Posted: August 23, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Fascist crackdown on Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro, John Bolton, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, mortgage fraud, National Guard troops in cities, Pete Hegseth, Pulse nighclub, rainbow crosswalk, sanctuary cities, Space Cat Visits Venus |
Book Cover
Good Afternoon!!
I think I’ve hit a wall this morning. I’m feeling so exhausted and overwhelmed with what Trump is doing to the country, that I just want to lie down and give up. I hope I can raise my spirts somehow as the day goes on.
Anyway, it is Caturday, and I have a new installment of Space Cat to share today. It’s the second book in the space cat series, Space Cat Visits Venus. Here is the synopsis from Amazon:
Flyball the Space Cat is back, and this time he’s living in Luna Port, the first city on the Moon. Workers at the lunar station are building a rocket to transport him and his pilot buddy, Colonel Fred Stone, to Venus. The two friends take a long voyage to the planet, where they encounter violet skies, torrential ammonia rains, and strange plants that can communicate without speaking.
This new edition of a charmingly illustrated storybook from 1955 is the second of a four-book series starring the intrepid feline known as Space Cat. Young readers will delight in taking a look at space exploration from Flyball’s point of view and following his escapades across the solar system.
It’s hard to believe these books are still in print after all this time, but I think they are really cute. See some of the illustrations scattered through this post.
As you know, John Bolton’s home and office were searched by the FBI yesterday. Below are some articles that analyze and comment on Trump’s retribution project.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: Trump’s Vendetta Campaign Targets John Bolton.
President Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents. But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term.
His revenge campaign took an ominous turn Friday as FBI agents raided the home and office of Mr. Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton. They brought two broad warrants to search the “premises.” Agents showed up unannounced at his Bethesda, Md., home at 7 a.m. They confiscated his wife Gretchen’s phone because it was visible and not on her person. Mr. Bolton had already left for his office, which is where FBI agents greeted him….
Cat with Venus rocket
It’s hard to see the raid as anything other than vindictive. Mr. Bolton fell out of Mr. Trump’s favor in the first term and then wrote a book about his experience in the White House while Mr. Trump was still President. Mr. Trump tried and failed to block publication. The President then claimed Mr. Bolton had exposed classified information, though the book had gone through an extensive pre-publication scrub at the White House for classified material.
The book investigation faded away under President Biden, but now it looks as if Mr. Patel is reviving it. Whether Mr. Trump ordered the FBI probe or not doesn’t matter. Mr. Patel knows what the President thinks about Mr. Bolton, and the President’s minions in Trump II don’t serve as the check on his worst impulses the way grown-ups did in his first term. The presidential id is now unchained.
Mr. Trump made clear that he was out for blood against Mr. Bolton when he pulled the former adviser’s protective detail after his re-election. Mr. Bolton is widely known as a defense hawk, and in 2022 the Justice Department charged an Iranian national it said planned to murder him.
A bit more:
It’s unlikely that Mr. Bolton broke any laws on national secrets, and he certainly didn’t share any with us over our long association with him. But perhaps Mr. Trump intends for the process itself to be the punishment even if there is ultimately no criminal charge. Mr. Bolton has to pay for legal counsel, and his family has to endure the anxiety of being under federal government siege.
Mr. Bolton has continued to speak candidly about Mr. Trump’s second-term decisions, pro and con, including in these pages this week. The President may also hope the FBI raid will cause Mr. Bolton to shut up, though knowing him we can’t imagine that working.
The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.
Shane Harris at The Atlantic (gift link): The Bolton Raid Feels Like a Warning.
FBI directors don’t customarily announce raids in progress. But early this morning, Kash Patel celebrated the search of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s home as agents were rolling into his suburban-Maryland driveway: “NO ONE is above the law … @FBI agents on mission,” Patel wrote on X. Agents also executed a search warrant at Bolton’s office in Washington, D.C. President Donald Trump later told reporters that he had learned about the raid on one of his most voluble critics from TV news, but he took the opportunity to call Bolton a “lowlife” and “not a smart guy.” Then he added: “Could be a very unpatriotic guy. We’re going to find out.”
Flyball dreams of mice
The FBI’s actions were hard not to read as payback for Bolton’s years of criticism of the president, even as the facts that persuaded a judge to approve a search warrant remain unknown. That’s the problem with a politicized legal system—even if an investigation is legitimate, it’s easy to assume that its motives are corrupt. Trump has spent years vowing retribution against Bolton, particularly after Bolton published a 2020 memoir that portrayed the president as incompetent and out of his depth on foreign policy.
If this was revenge, it wasn’t an isolated act. As agents were still packing up boxes of Bolton’s effects, The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had pushed out yet another senior military officer, firing Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In June, its analysts delivered a preliminary assessment that U.S. bombers had caused relatively limited damage to Iranian nuclear facilities, undercutting Trump’s pronouncements that the sites were “obliterated.” And just three days ago, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked the security clearances of more than three dozen current and former national-security officials. Several played key roles in efforts to counter or expose Russia’s 2016 election interference, what Trump calls the “Russia Hoax” and Gabbard has described as part of a “years-long coup” against the president.
Put it all together, and this may be remembered as the week Trump’s campaign against the “deep state” kicked into high gear. To some intelligence professionals I spoke with, it felt as though something fundamental had shifted in their historically apolitical line of work.
“Given the dystopian nature of it all—clearance revocations of former officials who did no wrong, forced retirements of long-standing intelligence officials, reductions in force that include junior officers who were just hired, and a wildly politicized leadership in the intelligence community—I no longer recommend young Americans to pursue careers in intelligence,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a veteran CIA officer who had his own security clearance yanked earlier this year, told me.
Purge doesn’t adequately capture what national-security experts see happening here. Chilling effect is too mild, though revoking the security clearances of two senior intelligence officers, as Gabbard did, effectively ending their government careers, will indeed send a message. Terrorizing the workforce is a phrase I heard a lot this week. And that may indeed be the point.
“Instead of being honest about what we think, now people will just keep their mouths shut or tell Trump what he wants to hear,” said one former official, who would only speak anonymously. The administration publicly identified this person as part of the “Russia Hoax,” and they’ve hired personal security for outside their home, fearing that Trump’s most fevered supporters might pay a visit.
Forget about calling out misbehavior or wrongdoing by administration officials, the person added: “Where would we go to file a grievance, or to report misconduct? Who’s going to do that?”
You can use the gift link to read rest. I wonder if they will target Hillary Clinton? I’m sure Trump would like to do that.
The Trump DOJ seems to have hit on mortgage fraud as their go to accusation against critics.
Flyball and Fred look out at Venus.
The Wall Street Journal: Mortgage-Fraud Accusations Are Trump’s New Political Weapon.
The Trump administration has a new weapon at its disposal in its efforts to take down Democrats and their appointees: mortgage records.
Members of the administration have now alleged three public officials have committed mortgage fraud, referring each to the Justice Department. The administration has signaled that it has just gotten started: U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin was recently tapped “to investigate fraud by public officials in mortgages,” according to a letter Martin sent.
The targets have denied wrongdoing, but the probes represent an aggressive new spin on opposition research that has long dug into tax records and financial disclosures public officeholders have to make. Mortgage applications go beyond the typical disclosure requirements.
Another twist is the allegations are coming from a government official overseeing an agency able to access massive amounts of mortgage data.
At the forefront of the campaign is Bill Pulte, a homebuilder heir Trump tapped to lead the government agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest players in the mortgage market.
At the historically quiet but powerful Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte has turned himself into a Trump attack ally, probing mortgages of prominent Democrats and a Biden-appointed official at the Federal Reserve.
So far, DOJ has announced investigations of Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, Senator Adam Schiff, andNew York Attorney General Letitia James.
Heading into an election season, mortgage documents could become even more a source of contention across the country, for both sides of the aisle. Mortgage fraud allegations have also emerged against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who is campaigning for a Senate seat. (Paxton’s campaign has declined to comment on his properties.)
Mick Mulvaney, a former chief of staff for Trump who had faced questions about taxes on his nanny when he was facing Senate confirmation, says the attacks are going to be part of the new normal for Republicans to use versus Democrats now.
“Right now it’s classified documents and mortgage applications,” Mulvaney said of the new opposition research. “Whether or not you pretend to need a wheelchair at an airport to get on the plane faster, that may be used next if that’s illegal.”
In other news, the troops (and FBI agents and ICE thugs) are still occupying Washington DC. Here’s the latest on that story.
CNN: Hegseth orders National Guard troops in DC to carry weapons.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered National Guard members patrolling the streets of Washington, DC, to begin carrying their service weapons as they fulfill President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital, according to a US defense official.
Taking off their helmets
The directive from Hegseth represents a notable shift in guidance from the Pentagon, which had previously indicated that National Guard members could be armed if the circumstances warranted, and suggests hundreds of guard troops deployed in DC will soon be carrying weapons despite serving in a support role.
“At the direction of the Secretary of Defense, (Joint Task Force) JTF-DC members supporting the mission to lower the crime rate in our Nation’s capital will soon be on mission with their service-issued weapons, consistent with their mission and training,” the official said….
It comes as other states’ National Guard members have begun arriving in Washington, DC, to be in-processed to assist the DC National Guard.
More than 1,900 troops from multiple states have been called up as part of the mission including from West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Louisiana, and Tennessee National Guards, according to a release from Joint Task Force – DC on Thursday.
What could possibly go wrong? I wonder if Hegseth has heard about Kent State?
ABC News reports that National Guard troops will now be permitted to act as law enforcement: National Guard in DC to carry M17 pistols, conduct law enforcement duties, task force says.
National Guard troops deployed on the streets of Washington, D.C., will now carry weapons for personal protection and are allowed to carry out law enforcement duties, defense officials announced Friday.
The decision is an escalation in President Donald Trump’s use of military troops to address what he insists is “out of control” crime in the nation’s capital. Since his announcement, Trump has mobilized nearly 2,300 National Guard troops from Washington, D.C., and six states with Republican governors. But troops had remained unarmed until now.
ABC News first reported Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had officially authorized the troops to carry weapons if their mission required it. On Friday, the joint task force overseeing the troops confirmed the move, noting that Guard personnel sent on missions would carry M17 pistols, “which are intended for person protection.” The task force said Guard members would receive proper training on how to use the weapons before being allowed to carry them.
“This decision is not something taken lightly,” said Army Brig. Gen. Leland D. Blanchard, III, the Commanding General of the D.C. National Guard, in a statement.
Flyball and the Venus Mouse.
Really? I think it is taken very lightly, considering there’s not as serious crime problem in DC and it’s illegal for the military to perform law enforcement functions in the U.S.
The task force also noted in its statement late Friday that Guard troops can carry out law enforcement duties because they are operating under Title 32 status, a law that exempts troops from restrictions under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, because they are still technically under a state governor’s command.
Legal experts have long warned about how presidents might use Title 32 as a kind of legal loophole to Posse Comitatus, which is supposed to prevent the president from using the military as a domestic police force. Under Title 32, a president pays for a Guard mission while keeping troops under control of the governors; in this case, Trump asked red-state governors to send their troops to D.C.
While those governors technically retain control of the troops, their missions are being decided by the White House, according to several administration officials.
Reuters: Trump crime crackdown deploys troops in Washington’s safest sites.
Hundreds of National Guard soldiers in military fatigues and combat boots mingled with tourists, posed for selfies, and treated themselves to ice cream from food trucks on Thursday along Washington’s National Mall, one of the safest parts of America’s capital.
On occasion an angry local would hurl verbal abuse at them, but the soldiers simply shrugged and carried on what appeared to be an undemanding assignment.
Outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture, five members of the West Virginia National Guard were standing on the street corner far away from the city’s crime hot spots.
A grateful rescued mouse.
“It’s boring. We’re not really doing much,” said Sergeant Fox, who declined to give his first name.
Fox is among almost 2,000 troops, including 1,200 from six Republican-led states, who are being deployed in Washington as part of an extraordinary militarization inside the Democratic-led city.
The soldiers, some of whom told Reuters they did not get involved in arrests, are officially in Washington to support a federal crackdown on what President Donald Trump calls a crime epidemic. But that depiction appears to run counter to the fact that crime rates overall have shrunk in recent years.
That disconnect, combined with the troop concentration near the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and in view of the U.S. Capitol, highlights criticism by the city’s Democratic leaders that this massive deployment is more a show of power by Trump, rather than a serious effort to fight crime.
No kidding.
This is something I hadn’t heard about before. Trump is also mobilizing National Guard troops in other parts of the country. The Independent: Trump mobilizing up to 1,700 National Guardsman in 19 states to widen crime and immigration crackdown.
The Trump administration reportedly plans to mobilize up to 1,700 National Guard troops across 19 states in the coming weeks to support its immigration and anti-crime crackdowns, a dramatic expansion of the controversial operation that’s seen federal agents and Guard troops carrying out activities across Washington, D.C.
The troops, who will largely be activated across Republican-controlled states, will serve in support of the administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, as well as other law enforcement priorities, according to comment from unnamed Pentagon officials and documents obtained by Fox News.
Taking photos of the plants
The Guardsmen assisting ICE will be carrying out tasks that may include “personal data collection, fingerprinting, DNA swabbing and photographing of personnel in ICE custody,” an official told outlet.
The deployments will take place across the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wyoming, per Fox.
Texas is reportedly slated to have the largest deployment.
The Guardsmen will be serving under Title 32 Section 502F authority, in which they technically remain under state command and control, but can assist with federal missions and are paid with federal funds. The status allows them to avoid running afoul of a federal law limiting military involvement in domestic law enforcement.
Read more at the link.
Trump is also fantasizing about occupying Democratic cities like Chicago and New York. The Guardian: Trump targets Chicago and New York as Hegseth orders weapons for DC troops.
Donald Trump has threatened to take his federal crackdown on crime and city cleanliness to New York and Chicago, as the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered that national guard troops patrolling the streets of Washington DC under federal control will now be armed.
The US president talked to reporters in the Oval Office and said: “When ready, we will start in Chicago … Chicago is a mess.” He added that then the administration “will help with New York”, amid the controversial and aggressive federal efforts to control leading Democratic-voting cities, each of which has a Black mayor….
Touching the telepathic moss.
On the issue of suddenly announcing that it would now arm the federalized troops in DC, the defense department did not immediately offer any other details about the new development or why it was needed.
The step is an escalation in the federal government’s rare intervention into policing in the nation’s capital and came as nearly 2,000 national guard members are stationed in the city.
Earlier this week hundreds of troops from several Republican-led states arrived to bolster the DC national guard.
The Pentagon and the US army had said last week that troops would not carry weapons.
There’s more information about the DC occupation in the Guardian article.
Hegseth’s orders come just a day after Jeanine Pirro, the District of Columbia’s top federal prosecutor, instructed prosecutors to pursue the most serious charges possible in cases stemming from recent arrests, limiting their discretion as the Trump administration intensifies its law enforcement presence in the capital.
That directive, first reported by the New York Times, was issued this week and narrows the ability of line prosecutors to decide how cases are charged and prioritized. By pushing for the maximum charges allowed, the new policy could lead to longer prison terms for convicted defendants….
According to the White House, federal agents have made more than 630 arrests as of Thursday, though the justice department has not clarified how that figure compares with typical city police numbers.
While Pirro has committed to filing the toughest charges possible in most cases, she has also relaxed enforcement of one local gun law. This week she directed prosecutors not to pursue felony charges against people for possessing rifles or shotguns in the city, despite a DC law prohibiting them.
Finally:
On Thursday, Trump declared his takeover of the Metropolitan police department to be a success.
He
had previously signaled that he would target other cities, such as Baltimore, Oakland and another mission in Los Angeles, as well as New York and Chicago, which are all strongly Democratic-voting and run by Black mayors. The Maryland governor, Wes Moore, said to CNN that crime was
dropping in Baltimore as a result of community violence prevention efforts and he would never activate the national guard “for theatrics”.
Yeah, right.
A few more interesting stories to check out today:
NBC News: Kilmar Abrego Garcia notified by ICE that he may be deported to Uganda.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was wrongfully deported to a high-security prison in El Salvador, was notified by immigration authorities that he may be deported to Uganda, less than 24 hours after his release from federal custody.
Abrego was released Friday from a jail near Nashville, Tennessee, where he had been held since his return to the U.S. in June after being mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.
Flyball’s first vegetarian meal.
Immigration authorities were expected to attempt to deport Abrego upon his release. Abrego “may be removed to Uganda no less than 72 hours absent weekends,” a source familiar with the case told NBC News on Saturday.
That is in line with standard procedure that ICE must give immigrants 72 hours notice before removing them to third countries.
Abrego, originally from El Salvador, had a withholding of removal order from 2019 that prevents his deportation to his home country due to concerns that he would be persecuted by violent gangs.
The removal order was violated when the Trump administration accidentally deported Abrego to the El Salvador’s CECOT prison, notorious for its harsh conditions, in March. However, the 2019 protective order does not bar Abrego from being deported to another country.
Abrego’s lawyers have now notified the judge in the Middle District of Tennessee that ICE has informed Abrego of its intent to deport him to Uganda. Abrego could not face the criminal charges of human smuggling brought against him by DOJ in that case if he is out of the country.
They are never going to leave this poor man alone.
AP: Judge blocks Trump from cutting money to Chicago, LA and other cities over ‘sanctuary’ policies.
A judge ruled late Friday the Trump administration cannot deny funding to Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and 30 other cities and counties because of policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration efforts.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco extended a preliminary injunction blocking the administration from cutting off or conditioning the use of federal funds for so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions. His earlier order protected more than a dozen other cities and counties, including San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.
An email to the White House late Friday was not immediately returned. In his ruling, Orrick said the administration had offered no opposition to an extended injunction except to say the first injunction was wrong. It has appealed the first order.
Orrick also blocked the administration from imposing immigration-related conditions on two particular grant programs.
More at the link.
Newsweek: Florida Locals Defy Ron DeSantis By Restoring Pulse Rainbow Crosswalk.
People in Orlando have defied Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and reinstated a rainbow crosswalk outside the Pulse nightclub, after Florida officials removed the painted crossing installed in memory of the 49 people killed at the site in 2016.
Fleeing the ammonia storm.
The restoration was led by local community members and LGBTQ+ advocates who gathered at the intersection following the overnight state-directed repainting. In a video shared to social media by the account @jeremy_rodrigue, people can be seen DIY-ing the rainbow crosswalk and drawing the colors back onto the ground.
“While this attack was meant to demoralize us and push us back in the closet, Orlando refused to be erased,” Democratic state Senator Carlos Guillermo Smith, who became the first openly gay Latino elected to the Florida legislature in 2016, told Newsweek. “It was inspiring to see so many local residents spring into action in response to the Governor’s cowardly abuse of power.” [….]
The removal of the rainbow crosswalk— painted in 2017 and approved during the administration of former Republican Governor Rick Scott—has sparked fierce backlash from city officials, survivors, and LGBTQ+ organizations who say it was eliminated in the dead of night with no warning.
The crosswalk was painted over following a directive from the Trump administration. In a letter to governors last month, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy instructed states to “eliminate” distractions on public roads. He wrote on X at the time: “Taxpayers expect their dollars to fund safe streets, not rainbow crosswalks.”
That’s it for me today. I’m going to try to ignore the news for awhile. Please take care of yourselves, everyone.
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Posted: August 16, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: Alaska Summit, Caroline Leavitt, Donald Trump, NATO, Steve Witkoff, Ukraine war, Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Zelensky |
Good Day!!
Well, that was just about what most of us expected. Trump practically bowed down to Putin. Uniformed U.S. troops were seen on their hands and knees setting up a red carpet from Putin’s plane to where Trump stood to welcome him.
When he saw Putin coming, Trump clapped his hands. He was obviously thrilled to see his idol again, and he gave Putin a warm handshake while patting him on the shoulder. Then Putin was invited to ride in the Beast where the two men could talk privately. Or perhaps Putin handed Trump a written message–who knows?
The cats are not happy today.
After the meeting, Putin and Trump appeared at a supposed “press conference,” but no questions from the press were allowed. Traditionally the host speaks first, but Trump deferred to Putin, who gave a dissertation on the history of Russia in Alaska. Putin also agreed with Trump that there never would have been an invasion of Ukraine if Trump had been president. Trump spoke only briefly, and he complained about how the “Russia Russia Russia hoax” interfered with his “fantastic relationship” with “President Putin.”
We were interfered with by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. It made it a little bit tougher to deal with, but he understood it. I think he’s probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He’s seen- he’s seen it all. But we had to put up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax, but what was done was very criminal, but it made it harder for us to deal as a country, in terms of the business, and all of the things that would like to have dealt with, but we’ll have a good chance when this is over.
Trump also noted that he was going to call NATO and Zelensky to let them know what happened in the meeting.
No questions from the press were allowed. You can read the full transcript at CBS News. It’s not very long.
MSNBC’s Peter Alexander reported that Trump’s entourage did not seem happy after the meeting:
Peter Alexander: "What struck me was the looks on the faces of a lot of the American, delegation here. Caroline Leavitt, Steve Witkoff, who came into the room, then left quickly. Leavitt appeared to be a bit stressed out, anxious. Their eyes were wide, almost ashen at times."
— Blue Georgia (@bluegeorgia.bsky.social) 2025-08-16T00:44:02.105Z
Wow. Witkoff was in the meeting. I hope he leaks about it.
Meanwhile, the Trump people committed a terrible security breach. NPR: Government papers found in an Alaskan hotel reveal new details of Trump-Putin summit.
Papers with U.S. State Department markings, found Friday morning in the business center of an Alaskan hotel, revealed previously undisclosed and potentially sensitive details about the Aug. 15 meetings between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin in Anchorage.
Eight pages, that appear to have been produced by U.S. staff and left behind accidentally, shared precise locations and meeting times of the summit and phone numbers of U.S. government employees.
At around 9 a.m. on Friday, three guests at Hotel Captain Cook, a four-star hotel located 20 minutes from the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage where leaders from the U.S. and Russia convened, found the documents left behind in one of the hotel’s public printers. NPR reviewed photos of the documents taken by one of the guests, who NPR agreed not to identify because the guest said they feared retaliation….
The first page in the printed packet disclosed the sequence of meetings for August 15, including the specific names of the rooms inside the base in Anchorage where they would take place. It also revealed that Trump intended to give Putin a ceremonial present.
“POTUS to President Putin,” the document states, “American Bald Eagle Desk Statue.”
Pages 2 through 5 listed the names and phone numbers of three U.S. staff members as well as the names of 13 U.S. and Russian state leaders. The list included phonetic pronouncers for all the Russian men expected at the summit, including “Mr. President POO-tihn.”
Pages 6 and 7 in the packet described how lunch at the summit would be served, and for whom. A menu included in the documents indicated that the luncheon was to be held “in honor of his excellency Vladimir Putin.”
A seating chart shows that Putin and Trump were supposed to sit across from each other during the luncheon. Trump would be flanked by six officials: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to his right, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff to his left. Putin would be seated immediately next to his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, and his Aide to the President for Foreign Policy, Yuri Ushakov.
During the summit Friday, lunch was apparently cancelled. But it was intended to be a simple, three-course meal, the documents showed. After a green salad, the world leaders would dine on filet mignon and halibut olympia. Crème brûlée would be served for dessert.
I wonder which side cancelled lunch?
The Russians released embarrassing footage. Sarah Ewall-Rice writes at The Daily Beast: Kremlin Leaks Footage Showing Trump Fawning Over Putin.
The state-run Russian international news network Russia Today (RT) has released behind-the-scenes video from Alaska that appears to show President Donald Trump fawning over Vladimir Putin.
The video shared by the Kremlin shows Trump and Putin standing together backstage near where they delivered public remarks following their three-hour meeting.
Despite walking away without a deal and without sharing any details on progress toward ending the war in Ukraine, the president could be seen laughing as he spoke to Putin.
The only person standing with the two leaders as they spoke was Putin’s translator.
In the video, Trump can be seen offering his hand first to shake hands with Putin. The president then tapped their joined hands with his other hand, embracing Putin with a two-hand shake. He also shook the Russian translator’s hand at the end of the clip.
The Kremlin was quick to release the video. While the White House has been posting a series of clips from the historic visit in Alaska, it has not yet shared any candid video of Trump and Putin together. The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
According to RT, the video was taken right after their public remarks, during which neither man took any questions from reporters. It described their behind-the-scenes banter as “light chatter.”
This is also from The Daily Beast, by Farrah Tomazin: Trump Leaves Alaska With Nothing Except a Lecture From Preening Putin.
President Donald Trump has ended his high-stakes Russia summit without announcing a deal to end the war in Ukraine, despite rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin as the first U.S. president in years to invite him to America.
After a ride in the presidential limousine, a military flyover, and three hours of talks, a somewhat subdued Trump told reporters in Alaska: “We didn’t get there—but we have a very good chance of getting there.” [….]
During a press conference lasting only a few minutes, Trump and Putin spoke of an agreement of sorts, but gave no details, took no questions, and made no mention of a ceasefire.
“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump said. “I will call up NATO in a little while. I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate, and I’ll, of course, call up President Zelensky and tell them about today’s meeting. It’s ultimately up to them.”
The lack of an announcement is likely to fuel claims that Putin was using the meeting as a stalling tactic to stave off further U.S. sanctions.
And, of course, Trump used it as an attempted distraction from the Epstein files.
The Russian authoritarian has been frozen out by the West for years, and his visit has been depicted in Moscow as a win for the Kremlin.
At the press conference, Putin addressed the room first, and then spoke for eight-and-a-half minutes about the history of the two nations, his desire for more business ties with America, and flattered the American president by agreeing that the war would not have happened if Trump had been in office.
He also told reporters that he greeted Trump on the tarmac in Alaska by saying, “Good afternoon, dear neighbor—very good to see you in good health and to see you alive.”
But Putin also made the point that in order to make a “lasting and long-term” end to the war, “we need to eliminate all the primary root causes” of the conflict in Ukraine.
This is viewed as shorthand for Putin’s hardline demands, which have repeatedly been rejected: that Ukraine disarms, gives up a large part of its land to Russia, and swears off joining NATO.
Friday’s summit in Alaska’s Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson was the first time Putin has been on U.S. soil in 10 years.
It was also the first time a U.S. president has given the VIP treatment to a Russian leader who faces an arrest warrant for war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court as well as being sanctioned by the U.S. government.
This is hilarious. Trump claims that Putin told him he obviously won the 2020 election, and it was rigged because of mail-in voting. Reuters: Trump says Putin agrees with him US should not have mail-in voting.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin agrees with him that letting voters send in ballots by mail puts honest elections at risk.
Trump, who promoted the false narrative that he, not Democrat Joe Biden, won the 2020 election, cited his agreement with Putin over absentee voting as he pressed his fellow Republicans to try harder to advance overhauls to the U.S. voting system that he has long sought.
Trump has voted by mail in some previous elections and urged his supporters to do so in 2024.
Putin, who has been Russia’s president or prime minister since 1999, was elected to another term in office with 87% of the vote in a 2024 election that drew allegations of vote rigging from some independent polling observers, opposition voices and Western governments. The most formidable opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony in 2024.
Imagine taking advice on fair elections from Putin. LOL
Here’s a reaction from Ukraine. The Kyiv Independent: Editorial: That meeting was sickening. Putin loved it.
Sickening. Shameful. And in the end, useless.
Those were the words that came to mind when we watched the Alaska Summit unfold.
On our screens, a blood-soaked dictator and war criminal received a royal welcome in the land of the free — as his attack drones headed for our cities.
In the lead-up to the meeting in Alaska, U.S. President Donald Trump declared he wanted a “ceasefire today” and that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would face “severe consequences” if he didn’t go for it.
Yet after a 2.5-hour closed-door meeting, Trump and Putin emerged to share… nothing. “Progress” was made and some “understanding” reached, but the two didn’t come to an agreement on “the most significant point” — clearly, Ukraine.
Trump didn’t get what he wanted. But Putin? He sure did.
From the moment he stepped off the plane on U.S. soil, the Russian dictator was beaming.
No longer an international pariah, he was finally getting accepted – and respected — by the leader of the free world. Trump’s predecessor once called Putin a murderer; Trump offered him a king’s welcome.
Trump greeted Putin with a red carpet, warm handshakes, a flyover of U.S. bombers, and a backseat limo ride.
The chummy display stood in stark contrast to Trump’s hostile reception of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office six months ago.
Ukraine’s president endured a public shaming. Russia’s was pampered. Both episodes were disgraceful.
Read the rest at the link.
Susan Glasser at The New Yorker: Trump’s Self-Own Summit with Putin.
Glasser begins by describing the buildup and aftermath of the meeting pretty much as I’ve already posted here. Her evaluation of the event:
Sometimes the news is what it seems to be, meaning, in this case: No deal. The day began with a hellish war in Ukraine, with air-raid sirens in Kyiv and fierce battles in the east, and that is how it ended. The only difference is that Putin got one hell of a photo op out of Trump, and still more time on the clock to prosecute his war against the “brotherly” Ukrainian people, as he had the chutzpah to call them during his remarks in Alaska. The most enduring images from Anchorage, it seems, will be its grotesque displays of bonhomie between the dictator and his longtime American admirer.
Right around the time that Trump was on the tarmac, clapping for the butcher of Bucha, his fund-raising team sent out the following e-mail:
Attention please, I’m meeting with Putin in Alaska! It’s a little chilly. THIS MEETING IS VERY HIGH STAKES for the world. The Democrats would love nothing more than for ME TO FAIL. No one in the world knows how to make deals like me!
The backdrop for this uniquely Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course, anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded. Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.
In the run-up to the meeting, debates raged about the right historical parallel to draw between this summit and its twentieth-century antecedents: Was it to be a replay of Yalta, with two great powers instead of three settling the fate of absent small nations, and with the United States once again signing off on Russia’s dominance over its neighbors? Or perhaps Munich was the better analogy, with Trump in the role of Neville Chamberlain, ceding a beleaguered ally’s territory as the price of an illusory peace? For Ukraine and its supporters in the West, the prospect of a sellout by Trump loomed large.
But history doesn’t repeat so neatly, and certainly not when Trump is involved. He is a sui-generis American President, who, at the end of the day, seemed to have orchestrated a self-own of embarrassing proportions. As ever, Trump’s big mouth offered up the best reminder of what he wanted in Alaska and what he did not get. On Friday morning, as Trump flew out of Washington aboard Air Force One, he told reporters, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” But, after his long-sought meeting with Putin, as he again boarded Air Force One for the long flight home, this was the chyron on Fox News that greeted him: “No Ceasefire After Trump-Putin Summit.”
Read the rest at The New Yorker. I got past the paywall by using the link at Memeorandum.com.
From Ukraine expert Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic (gift link): Trump Has No Cards. Why would Putin need to make a deal with him?
President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement.
Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.
Trump does say that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and sometimes he also says that he is angry that Putin doesn’t. But if the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored. No wonder all of Trump’s negotiating deadlines for Russia have passed, to no effect, and no wonder the invitation to Anchorage produced no result.
There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians. It’s strange that Russian reports of the meeting focused on business cooperation. “Russian-American business and investment partnership has huge potential,” Putin said today.
Applebaum notes that Trump had already destroyed any chance Americans had of influencing Putin.
The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.
This is rich, from CBS News: Trump says he will meet with Zelenskyy after “very successful day” with Putin.
President Donald Trump said he will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Monday afternoon to discuss an agreement “which would end the war” between Russia and Ukraine.
The Truth Social post came about half a day after Mr. Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Mr. Trump said the meeting with Putin “went very well.” He also said the meeting was followed by a “late night phone call” with Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO. The call took place around 2:40 a.m. ET.
“It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump did not share any details of the agreement. He said Zelenskyy would join him in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon to discuss the proposal.
European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, said in a statement that they had been debriefed on the meeting with Putin, and said Mr. Trump had supported security guarantees for Ukraine.
“We are clear that Ukraine must have ironclad security guarantees to effectively defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity. We welcome President Trump’s statement that the U.S. is prepared to give security guarantees,” the statement read.
Read more BS at the link.
That’s it for me today. What do you think?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Posted: August 13, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: 2001, Big Balls Corsitine, Bureau of Labor Statistics, DC Home Rule Act, DC National Guard, Donald Trump, EJ Antoni, Epstein Files, fascism, January 5, Michael Wolff, Smithsonian Museums, Trump tries to distract from Epstein files, virtual meeting on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin |
Good Afternoon!!
Trump’s efforts to distract from his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein are doomed to failure.
It’s just another day under the rule of fascist dictator wannabe Trump. All I can say is whatever is in the Epstein files about Trump must be really damaging, because every day he dreams up one or two new distractions.
Raw Story: ‘I need a big thing!’ Trump said to be considering major betrayal as Epstein distraction.
President Donald Trump has reportedly been frantically calling aides and allies seeking a “big thing” to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, and he’s purportedly considering a major geopolitical move to turn the page politically.
Trump biographer Michael Wolff told The Daily Beast’s new podcast “Inside Trump’s Head” that the president has been making “relentless” phone calls demanding ideas to get him past questions about his longtime relationships with the late sex offender and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Let me go back about a week or so, or 10 days, when Trump started to say to everyone who would listen — and everyone listens to Donald Trump — to staffers and on the phone calls, the relentless phone calls that he’s constantly making, he said, ‘I need a big thing, I need a big thing,'” Wolff told the podcast. ”What’s the ‘big thing?’ And everyone understood that this was code for I need a distraction from Epstein. What’s the thing that will move us beyond that?”
Trump considered turning New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani into a MAGA villain and reportedly called his chief rival Andrew Cuomo to discuss the plan, but Wolff said that option “didn’t get that traction,” so he next moved on to deploying soldiers and federal law enforcement in Washington, D.C., before landing on something else to distract his base.
“That is what he got to,” Wolff said. “‘I’m going to have to do Ukraine.’”
Wolff claims the president will pull the U.S. out of any involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which Trump believes will appease the isolationist MAGA base, after he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week in Alaska.
“He’s going to sacrifice Ukraine for Epstein,” Wolff said. “Essentially, this is, in his mind, a trade. It is the MAGA people who have pressed this Epstein issue constantly. I mean, they’re the threat.”
Wolff doesn’t think that will work either.
The National Guard began to show up on the DC streets yesterday.
Lisa Needham at Public Notice: Trump’s brownshirts deploy in DC.
On Monday, Trump dropped two executive orders, two fact sheets, and two “articles” (who knew that the White House issues articles?) about his decision to federalize the DC police and deploy the National Guard. Then, he held a bonkers press conference where he gave Attorney General Pam Bondi control of the DC police “as of this moment,” at which point Bondi took the podium to declare that “crime in DC is ending and ending today.”
It’s important to be precise about what’s happening in DC and why. As Chris Geidner explains at Law Dork, calling this a “takeover” of DC itself or the DC police is inaccurate.
DC’s Home Rule Act has a provision that lets the president direct the mayor to provide District police force service for federal purposes if he deems it necessary and determines an emergency exists. He can do that for 48 hours without informing Congress. Once he informs Congress, he gets 30 days. Past that, Congress needs to enact a joint resolution to extend it.
In theory, the legislative branch should act as a check on a lawless president. But given that the GOP majorities in both the House and Senate have willfully abdicated their responsibility to do so, there’s no reason to think lawmakers won’t let Trump’s brownshirts occupy DC as long as he wants.
There are no real impediments to the president calling up the DC National Guard. Unlike state National Guards, which are under the control of state governors, DC’s Guard is commanded by the president. Further, the position of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel is that the DC National Guard can be used for federal work without being federalized, unlike state National Guards. This means it can be used for law enforcement purposes without running afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which otherwise prohibits the use of federal troops for civilian enforcement efforts.
National Guard troops arriving in DC yesterday
So, the DC Home Rule Act, combined with the structure of its National Guard, gives the president a perfectly legal and relatively friction-free way to make local police do his bidding and to have the National Guard roam the streets.
At the moment, there’s a pretense that the DC National Guard will not be performing law enforcement duties. Instead, they have the authority to detain people temporarily until federal agents arrive. But as any first-year law student can tell you, if someone cloaked in the authority of the government has the power to detain you, they are engaged in law enforcement duties. It doesn’t matter that they eventually hand you off to someone else with the proper authority to detain you.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth must be so hyped for this. He can pretend he’s a five-star general in charge of a vast array of troops rather than a doofus civilian whose main achievement currently consists of posting misogynist and eugenicist garbage on his social media accounts — well, and sharing classified military plans in the group chat. He’s pretty good at that. But now, Hegseth gets to do Fox hits and bray about how the DC Guard “will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners.”
Read more at Public Notice.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone: Trump’s Military Crackdowns Are Only Going to Get Worse.
President Donald Trump has expanded his military campaign against the United States by deploying armed troops to yet another major metropolitan area, announcing on Monday that he is sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., to “liberate” the city.
Big Balls before and after attack
The D.C. operation, launched two months after the start of his Los Angeles crackdown, broadens a police-state-style domestic campaign that some senior Trump administration officials describe to Rolling Stone as a “shock and awe” show of force, a reference to the foreign war in Iraq that Trump has pretended to oppose.
It’s only going to get worse.
The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end with D.C. and L.A., that other military options are very much on the table. The facts, the laws, and data do not seem to matter: Trump and his team believe he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, including using the U.S. armed forces for domestic political purposes as well as intimidating his enemies. His team is privately putting together plans for him to do just that.
“Make no mistake, this is just the beginning,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro — a staunchly pro-Trump former Fox News host whom the president tapped specifically to “crack skulls” — said Monday night.
Can you believe Pirro is actually the US attorney anywhere?
At a press conference Monday announcing that the federal government had seized “direct” control of D.C.’s police department and that the National Guard would soon occupy the city, Trump warned that if he and his officials decide they “need to,” he will deploy military forces to other Democratic cities, too. The president named a few, including Chicago, Oakland, and Baltimore. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat whom Trump attacked by name, compared Trump’s use of the military to the Nazis tearing apart Germany’s constitutional republic, per the Chicago Tribune.
Trump has long yearned to unleash the military on American soil for his political agenda, and the D.C. and L.A. deployments this summer are critical stepping stones in his increasingly authoritarian government’s vision for punishing his enemies Democratic area of the country, carrying out his brutal immigration agenda, and making life hell for unhoused people. Trump said on Monday that federal forces will work to remove “homeless encampments from all over our parks,” and that the unhoused will not be “allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.” [….]
In recent months, according to government officials and other sources with knowledge of the situation, administration staff and lawyers have crafted detailed plans and menus of options for Trump to feed his desire for replicating and proliferating his militarized crackdowns — on immigrants and citizens alike — to different Democratic strongholds. National Guard troops are already mobilizing in D.C., and Trump has privately said, according to two sources familiar with the matter, that if he sees something that he feels crosses his line (like if street protests in the city grow too big or if he deems them a threat suddenly), he will gladly order larger numbers of troops to nation’s capital, as he did in Los Angeles earlier this year.
Trump has insisted to administration officials that it’s ridiculous that troops like National Guard members are not allowed to conduct various forms of domestic law enforcement, sources add. The president and his administration to some extent have had their hands tied on this due to the Posse Comitatus Act — which prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement — though that isn’t stopping them from actively exploring ways around the law. “There are ways things were done, and that’s not always going to be how they should be done now or tomorrow,” a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone.
MAGA mob attacks police line on January 6, 2001.
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Trump Deploys National Guard for D.C. Crime but Called Jan. 6 Rioters ‘Very Special.’
The heart of D.C. was in a state of lawlessness.
Roving mobs of wild men smashed windows, threatened murder and attacked the police.
One rioter struck an officer in the face with a baton. Another threw a chair at police officers and pepper-sprayed them. Others beat and used a stun gun on an officer, nearly killing him.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob committed a month’s worth of crime in the span of about three hours.
The F.B.I. has estimated that around 2,000 people took part in criminal acts that day, and more than 600 people were charged with assaulting, resisting or interfering with the police. (Citywide, Washington currently averages about 70 crimes a day.)
But President Trump’s handling of the most lawless day in recent Washington history stands in sharp contrast to his announcement on Monday that he needed to use the full force of the federal government to crack down on “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals” in the nation’s capital.
A bit more:
After a prominent member of the Department of Government Efficiency, known by his online pseudonym, “Big Balls,” was assaulted this month, the president took federal control of Washington’s police force and mobilized National Guard troops. His team passed out a packet of mug shots, and Mr. Trump described “roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people.”
That was nothing like the message he delivered to the mob of his supporters on Jan. 6, when he told them, as tear gas filled the hallways of the Capitol: “We love you. You’re very special.”
“If we want to look at marauding mobs, look at Jan. 6,” said Mary McCord, the director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law and a former federal prosecutor. “If you want to look at criminal mobs, we had a criminal mob and he called them peaceful protesters.”
In one of his first actions upon retaking the presidency, Mr. Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack. The president issued pardons to most of the defendants and commuted the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
He has sought to rewrite the history of the riot and called those arrested “hostages.”
In another fascist takeover attempt, Trump is trying to control what The Smithsonian puts on display.
The New York Times (gift link): White House Announces Comprehensive Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions.
The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it would begin a wide-ranging review of current and planned exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, scouring wall text, websites and social media “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”
White House officials announced the review in a letter sent to Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian. Museums will be required to adjust any content that the administration finds problematic within 120 days, the letter said, “replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions.”
The review, which will begin with eight of the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, is the latest attempt by President Trump to try to impose his will on the Smithsonian, which has traditionally operated as an independent institution that regards itself outside the purview of the executive branch.
Kim Sajet, the head of the National Portrait Gallery, resigned in June after Mr. Trump said he was firing her for being partisan. The Smithsonian’s governing board said at the time that it had sole responsibility for personnel decisions.
News of the letter was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal. It is signed by Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president; Vince Haley, the director of the Domestic Policy Council; and Russell T. Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget.
A bit more:
In a statement, the Smithsonian said that its “work is grounded in a deep commitment to scholarly excellence, rigorous research and the accurate, factual presentation of history.”
“We are reviewing the letter with this commitment in mind,” it continued, “and will continue to collaborate constructively with the White House, Congress and our governing Board of Regents.”
Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Mr. Bunch did not immediately returned a call seeking comment.
Some historians expressed concern at the political interference in an institution that was long viewed as independent. Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard and president of the Organization of American Historians, said the Smithsonian was already doing a “fantastic job of presenting American history.”
“People are voting with their feet,” she said. “It’s a very popular place. The content of exhibits shouldn’t simply reflect any one administration’s preferences. They are the product of a lot of hard work by dedicated and honorable people who want to present the most accurate picture of American history as possible. That includes the triumphs and the tragedies.”
Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written extensively about the Smithsonian, called the administration’s review “a full assault on the autonomy of all the different branches of the institution.”
Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.
At Civil Discourse, Joyce Vance has a few choice words about this attack on the Smithsonian: Living in 1984.
The headline tonight reads, “White House to Vet Smithsonian Museums to Fit Trump’s Historical Vision.”It’s in The Wall Street Journal, not exactly a bastion of liberal views. “Top White House officials will scrutinize exhibitions, internal processes, collections and artist grants ahead of America’s 250th anniversary.”
Why? The Journal answers that question in the opening paragraph: “The White House plans to conduct a far-reaching review of Smithsonian museum exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of America’s 250th anniversary to ensure the museums align with President Trump’s interpretation of American history.”
Trump’s interpretation of American history? The man isn’t exactly a scholar.
During his first term in office, at a breakfast celebrating Black History Month in 2017, Trump said: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Douglass, the famous abolitionist, died in 1895. At the time he made that comment, Trump seemed more enthusiastic about our national museums than he does today. He led into the comment by saying, “I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things.”
Perhaps this gaffe explains Trump’s subsequent antipathy to celebrating Black History Month. But he’s not someone who should be defining our history.
In 2009, Trump purchased a Virginia Golf Club. Its beautiful location on the Potomac River wasn’t enough for him—he needed it to have some historical importance. So he, or someone working for him, made it up. He put up a plaque claiming, “Many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot…The casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as ‘The River of Blood.’ ” According to multiple experts, nothing of the sort ever happened there.
The New York Times reports that when Trump was confronted with the lie, he said, “How would they know that? Were they there?” Trump is clearly not the man to entrust with the telling of our national history. “Write your story the way you want to write it,” Trump told reporters who pressed him for any evidence to support the supposed history he attributed to the site.
In a phone call with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his first term in office, Trump insisted that Canadians burned down the White House during the War of 1812. As every school child knows, it was the British.
And of course, there were Trump’s exaggerated claims about the size of the crowd at his first inauguration.
Read the rest at Civil Discourse.
This morning, Trump met virtually with European leaders and Ukraine’s President Zelensky ahead of his meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday. I don’t really think that anything Trump said can be trusted, but here are some reports:
CNN: EU leaders hold call with Trump and Zelensky ahead of Alaska summit.
A call between European officials, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and US President Donald Trump took place today.
Speaking at a news conference alongside Zelensky afterward, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Europe’s leaders are doing everything to ensure an upcoming meeting between Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin “goes the right way.”
Here are the latest developments:
- Joint meeting: A virtual summit involving US President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several European leaders took place today.
- Trump support: In comments made after the meeting, Zelensky said that “there should be a ceasefire first, then security guarantees – real security guarantees,” and that Trump has “expressed his support.”
- Renewed calls: Speaking alongside Zelensky after the meeting, Merz reiterated his call for Ukraine to be at the table for negotiations and said that a ceasefire must come first in any deal, as he said Kyiv needed “robust guarantees.”
- “Major decisions:” Merz said there could be “major decisions” made during the Trump-Putin summit as he said Europeans are therefore “doing everything we can in order to lay the groundwork to make sure that this meeting goes the right way.”
- Territorial exchange: Also speaking after the call, French President Emmanuel Macron said any territorial exchange in Ukraine “must only be discussed with Ukraine, as he added that it was a “good thing” that Russia and the US were talking, but it was important that Europe is “heard.”
- Territory: Meanwhile, a Russian foreign ministry official has poured cold water on the idea that both Russia and Ukraine would need to swap territory to reach a peace agreement
Territorial questions that fall under Ukraine’s authority cannot be negotiated and will only be negotiated by the President of Ukraine, Macron said, adding that Trump had expressed the same. Philippe Magoni EPA
The Independent: US and Russia suggest ‘West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine.’
The U.S. and Russia are set to suggest a West Bank-style occupation of Ukraine as a way of ending the war, according to The Times.
Under the proposed plans, Russia would have both economic and military control of the occupied parts of Ukraine, utilizing its own governing body, mimicking Israel’s control of Palestinian territory taken from Jordan during the 1967 conflict.
The suggestion was put forward during discussions between President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterparts, a source with insight into the U.S. National Security Council told the paper.
Witkoff, who also serves as the White House’s Middle East envoy, reportedly backs the suggestion, which the U.S. thinks solves the issue of the Ukrainian constitution prohibiting giving up territory without organizing a referendum.
While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected any notion of ceding territory, the new occupation proposal may lead to a truce following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.
According to the proposal, Ukraine’s borders would remain officially unchanged, similar to the borders of the West Bank, even as Israel controls the territory.
I can’t see how Zelensky could accept that.
One more report from Politico: Trump agreed only Ukraine can negotiate territorial concessions, Macron says.
Finally, at The Wall Street Journal, Paul Kiernan has a profile on Trump’s pick for Bureau of Labor Statistics head: The Partisan Economist Trump Wants to Oversee the Nation’s Data.
Conservative economist Erwin John “E.J.” Antoni sometimes jokes on social media that the “L” in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ acronym is silent.
President Trump this week tapped Antoni to run the agency whose data and methodologies he has long criticized, especially when it produces numbers that Trump doesn’t like. He recently proposed suspending the monthly jobs report, one of the most important data releases for the economy and markets. On Tuesday, a White House official noted that Antoni made the comment before he knew he was going to be chosen and that his comments don’t reflect official BLS policy.
E.J. Antoni was nominated by the president this week to oversee the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Photo by C-SPAN
If confirmed by the Senate, Antoni would run a 141-year-old agency staffed by around 2,000 economists, statisticians and other officials. The BLS has a long record of independence and nonpartisanship that economists and investors say is critical to the credibility of U.S. economic data.
According to a commencement program from Northern Illinois University, Antoni earned a master’s and Ph.D. in economics from that school in 2018 and 2020, respectively, and a bachelor of arts degree from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. Antoni’s LinkedIn profile says he attended Lansdale Catholic High School outside Philadelphia from 2002 to 2006.
According to the profile, Antoni went to work in 2021 as an economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin that has sued the federal government to overturn climate-change regulations. The following year, he joined the conservative Heritage Foundation as a research fellow studying regional economics. He is now the foundation’s chief economist and an adviser to the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a group of conservative economic commentators.
Past BLS commissioners have had extensive research experience, and many have climbed the ranks of the agency itself. Antoni doesn’t fit that profile. He doesn’t appear to have published any formal academic research since his dissertation, according to queries of National Bureau of Economic Research working papers and Google Scholar. Much of his commentary on the Heritage website praises Trump’s policies and economic record. He frequently posts on X and appears on conservative podcasts such as former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” where he criticized the economy under President Joe Biden and lauds Trump’s economy.
The Heritage Foundation declined to make Antoni available for an interview and didn’t respond to questions about his background.
There’s more at the link. I got past the paywall by using the link at Memeorandum.com.
That’s all I have today. What’s on your mind?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
Posted: August 9, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: Alaska, cat art, caturday, Covid-19, Donald Trump, Harvard University, measles, RFK Jr, Russia, Space Cat, Steve Witkoff, UCLA, Ukraine, vaccines, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky |
Good Afternoon!!
Book cover
A couple of Caturdays ago, I posted illustrations from a 1950s children’s book called Space Cat and the Kittens. My brother had shared them with me after he bought the book at a used bookstore. This week, he came across the first book in the four-part series, and I’m going to post some of the illustrations from that book today. I think they are really cute. The story:
A little gray kitten with a taste for adventure stows away on an airplane, and the daring stunt turns out to be his first step toward becoming … Space Cat! The plane’s pilot, Captain Fred Stone, names his fuzzy new friend Flyball and welcomes him to an experimental station set up in the middle of the desert. Flyball enjoys supervising the station’s workers and takes particular interest in the big rocket ship that he’s not allowed to explore. Regardless of the rules, the kitty is determined to hitch another ride, and before you know it, Flyball’s wearing a custom-made pressurized suit and headed for the Moon.
As for the news, everything is awful as usual today. We’re dealing with a “president” who is well on the way of becoming a dictator. He plans to meet with fellow dictator Vladimir Putin to hand over territory in Ukraine; He is allowing his HHS secretary RFK Jr. to endanger Americans with anti-vaccine policies; and he is deliberately damaging American higher education.
Ukraine and Russia
Tyler Pager and David E. Sanger at The New York Times: Trump Says He Will Meet With Putin in Alaska Next Week.
President Trump said he would meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia next Friday in Alaska, as he tries to secure a deal to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Mr. Trump announced the meeting Friday shortly after he suggested that a peace deal between the two countries could include “some swapping of territories,” signaling that the United States may join Russia in trying to compel Ukraine to permanently cede some of its land.
“We’re going to get some back, and we’re going to get some switched,” Mr. Trump said while hosting the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan for a peace summit at the White House. “There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both, but we’ll be talking about that either later, or tomorrow.”
The meeting, the first in-person summit between an American and Russian president since President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with Mr. Putin in June 2021, reflects Mr. Trump’s confidence in his ability to persuade Mr. Putin in a face-to-face encounter, a goal that has eluded Mr. Trump and his predecessors. For Mr. Putin, the meeting itself is a victory after he spent the past several months largely isolated from the international community, with NATO leaders — other than Mr. Trump — refusing to communicate directly with him.
Carrying cat to the rocket
At least he didn’t invite Putin to the White House, but will Putin try to get him to give Alaska back to Russia while they are swapping land in Ukraine?
The meeting also presents a host of challenges. Ukrainian leaders have adamantly opposed relinquishing any of their land to Russia, and the country’s constitution bars President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine from ceding any territory.
There would also be numerous political and military hurdles for Ukraine in turning over land to Russia, as well as questions including security guarantees for Ukraine and the future of frozen Russian assets. And many diplomats have suggested that Mr. Putin may be more interested in dragging out diplomacy to give him time to pummel Ukraine than in securing a peace deal.
White House officials declined to say exactly where in Alaska the two leaders would meet or why Mr. Trump decided to hold the meeting there, though it is the closest U.S. state to Russia. In 2021, the Biden administration held talks with China in Anchorage, Alaska.
Mr. Trump also provided little additional detail about the meeting, what territory could be swapped or the broader contours of a peace deal, saying earlier Friday that he did not want to overshadow the peace pledge between Armenia and Azerbaijan. But he told European leaders earlier this week that he planned to follow up his session with Mr. Putin with a meeting with Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky.
The New York Times: Zelensky Rejects Ceding Territory to Russia After Trump Suggests a Land Swap.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Saturday flatly rejected the idea that Ukraine could cede land to Russia after President Trump suggested that a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia could include “some swapping of territories.”
“Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video address from his office in Kyiv, several hours after Mr. Trump’s remarks, which appeared to overlook Ukraine’s role in the negotiations.
“Any decisions made against us, any decisions made without Ukraine, are at the same time decisions against peace,” Mr. Zelensky said. “They will bring nothing. These are dead decisions; they will never work.”
His blunt rejection risks angering Mr. Trump, who has made a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia one of his signature foreign policy goals, even if it means accepting terms that are unfavorable to Kyiv. In the past, Mr. Trump has criticized Ukraine for clinging to what he suggested were stubborn cease-fire demands and for being “not ready for peace.”
Cat in a hammock on spacecraft
What doesn’t anger Trump? Anything except blind loyalty and obedience.
A recent poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that more than three-quarters of Ukrainians are against transferring Ukrainian-controlled territory to Russia. When it comes to ceding land that includes territory already under Russian control, opposition drops slightly, with a little more than half of Ukrainians against it, “even if this makes the war last longer and threatens the preservation of independence,” the poll says.
But support for land concessions has grown since Ukraine’s failed 2023 counteroffensive, which underscored its inability to retake substantial territory. About 38 percent of the population thinks ceding land is acceptable now, according to the poll, up from only 10 percent about two years ago.
Russia has long demanded that Ukraine give up four regions in the east and south that Moscow claims to have annexed in late 2022, even though some of that territory remains under Ukrainian control. The Kremlin is particularly intent on seizing full control of the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, which it has long sought to capture with relentless assaults.
But ceding Luhansk and Donetsk, which are part of an area commonly known as the Donbas region, would create a host of issues for Ukraine. It would mean giving up a region rich in cities and industrial centers that Russia could use as a launchpad to reignite the war.
And Ukraine would have to abandon its main fortified defensive line in northern Donetsk, stretching between the cities of Sloviansk and Kostiantynivka, which has so far withstood Russian assaults.
Nick Paton Walsh at CNN: Trump-Putin summit in Alaska resembles a slow defeat for Ukraine.
Location matters, former real estate mogul US President Donald Trump said. Moments later he announced Alaska, a place sold by Russia to the United States 158 years ago for $7.2 million, would be where Russian President Vladimir Putin tries to sell his land deal of the century, getting Kyiv to hand over chunks of land he’s not yet been able to occupy.
The conditions around Friday’s summit so wildly favor Moscow, it is obvious why Putin leapt at the chance, after months of fake negotiation, and it is hard to see how a deal emerges from the bilateral that does not eviscerate Ukraine. Kyiv and its European allies have reacted with understandable horror at the early ideas of Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, that Ukraine cede the remainders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in exchange for a ceasefire.
Naturally, the Kremlin head has promoted the idea of taking ground without a fight, and found a willing recipient in the form of Witkoff, who has in the past exhibited a relaxed grasp of Ukrainian sovereignty and the complexity of asking a country, in the fourth year of its invasion, to simply walk out of towns it’s lost thousands of men defending.
Space cat in freefall
It is worth pausing and reflecting on what Witkoff’s proposal would look like. Russia is close to encircling two key Donetsk towns, Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka, and may effectively put Ukrainian troops defending these two hubs under siege in the coming weeks. Ceding these two towns might be something Kyiv does anyway to conserve manpower in the months ahead.
The rest of Donetsk – principally the towns of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – is a much nastier prospect. Thousands of civilians live there now, and Moscow would delight at scenes where the towns evacuate, and Russian troops walk in without a shot fired.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s rejection of ceding land early Saturday reflects the real dilemma of a commander in chief trying to manage the anger of his military and the deep-seated distrust of the Ukrainian people towards their neighbor, who continues to bombard their cities nightly.
What could Ukraine get back in the “swapping” Trump referred to? Perhaps the tiny slivers of border areas occupied by Russia in Sumy and Kharkiv regions – part of Putin’s purported “buffer zone” – but not much else, realistically.
The main goal is a ceasefire, and that itself is a stretch. Putin has long held that the immediate ceasefire demanded by the United States, Europe and Ukraine for months, is impossible as technical work about monitoring and logistics must take place first. He is unlikely to have changed his mind now his troops are in the ascendancy across the eastern frontline.
Read more analysis at the CNN link.
RFK Jr. is doing untold damage to the health of Americans.
The New York Times: Trump Just Shrugs as Kennedy Undermines His Vaccine Legacy.
During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring of 2020, President Trump was warned by medical officials that the development of a vaccine that could turn the tide against Covid could be over a year away.
For Mr. Trump, that timeline was not good enough.
He demanded a faster program. The creation of that program, Operation Warp Speed, led to lifesaving vaccines that contained messenger RNA, or mRNA, a synthetic form of a genetic molecule that helps stimulate the immune system. Those vaccines are widely regarded in the scientific community as the quickest way to protect Americans against future threats, including viruses that could mushroom into a pandemic, or man-made menaces, like a bioweapons attack.
Time has marched on and, apparently, so has Mr. Trump in his second term.
This week, the president all but shrugged off an announcement by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary and a longtime critic of vaccines, that a research division of his department had slashed $500 million in grants and contracts for work on mRNA vaccines.
“That was now a long time ago, and we’re onto other things,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. Mr. Trump added that his administration is now “looking for other answers to other problems, to other sicknesses and diseases.” He said he was planning to meet with Mr. Kennedy on Thursday to discuss the decision, but by Friday, White House officials did not say whether that meeting took place.
Space cat is first to land on the Moon.
A bit more:
Mr. Trump’s willingness to give Mr. Kennedy the space to impose his views is notable, given that the vaccines were once seen as legacy achievement during Mr. Trump’s first term. But his laissez-faire posture also leaves room for Mr. Trump to position himself in line with the portion of his base that has grown deeply skeptical about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
In recent months, Mr. Trump has offered little to no public input as Mr. Kennedy fired a 17-member committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that makes vaccine recommendations; appointed advisers who have rescinded some flu vaccine recommendations; and suggested, contrary to evidence, that many pediatricians make money from vaccines.
Mr. Trump has also said there is nobody better than Mr. Kennedy to explore the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. Mr. Kennedy is expected to release a report airing those findings in September….
Adm. Brett Giroir, an assistant health secretary in the first Trump administration who was involved in the development of the Covid vaccines, recalled that the president had been “very pro-vaccine,” particularly on matters involving flu preparedness. In 2019, Mr. Trump signed an executive order calling for the modernization of flu vaccines, because “he knew we weren’t as well prepared as we should be.”
Now it’s different. Trump would rather sacrifice millions more American lives than confront his conspiracy-minded followers.
RFK and Trump apparently aren’t concerned about a measles epidemic either. The Wall Street Journal: The Race to Find a Measles Treatment as Infections Surge.
As a record number of people in the U.S. are sickened with measles, researchers are resurrecting the search for something long-deemed redundant: treatments for the viral disease.
After the measles vaccine was introduced in the 1960s, cases of the disease plummeted. By 2000, federal officials had declared measles eliminated from the U.S. This success led to little interest in the development of treatments. But now, as vaccination rates fall and infections rise, scientists are racing to develop drugs they say could prevent or treat the disease in vulnerable and unvaccinated people.
“In America, we don’t like being told what to do, but we like to have options for our medicine chest,” said Marc Elia, chairman of the board of Invivyd, a Massachusetts-based drugmaker that started working on a monoclonal antibody for measles this spring.
Scientists across the country including at biotechs Invivyd and Saravir Biopharma—and institutions such as Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Georgia State University—are in the early stages of measles-treatment development. The drugs are still a ways from becoming available to patients but could offer alternatives to people who are immunocompromised, don’t respond to the measles vaccine or are vaccine skeptics.
Space cat saves astronaut’s life by plugging a hole in his helmet.
Some doctors and researchers warn that measles treatments could further drive the drop in vaccination. Nationally, 92.5% of kindergartners received the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, shot in the 2024-25 school year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. In 2019-20, the vaccination rate was over 95%, which is the rate encouraged by health authorities to prevent community transmission of measles.
More than 1,300 people, most of them unvaccinated, have been diagnosed with measles this year—a 33-year high.
“One of the motivations of getting the vaccine right now is that there are no treatments,” said Dr. Joel Warsh, a pediatrician who says more research is needed into immunization safety.
Still, Invivyd is betting its measles monoclonal antibody could help curb infections and outbreaks. Unlike the MMR vaccine, which is designed to train the body to make its own antibodies—proteins that help defeat specific pathogens—monoclonal antibodies are lab-made versions that can be delivered intravenously or as an injection and boost immunity immediately.
Antibody treatments could treat someone who is sick or help prevent measles in people recently exposed to the virus. They could benefit newborns and immunocompromised people who can’t be vaccinated, as well as the minority of people who don’t respond to the vaccine or whose immunity has waned. The treatments could offer weeks or months of protection against measles, researchers said.
“Think of it like antivenom after a snake bite,” said Erica Ollmann Saphire, chief executive of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, whose lab is developing its own monoclonal antibodies for measles. “Even people unsure about vaccines, if they are already sick with measles, getting an antibody treatment could be palatable.”
There’s much more at the link. I got past the paywall by clicking the link at Memeorandum.
Jake Scott, infectious disease physician, at MSNBC: RFK Jr. is attacking the very science that saved millions.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to terminate $500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccine development threatens to unravel one of medicine’s greatest recent achievements. His claim that these vaccines “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu“ represents a fundamental misunderstanding of vaccinology that could cost lives in future pandemics.
As an infectious disease physician who cared for dozens of critically ill Covid patients in December 2020, I witnessed a remarkable shift in the months that followed. As mRNA vaccines became available in early 2021, severe cases among vaccinated individuals became extremely rare. Deaths were almost exclusively among those who declined vaccination, which was tragic given how preventable these outcomes had become.
Space cat in the moon cave
No vaccine for respiratory viruses has ever provided complete, lasting protection against all infections. Not the flu vaccine. Not RSV vaccines. That never should have been the expectation. Some vaccines, like those for measles or polio, can effectively prevent infection and transmission, but these target fundamentally different viruses that don’t constantly mutate and reinfect the respiratory tract. The purpose of respiratory virus vaccines is to prevent severe disease, hospitalization and death. By that measure, mRNA vaccines have been revolutionary.
The data confirms what I witnessed firsthand. According to research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, unvaccinated individuals had 53 times the risk of death compared to those who had been fully vaccinated during the Delta wave in 2021. A New England Journal of Medicine study analyzing over 6 million Covid cases found that protection against death remained above 90% and remarkably durable, even as protection against infection declined.
In winter 2020, my hospital’s ICU overflowed with COVID patients. Like many colleagues worldwide, I watched patient after patient die despite our best efforts. It was unlike anything any of us had ever seen. By summer 2021, after vaccines rolled out widely, the change was undeniable. Far fewer patients arrived with respiratory failure. Nursing homes saw deaths plummet.
As vaccine expert Paul Offit stated in December 2020: “All you want to do is keep people out of the hospital and keep them out of the morgue and I think this vaccine can certainly do that.” Even then, before vaccines were widely available, experts understood the real goal.
There’s more at the link.
Trump vs. higher education
AP: Trump administration seeks $1 billion settlement from UCLA, a White House official says.
The Trump administration is seeking a $1 billion settlement from the University of California, Los Angeles, a White House official said Friday, after the Department of Justice accused the school of antisemitism and other civil rights violations.
UCLA is the first public university to be targeted by a widespread funding freeze over allegations of civil rights violations related to antisemitism and affirmative action.
President Donald Trump’s administration has frozen or paused federal funding over similar allegations against elite private colleges. In recent weeks, the administration has struck deals with Brown University for $50 million and Columbia University for $221 million but has explored larger settlements, such as in its ongoing battle with Harvard University.
The White House official did not detail any additional demands the administration has made to UCLA or elaborate on the settlement amount. The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the request and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The university had drawn widespread criticism for how it handled dispersing an encampment of Israel-Hamas war protesters in 2024. One night, counterprotesters attacked the encampment, throwing traffic cones and firing pepper spray, with fighting that continued for hours, injuring more than a dozen people, before police stepped in. The next day, after hundreds defied orders to leave, more than 200 people were arrested. Later, Jewish students said demonstrators in encampments blocked them from getting to class.
Read the rest at the link.
The Wall Street Journal: Trump Administration Threatens to Take Over Harvard’s Patents.
The Trump administration is warning Harvard University that it could take over its patents, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if a review finds the university hasn’t complied with federal law, an escalation of the continuing negotiations between the White House and America’s oldest university.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Harvard President Alan Garber on Friday, telling him the administration planned to do a thorough review of all patents held by the university.
General likes Space Cat.
“We believe that Harvard has failed to live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer and is in breach of the statutory, regulatory, and contractual requirements tied to Harvard’s federally funded research programs and intellectual property arising therefrom, including patents,” the letter says.
A Harvard spokesperson called the move “yet another retaliatory effort targeting Harvard for defending its rights and freedom.” The university’s technology and patents help save lives and redefine industries, and Harvard is committed to complying with all federal laws around the patenting of work from federally funded research, the spokesperson said.
The letter is another point of leverage for the Trump administration in its effort to punish the university for allegedly failing to stop antisemitism on campus. The administration has frozen billions of dollars in Harvard’s federal research money and cut the university off from future grants.
Lutnick told Garber that he had until Sept. 5 to respond with a list of all patents that have stemmed from federally funded research grants and to provide information showing it complied with federal regulations, including a 1980 act by Congress known as Bayh-Dole that allowed institutions to retain ownership of a patent even if the innovation used taxpayer dollars.
A bit more, because of the paywall:
Harvard has more than 5,800 patents, according to its website. In its fiscal year ended in June, the university was issued 159 patents. Startups from Harvard range from pharma and biotech companies to manufacturing.
Federal regulations under Bayh-Dole require a litany of disclosures for a patent, including how the American people benefit from an invention. If a patent holder fails to make these disclosures, the government has the right to take ownership of the invention.
Lisa Ouellette, a law professor at Stanford, said the Trump administration’s move appears to be unprecedented in the four and a half decades of the Bayh-Dole Act. “I have never seen the government step in to reclaim control of a university’s patents in any sense,” she said. The Biden administration considered using a provision of the act to try to lower pharmaceutical prices, but the proposal never came to pass, Ouellette said.
The Trump administration has been in talks with several universities, including the University of California, Los Angeles, Cornell and Northwestern, and sees striking a deal with Harvard as an essential mission. The White House has already reached a $200 million settlement with Columbia and a $50 million deal with Brown.
This is breathtaking.
That’s all I have for today. What’s on your mind?
Did you like this post? Please share it with your friends:
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Recent Comments