“George Washington, he ain’t. “John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
How can you spend a springtime in the District without marveling over Cherry Blossom season? How do you repeatedly ignore the history and laws of the most historically significant places in the country? Orange Caligula, narcissist supreme, has done it again. This happened a few days ago. No one stopped him. He has a long history of destroying things only to replace them with something disgusting. The Jackie Kennedy Rose Garden and the Oval Office were only the beginning. He ignores we, the people and the law.
This was the CNN headline. “Par for the course: Trump forging ahead with DC golf course makeover without input from oversight agencies.” Sunlen Serfaty has the lede. The man is an international menace. No living thing is safe with him alive.
Whenever President Donald Trump gets an idea for a major project or renovation in Washington, DC, a pattern has emerged: move forward and ask questions later.
Public sagas over Trump’s proposed “triumphal arch,” the East Wing ballroom construction and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation have followed this playbook – provoking outcry and numerous legal challenges.
Now, the greenways of a manmade peninsula just south of the National Mall is next on Trump’s quest to remake the nation’s capital in his style, and they’re poised to be made over in a way that’s par for the course for this president.
The administration is on track to push ahead with turning the 300-acre East Potomac Park and its public golf course into a championship course without firstgetting approvals from two key agencies that have oversight of DC public spaces.
Neither the National Capital Planning Commission nor the Commission on Fine Arts have received any golf course plans from the Trump administration to review, officials from both told CNN. Neither agency meets in August, and ground is supposed to be broken by the start of the following month.
And based on what has been publicly reported, a project of this complexity and ambition would typically require months of regulatory reviews to examine environmental impact, questions over historical preservation, planning and design, the officials at each agency said.
On Friday, the administration provided a federal judge overseeing a legal challenge to the project with new information about the venture. It included a disclosure that the government did not finish testing soil from the demolition of the East Wing that was deposited onto the golf course before deeming it was safe.
The revelation opens the door to allowing plaintiffs to question administration officials under oath.
The DC Preservation League and two local golfers are pressing US District Judge Ana Reyes to issue an order that would bar the Trump administration from moving ahead.
Critics worry that proper approvals and legal battles have hardly handicapped the president before.
“There is really this ability to ignore regulatory guardrails, rules and protocols that have existed in the past. And we just see it again and again, and the golf course, sadly, is yet another example of that,” said Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, which has filed lawsuits against several other Trump projects.
Those historic trees plus others could be removed to make way for Trump’s plan to turn the public East Potomac Golf Links into a “championship” venue capable of hosting major tournaments such as the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup.
No one ever stops this pathetic, destructive, personality disorder-ridden man. The warnings were clear back on July 13th. He just won’t ever do the right thing, work through the process, or listen to anyone. This article is from back on July 13. It’s from a local Ohio paper, the Ohio Capital Journal,and somehow, none of this reached the establishment national media covering our sicko president. Now, it’s too late. Acres of beautiful, mature cherry trees gifted by Japan are gone.”President Taft descendant, former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, slams Trump plan to devastate D.C. cherry trees.” Alan Johnson reports the story.
A plan that threatens some historic Washington, D.C., cherry trees to make way for President Donald Trump’s planned golf course is “very unfortunate,” said the great-grandson of William Howard Taft who received the Japanese trees more than a century ago.
“I don’t understand the idea of a championship golf course near the nation’s capital. There are already world-class golf courses there,” said former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, who served from 1999 to 2007. He is the great-grandson of William Howard Taft, the 27th president.
“Now is not the time to devastate cherry trees that have an important role as part of the cultural alliance between the United States and Japan … It’s very concerning.”
Taft, a Republican as is Trump, is an avid outdoorsman and golfer. He said chopping down cherry trees is an afront to his family heritage and a threat to the beauty of Washington as an international tourist attraction.
“They are a United States institution,” Taft said. “People from all over the world come to the Cherry Blossom Festival.”
Cherry trees were given by the Japanese to former President Taft and his wife, Nellie, who had ambitions to beautify the nation’s capital. She admired the flowering trees when her husband was the presidentially appointed Governor General of the Philippines.
The plan would also eliminate a riverside bike trail and other public recreation areas. Trump toured the course June 28 with government officials and golf course planners. The project could begin as early as Sept. 1.
The Ohio connection to the threatened Japanese cherry trees goes back to 1912-1913 when 3,020 saplings from the banks of the Arakawa River in a Tokyo suburb were planted along the Tidal basin.
He’s willing to destroy everything and everyone to make it all about him. At the top of his list is making sure a lot of us can’t vote. This is from today’s New York Times. I’m no longer surprised but will be forever appalled. Adam Sella and Nick Corasaniti share the lede. “More Mail Ballots Are Arriving Late This Cycle, and They’re Getting Tossed. State officials say they worry about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver votes this fall. They are urging voters to mail their ballots early or use drop boxes so their votes count.” We’re a Banana Republic.
The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.
The states studied by The New York Times include some of the most critical battleground House and Senate seats where control of Congress will be determined, as well as key races for governor and secretary of state. The Times obtained data from California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington.
In Wisconsin, which hosts an open race for governor, a competitive House election plus contests for both chambers of the state legislature, lateness accounted for about 5,000 rejected mail ballots in the spring primary this year, or 78 percent of all tossed ballots. During the last spring election, in 2023, the figure was roughly 2,300, or 47 percent of all tossed votes.
The increase is particularly striking when comparing primaries in 2024 and this year. In Michigan’s primary earlier this month, more than 10,000 mail ballots were rejected for arriving after the state’s deadline of 8 p.m. on Election Day. That is nearly double the number of ballots rejected in 2024. In Washington, the number of late-arriving mail ballots increased from about 16,000 to more than 20,000 in the same period.
The rise in rejected ballots comes at a time of immense upheaval at the Postal Service, where a budget crisis has prompted widespread complaints about delivery delays. The increase also comes as President Trump and his allies are trying to transform the 251-year-old agency into a central player in their quest to restrict mail voting and otherwise overhaul the nation’s elections.
I can feel this in my backyard, as there’s been a huge push to actually shut down my local post office. There are next to no Republicans in my ward and precinct. It’s basically a neighborhood with many black, GLBT, and single women like me. I can understand why they’d like my massive blue dot in a blue city to get as little ability to vote as possible.
Meanwhile, back in pathological liar land, The Independent had this headline that could only happen under Orange Caligula. “Trump’s fake AI video of Kharg Island ‘attack’ leaves US military scrambling to explain President’s very realistic AI slop video, posted to his official Truth Social account, forces Pentagon to step in with a denial.” Andrew Feinberg has the story.
But a U.S. official said no such attack had taken place, with Kharg Island not being among the locations targeted overnight in what has been the first exchange of fire between American and Iranian forces in weeks.
Additionally, the head of National Iranian Oil Co, Hamid Bovard, said on Monday that the president’s post was “laughable” and described conditions on Kharg Island as “calm and appropriate.”
Trump — whose White House has repeatedly stated that his Truth Social posts count as official statements from the commander in chief — also hit out at Iran again in a separate Truth Social post on Monday, writing that it was “officially a Failed Nation” and “DEAD.”
“They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead,” he said.
Iranian media outlets did report explosions near Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz, where an American official said Tehran had been preparing to launch mine-laying rockets as part of the country’s bid to choke off the key waterway and hamstring the American economy in response to Trump’s war, which has now passed the half-year mark without end in sight.
Here’s an FYI.
In my state and others, small and large communities are fighting to prevent Data Centers from causing irreparable damage to water supplies, the environment, animals, and communities. Here’s Trump’s response to us all via Politico. “Trump: Communities that reject data centers will end up ‘backwards and poor’. It’s the president’s latest line of support for data centers despite growing bipartisan concerns over the cost of such projects.”
President Donald Trump on Monday again championed the spread of data centers despite growing bipartisan backlash ahead of the midterms in November.
In a post to Truth Social, the president insisted data centers will lead to richer, more successful Americans and criticized those who object to them.
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump said. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”
Data center expansion has become a critical component in the leadup to November’s midterms, with polls showing a majority of Americans oppose them being built in their communities. Republicans and Democrats alike have expressed concerns over data centers, with lawmakers and state leaders warning about overloaded power grids, strained water systems and the level of noise the projects create.
Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott this month instituted new regulations on data centers despite expressing broad support for them over the last year on the campaign trail. Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers and Pennsylvania GOP nominee for governor Stacy Garrity have both urged for a temporary halt to some projects.
But Trump, who has met with some of the world’s leading tech giants on numerous occasions, is adamant that data centers are critical to staying ahead of China in the artificial intelligence race — a point he made in a recent interview with his former fixer Michael Cohen and which he reiterated on Monday.
“China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
If only we were following China’s example. This is from Wired. “China Opens World’s First Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center. With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the innovative data center uses seawater as a natural cooling system.”
China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country’s strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.
The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.
With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.
This feature solves one of the main energy consumption challenges of conventional data centers, where air conditioning systems typically account for 40 to 50 percent of the total electricity required to operate.
The thermal efficiency of the UDC is directly reflected in its power-usage effectiveness, or PUE. This metric is used by the industry to evaluate the energy performance of a data center; 1.0 represents the maximum theoretical efficiency. In its first phase, the Lin-gang facility is designed to achieve a PUE of no more than 1.15, a figure considered state-of-the-art within the industry.
Under this same cooling principle, HiCloud opened the world’s first commercial underwater data center in 2023 in Hainan, an island located in southern China. However, the Shanghai complex marks a milestone as the first to operate using offshore wind power.
Construction of the UDC was completed in mid-October last year. According to the Chinese government, “compared to traditional onshore data centers, the project is designed to use more than 95 percent green electricity, reducing energy consumption by 22.8 percent, and water and land use by 100 percent and more than 90 percent, respectively.”
The opening of the complex is an important step in China’s efforts to optimize energy supply through renewable sources and, at the same time, sustain its leadership in computing capacity linked to AI development.
The difference is that China isn’t trying to kill off its people and natural resources and it’s not relying on fossil fuels which are dirty, nasty, require fracking, and kill off living things. Trump also doesn’t want any regulation on the damn things. Here’s some information on that from The New Republic. “This Data Center Is Everything That Everyone Hates About AI. Utah’s Stratos Project is showing how everyone loses in the unregulated rush to build these Big Tech behemoths—even investors.” Luke Barnes has the analysis.
Big Tech firms are now keenly aware of the need for their data centers to have at least some environmental protections and community considerations built into development plans. Microsoft, for instance, announced its “Community-First” AI infrastructure plan in January 2026, shortly after it was forced to cancel a proposed data center in rural Wisconsin. The plan calls for covering the grid and electricity costs its data centers create, minimizing and replenishing local water use, and paying its full share of local property taxes rather than seeking the tax breaks data centers typically negotiate. OpenAI has called for significant investment in renewables to help modernize the U.S. electrical grid and make data center build-out more sustainable, while Anthropic has pledged to cover the grid infrastructure improvements and electricity cost increases that are generated from the data centers it uses.
These actions from both big business at one end and state actors at the other are a recognition of the problem. But they are the inverse of the kind of investment that the Stratos Project represents: rushed ad hoc investment on one side of the coin, and reactive ad hoc regulation on the flip side.
What’s more, both actors have fundamental limitations. Data centers are a footloose industry, meaning if one state is deemed to be overregulating, investors can easily shop for a friendlier jurisdiction. And while Big Tech firms might talk a good game, they are also subject to severe market pressures that could make them put their plans for equitable, environmentally friendly data centers on the back burner.
What’s needed is a concrete set of enforceable federal standards that can slow down the ad hoc gold rush in favor of equitable (and ultimately faster) long-term build-out. But here, the Trump administration is doing the exact opposite. In its July 2025 executive order, the White House moved to ease regulatory burdens on data centers costing at least $500 million, while compressing review windows and streamlining environmental evaluations meant to identify those burdens, and saying nothing about the water consumption or community frustration driving the backlash.
Lousyana is the perfect example of how not to let your crazy Republican Governor go wild on these things. We now not only have an AI center in process. We have a SpaceX project that will likely ruin the ecosystem and lives of people living on and near the Gulf of Mexico. We are so fucked it’s not even funny. One month ago, this showed up in the New York Times. (I’ve gifted the links, btw.) “How Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal. A Times examination details how the Silicon Valley giant used private talks with local officials to start a project big enough to cover nearly six square miles.”
Mr. Turner had helped land the largest development in Louisiana’s history: a $50 billion data center for the Silicon Valley giant Meta that planners say could cover about six square miles and use seven times as much energy as New Orleans.
Meta wanted the rebate to build its data center in Richland Parish, an impoverished farming community in Louisiana’s northeast corner. The tech company also needed a secret deal done quickly, and state officials were eager to oblige.
Rewriting the bill was a critical part of a nine-month process that Meta used to cut deals behind the scenes, avoid local opposition and offload financial risk, according to interviews with more than 40 people and a review of corporate filings, tax records, property records and meeting transcripts.
The secrecy was agreed to by nearly everyone involved, from utility executives to the governor’s office to a local elected official who knew about the talks with Meta and sold 300 acres of his own property for the project.
The upshot was a deal that was nearly ironclad for Meta because everyone else took on most of the potential downside. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, also gave his company an escape hatch to get out of it years before its partners.
Those partners include Entergy Louisiana, the state’s largest power company, and Blue Owl, a Wall Street investment firm, according to public statements from the companies and investor documents. If Meta should pull out of the project because of a natural disaster, Blue Owl and its investors could be stuck with tens of billions of dollars in debt. Should Meta exit its lease early for other reasons and pay high penalties for doing so, Entergy and its customers could wind up saddled with higher costs.
Adding to their risk, insurance companies would not fully insure Meta’s facility because of its size and location in the Louisiana Delta flood plains.
The New York Times’s examination shows for the first time how Meta used secrecy and speed to pave the way for its giant project, which it calls Hyperion. At a pivotal moment for the A.I. boom, Hyperion could be a blueprint for other companies intent on avoiding local opposition in order to get massive data centers built fast.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others are expected to spend more than $1 trillion on data centers in coming years, but some communities are pushing back because they are worried about water use, higher electricity rates, disruption by construction and the endless hum of giant computing centers running throughout the night.
We’ll not be the Sportsman’s Paradise between that and the Musk project. All living thing are likely to perish in the parish at this rate. Landry is a mini Trump and very much a part of the brotherhood of sociopaths. This is from The Hill. “Louisiana governor ‘not concerned’ about environmental impact of Gulf Coast SpaceX facility.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) brushed aside fears Wednesday morning about possible negative environmental impacts from SpaceX’s planned $100 billion launch facility in the state.
He told CBS News on Wednesday that he was “not concerned about the environmental impact” of the new spaceport, which will be constructed along the Gulf Coast on a former Exxon property in Vermilion Parish, La.
“What I am concerned about is the lack of economic opportunity on the coast that continues to basically rob us of opportunities to rebuild our coast,” the governor said.
The spaceport will be the company’s fourth and largest launch site, and it will serve as the main facility for Starship, SpaceX’s in-development reusable rocket launch system.
SpaceX got into hot water over its operations at its first launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.
In 2024, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality found that the company violated environmental regulations by repeatedly releasing pollutants into nearby bodies of water.
This followed an earlier warning by the Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 office, which oversees Texas, that SpaceX violated the Clean Water Act with these actions.
Elon Musk’s company said in a statement that it was committed to working with federal and state agencies and conservation groups “to protect shoreline, restore wetlands, and support the wildlife and recreation that depend on them” in Louisiana.
And if any one believes Musk will do that I have several bridges over the Mississippi River I’d like to sell you.
So, I end with this thought. WE ARE SO FUCKED.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
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“Upon further reflection, the Rededicate 250 National Prayer thing now makes huge sense. He Is Risen!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The one thing you can depend on every time Orange Caligula gets the reins of government is that things will always get worse, except for democracy backsliding. It’s just a matter of how shocking the next thing is. How many of us are in a constant state of being stunned that we aren’t the least bit surprised by the news, even though we still find the actions stomach-churning? Well, hang on! It’s been a week of WTF moments.
Today’s Tit-for-Tat announcement shows just how brazen the entire administration has gotten. This is from Time Magazine. It’s reported by Rebecca Schneid. What kind of monster thinks these things up?
President Donald Trump has withdrawn his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) amid reports that he struck a deal with his own Justice Department to create a $1.7 billion fund to compensate political allies who claim they were wrongly targeted by the Biden Administration.
The alleged plan, first reported by the New York Times and ABC News, would be paid for with taxpayer funds and is being fast-tracked, but has yet to be officially approved. If approved, the fund would be used to pay damages to people who say they were harmed by the Biden Administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Court documents showed Trump withdrew his lawsuit against the IRS, a move that could herald a private deal between the president and the agency he controls, while skirting legal oversight of the deal.
In a lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court in January, Trump and other plaintiffs accused federal agencies of failing in their duty of stopping a former IRS contractor from illegally obtaining and disclosing tax returns to the New York Times, ProPublica, and “other left-wing media outlets,” between May 2019 and September 2020.
The funds would also be used to settle his request for $230 million in legal claims from the Justice Department for the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and investigation into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia
As part of the settlement, Trump would also reportedly ask the IRS to public1pologize for the disclosure of his personal financial records and to waive an IRS audit
According to the Times, the Justice Department would model the program after the historic $760 million settlement fund stemming from the Keepseagle v. Vilsack class-action lawsuit, settled in 2011, which alleged that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) systematically discriminated against Native American farmers and ranchers in its farm loan and loan servicing program.
We know someone who can sum this up nicely. This is how Hillary put it this morning.
Trump didn’t just pardon his followers who stormed the U.S. Capitol. He’s now set them up for payments through a slush fund he created to reward his allies—out of your tax dollars. You could not make this up.
Robert Reich had some additional thoughts and analysis. He elucidated them on his SubStackthis morning. “Has Trump’s Republican Party Become a Criminal Enterprise? Trump’s purge of all political opponents, including Senator Bill Cassidy, leaves it with no purpose other than helping Trump achieve his lawless goals.” Trump puts us in a Mafia State every time he’s elected. Grifting is his only talent, and he’s been rich and influential enough to find ambitious and greedy toadies to carry out his wishes. We’ve known this forever here.
On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press,“There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”
There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.
Will these latest bits of news set up another J-6 self-coup? There will certainly be a rabid MAGA candidate sitting in Cassidy’s seat come next January. This is from NPR. “Louisiana senator who voted to convict Trump loses Republican primary.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, one of seven Republican senators who voted to remove President Trump from office after the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lost his bid for reelection.
Louisiana’s Senate primary on Saturday was the latest test of Trump’s hold on his party. The president recruited a challenger, Rep. Julia Letlow, and urged supporters to defeat Cassidy over his vote.
“His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now part of legend,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post about Cassidy. “And it’s nice to see his political career is OVER.”
Cassidy finished third in a three-way race, according to the Associated Press. Letlow and another candidate, state Treasurer John Fleming, will advance to a June 27 runoff.
In conceding the race, Cassidy hinted that he would not finish his second term quietly. But in an apparent dig at Trump, he also said he wouldn’t contest his loss.
“You don’t pout, you don’t whine, you don’t claim that the election was stolen,” Cassidy told supporters on Saturday night. “You thank the voters for the privilege of representing the state or the country for as long as you’ve had that privilege. And that’s what I’m doing right now.”
Cassidy told voters they should cast their ballot based on the present and the future, not the past, a subtle discouragement from re-litigating the 2020 election six years on. But for many primary voters, Cassidy’s move to convict felt like a betrayal, and Trump’s endorsement was paramount.
“I’m the type of person, if you cross me, I probably won’t trust you anymore,” retired sheriff deputy Kevin Dupree said earlier this month. “I think his political career in Louisiana is finished.”
My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.
Although he pandered shamelessly to Trump and MAGA to the bitter end, Sen. Bill Cassidy could have written a different ending to his political career.
He could have left office with his head held high, proud and satisfied that he’d remained true to his principles and the Hippocratic Oath.
He could have protected our families by blocking Trump’s efforts to destroy our public health system.
He could have legislated (and campaigned) as the moderate he told me and others he truly was.
He could have put the state of Louisiana — and the nation — ahead of his desire for another U.S. Senate term.
He could have been our senator, not Donald Trump’s.
He could have done all this and more, but Cassidy lacked the courage, the imagination, and the decency to put you and me ahead of his political ambition.
What Cassidy received in return for his soul is eternal shame and a well-earned legacy of cravenness.
I hope Cassidy enjoys his earnings.
I hope he also feels the harsh judgment of history that will be reserved for a Trump critic turned shameless toady who sold out to the worst, most corrupt president in American history—and still lost.
Bill Cassidy could have written a different story for himself and his state, but he just didn’t have it in him.
Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.
With the conflict in Iran still smoldering, President Trump’s obsession with Greenland seems like a forgotten sideshow.
But for the past four months, negotiators from the United States, Greenland and Denmark, which controls Greenland’s foreign affairs, have been holding confidential talks in Washington about Greenland’s future.
The talks were meant to give Mr. Trump an offramp to his threats of a military takeover of Greenland and to scale back a crisis that risked breaking apart the NATO alliance. But Greenlandic leaders are worried about what is being proposed, which is a much larger U.S. role on the Arctic island. And they fear that if the conflict with Iran winds down, the president will swing his aggression back on them.
Some Greenlandic politicians say they have even circled a date on their calendars to be wary: June 14, Mr. Trump’s birthday.
An investigation by The New York Times, based on interviews with officials in Washington, Copenhagen and Greenland, has discovered:
The United States is trying to modify a longstanding military arrangement to ensure American troops can stay in Greenland indefinitely, even if Greenland becomes independent. The notion is basically a forever clause, and Greenlanders do not like it.
The United States has pushed the talks beyond military matters and wants effective veto power over any major investment deals in Greenland to box out competitors like Russia and China. Greenlanders and Danes strongly object to this.
The United States is discussing cooperation with Greenland on natural resources. The island is loaded with oil, uranium, rare earths and other critical minerals, though much of it is buried deep beneath Greenland’s ice.
The Pentagon is rapidly moving ahead on plans for a military expansion and recently sent a Marine Corps officer to Narsarsuaq, a town in southern Greenland, to inspect the World War II-era airport, the harbor and places where American troops could be housed.
The American demands are so steep, Greenlandic officials fear, that they amount to a major imposition on their sovereignty. Despite all of the talk from Danish and American officials that Greenland’s future is up to the island’s 57,000 people, Greenlandic officials said the American demands would tie their hands for generations.
If the Americans get everything they want, said Justus Hansen, a member of Greenland’s Parliament, there will never be any “real independence.”
“We might as well raise our own flag halfway,” he said.
There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”
Donald Trump is annoyed that he can’t celebrate the massive profits oil companies are making due to the war he launched in the Middle East. Left to his own druthers, Trump would be exulting in the hundreds of billions of dollars produced by skyrocketing oil prices—if it weren’t for the pesky fact that it comes at the expense of ordinary Americans, who are now paying roughly 40 percent more every time they fill up the gas tank than they were before Trump started bombing Iran nearly three months ago.
We know this thanks to Trump’s endless dedication to saying the quiet part out loud. Speaking with Sean Hannity of Fox News on Thursday, Trump chortled that because far less oil was coming out of the Middle East, “people are finding other places to buy oil, like Texas.” Trump added, “So I don’t want to say we’re making a fortune, you understand that? Because if I say that, they’re going to say ‘oh, he forgets about the little man with the $4 gasoline.’”
The juxtaposition between “making a fortune” and the “little man” suffering at the gas station underscores just how obtuse Trump and his allies have become in their economic message. Their response to the harm caused by Trump’s policies is not to reverse those policies, or even to appear sympathetic about their effects. It’s to express their total indifference to the suffering of the American people. At the same time, Trump is obsessively focused on his real priorities: enriching himself and his family, and creating gaudy monuments to himself such as a new White House ballroom and a Triumphal Arch that will squat in the middle of Washington, DC. In response to a reporter’s query as to whom the arch would celebrate, Trump pointed to himself and said “me.”
Trump twice won the White House on a message of economic populism, promising in his 2025 inauguration that he would “bring prices down.” Today, he sings a very different tune, with a message that amounts to the apocryphal words misattributed to the French Queen Marie Antoinette: “Let them eat cake.”
Speaking to reporters last Monday, Trump said, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.” He also said that concern for the financial suffering of Americans would not be a factor in making a deal with Iran “not even a little bit.”
Under normal political circumstances, the Republican Party would be wise to separate itself from Trump’s callousness. But the GOP has become a hollowed-out operation mainly concerned with tending to Trump’s cult of personality. On Saturday, Trump won a major victory against critics in the party when Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy came in third in his party’s Senate primary race, losing to a candidate Trump had supported. Cassidy’s loss underscores a lesson Trump has taught the GOP again and again over the last decade: There is no future in the party for anyone who defies his will.
So, rather than distancing themselves from Trump’s “let them eat cake” message, Republicans are embracing the president’s self-defeating rhetoric. On Thursday, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan told CNN that oil prices were “were coming down until we had to deal with this situation, but, you know, that’s life, that’s dealing with…the world we live in.”
It’s going to take hard work and a lot of voting to get rid of this monster and all the dregs of humanity he’s put in charge of the country. It appears they have all been profiting from insider news on the Iran War.
1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.
This is from Jude Legum’s SubStack. “The smoking guns in Trump’s new financial disclosure, Trump publicly praised companies the same day he bought their stock.”
On March 11, President Trump took a tour of a manufacturing facility in Reading, Ohio, owned by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a medical supply company. During the tour, Trump lavished praise on Thermo Fisher which uses the facility to manufacture prescription drugs on a contract basis. “It’s a great honor being here. It’s a great company,” Trump said, appearing alongside CEO Marc Casper. “You have done a fantastic job and I’d like to congratulate you.”
Later, Trump asked another Thermo Fisher executive to share “some great information about this incredible company.” The executive talked about how Thermo Fisher is producing drugs for Merck and others at the facility. Trump then explicitly encouraged other pharmaceutical companies to contract with Thermo Fisher to “on-shore” more jobs. He claimed that some pharmaceutical companies were building their own U.S. manufacturing facilities but said “they can get here a lot faster by using this great company.”
Trump did not mention that, the same day of the tour, March 11, he purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 of Thermo Fisher stock. (Federal disclosure rules only require filers to list their transactions in broad ranges.) Trump did not publicly disclose the purchase until May 14. It was listed on page 38 of a 113-page document cataloging Trump’s stock purchases in 2026.
Trump also purchased between $51,000 and $115,000 worth of Thermo Fisher stock about one month before his visit on February 12. He made another purchase of Thermo Fisher valued between $15,000 and $50,000 on March 2. So at the time of Trump’s effusive remarks about Thermo Fisher, he had purchased as much as $215,000 worth of the company’s stock over the previous month.
The fact that Trump visited a Thermo Fisher facility on the same day he purchased the company’s stock — and bought Thermo Fisher stock repeatedly in the weeks before his visit — has not previously been reported.
The disclosures reveal that Trump has been a highly active trader in 2026, executing thousands of transactions — many in individual stocks impacted by his administration’s policies. In response to criticism, a spokesperson for the Trump Organization claimed that the trades were completely separate from Trump’s official duties and managed by an independent outside financial advisor. “President Trump’s investment holdings are maintained exclusively through fully discretionary accounts independently managed by third-party financial institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions,” the spokesperson said. “Trades are executed and portfolios are balanced through automated investment processes and systems administered by those institutions.”
The fact that Trump purchased stock in Thermo Fisher the same day that he toured its facility undercuts this claim. Further, the March 11 purchase of Thermo Fisher stock was marked “UNSOLICITED” in the document. An “unsolicited” trade is one that is not recommended by a broker, but initiated by the customer.
At least three immigrant children were taken into custody and restrained with zip ties at the San Antonio Immigration Court. The children were between the ages of 9 and 12.www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/a…
Brookings reminds us that there are still thousands of families with children experiencing horrible detentions and deportations because of the MAGA obsession with keeping America as white as possible. “The administration has detained 400,000 immigrants: What do we know about their children?” Is this really the kind of country you want to live in and that you thought you grew up in?
The Trump administration has made detention and deportation the centerpieces of its immigration policy. Around 60,000 people are being held in detention currently, and around 400,000 people have been booked into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention from an interior arrest since the administration began. Detention capacity is likely to expand, with $45 billion allocated to expanding detention facilities in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Though it is mostly adults who are detained and deported, many children are impacted by separation from their parents. However, there are no reliable data on how many detainees or deportees have children in the U.S., nor on what happens to them once their parent is taken into custody. Here we focus on detainees, about whom we have better information than deportees. Even a short separation from a parent is likely traumatic for a child, but a majority of detentions are not short-lived separations. A ProPublica study following ICE arrests of mothers of U.S. citizen children over the first seven months of the administration found that 60% had been removed and 17% remained in custody at the study’s conclusion.
To estimate the number of children affected by parental detention, we rely on demographic characteristics of detainees matched with likely unauthorized immigrants in the American Community Survey. Our analysis (detailed below) suggests that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced a parent booked into detention since the administration began, with more than 22,000 of those experiencing detention of all their co-resident parents. In the accompanying interactive, we allow users to explore how the estimates change when the underlying assumptions are varied. Regardless of the assumptions used, it is clear that tens of thousands of children have faced parental detention since January 2025.
Please use the link to read the details. The time and research it took to find out all this was amazing and hard to believe.
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I can’t even explain what kind of crush I had on Cat Stevens in ninth grade. I could basically play his entire songbook. He’s an amazing songwriter and musician.
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“Pete Hegseth’s Department of War days ago shot down one of Kristi Noem’s border protection drones, while the USS Gerald R. Ford is experiencing a massive toilet failure on deployment. What else could go wrong?…” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
We’ve been dutifully following the release and blowback from the Epstein Files here. If Orange Caligula wanted center stage back and the headlines to shift from that, he certainly is accomplishing his goal. He now has dead school children, dead American troops, and attacks on numerous American Assets and countries in the Middle East on his nasty orange hands. We’re in there for real now, just like we were with the last bumbling Republican idiot in that office. I thought we’d learned our lessons on regime change back then.
The questions now are what’s next and what’s the actual goal here? Then how the hell do we get out with the least amount of carnage and destruction? Unfortunately, the folks who started this have no clue. Planning and follow-through are not their strong points. It’s one big show to distract from other failures. Let’s review the headlines this morning and hope there are some adults somewhere in the State Department and the aptly-named Department of War.
This Reutersheadline sums up the idiocy that we’re being spoonfed minute by minute. Two old fascist codgers with scandals and lawsuits just teamed up to create a needless slaughter fest and economic disaster. “Pentagon tells Congress no sign that Iran was going to attack the US first, sources say. This is reported by Phil Stewart and Humeyra Pamuk.
Trump administration officials acknowledged in closed-door briefings with congressional staff on Sunday that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran planned to attack U.S. forces first, two people familiar with the matter said.
The United States and Israel launched their most ambitious attacks on Iran in decades on Saturday, killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sinking Iranian warships and hitting more than 1,000 targets so far, officials say.
But Sunday’s remarks to Congress appeared to undercut one of the key arguments for the war made by senior administration officials.
They told reporters the day before that President Donald Trump decided to launch the attacks in part because of indicators that Iranians might strike U.S. forces in the Middle East “perhaps preemptively.
“Trump, one of the officials said, was not going to “sit back and allow American forces in the region to absorb attacks.
All this was happening while Trump was at a big donor fundraising gala in Florida, utilizing a small hut with curtains as the War Room. This is from CNN. “Hunkered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump makes his club a makeshift Situation Room.” I guess an easel is the latest technology they have down there at Mar-a-Lago.
As gala-goers in gowns and tuxedos were dancing the night away inside Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom Friday evening, a very different scene was unfolding on the other side of the rambling estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Out the gilded doors, past layers of security and behind a set of black curtains, the country’s top national security officials were convening in anticipation of a long night.
The CIA director, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense had all slipped in earlier, unseen by the crowd sipping cocktails by the pool. So had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose map of the Middle East showing the locations of American assets — along with Iranian targets — was set up on an easel.
By the time President Donald Trump touched down, the space was running as a makeshift Situation Room from which he would oversee the start of a sustained attack on Iran.
First, though, the ballroom summoned.
“Have a good time, everybody,” Trump called out to the black-tie crowd gathered for a charity gala after briefly jerking his arms around to his anthem, “God Bless the USA.”
“I gotta go to work.”
Behind the black curtains, photos released by the White House showed Trump, tieless and wearing a white hat emblazoned with “USA,” watching the unfolding action, which would include the killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Raw Story‘s Robert Davis delves deeper into the prior TV News reports that the U.S. has a weapons shortage from already from all the prior attacks made on targets by the Trump Regime. “US troops in Iran racing against the clock before running out of ammo: report.” There is absolutely nothing this regime knows about planning, strategy, and follow-through. I bet the generals that Trump ousted last year are beside themselves with worry and rage.
U.S. troops in Iran are staring down a difficult situation in the wake of strikes that killed Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a new report.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that U.S. troops are racing to destroy Iran’s ballistic and nuclear missile facilities before they run out of interceptors to defend from Iranian retaliatory strikes. The exact size of the military’s ammunition base is classified, but analysts and former officials who spoke to The Journal said the stockpile has been diminished after repeated conflicts in the region.
At the same time, military troops are working to fend off a series of retaliatory strikes from the Iranians. U.S. Central Command said on Saturday that they mounted a “largely successful defense against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks,” according to the report.
“One of the challenges is you can deplete these really quickly,” Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, told The Journal. “We’re using them faster than we can replace them.”
Troops are also running low on sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles and aircraft-launched weapons following the operation last year to take out Yemen-based Houthi militants, according to the report.
“Eventually it boils down to numbers,” Jonathan Conricus, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told The Journal. “How many interceptors will we have versus how many launchers will they be able to field and fire.”
Axios follows up on the number of attacks and results Orange Caligula has chalked up during his Regime of Terror. Zachary Basu reports this story. “Trump’s lethal presidency.”
No president in the modern era has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries as Donald Trump.
He’s attacked seven nations, three of which — Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela — had never been targeted by U.S. military strikes. He authorized more individual air strikes in 2025 than President Biden did in four years.
Why it matters: Trump explicitly ran as the anti-war candidate. The White House argues he still is — that he always exhausts diplomacy before acting, and that projecting overwhelming force is itself a path to lasting peace.
“Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is,” Trump said in a video statement Sunday. “But we’ll do everything possible where that won’t be the case,” he added, vowing to “avenge their deaths.”
The big picture: Trump’s strikes are historically distinctive not just in number but in kind.
President Bush’s post-9/11 campaigns and President Obama’s drone wars were massive in scale — but concentrated in inherited or congressionally authorized theaters.
Alongside traditional counterterrorism efforts, Trump has opened new fronts — a Christmas Day strike in Nigeria, drug boats sunk in the Caribbean, Nicolás Maduro snatched from Caracas.
His preferred model is consistent: no boots on the ground, no lengthy entanglements, overwhelming force applied quickly and framed as essential to defending American interests.
He’s like a walking stereotype for all the complaints every country has ever had about us. We are truly Ugly Americans. Judd Legum follows the money at Popular Information. As we’ve learned, that’s the central role of getting to this level of destruction and lunacy. We used to call it the military industrial complex, abetted by bribed politicians. “The money behind the new Iran War.”
In private calls over the last several weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) reportedly urged President Trump to attack Iran. Iran is a top regional rival of Saudi Arabia, and MBS had become concerned about Iran’s growing military capabilities.
MBS’s influence with Trump has grown as the Saudi government has invested billions in projects that personally enrich Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Despite the glaring conflicts-of-interest, Trump installed Kushner as a top negotiator with Iranian officials. Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff participated in a mediation session with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva on Thursday, billed as a last-ditch effort to avoid war.
The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) is the largest investor in Jared Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners. PIF invested $2 billion in Affinity Partners in 2021, even though the PIF committee that screens investments recommended rejecting Kushner’s proposal, citing “inexperience” and “excessive” fees. The committee’s recommendation was overruled by MBS, who heads PIF’s Board of Directors.
PIF pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, or $25 million, annually. The Senate Finance Committee estimates that Kushner will be paid $137 million in management fees from PIF by August 2026. Further, in September 2025, PIF, Affinity Partners, and others jointly acquired Electronic Arts, the publisher of iconic video games like The Sims and Madden NFL, for $55 billion. The deal, which is the largest leveraged buyout in history, will likely be very lucrative for Kushner.
After raising billions for the Saudis and other foreign governments, Kushner dismissed concerns about conflicts of interest, pledging he would not be involved in Trump’s second term. In February 2024, Axios’ Dan Primack asked Kushner whether his business relationship with foreign governments would make it “very difficult… to do any sort of foreign policy work” moving forward. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner replied. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.”
Yet, after Trump took office, Kushner resumed his central role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. In an October 2025 interview on 60 Minutes, Kushner argued that financial conflicts made him and Witkoff more effective. “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner said.
CNN reported that both Saudi Arabia and the UAE lobbied Trump to strike Iran. Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE has significant financial ties to Kushner and Trump.
The UAE is another major backer of Affinity Partners, directly investing about $200 million with Kushner’s firm. Additional money came via Lunate, a supposedly private Abu Dhabi investment firm that is financed by government money and tied to the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds.
Witkoff is the co-founder of the crypto firm World Liberty Financial (WLF) and retains an 8-figure stake in the company. Trump and his family also own significant pieces of the company. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security advisor and head of the country’s largest sovereign wealth fund, purchased 49% of WLF days before Trump’s inauguration. Of the $250 million paid up front by the UAE, $187 million was directed to Trump family entities and $31 million to the Witkoff family. In May 2025, MGX, a company controlled by Tahnoon, purchased $2 billion of crypto tokens from WLF.
Following the conclusion of the mediation on Thursday, Kushner and Witkoff “ominously issued no statement,” and the pair was reportedly “disappointed“ by the Iranian negotiating position. After presumably being debriefed by Kushner, Trump said, “we’re not thrilled with the way they’re negotiating.” According to Trump, it would be “wonderful” if the Iranians “negotiated in … good faith and conscience but they are not getting there so far.”
The new Iran War comes weeks after PIF financed a $7 billion development deal in Saudi Arabia with the Trump Organization. Under the agreement, Dar Global, a developer with close ties to the Saudi government, will build a “Trump-branded hotel and golf course,” along with “500 mansions, priced between $6.7 million and $24 million.” The project is part of Diriyah, a $63 billion development funded entirely by PIF.
Only Trump could make Nixon look good. You can read a lot more about the money trail at the links above. Meanwhile, “fog of war” actions look pretty bleak for as many mistakes are being investigated. The Hill reports that “Kuwait mistakenly’ shoots down 3 US F-15s: Pentagon.” Tara Sutter reports the story.
Kuwait “mistakenly” shot down three U.S. F-15 fighter jets on Sunday after strikes were launched against Iran one day earlier, according to U.S. Central Command (Centcom).
Centcom said in a statement that the fighter jets were downed in Kuwait shortly after 11 p.m. EST Sunday.
The jets “were mistakenly shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses,” according to the statement.
The six service members who were on board the jets “ejected safely,” Centcom added, and are “in stable condition.”
“Kuwait has acknowledged this incident, and we are grateful for the efforts of the Kuwaiti defense forces and their support in this ongoing operation. The cause of the incident is under investigation. Additional information will be released as it becomes available,” its statement said.
Here’s another example of bad planning and big lies from Politico. “Pentagon offers no evidence to support claim it attacked Iran in defense. The Trump administration’s effort to construct a case for war after shots started flying has few historical parallels.” Again, there really was no case for this regionwide war we have created with Israel.
The Trump administration is making the case that it ordered expansive, deadly strikes to stop an imminent threat from Tehran, but is providing no evidence Iran had such plans.
The White House, amid the largest military buildup in the region in decades, has yet to explain to the public or to Congress what Iranian threat prompted the massive attacks that have upended the region and could draw the U.S. into another Middle East war.
The administration first tested out its justification more than 12 hours after the U.S. began bombarding Iran with missiles, drones and long-range artillery. A senior Trump administration official told reporters Saturday that the U.S. had determined American troops would have suffered far more casualties by waiting for an impending Iranian strike. In the same briefing, two other officials said the president ordered the strikes after he determined Iran would not agree to stop uranium enrichment altogether.
But the administration’s efforts to construct a case for war only after the shots have started flying has few historical parallels. The Pentagon has held no briefings nearly 36 hours after the U.S. military strikes, bucking a practice of doing so after attacks that goes back to the Vietnam War. And unlike past presidents embarking on major military campaigns, Trump made little effort to drum up support from Congress, U.S. allies or the American people. The administration did not try to convince the Senate to authorize the war, as President George W. Bush did in Iraq, or plead to the United Nations, as George H.W. Bush did to build a coalition against Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait.
“Whatever imminent threat they’re posing was likely in reaction to our unprecedented military buildup in the region,” said Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.). “This is an example of the president deciding what he wanted to do, and then making his administration go and find whatever argument they could make to justify it.”
The administration briefed some Hill staffers Sunday on the operation. But officials did not present clear evidence the Iranians were preparing an imminent attack on U.S. troops, said two people who attended. They, like others in this report, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe will give an Iran briefing to House members on Tuesday, according to four people with direct knowledge of the meeting. They will also meet with senators, according to two people familiar with the plans.
This gives the idea of ‘going off half-cocked’ an entirely new meaning. This was basically an impulsive decision that will cost us plenty. But as we can see, some folks will make lots of money from the death and destruction. We are also far beyond flintlocks with hammers.
I really am at a place where I just can’t deal with this anymore. There’s far too much at stake, and there will be blowback for all of us. If they can bomb a girls’ school and not really talk about it, where the fuck are we? This is from theNew York Times. “Strike on Girls’ School Kills at Least 175, Iranian State Media Says. Videos and images verified by The New York Times showed that at least half of the school was destroyed. It was not immediately clear why the school was hit, or which country’s forces had fired at it.”
At least 175 people, most of them likely children, were killed in a strike on a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran on Saturday, health officials and Iranian state media said.
The search for survivors in the rubble of the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in the southern town of Minab ended Sunday, according to Mohammad Radmehr, the governor of Minab, Iranian state media reported. It appeared to be the deadliest attack in the ongoing American-Israeli bombing campaign.
Several videos and images verified by The New York Times showed that at least half of the two-story school was destroyed in the explosion. Emergency workers with the Red Crescent could be seen alongside families desperately combing through the rubble, which was littered with schoolbooks and book bags covered in blood and ashes. Portions of the building jutted out from the rubble, with bits of colorful murals visible on what were once the walls of the school. Desks were piled with debris.
In other verified videos, rescue workers retrieved a severed arm from the rubble. Victims were laid out in body bags at the scene, where throngs of people were gathered among ambulances and rescue workers.
“The Minab school incident has no comparison with any other incident,” said Pirhossein Kolivand, the head of Iran’s Red Crescent, in a video posted on social media on Sunday.
“Even in Gaza,” he added, there had not been such a high number of students killed simultaneously, calling the attack “a unique and bitter incident.”
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
He’s willing to destroy everything and everyone to make it all about him. At the top of his list is making sure a lot of us can’t vote. This is from today’s New York Times. I’m no longer surprised but will be forever appalled. More Mail Ballots Are Arriving Late This Cycle, and They’re Getting Tossed. State officials say they worry about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver votes this fall. They are urging voters to mail their ballots early or use drop boxes so their votes count.” We’re a Banana Republic.
I can feel this in my backyard, as there’s been a huge push to actually shut down my local post office. There are next to no Republicans in my ward and precinct. It’s basically a neighborhood with many black, GLBT, and single women like me. I can understand why they’d like my massive blue dot in a blue city to get as little ability to vote as possible.
If only we were following China’s example. This is from Wired. “China Opens World’s First Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center. With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the innovative data center uses seawater as a natural cooling system.”
The difference is that China isn’t trying to kill off its people and natural resources and it’s not relying on fossil fuels which are dirty, nasty, require fracking, and kill off living things. Trump also doesn’t want any regulation on the damn things. Here’s some information on that from The New Republic. “This Data Center Is Everything That Everyone Hates About AI. Utah’s Stratos Project is showing how everyone loses in the unregulated rush to build these Big Tech behemoths—even investors.” Luke Barnes has the analysis.
Lousyana is the perfect example of how not to let your crazy Republican Governor go wild on these things. We now not only have an AI center in process. We have a SpaceX project that will likely ruin the ecosystem and lives of people living on and near the Gulf of Mexico. We are so fucked it’s not even funny. One month ago, this showed up in the New York Times. (I’ve gifted the links, btw.) “How Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal. A Times examination details how the Silicon Valley giant used private talks with local officials to start a project big enough to cover nearly six square miles.”
We’ll not be the Sportsman’s Paradise between that and the Musk project. All living thing are likely to perish in the parish at this rate. Landry is a mini Trump and very much a part of the brotherhood of sociopaths. This is from The Hill. “Louisiana governor ‘not concerned’ about environmental impact of Gulf Coast SpaceX facility.”
There’s more at the link. My question is, what the hell can the rest of us who don’t support him do? I voted Saturday morning, wondering which candidate I had voted for would even have a chance under the new gerrymandering. That doesn’t even consider that we couldn’t even vote for our Congressional representatives, given the Supreme Court decision and the quick fix redraw of our map to ensure maybe one black person will retain their seat. The only good news to come out of the election was that all five constitutional amendments proposed by Governor Klandry were voted down.
My friend Robert Mann, a former Journalism Professor at LSU, has something poignant to say about the loss. This is from his SubStack. “Enjoy your tarnished legacy, Bill Cassidy. You earned it.” It’s a good lesson: while all politics is local, it can be influenced by a cult of personality.
Speaking of Mafia-like behavior, here’s a little something on the Don’s Greenland Grab. This is from the New York Times. “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland. Greenlandic officials worry about the direction of the negotiations aimed at defusing President Trump’s threats to seize their island. But they have little leverage.” The story has a number of contributing reporters.
There’s a lot more at that gifted link. Jeer Heeter has this description of our Grifter-in-Chief in his article in The Nation. “Trump Gloats About “Making a Fortune” While Americans Suffer. As his war in Iran wreaks havoc, Trump is fixated on personal glory and enrichment.”
All this was happening while Trump was at a big donor fundraising gala in Florida, utilizing a small hut with curtains as the War Room. This is from CNN. “Hunkered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump makes his club a makeshift Situation Room.” I guess an easel is the latest technology they have down there at Mar-a-Lago.
Raw Story‘s Robert Davis delves deeper into the prior TV News reports that the U.S. has a weapons shortage from already from all the prior attacks made on targets by the Trump Regime. “
Axios follows up on the number of attacks and results Orange Caligula has chalked up during his Regime of Terror. Zachary Basu reports this story. “Trump’s lethal presidency.”
He’s like a walking stereotype for all the complaints every country has ever had about us. We are truly Ugly Americans. Judd Legum follows the money at Popular Information. As we’ve learned, that’s the central role of getting to this level of destruction and lunacy. We used to call it the military industrial complex, abetted by bribed politicians. “The money behind the new Iran War.”
Only Trump could make Nixon look good. You can read a lot more about the money trail at the links above. Meanwhile, “fog of war” actions look pretty bleak for as many mistakes are being investigated. The Hill reports that “Kuwait mistakenly’ shoots down 3 US F-15s: Pentagon.” Tara Sutter reports the story.
Here’s another example of bad planning and big lies from Politico. “Pentagon offers no evidence to support claim it attacked Iran in defense. The Trump administration’s effort to construct a case for war after shots started flying has few historical parallels.” Again, there really was no case for this regionwide war we have created with Israel.
This gives the idea of ‘going off half-cocked’ an entirely new meaning. This was basically an impulsive decision that will cost us plenty. But as we can see, some folks will make lots of money from the death and destruction. We are also far beyond flintlocks with hammers.
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