Finally Friday Reads: Felon leaves jurisdiction
Posted: July 25, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked, Alligator Alcatraz, Breaking News, kakistocracy, Trump is the new Saddam | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, FARTUS, Gislaine Maxwell, Jerome Powell, Scotland, South Park Sermon on the Mount 3 Comments
“There you have it, MAGA. Stinky has set the record straight. Move on from Epstein.” John Buss, @repeat1969
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
This week’s adventures in Bad Presidenting contained some whoppers. First, a misfired gotcha at Fed Chair Jerome Powell over supposed overspending on construction work on buildings included costs of a building that was finished five years ago. I wonder which accounting genius was responsible for that. This is from CNBC. “Trump spars with Powell over renovation costs during Fed visit, but backs off firing threats.” This entire thing continues to tweak my economist mind. If the citizenry is complaining about inflation, why would you push a policy that would make it worse? Since Trump bulldozes historic buildings rather than handles restoring historic buildings in historic districts where materials used are either part of the restoration or replaced by materials that aren’t asbestos, he seemed destined to look stupid. Here’s Fortune‘s take. “Here’s how the Fed’s renovation budget ballooned to $2.5 billion.” The reporting is by Lily May Lazarus. Remember, the Fed cannot use shortcuts like not paying undocumented workers, or just destroying the historical edifice like Trump did with Fifth Avenue Landmark, the Bonwit Teller building. My house is in a historic district, and you have to have permission to change the edifice. In the French Quarter, you can’t even pick your own paint color, let alone mess with the building’s facade.
The Federal Reserve’s long-planned renovation of its Washington, D.C. headquarters has turned into a $2.5 billion political flashpoint. Initially estimated at $1.9 billion in 2021, the cost of overhauling the Fed’s historic Marriner S. Eccles Building and its adjacent Federal Reserve East Building has jumped by over 30%, drawing fire from President Donald Trump and his allies, and raising questions about fiscal oversight at the nation’s central bank.
The project, which began planning in 2017 and broke ground in 2022, aims to bring the aging buildings into compliance with modern safety and accessibility codes and add office space while preserving their historic architecture. But that effort has come with growing pains and costs.
Renovating the Fed was never going to be an easy task. In fact, Fed Chair Jerome Powell admitted the renovations would likely stoke controversy. “No one in office wants to do a major renovation of a historic building during their term in office,” he said in June. But Powell sees the project as necessary.
According to the Fed’s information page on the project, neither the Eccles Building nor the East Building has ever been fully renovated, despite having been built nearly a century ago, with some major mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems dating back to their construction and containing lead and asbestos.
The original budget underestimated several now-familiar forces: pandemic-era inflation, soaring construction costs, and unexpected infrastructure challenges. Prices for structural steel and other materials spiked in 2021 and 2022 as supply chains tightened and demand for large-scale projects rebounded. Labor shortages in the construction industry, namely mechanical, plumbing, and electrical trades, further drove up costs. These price inflationary factors were noted in the Fed board’s 2025 budget.
On-site, several environmental factors have also added to the renovation’s cost. Workers uncovered asbestos and several water-table issues resulting from the swampy DC soil. These complications added complexity and price costs, to excavation and foundation work—especially since strict D.C. building regulations cap building heights—forcing deeper builds underground. The difficult excavation work even earned the company working on the Fed’s foundation and underground aspects a 2025 award for “excellence in the face of adversity” from the Washington Building Congress.
And the best Trump could down was stick in the costs of a building finished five years ago to inflate the final costs. He was easily finished off by the Central Banker, who deals with far more sophisticated math than that. The visit was likely a distraction from the ongoing Epstein situation, from which he cannot extricate himself. That didn’t go as planned, as the release of a new South Park episode ate up the airwaves at the end of the week. I managed to find a place where I could watch it outside the graph of Paramount, which just got its wish to sell itself to Sky Dance. (No relationship to us and an insult of a name to dakinis on all planes of existence. “Sermon on the ’Mount” (South Park Season 27 Episode 1) is the funniest satire I’ve seen in years.
So, it couldn’t be better timing, but a terrible waste of funds to go bother Scotland, whose people hate Trump more than the Canadians. This is from the. New York Times. “Trump Flies to Scotland, Leaving Chaos Swirling in Washington. The five-day visit will be a mix of personal business and golf with some diplomacy thrown in.” What a brilliant waste of time. Plus, isn’t this all supposed to be in a government trust that he’s not supposed to involve himself in?
President Trump headed to Scotland on Friday for a five-day visit, hoping to leave behind the chaos of Washington and the persistent questions over the handling of the Epstein files for what will be a mix of personal business and diplomacy.
Mr. Trump will celebrate the opening of a new 18-hole course — the MacLeod Course — at Trump International Golf Links outside of Aberdeen, named after his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, who was born in Scotland. He also plans to play rounds at the Trump Turnberry course, which Mr. Trump bought in 2014, on the other side of Scotland.
The president has some business on the agenda, as well. He plans to meet with the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who has spent months nurturing his relationship with the American president.
Mr. Trump’s reception in Scotland may be rocky.
The Scots are generally not fans of Mr. Trump, and protests are already planned. A group called “Stop Trump Scotland” said it is organizing a “festival of resistance” against Mr. Trump during the trip and has called on John Swinney, the first minister of Scotland, to decline to meet with him.
“The people of Scotland don’t want to roll out a welcome mat for Donald Trump, whose government is accelerating the spread of climate breakdown and fascism around the world,” the protest group said in a statement.
A survey in February by the research firm Ipsos found that 71 percent of those polled in Scotland had an unfavorable opinion of him, versus 57 percent of the broader British public.
The authorities said they were prepared for the demonstrations.
It’s all enough to make me do a Highland Fling in the middle of this wretched heat and humidity. I’ll just settle by singing Scotland the Brave. However, all the fun may be here as we look forward to the midterm elections. This is from AXIOS. “Scoop: DNC targets vulnerable House Republicans with Epstein ads.” The thing that still worries me the most is that the poor women who were the child victims of Epstein have to see all this.
The Democratic National Committee will target MAGA voters with ads about Jeffrey Epstein in a dozen GOP-held House districts at the start of the August recess, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: Democrats, after suffering debilitating losses in 2024, have found their mojo in pushing for the release of the Epstein files.
- Democrats are pitting squeamish Republicans eager to move on from Epstein against MAGA voters who want validation of theories around the late financier’s sex trafficking operation, its clientele and his 2019 death, ruled a suicide.
Driving the news: The ads will run before videos on right-wing YouTube and Meta channels like those of Fox News, Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro – target-rich audiences for the voters fixated on Epstein.
- “Call your representative. Demand they release the Epstein files,” says the ad, while hitting House Republicans for going on August recess without having cast a floor vote to release more Epstein details.
- One video ad features Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) deeming Epstein a “serious issue.” Another includes video of President Trump with Epstein. It’s long been known that Trump knew Epstein, and the president has not been accused of any wrongdoing related to his operation.
The ad will run for five days, starting Friday, in the districts of 11 Republicans the DNC says are vulnerable in the 2026 midterms:
- Reps. Tom Barrett (Mich.) Gabe Evans (Colo.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Ashley Hinson (Iowa), Young Kim (Calif.), Mike Lawler (N.Y.), Zach Nunn (Iowa), Andy Ogles (Tenn.), Chip Roy (Texas), Bryan Steil (Wisc.) and Derrick Van Orden (Wisc.).
- It’s also running in Rep. Virginia Foxx’s (N.C.) district. Foxx is not viewed as particularly vulnerable, but she chairs the powerful Rules Committee, which determines what legislation receives votes on the House floor.
What they’re saying: The DNC is seeking to reach up to a million Americans with the five-figure ad campaign.
It’s times like these when I’m glad my new TV is going on its third year in the box it came in. ProPublica has uncovered an American Scrooge. “His Former Company Got Caught Employing Undocumented Workers. Now He’s Profiting Off an Immigrant Detention Camp. Disaster Management Group is one contractor behind the nation’s largest detention camp, to be built at Fort Bliss. It’s run by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty to a scheme to hire and conceal undocumented workers. ” Isn’t this what America is all about these days?
On Monday, the Department of Defense announced that it had awarded a massive new contract to build the nation’s largest migrant detention camp on the Fort Bliss military base, a facility that will play a key role in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.
Unmentioned was that one of the subcontractors slated to work on the project, Disaster Management Group, is owned by Nathan Albers, who previously co-owned a company that pleaded guilty in 2019 to a scheme to hire undocumented workers and conceal them from immigration authorities. Albers is a big-time Republican donor who has spent time at Mar-a-Lago.
Two people with direct knowledge of the award and two familiar with the company told ProPublica that Disaster Management Group would help build the new facility, receiving a substantial chunk of the more than $1.2 billion the government has allocated for the project.
“The idea that you could use illegal labor and then sell services to ICE, the irony is thick,” said Scott Shuchart, a former official with the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during President Donald Trump’s first term and later under President Joe Biden, referring to the immigration case involving TentLogix, the company Albers once co-owned.
In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson for Disaster Management said that Albers and Disaster Management had been dropped from the DHS’ investigation of TentLogix and exonerated. Upon learning of illegal actions by TentLogix’s co-founder, the spokesperson said, “Mr. Albers parted ways as a minority and non-operating owner of TentLogix.”
The spokesperson didn’t directly answer questions about Disaster Management’s role in the detention camp at Fort Bliss, saying only that the company “is proud to support projects of national importance for nearly 20 years.”
The White House didn’t answer questions about Disaster Management or Albers, referring ProPublica to the DOD and DHS, neither of which provided comment.
The new migrant detention camp near El Paso, Texas, is expected to hold up to 5,000 people. The prime contractor is Virginia-based Acquisition Logistics, and people with direct knowledge of the work at Fort Bliss told ProPublica that Amentum, a major engineering and technology services contractor, will be another subcontractor.
Neither Acquisition Logistics nor Amentum replied to questions from ProPublica about the project.
Disaster Management specializes in building temporary structures. Since 2020, it’s won over $500 million in government contracting work, mostly to construct lodgings for a U.S. program to resettle Afghan refugees.
We’re getting details about the last Trump exchange of prisoners, and it’s about par for the course for Trump to have a murderer sent back to us. This is from the New York Times. “Convicted Murderer Released by Trump From Venezuelan Prison Is Free in U.S. At least some American officials knew that Dahud Hanid Ortiz had been convicted of a triple murder when he was put on the plane to the United States.” Well, isn’t that special?
He killed three people in Spain and fled to Venezuela, where he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, court documents show. Then last week, the Trump administration negotiated his release as part of a large prisoner swap, and he arrived on American soil.
Now, the convict, Dahud Hanid Ortiz, 54, a U.S. Army veteran, is free in the United States, according to two people with knowledge of the case. One said he was in Orlando, Fla.
When the Americans put Mr. Hanid Ortiz on a plane on Friday back to the United States, at least some people in the Trump administration knew of his criminal past, according to a third person.
Mr. Hanid Ortiz was among 10 Americans and U.S. legal permanent residents extracted by the United States from detention in Venezuela on Friday. In exchange, the United States agreed to allow the release of 252 Venezuelan men it had sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
The Trump administration claimed all the men were members of the Tren de Aragua gang and had to be removed to protect the security of Americans.
Trump’s homegrown murderers and rapists get deals. This brings me to Gislaine Maxwell, who is suddenly getting a lot of visitors looking for something or another. This is from NBC News. It’s just breaking and is reported by Chloe Atkins and Dareh Gregorian. “DOJ’s Maxwell questioning done for the day, her attorney says.” Do you suppose it was a merry meet?
Maxwell attorney David Oscar Markus said the deputy attorney general has finished his questioning of Maxwell for the day.
“We started this morning right around 9 o’clock, and went to now lunchtime, and we’re finished after all day, yesterday and today, Ghislaine answered every single question asked of her over the last day and a half, she answered those questions honestly, truthfully, to the best of her ability. She never invoked a privilege. She never refused to answer a question,” Markus said.
“They asked about every single, every possible thing you could imagine. Everything,” Markus said.
It was unclear whether Blanche intends to question her further. Markus said he did not know whether the discussions would have any impact on her case.
“We don’t know how it’s going to play out. We just know that this was the first opportunity she’s ever been given to answer questions about what happened and so the truth will come out about what happened with Mr. Epstein, and she’s the person who’s answering those questions,” he said.
Prosecutors and the judge who oversaw her 2021 trial have said that Maxwell had made multiple false statements under oath and failed to take responsibility for her actions. She’s serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted of sex trafficking minors.
“People have questioned her honesty, which I think is just wrong,” Markus said.
Asked if she’d got any offer of clemency from the government, the lawyer said no offer had been made.
What exactly has happened to our country in the last few months? I don’t recall any of this stuff being something that would be normalized by even Richard Nixon. I know it could’ve been different.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
This is artist Amy Sherald’s take on the Statue of Liberty. You may remember she did the official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama. She quit a big show over the possible censorship of this painting. It’s a Trans Woman.
Finally Friday Reads: Chicks coming Home to Roost
Posted: July 18, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked, 2025 What Fresh Hell?, Abusive Relationships, child sexual abuse, impeach trump, kakistocracy | Tags: #TrumpCult, Epstein Files, Trump adjudicated Rapist, Trump coup attempts, Trump hebephile, Trump in girl's dressing room 5 Comments
“Come on, he picked it up at Walgreens.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein may be dead and gone, but the damage he and his buddies have done to the lives of teenage girls will never be undone. I can only imagine their suffering as the news cycle reminds them of a life they try daily to forget and move beyond. This is the reason everyone should honestly put them first in the search for justice for those men who joined Epstein in stealing their youth. More stories of the exploitation of these girls are reaching front pages.
Today, in People Magazine, we learn that an “Ex-Casino Boss Claims Trump and ‘Best Friend’ Jeffrey Epstein Were Once Caught Bringing Underage Girls to Casino Floor. A former executive at Trump’s Atlantic City casino told CNN that the duo brought three girls to the gambling floor who were not yet 21. The White House is calling his story “fabricated.” I’m enjoying the turning of the screw as many of the MAGA faithful burn their red hats in effigy. I just hope that support is available as the victims of their abhorrent crimes relive spiritual murder.
A former employee of Donald Trump claimed in a new interview that the president and Jeffrey Epstein were once caught bringing girls into Trump’s casino who were not old enough to gamble. The White House denies the allegations.
Jack O’Donnell, who oversaw the Atlantic City Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino for four years in the 1980s, spoke with CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday, July 16, about the president’s friendship with the late billionaire, who later became a convicted sex offender.
“In my mind, [Epstein] was his best friend, you know, [throughout] the time I was there for four years,” O’Donnell said in the interview, noting that the pair “frequently” came to Trump’s casino together.
One alleged instance stood out to the former casino boss. He claimed that one night in the late 1980s, Trump and Epstein visited Trump Plaza with three women and brought them onto the casino floor despite them being under 21.
O’Donnell said he found out about the incident the following day, when state casino commission inspectors were waiting for him in his office. An inspector, it seems, had identified one of the girls with Trump and Epstein as “the No. 3-ranked tennis player in the world.”
“This [inspector] happened to be a tennis fan and he said, ‘Jack, I know she’s 19 years old,’ ” O’Donnell said. “They had determined that the women that they brought down were underage to be in the casino.”
In the state of New Jersey, it is illegal for anyone under 21 to gamble on a casino floor. Despite the law, O’Donnell claims the commission gave Trump a “break” for the incident, but told him to warn the future president about the potential consequences.
“I had to call them and say, ‘They’re giving you a break this time, but if this happens again, the fine is going to be substantial and it’s going to be on your head,’ ” he claimed.
O’Donnell also claimed to have told Trump that continuing to hang out with Epstein and underage women was “not gonna look good.”
“I did tell him in that conversation, ‘I don’t think you should be hanging out with this guy, just so you know, and you certainly shouldn’t be doing that in Atlantic City,’ ” he said.
When asked on Thursday about O’Donnell’s CNN interview, the White House passionately denied his claims.
“Jack O’Donnell is a stone cold loser who is a liar and fraud,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told PEOPLE in a statement. “This is completely fabricated story from his warped imagination as he suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his pea-sized brain.”
The repetitive use of the same old explanations has certainly become insufficient. Trump is the forever victim. We knew of his proclivities a long time ago. He even bought a teen beauty pageant to gain access to the dressing room of the contestants. But her emails. This is the PolitiFact take on the case from back in the day.
As waves of allegations of Donald Trump’s inappropriate behavior toward females swept over the presidential campaign, reaction from around the country was swift.
During an Oct. 12, 2016, meeting with the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., commented on one of the latest revelations, saying:
“I was just reading on the way over here this morning on how Trump would walk into the (Miss) Teen USA dressing room, all these 15- and 16-year-olds completely naked, just walk right in on them. Man, is that the image we want of the president of the United States? It’s just disturbing to think that he could get away with all this stuff.”
So, did Trump “walk right in on” naked 15- and 16-year-old contestants in their dressing room?
The implication is that the alleged incident, back when the Republican nominee owned the pageant, wasn’t a mistake.
We’re not going to rate this on our Truth-O-Meter, since some of the key sources are anonymous. But we’ll lay out what we do know about the allegation.
The nightmare of every woman, mother, and grandmother is that their young girl will fall under the power structure set up by these men to hide their proclivities. Hebephiles are omnipresent in places that give them access to prepubescent children. There is not a day that goes by where we learn some minister or priest is abusing an adolescent or young child. One of the most amazing things I’ve seen is this year’s book and appearances written by E Jean. Carroll. Just a week ago, a Judge ruled on Trump’s latest court attempt to overturn the verdict in her case. You would have to be deliberately blind to not see Yam Tits as a sexual predator. This is from The Hill.
The mandate reaffirms the 90-day clock for Trump to appeal the case to the Supreme Court after the court last month rejected Trump’s bid to overturn the verdict.
A three-judge panel on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict late last year, keeping intact Carroll’s $5 million judgment over claims Trump sexually abused her at a New York City department store in the mid-1990s. He denies her allegations.
Thursday’s mandate was issued after the full 2nd Circuit last month rejected Trump’s bid to overturn the three-judge panel’s ruling.
“Thursday, July 10th, 2025 So long, Old Man! The United States Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit, bids thee farewell,” Carroll wrote in a social media post celebrating the mandate.
A White House spokesperson described Carroll’s case as “liberal lawfare” in a statement sent to CNBC.
You have to wonder about Paramount’s decision to end the successful run of Steven Colbert’s show. Colbert was undoubtedly the best Trump detractor on TV. The timing is definitely suspicious, and Yam Tits immediately celebrated the news on his propaganda social media site, Truth Social. This is from the Washington Post.
“The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert will end in May 2026at the conclusion of its current broadcast season, CBS announced Thursday in a statement. It called the cancellation “purely a financial decision.”
“It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount,” the network said, describing it as an “agonizing decision.” Colbert took over as host, executive producer and writer of the show in 2015.
Colbert told the audience at a Thursday taping that he found out about the cancellation the previous night. “I share your feelings,” he said, when the crowd booed after his announcement.
He said it was the end of “The Late Show,” not just his stint at its helm. “I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away,” Colbert said. He added that he was “extraordinarily, deeply grateful to the 200 people who work here.”
CBS staffers were caught off guard by the announcement. “We are flabbergasted,” said one staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.
The announcement came days after Colbert spoke out against the decision earlier this month by Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump during last year’s presidential campaign.
We may never know for certain what role that lawsuit and the settlement played in that decision, but I have my suspicions. So does Senator Elizabeth Warren.
CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump – a deal that looks like bribery.America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.
President Trump said Friday morning that he was thrilled by the news that CBS is canceling the decade-running “Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social. “His talent was even less than his ratings.”
Meanwhile, the Republican attack on children continues with a new trick to pull back funding for NPTV and NPR. Rural communities receive vital weather warnings from the stations, as it is the only provider of that information in the many middle-of-nowhere places in this country. It’s truly fitting that PBS News writes its own obituary. The Senate caved shortly after. “House gives final approval to Trump’s $9 billion cut to public broadcasting and foreign aid.”
The cancellation of $1.1 billion for the CPB represents the full amount it is due to receive during the next two budget years.
The White House says the public media system is politically biased and an unnecessary expense.
The corporation distributes more than two-thirds of the money to more than 1,500 locally operated public television and radio stations, with much of the remainder assigned to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service to support national programming.
Democrats were unsuccessful in restoring the funding in the Senate.
Lawmakers with large rural constituencies voiced particular concern about what the cuts to public broadcasting could mean for some local public stations in their state.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the stations are “not just your news — it is your tsunami alert, it is your landslide alert, it is your volcano alert.”
As the Senate debated the bill Tuesday, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the remote Alaska Peninsula, triggering tsunami warnings on local public broadcasting stations that advised people to get to higher ground.
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said he secured a deal from the White House that some money administered by the Interior Department would be repurposed to subsidize Native American public radio stations in about a dozen states.
But Kate Riley, president and CEO of America’s Public Television Stations, a network of locally owned and operated stations, said that deal was “at best a short-term, half-measure that will still result in cuts and reduced service at the stations it purports to save.”
You may recall that early in this blog’s history, I was commuting about an hour to a university across the lake. NPR was my companion on the long commute. I can attest that there was a good part of the drive where my cellphone did not work, and that the only radio station I could get in the swamps along I-55 was NPR. I’d start with the local in New Orleans, and everything would drop until I got the NPR station from Baton Rouge. I can only imagine what the hinterlands are like up North in places like Montana and Wyoming. We’re definitely in the fascist country of Trumpistan now. Lisa Murkowski complained about the funds cut to NPR and voted against it. This is from UPI. “Coming PBS, NPR cuts already hurting many stations.”
The public stations already have received funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to get them through September. Once that money runs out, more than 100 PBS and NPR stations are at risk of closing. The cuts will hit especially hard in rural areas.
For example, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit off the coast of Alaska on Wednesday. Public media helped broadcast a tsunami alert, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
“Their response to today’s earthquake is a perfect example of the incredible public service these stations provide,” Murkowski said Wednesday on X. “They deliver local news, weather updates, and, yes, emergency alerts that save human lives.”
Murkowski was one of two Republican senators who voted against the bill.
The effects of the cutting off of funding could be even wider-reaching than expected, observers said.
“Failing stations will create a cascade effect in this highly connected and interdependent system, impacting content producers and leading to the potential collapse of additional distressed stations in other areas of the country,” Tim Isgitt, CEO of advisory firm Public Media Company, told The New York Times.
An analysis by non-profit Public Media Company identified 78 public radio organizations and 37 TV organizations that will likely close. They rely on funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for about 30% of their budgets.
“I think unfortunately this is cutting off their constituents’ noses to spite NPR’s face,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher said Wednesday on CNN. “It doesn’t help anyone to take this funding away.”
PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said in a statement that the cuts “will be especially devastating to smaller stations and those serving large rural areas.”
Here’s some interesting analysis of the week’s events from TPM. “Nearly All The Trump II Depredations Run Through DOJ.”
The Trump Justice Department continues to be ground zero of his second term. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the impact of a White House-run DOJ dwarfs most other Trump II depredations precisely because it allows space for them continue unchecked. A totally compromised DOJ eliminates accountability for breaking the law in the criminal sense and for the mass lawlessness in non-criminal contexts.
I offer that as an introduction to the series of news items below that either directly involve malfeasance under Attorney General Pam Bondi or are a byproduct of DOJ bad acts. As the Jeffrey Epstein matter threatens to consume the Trump White House, remember that it, too, is an outgrowth of trying to abuse and misuse the powers of the Justice Department. It just happened to backfire.
Fired DOJ prosecutor Maurene Comey sent this note to her former colleagues in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office.
Comey’s firing by Main Justice blindsided acting U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who was reduced to “just a paper-pusher,” in the words of one observer.
Trump is starting a new initiative to put more political appointees into federal jobs. This is from GovExec.com. “Trump creates ‘Schedule G’ to add more political appointees to agencies’ top ranks. The new, non-career employees will serve in policy-making roles and add “horsepower” to carrying out the administration’s agenda, White House says.” Why aren’t folks screaming Communism at this attempt to stack the federal government with idiots? It sure sounds like a command and control model of government, ala the Soviet Union, to me.
President Trump created another new category of federal employee on Thursday evening, issuing an executive order to expand the number of political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation and will serve in policy-making or policy-advocating roles.
While presidents can already tap an uncapped number of appointees to serve in Schedule C positions, Trump noted those individuals serve in more narrow confidential or policy-determining roles. The new positions will therefore fill a gap that currently exists in federal appointments, the White House said.
The order is the latest in Trump’s effort to establish a tighter grip on the executive branch and its actions. He has already created Schedule Policy/Career, formerly known as Schedule F, which is similarly defined to Schedule G but reserved for career civil servants. Agencies are in the process of determining who qualifies for conversion to Schedule Policy/Career and those employees will become easier to fire for any reason.
“President Trump believes creating non-career Schedule G positions will enhance government efficiency and accountability and improve services provided to taxpayers by increasing the horsepower for agency implementation of administration policy,” the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the order.
Appointments to Schedule G positions are expected to lapse at the end of a presidential administration. The roles are particularly aimed at the Veterans Affairs Department and will go to applicants who prove to be suitable supporters of the president’s agenda. Agencies cannot take into consideration an applicant’s political affiliation.
“Schedule G employees will be hired to help faithfully implement the President’s policy agenda,” the White House said.
It boasted that Schedule G’s creation is just the latest effort to deliver “on his promise to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our government from Washington corruption.”
Trump tasked the Office of Personnel Management with establishing regulations to implement Schedule G. In April, OPM issued guidance that encouraged agencies to consider offering the maximum salary of $195,200 to attract Schedule C employees. It is not immediately clear if that pay cap will apply to Schedule G appointees. OPM’s guidance also removed career human resources staff from the process of vetting Schedule C appointees, onboarding them and setting their pay.
Don Moynihan, a professor at University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, said the executive order was the president’s latest effort to strip career experts of influence within federal agencies.
The order “opens space at top ranks of government for Trump loyalists as policymakers, with no limit on hires,” Moynihan said, adding it “continues [a] pattern of politicization.”
This frightening analysis from David R. Lurie–writing at Public Notice--is not going to let your meals settle gently today. “The emerging coup. Lawless authoritarian regimes don’t give up power willingly.”
Six months into the second Trump administration, two things are becoming clear: First, the president remains a nearly entirely non-strategic actor, motivated only by an abiding desire to accumulate ever greater power, adulation, and wealth. And second, he’s fundamentally changing the nature of the United States in ways that threaten to bring an end to the nation’s 249 year old status as the world’s leading democracy.
Despite Trump’s consistently haphazard “governance” style, it’s becoming easy to foresee how his regime could effectively void our democracy. The now fully MAGA-fied GOP is increasingly likely to lose the next presidential electionafter incurring bracing losses in the midterms and other intervening state races. And as the nation learned before and following the 2020 election, Trumpists are more than willing to use force and other extra-legal actions to attempt to cling to power.
For Trump and his cronies, the prospect of losing power — or even sharing it with Democrats in the event control of the House shifts in 2026 — could prove to be catastrophic because of their reasonable fear of being held accountable for criminality that dwarfs Trump’s first term. And unlike January 2021 — when the Big Lie scheme failed — Trump and his cohorts will have new tools to carry out a coup, including a massive federal police force with a proven willingness to engage in systemic illegality.
Trump’s brownshirts
From its outset, Trump 2.0 has been grounded on systemic illegality and unilateral executive actions, a course of (mis)conduct the administration has succeeded in pursuing because of pliant GOP majorities in Congress the Supreme Court. It’s all but certain that the administration’s authoritarian conduct will grow in scope and intensity over the succeeding months, in no small part because the GOP reconciliation bill will hand over a staggering $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security.
The bill includes nearly $30 billion in new “enforcement” funds. DHS boasts that it is already the largest federal law enforcement agency, with over 80,000 officers spread across nine organizations. But DHS says it plans to use the new funding to quickly hire 10,000 more more ICE thugs. And in recent months, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has systematically dismantled DHS’s oversight offices, thereby paving the way for a lot of corner cutting.
My daily mantras these days are ‘We are so fucked’ and ‘Why doesn’t he just die?’ I have to pull myself back to my normal meditation routines. At least it hasn’t impacted my exercise schedules, where I actually am encouraged to focus on my abdomen.
So, this is “all I can stands and I can’t stands no more.” Funny, how my kindergarten cartoon hero seems more necessary given we have Orange Bluto for FARTUS.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
Mostly Monday Reads: UnLawful and DisOrder Episode ∞
Posted: July 14, 2025 Filed under: Constitutional Crises, Corruption and Criminal Insanity, Department of Homeland Security, Disappearing Immigrants, Discrimination against women, Epstein Files, FARTUS, Fascist Florida, FBI, GOP Crimes Against Humanity, immigration, Incontinentia Buttocks Cabinet picks, kakistocracy | Tags: Assault on democracy, Congressman John Lewis, ICE Raids and children, Jeffrey Epstein files, MAGA Epstein Quest, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) 10 Comments
“True Story.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
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.
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!
No other issue has tested the MAGA base’s commitment to Trump like the Epstein files.
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 Politico have 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 Patel did the same. Ditto Dan 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!!!”
Adam Wren breaks this news at Politico.
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 Herald reports 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 has explained.
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.
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?
Repeat Independence Day: Free the Union!
Posted: July 4, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, Abusive Relationships, Broligarchy, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Constitutional Crises, corruption, kakistocracy, Polycrisis, poverty | Tags: Curtailing the First Amendment, Independence Day, Ukraine, Worst Fiscal Policy Ever 6 Comments
“Apparently, we are not better than this. An entire political party subservient to a crappy reality television personality. Trump’s Amerika. Shameful.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Happy Independence Day, Number 249, Sky Dancers!
What do we have? A democratic Republic, if we can keep it. I’m not sure it’s mostly gone. Convince me I’m wrong, please!
Let’s start out by celebrating the First Amendment to the US Constitution and by realizing we have work to do. This is from the AP this morning. “EPA puts on leave 139 employees who spoke out against policies under Trump.” Mad King Yam Tits strikes again!
The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday put on administrative leave 139 employees who signed a “declaration of dissent” with its policies, accusing them of “unlawfully undermining” the Trump administration’s agenda.
In a letter made public Monday, the employees wrote that the agency is no longer living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment. The letter represented rare public criticism from agency employees who knew they could face blowback for speaking out against a weakening of funding and federal support for climate, environmental and health science.
In a statement Thursday, the EPA said it has a “zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting” the Trump administration’s agenda.
Employees were notified that they had been placed in a “temporary, non-duty, paid status” for the next two weeks, pending an “administrative investigation,” according to a copy of the email obtained by The Associated Press. “It is important that you understand that this is not a disciplinary action,” the email read.
More than 170 EPA employees put their names to the document, with about 100 more signing anonymously out of fear of retaliation, according to Jeremy Berg, a former editor-in-chief of Science magazine who is not an EPA employee but was among non-EPA scientists or academics to also sign.
Read more at the link. It’s hard to know what exactly to say about this bit of news from CNN. I guess we’ve known who he is since his “very fine people on both sides paraded past a Synagogue for a MAGA rally, shouting “Jews will not replace us” in the Charlottesville protests in 2017. His fascination with Hitler is one big, ugly clue. “Trump says he had ‘never heard’ Shylock as an anti-semitic term after using it at rally.”
President Donald Trump said early Friday that he wasn’t aware that some people view the word “Shylock” as antisemitic after using the term during a rally to decry amoral money lenders.
“I’ve never heard it that way. To me, Shylock is somebody that’s a money lender at high rates,” Trump told reporters after getting off Air Force One. “I’ve never heard it that way, you view it differently than me. I’ve never heard that.”
Trump was arriving back in Washington after an event in Iowa marking the kick-off to nationwide celebrations marking the country’s 250th anniversary next year.
In his speech, he used the word when touting aspects of the major domestic policy bill that had been approved by Congress a few hours earlier.
“Think of that: no death tax, no estate tax, no going to the banks and borrowings from in some cases a fine banker. And in some cases, Shylocks and bad people,” he said during his event in Des Moines. “They took away a lot of, a lot of family. They destroyed a lot of families, but we did the opposite.”
The name “Shylock” derives from the name of the antagonist in William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” Shylock, a Jew, was a ruthless moneylender in the play, and he’s remembered for demanding a “pound of flesh” from the merchant Antonio if he failed to repay a loan.
The Anti-Defamation League condemned Trump’s use of the word Friday morning.
“The term ‘Shylock’ evokes a centuries-old antisemitic trope about Jews and greed that is extremely offensive and dangerous. President Trump’s use of the term is very troubling and irresponsible,” the organization wrote in a statement on X. “It underscores how lies and conspiracies about Jews remain deeply entrenched in our country. Words from our leaders matter and we expect more from the President of the United States.”
I learned this when we started studying Shakespeare in the 5th grade. I can’t imagine any person educated after World War 2 not knowing this. Trump’s maleducation is so obvious. Do you remember when we used to have these great Fourth of July celebrations to watch on PBS, like The Boston Pops orchestra playing in front of the giant fireworks display? Well, it’s a tacky Fourth of July for the MAGATs, with proceeds going to his friends. This is from AXIOS. “Trump to host UFC fight at White House as part of ‘America250’ celebrations.”
President Trump will host a UFC fight at the White House as part of celebrations marking 250 years since the signing of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he announced at a Thursday rally in Iowa.
The big picture: “Every one of our national park battlefields and historic sites are going to have special events in honor of ‘America250‘ and I even think we’re going to have a UFC fight,” Trump said on the eve of the July Fourth holiday during a speech at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines that kicked off yearlong 250th anniversary celebrations.
- The president’s links to the Ultimate Fighting Championship date back to at least 2001, when the since-closed Trump Taj Mahal hosted the mixed martial arts enterprise.
- Trump’s attended multiple UFC fights since then and is good friends with the enterprise’s CEO, Dana White, who introduced Trump at the Republican National Convention before he accepted the GOP presidential nomination last year.
Zoom in: Trump said White would organize the White House UFC event.
- “It’s going to be a championship fight, full fight, like 20,000 to 25,000 people and we’re going to do that as part of ‘250’ also,” he said.
- Other celebrations will include “the great American State Fair” that will “bring America250 programming for fairgrounds across the country, culminating in a giant patriotic festival next summer on the National Mall, featuring exhibits from all 50 states,” according to Trump.
What they’re saying: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is “dead serious” about the UFC fight plans, per a White House pool report.
Temple and I started our own celebration of deposing Mad Kings this morning in the Bywater. Perhaps by our afternoon, we will have more than 2 people and 2 dogs.
If the dead part weren’t followed by the word serious, I might’ve planned a big celebration myself. Temple and I already had our parade this morning. The partner of Anti-Semitism was right there along Yam Tits at his rally in Iowa. This is from The Hill. “Trump goes after Mamdani at Iowa rally.” Islamaphobia is so on brand for him. Nothing says “Let Freedom Ring” like hating on religious minorities.
President Trump used Thursday remarks in Iowa ahead of Independence Day to take aim at Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City who has become a favorite target of criticism for Republicans.
“This guy is a communist at the highest level, and he wants to destroy New York. I love New York, and we’re not going to let him do that,” Trump said at an event in Des Moines.
“Generations of Americans before us did not shed their blood only so that we could surrender our country to Marxist lunatics on the eve of our 250th year,” Trump continued. “As president of the United States, I’m proclaiming here and now that America is never going to be communist in any way, shape or form, and that includes New York City.”
The comments marked the latest attack from Trump, a New York City native, against Mamdani, who earlier this week officially secured the Democratic nomination for November’s mayoral race and instantly became a lightning rod for GOP attacks.
Trump earlier this week threatened to investigate Mamdani’s immigration status and arrest him if he stood in the way of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s raids in the city.
Generations of Americans did not shed their blood only to surrender our county to another Mad King, Plantation Slaveholder, and NAZI either. Mine were around everywhere since the Revolution. I’m pretty sure my great-uncle John Parke Custis didn’t die being an aide-de-camp to his stepfather, George Washington, at the Siege of Yorktown from camp fever, just for us to have another Mad King. Also, sure that all my great-great-grandfathers who fought for the Union didn’t expect to see an American President try to strip the rights away from the African-Americans freed from slavery. Also, sure my Dad who bombed NAZIs and my uncles who served in the navy and in army intelligence didn’t expect to have a fascist as president too. Yet, here we are.
More indications of his madness and warped view of the country’s form of government and rule of law are on display in Politico today. Rachel Blade has this interview and analysis. “What Trump Told Me About His Complete Domination of Congress. Demanding a bill by Independence Day was a telling flourish for someone with zero tolerance for independence in the legislative branch.” It’s obvious he didn’t care or probably even read what was in it. He just cares about the control and the photo op, signing the deaths of millions of Americans, including the elderly and children.
When I reached President Donald Trump by phone Tuesday night, with his “big, beautiful” bill on a clear track for passage, he seemed to be in a buoyant mood. And no wonder.
In a span of two weeks, he greenlit an unprecedented U.S. strike on Iran, then brokered an almost immediate cease-fire. He watched NATO allies bow to his decade-old demand to pony up more defense spending, then saw the Supreme Court curtail judges’ power to block his policies.
And when he picked up the phone, the president realized he was on the precipice of a major legislative achievement — cementing his campaign-trail promises of “no tax on tips,” increased border enforcement and more.
“It’s been an incredible two weeks,” he said. “Really — it’s been a great six months.”
Particularly on Capitol Hill, things could have gone much different. In fact, they did in his first term. Even with a much larger House majority, he struggled to corral lawmakers who had their own conceptions of what a unified Republican government ought to be doing. Early dreams of tossing Obamacare into the dustbin evaporated; so, too, did the GOP’s House majority.
Much felt similar this time around. You have fiscal hard-liners like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas groaning about deficits and moderates like Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska balking at health care cuts — to say nothing of the various parochial factions pulling the bill back and forth.
But this time, with the Republican Party almost entirely remade at Trump’s bidding, hardly any corralling was necessary. Yes, there were a pair of overnight vote-a-ramas and last-ditch negotiating standoffs. But it all felt awfully fait accompli — as those on Capitol Hill fully realized.
“If anybody’s griping, I can tell you right now, it’s the same actors, the same movie,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) said Wednesday as Freedom Caucus holdouts made their final stand. “It’s gonna be the same ending.”
True to form, Trump did it while exhibiting only the lightest interest in the policy details. He was very invested in delivering on his campaign tax promises and boosting immigration enforcement, but rarely much beyond that.
I’m still worried about our economy.
Now, I worry for poor Rooster and his girlfriends in the house 3 doors down from me. Oh, and everyone around here since our trees are full of them and many keep chickens in their backyards here.
Still, it’s that damnable Big Ugly Bill that may yet take this country down. This is from G. Elliott Morris writing at Strength in Numbers. “One Big Unpopular Bill. The Republican budget bill, which now heads to Trump’s desk, will be the most unpopular major law in at least 30 years.”
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (yes, that is its official government name) is a huge package of different policies, including tax cuts for the wealthy and the largest ever yearly increase (hundreds of billions of dollars) in funding for the Pentagon, ICE, and CBP. Republicans have “paid for” those tax cuts and spending increases by making the largest ever cuts to Medicaid and government food benefits, among other programs.
I place “paid for” in quotes because despite the claims from Trump’s White House advisors, the reduction in spending on various social programs does not come close to covering the cost of the tax cuts. The Republican budget bill is a historic shifting of taxpayer money previously allocated to government assistance to the needy, to rich people, and immigration enforcement. This chart from The Economist lays out the math:
The OBBBA is also historic in another way: It is likely the most unpopular budget ever, is the second most unpopular piece of key legislation since the 1990s, and the most unpopular key law, period, over the same period.
I have been an economist for about 50 years now, and it takes a lot to turn me into a Deficit Hawk. This did it. It’s fiscal policy gone deadly. Drunk Secretary Hegseth has turned me into a fan of bombs overnight. This is from NBC News. “Hegseth halted weapons for Ukraine despite military analysis that the aid wouldn’t jeopardize U.S. readiness. The move blindsided the State Department, Ukraine, European allies, and members of Congress, who demanded an explanation from the Pentagon.”
The Defense Department held up a shipment of U.S. weapons for Ukraine this week over what officials said were concerns about its low stockpiles. But an analysis by senior military officers found that the aid package would not jeopardize the American military’s own ammunition supplies, according to three U.S. officials.
The move to halt the weapons shipment blindsided the State Department, members of Congress, officials in Kyiv and European allies, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the matter.
Critics of the decision included Republicans and Democrats who support aiding Ukraine’s fight against Russia. A leading House Democrat, Adam Smith of Washington, said it was disingenuous of the Pentagon to use military readiness to justify halting aid when the real reason appears to be simply to pursue an agenda of cutting off American aid to Ukraine.
“We are not at any lower point, stockpile-wise, than we’ve been in the 3½ years of the Ukraine conflict,” Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told NBC News.
Smith said that his staff has “seen the numbers” and, without going into detail, that there was no indication of a shortage that would justify suspending aid to Ukraine.
Suspending the shipment of military aid to Ukraine was a unilateral step by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to three congressional aides and a former U.S. official familiar with the matter. It was the third time Hegseth on his own has stopped shipments of aid to Ukraine, the sources said. In the two previous cases, in February and in May, his actions were reversed days later.
According to AXIOS, Trump might be providing more aid to Ukraine shortly. “Trump tells Zelensky he wants to help Ukraine with air defense, sources say.” Did Putin piss him off or is he that hell-bent on getting a Nobel Peace Prize?
Why it matters: Earlier this week the Pentagon paused a weapons shipment, including air defense interceptors and ammunition, to Ukraine’s army.
- The decision caught Ukraine and many Trump administration officials surprise.
Behind the scenes: The two sources said the call between Trump and Zelensky lasted around 40 minutes, with a major focus on Ukraine’s air defense needs.
- One source said Trump was aware of the recent Russia escalation, including both air strikes on Ukrainian cities and on the frontline.
- “Trump said he wants to help with air defense and that he will check what was put on hold if anything,” the source said.
- The Ukrainian official said Trump and Zelensky agreed that teams from the U.S. and Ukraine soon will meet to discuss air defense and other weapons supplies.
- The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Okay, that’s enough. I’m going to play crazy cat lady and make sure my little feral girl is eating the food I put out today. Try to remember the sacrifice of all the people who worked hard to make this country a beacon of freedom. Then vow to do what you can to help keep it.
My friend in Miami called me in tears yesterday afternoon. She has been self-employed for over three years and is reliant on the Affordable Healthcare Act for her insurance. She has an incredible number of pre-existing conditions and is under the care of a neurologist for a motor neuron disease. She received a letter from Aetna yesterday that said she will lose her coverage on January 1 because they will no longer provide anything connected to the ACA that goes defunct after the next midterms. It seems businesses are not waiting until the last minute to bail from that and Medicaid. I can only imagine what this will do to Medicare.
But hey, one more billionaire can buy Venice for $25 million or even more for a wedding. Can you imagine how many starving children, or children with diseases, or children with special needs could benefit from that?
What’s on your Blogging and Reading list today?
I pulled Martina McBride’s Independence Day song and video off with the 8 men on the Diddy jury in mind. Women do not ask to be raped, assaulted, trafficked or slut slammed for what men do to them even when it may have started out as consensual. A lot of us in this country are still waiting for our independence.
Monday Reads: Drunken SCOTUS Rulings
Posted: June 30, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, Broligarchy, campaign financing, hunger, ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, impeach trump, Incontinentia Buttocks Cabinet picks, kakistocracy, kleptocracy | Tags: @johnbuss.bsky.social John Buss, Big Bad Budget-Busting Bill, Kristi Noem Sociopath and Cunt, Murderous Republican Christofascists 2 Comments
Sick, John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Today’s Republican Decision-makers seem hell-bent on killing people. Considering so many of them are hyper-Christian, I find this very strange. I’ve found instances of this in basically all three branches of government today. Steven Miller’s high deportment numbers sending everyday people to death zone countries can only be described as some kind of eugenics experience in trying to increase the percentage of wipipo in the country. The Big Bad Budget-Busting Bill, making its way to law in Congress, will definitely kill people. Then, there’s this SCOTUS ruling that almost made it past me. Imagine handing a lot more power to life-or-death situations to RFK, Jr? Well, that’s exactly what SCOTUS did with the drunk on the Court making the decision.
Aren’t these the same people who scream at women trying to get Health Care over fertilized eggs? This is from USA Today, as reported 2 days ago by Adrianna Rodriguez. “What the Supreme Court Obamacare decision means for RFK Jr.” As if I wasn’t worried enough about ICE killing people and sending them to death zones and the Big Budget-Busting bill removing Medicaid from the neediest people and children. I still haven’t figured out how a 90-year-old in dementia care is going to manage to find a job to access private insurance, but that’s just Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts coming back to haunt us.
The U.S. Supreme Court preserved a key element of the Affordable Care Act that helps guarantee that health insurers cover preventive care at no cost to patients.
The justices reversed a lower court’s ruling that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which under the 2010 law has a major role in choosing what services will be covered, is composed of members who were not validly appointed.
The suit started in Texas, where two Christian-owned businesses and individuals argued that health insurance plans they buy shouldn’t have to cover medical tests and drugs they object to on religious grounds, such as the HIV-prevention drug PrEP. But the legal question at the heart of the Supreme Court case was whether the task force is so powerful that, under the Constitution, its members must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the 6-3 majority that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can remove task force members at will and can review their recommendations before they take effect.
“The Task Force members are removable at will by the Secretary of HHS, and their recommendations are reviewable by the Secretary before they take effect,” he wrote. “So Task Force members are supervised and directed by the Secretary, who in turn answers to the President preserving the chain of command.”
Chain of Command? Are we bombing Iran again? I’m going to have to call Sister Helen PreJean CSJ for another one-on-one conversation about what life means again. Conway, Kavanaugh, and Kennedy need another set of Sunday School lessons. So that article is good for basic information, like, evidently, a certain type of Christians feel they can murder people if they just claim a method that’s in line with whatever their cult made up as a religious exception. Handing people over to RFK Jr. just seems beyond cruel. Mark Joseph Stern has this analysis in Slate. Again, it’s from 2 days ago. “The Supreme Court Just Handed RFK Jr. a New, Extraordinarily Frightening Power.” It’s just another example of SCOTUS and its idea of concentrated power in the Executive branch.
The Supreme Court upheld a key plank of Obamacare against a constitutional attack on Friday by a 6–3 vote. But in the process, the majority wound up handing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. significantly more authority over American health care than Congress ever intended. Kennedy, the current secretary of health and human services, now has unquestioned power to hire and fire members of a key panel that mandates insurance coverage for preventive treatments, and to block its decisions about what insurers must cover. To save the panel, the court destroyed its independence.
Friday’s case Kennedy v. Braidwood Management involved a challenge to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, or PSTF. Congress designed this body to consist of medical experts who use their independent judgment to determine which preventive services provide a substantial benefit to patients. A provision of the Affordable Care Act made their decisions binding on insurers, meaning top-rated services must be covered at no cost to patients. Today, the PSTF has determined that more than 40 treatments qualify for mandatory coverage, including many cancer screenings, heart medication, and HIV prevention drugs.
The Supreme Court upheld a key plank of Obamacare against a constitutional attack on Friday by a 6–3 vote. But in the process, the majority wound up handing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. significantly more authority over American health care than Congress ever intended. Kennedy, the current secretary of health and human services, now has unquestioned power to hire and fire members of a key panel that mandates insurance coverage for preventive treatments, and to block its decisions about what insurers must cover. To save the panel, the court destroyed its independence.
Friday’s case Kennedy v. Braidwood Management involved a challenge to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, or PSTF. Congress designed this body to consist of medical experts who use their independent judgment to determine which preventive services provide a substantial benefit to patients. A provision of the Affordable Care Act made their decisions binding on insurers, meaning top-rated services must be covered at no cost to patients. Today, the PSTF has determined that more than 40 treatments qualify for mandatory coverage, including many cancer screenings, heart medication, and HIV prevention drugs
The problem with the PSTF is that its structure and operations are likely unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s current precedents. And indeed, in a 2020 decision, the court hinted that this kind of scheme is unconstitutional. There are two main issues: First, it is not entirely clear from the law who is supposed to appoint its members and who, if anyone, has authority to fire them. Second, the ACA states explicitly that the panel “shall be independent and, to the extent practicable, not subject to political pressure.” Congress seems to have intended it to operate as an independent body with open-ended power to regulate the multibillion-dollar insurance market, subject to little or no political oversight. That setup clashes with the Supreme Court’s current interpretation of executive authority. Specifically, it would make the PSTF’s members “principal officers” who must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. And because its officers are not currently appointed this way, Supreme Court precedent would render its decisions invalid and voluntary.
This is extremely important as HIV Denialism is just one in a long list of RFK Jr’s hobgoblins. Read about Justice Thomas’ complaints about the Beer Guy’s logic at the link. It actually is worth the read. As for the Big Budget-Busting Bill, it’s speeding along to passage today. This is from the Washington Post and Jeff Stein. “Senate GOP tax bill includes largest cut to U.S. safety net in decades. The legislation would enact historic, possibly unprecedented, reductions in Medicaid and food stamps spending.” What I can’t figure out is why they’re not concerned that the people who benefit the most live in Red States, concentrated in rural areas of the country, and are primarily white. Isn’t that their voter base? No wonder Bezos could afford to buy Venice for a day, and his wife could afford all those ugly clothes and that awful plastic-surgery ruined face. We live in a land of monsters.
The Senate Republican tax bill speeding to passage includes the biggest reduction of funding for the federal safety net since at least the 1990s, targeting more than $1 trillion in social spending.
Although the legislation is still estimated to cost more than $3 trillion over the next decade, the Senate GOP tax bill partially pays for its large price tag by slashing spending on Medicaid and food stamps, which congressional Republicans maintain are rife with fraud.
The tax bill centers on making permanent large tax cuts for individual taxpayers, extending the cuts that Republicans first enacted under President Donald Trump’s first term. The bill includes an increase to the standard deduction claimed by most taxpayers, rate reductions for most U.S. households, and a partial version of Trump’s plan to end taxes on tipped wages, among many other provisions.
But it offsets these expensive tax cuts in part through what several experts said may prove to be the most dramatic reductions in safety net spending in modern U.S. history. While last-minute changes to the bill text make precise estimates impossible, the legislation appears on track to cut Medicaid by about 18 percent and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by roughly 20 percent, according to estimates based on projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.Previously, the biggest recent cut to food stamps was a roughly 14 percent cut approved by Congress during President Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s, according to Bobby Kogan, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank. (Food stamp benefits also sharply increased, and then fell, after the expiration of COVID benefits.) The biggest prior cut to Medicaid was during President Ronald Reagan’s term in the 1980s, when Congress and the White House approved a roughly 5 percent reduction to the federal health insurance program that primarily benefits low-income households during his first two years in office, Kogan said.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the Senate tax bill will lead to roughly 12 million fewer people receiving Medicaid and more than 2 million fewer people receiving food stamps.
This New York Times article gets down to the nitty gritty if you’re interested (gifted). “A List of Nearly Everything in the Senate G.O.P. Bill, and How Much It Would Cost or Save.” I bet the bills for Presidential golfing and loafing around Mar-a-Lago are bigger than any money saved by kicking small children off their daily meals.
The tax and domestic policy bill nearing a vote by Senate Republicans includes hundreds of provisions, including extended and expanded tax cuts and significant cuts to Medicaid, food benefits and other programs. It would add more than $3 trillion to the national debt. To become law, it still needs to pass the Senate — where an extended “vote-a-rama” on amendments and rulings by the Senate’s parliamentarian could bring last-minute changes. Then it must gain a second passage through the House and be signed by the president to become law.
Below is a table that lists how nearly every provision would affect the federal budget over 10 years, as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office in an analysis published Sunday. The budget office measured the legislation as it usually does, taking into account the cost of extending expiring tax cuts. This is a different approach than the one embraced by the Senate’s leaders. The C.B.O. evaluation does not include a handful of policy provisions that do not have direct effects on the federal deficit.
This is from Jennifer Ruben writing at The Contrarian. “The worst bill in modern history. Democrats must make it a career-ender for Republicans.” I can’t imagine Boudreaux and Thibodeaux getting up in their houseboat on the Atchafalaya Basin, not realizing they’ve just been had. But I may be wrong. I’m frankly suggesting that Senator Cassiday lose his license to practice medicine based on how much harm this does.
Senate Republicans over the weekend decided to move forward on the big, ugly bill to rip healthcare coverage from 17 million people, deprive millions of food assistance, and use that money to pay (only partially!) for gigantic tax cuts for the super-rich. Their version is far worse than the House’s handiwork; Senate Republicans want to cut more than $1 trillion from Medicaid. Apparently, they concluded the House’s $700 billion cut did not throw a sufficient number of people off their healthcare coverage. An estimated 17 million (including those priced out of the Affordable Care Act exchanges) would lose healthcare coverage
Even those who mouthed concerns about the draconian cuts, including Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) fell into line, voting to move the bill forward. They are daring voters not to hold them accountable for their monstrous hypocrisy.
Lawmakers are not in the dark. Their constituents, rural hospitals, state and local officials, the Congressional Budget Office, conservative think tanks, the Wall Street Journal, and their Democratic colleagues have explained the bill’s horrid consequences. Republicans might parrot MAGA talking points, but when Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) distributes materials to fellow Republicans highlighting the devastation the bill will cause, only the truly deluded can imagine this is anything but horrid policy. (The Hill quoted a source familiar with the scene at Tuesday’s Senate Republican lunch: “Thom Tillis got up and he had a chart on what the Senate’s provider tax structure will cost different states, including his. His will lose almost $40 billion. He walked through that and said, ‘this will be devastating to my state.’”)
Senate Republicans have been hammered from all sides. On the right, the Committee for a Responsible budget found it would add $3.5-4.2 trillion to the debt and move the Medicare and Social Security trust funds a year closer to insolvency. Meanwhile, Republican senators with Democratic governors (e.g., Josh Stein in North Carolina, Laura Kelly in Kansas, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Janet Mills in Maine) got slammed daily on the consequences of Medicaid, SNAP, and other cuts back home.
Aside from the disastrous policy objections, Republicans should not delude themselves about the political quicksand they stepped in. The reverse-Robin-Hood scheme is deeply unpopular in every recent public poll. A Fox News poll shows only 38% support it, while 59% oppose it. (Among independents, it is a stunning 22-73%.) Quinnipiac’s poll is even worse for MAGA (27-53%; among independents 20-57%.) KFF (35-64%; only 27% of independents support); Pew (49-29%) and The Washington Post and Ipsos (23-42%) are miserable as well.
Perhaps the scariest poll for Republicans was one from Maine showing Collins sure has reason for “concern”: Her favorability is a miserable 14% with disapproval at 57%. Mills, the strongest potential 2026 challenger, has a 51-41% favorability rating. Come to think of it, maybe Collins should forget “concern” and zoom ahead to full-blown panic.
Phillip Bump has these thoughts at the Washington Post. “This is what ICE is doing with the tax dollars you already provide it. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stands to see a sharp increase in its funding under the Republican budget bill.” My understanding is that they have a bigger budget now than the Marines. Miller sure wants to deport him some POC.
But there is another group of people who would also benefit enormously from the bill: staff and officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency which stands to see tens of billions more in funding. An analysis of an earlier version of the bill indicated that “mass deportation would account for almost a quarter of the bill’s total price tag.” So it’s worth stepping back and considering what ICE is doing with the by-contrast modest (but still substantial) funding it currently gets.
We should start by acknowledging that ICE’s hyperactive targeting of immigrants in the U.S. since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January doesn’t exactly reflect current funding levels. Earlier this month, it was reported that ICE was already $1 billion over budget for the fiscal year, driven by the new administration’s focus on deploying the agency to arrest and deport as many immigrants as possible.
What that’s meant, in practice, is a surge in arrests and detentions of immigrants who have not been convicted or even accused of any crime. The number of criminals and accused criminals who have been arrested by ICE and remain detained by ICE is up 128 percent over a year ago. But the number of immigrants with no criminal record arrested and detained by ICE is up more than 1,400 percent — there are more than 15 times as many now as there were then.
In past years, it was generally Customs and Border Protection that arrested more noncriminals, since it was stopping and detaining people seeking to enter the U.S. without authorization. In mid-June 2024, for example, there were 30 times as many noncriminals in ICE detention who’d been arrested by CBP vs. ICE. Now, thanks in part to declining attempts to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, the ratio is almost 1 to 1.
The grifting in this administration is astounding. This is from ProPublica. “Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations.” This was investigated by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski.
In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.
In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.
Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.
Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I am silently screaming now. None of this is what should be happening in the United States of America.
What’s on your Reading and Blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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