes, have been dutifully dismissing cases so as to allow the immigrants to be immediately jailed as “illegals.” In one recent case, armed thugs dragged into an elevator an immigrant who had fainted after they had swooped in to grab her while her attorney was in the restroom.
State courts have also become favored hunting zones for ICE. Judges who have the temerity to point out that this tactic discourages immigrants from complying with court orders, and thus the law, are being threatened. Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, for example, was jailed and indicted on the flimsiest of criminal charges for allegedly helping a man evade ICE. Her indictment has been decried by other jurists as a “threat [to] public trust in the judicial system and the ability of the public to avail themselves of courthouses without fear of reprisal.”
ICE gangs are also now routinely assembling in restaurants and other places of work, often bearing submachine guns, cuffing everyone in sight, and jailing some, simply on suspicion of being “illegals.” Recently, a gang of armed and masked ICE officers terrified patrons and workers in a San Diego restaurant, and even cuffed the manager. The rifle-toting “law enforcement” officers retreated from the scene by shooting flash bang grenades into a crowd of citizens distressed by their misconduct. (They only managed to arrest two “illegals.”)
Despite the fact that Trump has had to resort to fabricating new crimes to turn law-abiding immigrants into targets for deportation, the GOP is now about to make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” includes over $150 billion for immigration enforcement and seeks to make ICE the most highly funded law enforcement agency in the United States.
And as Trump’s threats about a military invasion of Los Angeles County, which appeared to be commencing through the use of federalized National Guard units as this piece was being prepared for publication Sunday evening, demonstrate that his administration is intent on using its growing immigration “law enforcement” apparatus to wreak havoc in America’s cities, and to threaten to make peaceful protest a crime.
Brian Stelter from CNN has this odd headline. “Dr. Phil was embedded with ICE during controversial Los Angeles immigration raids.” What the actual Hell is this? This is absolutely the “reality” show administration!
As federal agents prepared to fan out in Los Angeles for a controversial immigration crackdown, the officers were greeted by a familiar face: Dr. Phil McGraw.
The television personality and his camera crew were on hand before and after the raids that took place on Friday and triggered several days of street protests.
McGraw was there “to get a first-hand look at the targeted operations,” according to his conservative TV channel, MeritTV.
McGraw also had “exclusive” access to Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, a spokesperson for the channel said. The two men sat down for taped conversations about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts both “the day before and day after the LA operation.”
The TV personality and Homan were also together at the Homeland Security Investigations field office in L.A. on the morning the raids began.
McGraw’s presence on the ground in L.A. reinforces the made-for-TV nature of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The former daytime talk show host was embedded with ICE officials in Chicago back in January, when some federal agents were told to be camera-ready for a show of force at the very start of President Trump’s second term.
A MeritTV spokesperson said this time was different, however. “In order to not escalate any situation, Dr. Phil McGraw did not join and was not embedded” during the L.A. raids, the channel spokesperson said.
Instead, he hung out at the field office and had face time with Homan. The conversations will air on “Dr. Phil Primetime” on Monday and Tuesday night.
Evidently, The New Republic and I are sympatico. “What the Hell Was Dr. Phil Doing at the ICE Raids in Los Angeles? As if things weren’t already bad enough, Trump’s pseudo-doctor lackey is fanning the flames in California.” They’re evidently going on a full-scale propaganda pogrom. The New York Times‘ Billy Witz remembers a different protest in 1992. “When the National Guard Went to L.A. in 1992, the Situation Was Far Different. The skirmishes with immigration agents of the past few days are dwarfed by the widespread rioting, vandalism, and violence that engulfed whole neighborhoods in 1992.” Republicans have been displaying selective memory all day. I’ve read assertions that it was Nancy Pelosi’s fault that the National Guard wasn’t called during J6. And that Trump had called up like 2000 troops. As I demonstrated in the top link, these things are on film and debunked all over the place but it doesn’t stop Yam Tits’ Cult and their low information mindsets.
Some Republicans have drawn parallels between President Trump’s dispatching of National Guard troops to Los Angeles on Saturday and what happened in 1992, when soldiers and Marines were sent to the Los Angeles area to restore order after the Rodney King riots.
But that was a far different situation.
In contrast with the isolated skirmishes seen in Los Angeles County over the past few days, there were neighborhoods in 1992 that had devolved into something resembling a lawless dystopia. Drivers were pulled from cars and beaten. Buildings were burned. Businesses were looted. In all, 63 people died during the riots, including nine who were shot by the police.
The mayhem, which went on for six days, was rooted in Black residents’ anger over years of police brutality. It ignited after four officers were found not guilty of using excessive force against Mr. King, a Black motorist who had been pulled over after a high-speed chase, even though videotape evidence clearly showed the officers brutally beating him. That anger had erupted before, notably in the Watts riots of 1965.
The violence in 1992 was also fueled by tensions between the Black and Korean American communities in the area, and by the shooting death of a Black girl by a Korean American shopkeeper. It got so far out of control that major-league sports events were postponed or moved to safer locations, dusk-to-dawn curfews were imposed, schools were closed and mail delivery was withheld in some neighborhoods.
On the third day of the violence, President George H.W. Bush activated the National Guard at the request of Gov. Pete Wilson and Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles. Thousands of Army and Marine troops were sent into Los Angeles as well. Caravans including Humvees and other armored vehicles rolled into the city along the freeways.
The protests of 2025 bear little if any comparison to the widespread upheaval and violence of 1992. The protesters have directed their anger mainly at ICE agents, not at fellow residents, and the demonstrations have so far done relatively little damage to buildings or businesses.
I agree with Robert Reich writing for The Guardian. “We are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state. The national guard’s deployment in Los Angeles sets the US on a familiar authoritarian pathway. History shows the results.” We have nationwide protests coming up this Saturday, the 14th. I’m sure the world will be watching.
Now that Donald Trump’s tariffs have been halted, his big, beautiful bill has been stymied, and his multi-billionaire tech bro has turned on him, how does he demonstrate his power?
On Friday morning, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) conductedraids across Los Angeles – including at two Home Depots and a clothing wholesaler – in search of workers who they suspected of being undocumented immigrants.
Though figures vary, they reportedly arrested 121 people.
They were met with protesters who chanted and threw eggs before being dispersed by police wearing riot gear, holding shields, and using batons, guns that shoot pepper balls, rubber bullets, teargas, and flash-bang grenades.
On Saturday, Trump escalated the confrontations, ordering at least 2,000 national guard troops to be deployed in Los Angeles county to help quell the protests.
He said that any demonstration that got in the way of immigration officials would be considered a “form of rebellion.” Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, called the protests an “insurrection”.
On Saturday evening, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, threatened to deploy active-duty marines, saying: “The violent mob assaults on ICE and Federal Law Enforcement are designed to prevent the removal of Criminal Illegal Aliens from our soil. A dangerous invasion facilitated by criminal cartels (aka Foreign Terrorist Organizations) and a huge NATIONAL SECURITY RISK. Under President Trump, violence and destruction against federal agents and federal facilities will NOT be tolerated.”
We are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state.
Last week, raids in San Diego, in Martha’s Vineyard and in the Berkshires led to standoffs as bystanders angrily confronted federal agents who were taking workers into custody.
Trump’s dragnet also includes federal courthouses. Ice officers are mobilizing outside courtrooms across the US and immediately arresting people – including migrants whose cases have been dismissed by judges.
History shows that once an authoritarian ruler establishes the infrastructure of a police state, that same infrastructure can be turned on anyone.
Trump and his regime are rapidly creating such an infrastructure, in five steps:
(1) declaring an emergency on the basis of a so-called “rebellion”, “insurrection”, or “invasion”;
(2) using that “emergency” to justify bringing in federal agents with a monopoly on the use of force (Ice, the FBI, DEA, and the national guard) against civilians inside the country;
(3) allowing those militarized agents to make dragnet abductions and warrantless arrests, and detain people without due process;
(4) creating additional prison space and detention camps for those detained, and
(5) eventually, as the situation escalates, declaring martial law.
We are not at martial law yet, thankfully. But once in place, the infrastructure of a police state can build on itself.
Those who are given authority over aspects of it – the internal militia, dragnets, detention camps, and martial law – seek other opportunities to invoke their authority.
Rebecca Solnit has this to add at her Meditations in an Emergency Blog. “Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence.”
I think maybe it’s begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that’s happened over the past several decades – the advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, workers, the right of us all to be free from being poisoned by food, water, air. It began in Los Angeles, the city of angels, a city of almost four million people, almost half of them Latino, in a region of almost twelve million that two thousand California National Guards cannot and will not subjugate. All they can do is punish and incite, and I hope that some of the protesters are telling them they’re violating their mission and maybe the law. In the nonwhite-majority state of California, which recently advanced to become the fourth-largest economy in the world.
We are escalating because they are escalating. But as a smart guy on BlueSky noted, he’s “seeing a massive divide online between Angelenos of all political stripes who understand that the protests in LA yesterday were mostly peaceful and any violence was ICE-initiated and East Coast establishment liberals lecturing ‘the left’ on how riots just amplify right wing talking points.” This is familiar ground, the idea that no matter what the right does, however much the systematic violence harms us, however horrible a police murder or another violation of human rights such as ICE’s grabbing people off the street, we have the responsibility to remain not just peaceful but peaceful in a way that pleases our enemies. It becomes collective responsibility and collective guilt because even if a few people in a few places torch something or break something, it’s supposed to indict the whole movement, and has often been used to justify more institutional violence.
Her,e it’s also useful to make a distinction between property damage (which protesters in the USA in our era have done from time to time) and harming living beings (which is largely something done by law enforcement in these demonstrations). Property destruction can be dramatic theater (suffragists in early twentieth-century London broke all the plate glass windows on a stretch of shopping street; no living beings were at risk), can be actual protection (the firefighters taking an axe to the door to rescue the people from the blaze), or acts of intimidation (the husband breaking the furniture to convey to his wife he can break her too). All I’ve read about so far in L.A. is property damage by protesters, while we’ve seen many kinds of violence and intimidation from the heavily armored and armed thugs serving the Trump Administration’s war on immigrants.”
These are indeed Dark Times.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
“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.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
“The most transparent administration ever..” John Buss @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’m hoping we’re entering a Golden Age of Journalism because the number of stories floating around out there today indicates that we need more investigative journalists than ever before. Because of that, I cannot seem to play the Wake Forest Commencement by Sixty Minutes‘ Scott Pelley enough. His first statement rang true throughout the world. “Our sacred Rule of Law is under attack.” The Speech was entitled “The Meaning of You.”
The path to self-discovery starts with finding what kind of person you are when times get dark. As I’ve said before, these times are very dark. Do you shy away from speaking out? Do you take fighting action on whatever level you can? Do you melt away? Do you just go along or cheer it? I’ve come back to this speech this week because the headlines today show how important the press can be in exposing the dark times and the dark ones and their actions to light. It is then up to us to do something about it and to get our elected officials on it.
The New Republic’s Parker Molloy briefly discusses the importance of the Pelley Speech and the evil MAGA’s response. “Scott Pelley Warns Graduates About the Threats to American Democracy. The “60 Minutes” correspondent never mentioned Trump by name, but his call to defend democratic institutions was apparently too much for the MAGA crowd to handle.”
Earlier this month, journalist Scott Pelley delivered what should have been a fairly standard commencement address at Wake Forest University. The 60 Minutes correspondent spoke about seeking truth, defending democracy, and the importance of courage in difficult times—the kind of boilerplate inspiration you’d expect from a veteran journalist addressing graduates.
But because we live in very normal times, the speech went viral over Memorial Day weekend and triggered a conservative meltdown that’s been fascinating to watch unfold.
What did Pelley say that sent the right into such a tizzy? Well, he had the audacity to suggest that “our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack.” He warned of “insidious fear … reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts, the fear to speak in America.”
And perhaps most provocatively, Pelley criticized the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, saying, “Diversity is now described as ‘illegal.’ Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word. This is an old playbook, my friends.” He also referenced “masked agents” who “abduct a college student who wrote an editorial in her college paper defending Palestinian rights and send her to a prison in Louisiana charged with nothing.”
Pelley’s speech comes as Trump is suing CBS for $20 billion over alleged “election interference” and CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon abruptly resigned, citing disagreements with the company amid the legal pressure.
What’s remarkable is how a fairly conventional call for civic engagement and democratic values could generate such hysteria. But then again, when you’re running an administration built on exactly the kind of authoritarian playbook Pelley described, I suppose any critique—no matter how measured—feels like an existential threat.
Reading the speech in full, it’s hard to see what’s so “unhinged” about urging graduates to be engaged citizens and defend democratic institutions. Unless, of course, you’re deeply invested in attacking those very institutions.
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch Paley’s address here. The headlines today may be bleak, but the important thing is that reporters and the people supporting the work investigate and can find unbelievable corruption, stark depravity, and many examples of bad human conduct, demeanor, and actions. Then expose it!
When I was born, and as I grew up and my family moved into the middle class, I was instilled with the importance of reading magazines and watching the news. My Grandfather on my mother’s side always sent me books for my birthday and Christmas. My Nana on my mother’s side sent my sister and me subscriptions to National Geographic and The Christian Science Monitor. We read the local newspapers and the Des Moines Register every morning and evening. When I asked my Dad while I was in high school if I could get a subscription to The Manchester Guardian and to Paris Match, he didn’t even hesitate. I can tell you my show and tell performance, as well as my reports from newspapers, were altogether different from my Council Bluffs and Omaha friends.
When I hit university, all the foreign students whom I continually sought out for all dorm meals originally thought I was from Canada. When my family travelled to Europe, I tried to blend in as much as possible and just observe. It is perhaps this that makes me blog today, even though the only journalism classes I took were in high school. I wrote for the school newspaper, an underground newspaper, and the junior high newspaper. I always assumed everyone was as news-hungry as I was growing up in some of the most boring and inane places on the planet. I couldn’t live with oatmeal after reading about Belgian waffles. Can you imagine what happened when I got my first bite of one?
Knowledge of news is important for good citizenship, it’s important for making decisions that impact your household, and it’s important just because things are moving faster than ever. So let me get down to my first suggested reads today.
One of the things I find most threatening these days is seeing my students, my university, and many places leave their brains behind and try to make things easy using AI. It may have a future, but presently, any good professor worth their salt can tell when someone uses it. You should get good at spotting it on the internet, and you will be annoyed when you’re making an important call about something or chatting with some company, and even when it’s given a name, you can tell by the idiosyncrasies and the lack of niceties of American English, this thing ain’t human.
I’ve noticed that the grammar check my University uses completely breaks down when dealing with nuances and colloquialisms. It seems to excel mostly at filling my writing with commas and catching typos. That’s okay by me and easy, but believe me, I can tell when a student overuses AI. We’re being trained at spotting it as well as teaching students how to use it correctly. However, someone who knows what they are doing from years of doing it can make a better decision about its use than those still on the learning curve.
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from my fellow Westside High School journalism classmate, Kurt Anderson. One thing Westside always turned out was students who knew how to write. That skill got me through all the rest of my degrees because, damn I could write a good paper. Evidently, RFK Jr. did not get that skill.
It’s rather interesting given the difficult times Harvard is facing in protecting its foreign students. Now granted, I helped many a colleague from distant lands to get their excellent research into prime American English form. Everyone always sent them to me before they were sent to a journal for publishing, which bought me a cheap pub. But, every one of them took me farther down the path of being a numbers and stats guru. Did you know kids in India start their calculus classes in like 5th grade? It was also easier for me to actually come up with a sweet hypothesis to test because I was taught to be both analytical and creative. That’s what a good public school can do for you. A good university exposes you to what’s possible and exposes you to all kinds of interesting thinkers. But, again, I guess RFK Jr. was too busy with drugs to take advantage of anything like that. That’s why he’s likely never going to be part of a blog community, a book club, or a group that goes to the Saturday Night Midnight movies.
Okay, I really am getting to the read now. At his advanced age, with his unlimited educational opportunities and his money, he cannot write a research paper. And yet, it showed up in the public sphere because he was trying to prove his very wrong hypotheses at any cost. He didn’t prove anything. He turned to all manner of things to argue his hypothesis. None of his antics were academically sound. At first, the White House’s dumbest Press Secretary announced there were “formatting” errors. But, how could that be when, after investigating sources, reporters found them either made up or seriously in error? The Make America Healthy Again report was just embarrassing.
MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki derided White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s defense of a “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report filled with errors and broken links.
NOTUS reported the paper, released under the administration of President Donald Trump and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., cited at least seven sources that do not appear to exist. The news publication contacted epidemiologist Katherine Keyes, who the MAHA report lists as the first author of a study it cited on adolescent anxiety, and discovered Keyes didn’t write the paper.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
NOTUS also reported two other studies pertaining to direct-to-consumer drug advertisements for ADHD medications and antidepressants for kids appear nowhere “to be found.” Reporters also could not validate another section claiming 25% to 40% of mild cases of asthma are overprescribed. Additionally, the author of a corticosteroids study’s the MAHA report cited to support its arguments denied writing the study.
NOTUS reporter Jasmine Wright was in the White House briefing room Thursday and asked Leavitt: “does the White House have confidence that the information coming from HHS can be trusted?”
“Yes, we have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt responded. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed.”
Psaki, a former White House press secretary herself, did not contain her scorn.
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the Washington Post. “White House MAHA Report may have garbled science by using AI, experts say. The report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was intended to address the reasons for the decline in Americans’ life expectancy.” Well, that’s typical of a lot of students. If they can’t do it, they pay someone who can. You can always tell this, though, because if you’ve seen any previous work, you recognize their voice and you know when something is different. AI is the most recent example of buying a paper online, but with a lower cost and perhaps a lower chance of getting caught because you won’t find a cheat paper by searching it verbatim with your student’s work. Believe me, the discussion on this in teacher lounges and faculty clubs is de rigueur these days. Evidently, RFK Jr. didn’t even know the most tell-tale of the signs.
Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House’s sweeping “MAHA Report” appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence, resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday.
Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post. Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning.
Some references include “oaicite” attached to URLs — a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of “oaicite” is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company.
A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate — as well as the tendency to “hallucinate” studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
AI technology can be used legitimately to quickly survey the research in a field. But Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington who studies AI, said he was shocked by the sloppiness in the MAHA Report.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
“The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which addressed the root causes of America’s lagging health outcomes, was written by a commission of Cabinet officials and government scientific leaders. It was led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has a history of misstating science, and written in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The New York Times published the first media review pointing out made-up sources. “White House Health Report Included Fake Citations, ‘A report on children’s health released by the Make America Healthy Again Commission referred to scientific papers that did not exist.” Now, I’m not a scientist, but I lived with a Yale-educated Doctorate in Microbiology who published a lot of things on RNA transcription, ran a lab at a public university, and wound up with the NSF. I have no idea if he’s retired or if he went with the current purge of scientists. I read many of his works pre-publication, and he got published in all the big ones. I think the science journals are more nerve-wracking to write for than the Economics and Finance. Usually, it’s based on lab data rather than the Federal Reserve Beige Book or World Book data, which gets a pass even though the methodology and the model itself get the eagle eye. This report was a hot mess on all accounts.
The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legalfilings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this
So, after finding out about all of that, this should make you feel really at ease.
The Trump administration has quietly spread Palantir’s technology through U.S. agencies, paving the way to easily compile data on Americans. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since President Trump took office. nyti.ms/4dJfR0o
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from Forbes Magazine. “Lucky” Susan Dorn got this assignment. “Musk Used Heavy Drugs Including Ketamine And Ecstasy While He Became Close To Trump, Report Says. Elon Musk used a copious amount of drugs—and travelled with a pill box that appeared to contain Adderall—last year as he ramped up his donations to President Donald Trump, according to a New York Times report that comes on his last official day at the White House.” He’s the Wolf of Austin, I guess.
Key Facts
Musk told confidants he was taking so much ketamine it affected his bladder, according to The Times, citing unnamed sources who said he also took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
The Times also reported it obtained a photo that showed a medication box Musk travelled with containing about 20 pills, including Adderall.
The alleged drug use overlapped with his campaign activity last year on behalf of Trump—with an endorsement in July followed by $250 million to help elect him.
The report comes as Musk is set to exit the White House Friday after announcing Wednesday his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency had come to an end.
Neither Musk nor his lawyer responded to The Times’ request for comment, but Musk has said previously he was prescribed ketamine for depression.
The New York Timeshas more details. “On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama. As Mr. Musk entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous, and his drug use was more intense than previously known.” Of course, they sent two women after this story, too. Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey were the assigned reporters.
As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according topeople familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.
It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the Independent. “Stephen Miller’s wife leaves the White House to work for Elon Musk ‘full time’, Kate Miller was working as an adviser for Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency.” I should eat some lunch, and I really will not ruin it by going any deeper into these. BLECH.
So, we lose a clown and gain one. Seriously, none of these Trump men are strangers to make-up. This is from ABC News. “Trump taps former right-wing podcast host Paul Ingrassia for key watchdog post. Ingrassia would replace Hampton Dellinger, who opposed Trump’s mass firings.”
President Trump announced Thursday night that he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former far-right podcast host, to lead the Office of Special Counsel — an independent watchdog agency empowered to investigate federal employees and oversee complaints from whistleblowers.
The Trump administration has previously taken aim at the Office of Special Counsel, firing the head of the agency, Hampton Dellinger (a Biden appointee) in February. Dellinger expressed opposition to the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees under DOGE-led cuts, noting that many had been fired or laid off without notice or justification.
Dellinger challenged his firing in court and was briefly reinstated to the post until a federal appeals court allowed for his dismissal. Dellinger decided to drop the challenge.
ABC News exclusively reported in February about how Ingrassia, in his role as White House liaison to the Department of Justice, was pushing to hire candidates at the DOJ who exhibited what he called “exceptional loyalty” to Trump. His efforts at DOJ sparked clashes with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s top aide, Chad Mizelle, leading Ingrassia to complain directly to President Trump, sources told ABC News.
Ingrassia was pushed out of DOJ and reassigned as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, where he was serving prior to Trump announcing his new role, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
In a post on X, Ingrassia wrote in response to his nomination: “It’s the highest honor to have been nominated to lead the Office of Special Counsel under President Trump! As Special Counsel, my team and I will make every effort to restore competence and integrity to the Executive Branch — with priority on eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal workforce and revitalize the Rule of Law and Fairness in Hatch Act enforcement.”
For the Senate-confirmed five-year term, Ingrassia will likely face tough questions over his lengthy history of media appearances and posts on social media promoting Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as well as his ties to far-right media figures.
He was previously spotted at a 2024 rally hosted by white nationalist Nick Fuentes and has publicly praised figures like Andrew Tate — who has faced criminal charges for alleged sexual assault (Tate denies all wrongdoing).
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” This is from CNBC. “Trump accuses China of violating preliminary trade deal.” Dan Managan gets all the serious stories, you know.
President Donald Trump on Friday said that China has “totally violated its” preliminary trade agreement with the United States, and suggested he would take action in response.
“So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!” Trump wrote in a social media post that said China had reneged on a deal that paused retaliatory tariffs between that country and the U.S.
Stock futures fell Friday morning on the heels of Trump’s statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, in a CNBC interview Friday morning, echoed Trump’s allegation, saying “we’re very concerned with” China’s purported non-compliance with the temporary trade deal.
The “United States did exactly what it was supposed to do, and the Chinese are slow rolling their compliance,” said Greer.
He called that “completely unacceptable and has to be addressed.”
CNBC has requested comment from China’s embassy in Washington, D.C.
The U.S. and China on May 12 agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed on each other’s imports.
The agreement was reached after Trump slapped sky-high tariffs on imports from China into the U.S., and China retaliated in kind.
“Two weeks ago China was in grave economic danger!” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social on Friday.
“The very high Tariffs I set made it virtually impossible for China to TRADE into the United States marketplace which is, by far, number one in the World,” Trump wrote. “We went, in effect, COLD TURKEY with China, and it was devastating for them. Many factories closed and there was, to put it mildly, “civil unrest.” I saw what was happening and didn’t like it, for them, not for us. I made a FAST DEAL with China in order to save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation, and I didn’t want to see that happen.”
“Because of this deal, everything quickly stabilized and China got back to business as usual. Everybody was happy! That is the good news!!!” the president wrote.
“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”
Trump posted his screed two days after he lashed out at CNBC reporter Megan Cassella at the White House when she asked about the term “TACO trade,” which refers to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
The term, coined by a Financial Times columnist, suggests that stock pickers can make money by buying shares after markets fall on news of new tariffs imposed by Trump, knowing that he invariably will pause or reduce the tariffs, sending markets higher.
You had to know he had to have a bully story to cover up all the Court sha-la-la about his on-again, off-again tariffs. Wow, my Grammarly got really dash happy there! Actually, I did it but wondered if it would notice anything and it did. One missing comma. I evidently have a thing against commas.
So, at least it’s the weekend! Hope y’all have a great one! I say TACO, they say TACO!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
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.
This morning’s 
Are we great again yet?
What passes for US foreign policy is the usual lovefest between Putin and Yam Tits.
I really don’t know what to make of this headline. Maybe this is how Trump plans to pay for his extensive wrecking of the White House. “U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD A.I. Chip Sales to China. In a highly unusual arrangement with President Trump, the companies are expected to kick 15 percent of what they make in China to the U.S. government.” And of course, this cost gets passed forward from the businesses to the consumers. 
Okay, so tell me the one about “free markets” again. I’ll end with this opinion piece in the
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 
Last night, I watched BBC Live again for decent coverage of the L.A. Riots. I haven’t been this reliant on UK-based media since the Nixon Days. I woke up to lots of complaints on social media posts about the coverage of the Cable News presentation. I luckily found BBC Live after seeing reruns of old news programs on both MSNBC and CNN. The main channels had sporadic coverage. It was old-fashioned style coverage where the reporter at the scene reported, and the guy or girl in the chair asked questions. Reporters from the 
You may watch their footage at the link. Several reporters at the scene have complained that the L.A. Police had targeted them even though they were clearly wearing clothing and helmets identifying them as press. Yam Tits sent the California National Guard to the scene even though neither Mayor Bass or Governor Newsome had asked for the Guard to be activated. There are clear legal problems with this, and the Governor is acting on them.
David R Lurie–
Evidently, 
I agree with Robert Reich writing for
Last week, raids in San Diego, in 
Rebecca Solnit has this to add at her 
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 
A complete transcript of the speech follows. Also, you may listen to and watch 
This phenomenon played out yesterday as one of RFK Jr.’s prodigal research adventures turned into something I wouldn’t even expect from an undergrad or, actually, even someone sitting in my high school or university composition class. He was, of course, a legacy student there because of his father. We also know he was the dorm’s drug dealer from 
Well, the nation’s biggest and most disappointing media of record investigated and found some interesting things in the MAHA report. Let’s start with the 
So, our Secretary of Health and Human Services is so bereft of research skills that he can’t even avoid the number one Rookie mistake. Does he have anyone around him who knew better and could catch this? I can tell you that a team of peers that checks every research paper headed to publication in an academically sound journal would never let this go through to print. If you’re the main author, you try to avoid any humiliating mistakes for serious journals.
So, while all this is going on, we’re beginning to hear some interesting information on Elon Musk as he exists stage right. This is from 
I’m not about to go to the Gossip Rag road, but there are rumors about Mush and Steven Miller’s wife if you’re interested. This is from the
All the best people, folks, all the best. So, I know you just want to know the latest information on the American Soap Opera “As the Tarrifs and the TACO Turns.” 
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments