Everything is awful again this morning. Trump’s coup is advancing rapidly as he increases his control of Washington DC, attempts to take over the Fed, and threatens Chicago and other large cities. He has already politicized the Department of Justice, and now his goons are working to destroy the Social Security Administration and the Department of Defense. He is even speaking openly about wanting to be a dictator.
Here’s the latest:
I’ve been briefed on a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School and will continue to provide updates as we get more information. The BCA and State Patrol are on scene.I’m praying for our kids and teachers whose first week of school was marred by this horrific act of violence.
A shooting occurred Wednesday morning during the first week of classes at a Minneapolis Catholic school, Minnesota governor’s said. Authorities gave no immediate information on the number of injuries, but Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “horrific.”
The Minneapolis city government said the shooter had been “contained” after the gunfire at Annunciation Catholic School and there was no longer any “active threat” to residents.
A spokesperson for Hennepin Healthcare, which has Minnesota’s largest emergency department, said in a text message that it was actively dealing with an emergency and provided no additional details. A social media post from the company said it was caring for patients from the shooting.
This is a developing story.
Yesterday Trump escalated his efforts to take over control of the Federal Reserve.
President Trump’s bid to fire a member of the Federal Reserve board is a new escalation of his efforts to amass more power over American government and society: Congress generations ago structured the agency, crucial to the health of the economy, to be independent of White House control.
In purporting to fire the board member, Lisa D. Cook, Mr. Trump is setting up another test of how far the Republican-appointed supermajority on the Supreme Court will let him go in eroding the checks and balances Congress has long imposed on executive power.
His attempt to fire Ms. Cook presents a new twist. It raises the question of whether he alone can decide whether there is cause to fire an official at an independent agency whose leaders are protected by law from arbitrary removal — or whether courts will be willing and able to intervene if judges believe his justification is a pretext.
But the move to oust Ms. Cook, whom the Senate confirmed for a term that ends in 2038, also fits into a now familiar arc, joining the various ways Mr. Trump has systematically accumulated greater authority.
Trump is drunk with power. Can anyone stop him?
Mr. Trump has stretched the bounds of some legal authorities, like prolifically declaring emergencies to unlock more expansive power, sendingtroops into the streets of American cities, unilaterally raising import taxes and blocking spending Congress had directed. In this case, he is pushing at the limits of a statute that says Fed board members serve 14-year terms unless removed “for cause” by a president.
But in telling Ms. Cook he was firing her, Mr. Trump invoked a provision Congress wrote into the Federal Reserve Act that says Fed board members may only be removed before their terms are up for cause. He said he had determined that sufficient cause existed to remove her.
That provision does not define what counts as a sufficient reason. In general, such provisions have been understood to mean something like significant misconduct or neglect of office.
Use the gift link to read the rest.
This is a true emergency. Fortunately, Cook plans to fight back by suing Trump.
President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, said Wednesday that Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Lisa Cook should go on leave from the central bank even as she plans to file a lawsuit challenging her removal by Trump.
“If I were her in her circumstance, I would take leave,” Hassett told reporters outside the White House.
Lisa M. Cook
“I think it’s the honorable thing to do,” he continued, after a reporter asked about whether Cook should be presumed innocent of allegations of mortgage fraud raised by another Trump-appointed official….
Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Fed governor, is expected to soon file a lawsuit over Trump’s move, her attorney, Abbe Lowell, said Tuesday.
Trump’s “attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis,” Lowell said in a statement.
The Fed said Tuesday that “Cook has indicated through her personal attorney that she will promptly challenge this action in court and seek a judicial decision that would confirm her ability to continue to fulfill her responsibilities as a Senate-confirmed member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.”
The battle over Cook’s removal could end with the Supreme Court issuing a final decision on the matter.
Would the Supreme Court allow Trump to take control of the Federal Reserve? I’m not sure they will challenge Trump over any of his power grabs.
As President Donald Trump continues to stand behind his decision to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, one former leader at the agency warns that the consequences of the firing, should it ultimately go through, could be catastrophic.
Trump announced on Monday that Cook would be fired “effective immediately,” alleging the Biden-appointee of mortgage fraud, claims that have yet to be litigated in court. Cook immediately rebuked Trump in declaring her intention to continue to serve out the remainder of her 14-year term.
Bill Dudley, a former president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, however, warned that should Cook ultimately be fired, the new makeup of the agency’s board could set off a series of “standoffs, showdowns, chaos and uncertainty” that he said “would be truly frightening,” in an op-ed published in Bloomberg Wednesday.
“The attack on Cook represents a major escalation that could end very badly,” Dudley wrote. “Never before has a president tried to fire a Fed governor, and there’s much more at stake than one person’s job.”
Dudley went on to note that, should Cook be removed from her position, Trump would then have appointed four of the central bank’s seven governors, granting him a powerful majority that would grant the president far more leverage at the Fed.
“The Board of Governors could, for example, refuse to reappoint some or all of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents, whose five-year terms come up for renewal in February 2026 – and five of whom vote on the FOMC on a rotating basis. In theory, this could be a way to populate the (Federal Open Market Committee) with members that would do Trump’s bidding, empowering the president to get the big rate cuts he seeks.”
US President Donald Trump’s claim that he has “fired” Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook “for cause” is not only unlawful. It is profoundly dangerous.
It represents a direct attempt to politicise the Fed, intimidate its leadership and bend monetary policy to the president’s will. This action threatens to end the independence of the Federal Reserve — and with it, the credibility of the US’s monetary policy both at home and abroad.
Janet Yellen
The law is clear: Federal Reserve governors serve 14-year terms precisely so they cannot be tossed aside by presidents who dislike their views or who seek their allegiance. Removal “for cause” is intended for documented misconduct. “Accusations” are not “cause”.
Cook has done her job with integrity — weighing evidence and voting for policies designed to achieve the Fed’s dual mandate of price stability and maximum employment. For Trump to invoke cause here is a fiction; it is a pretext to justify an autocratic power grab.
This is not about one Federal Reserve governor. It is about intimidation. By targeting Cook, Trump is sending a chilling message to every member of the Federal Reserve board and to the regional reserve bank presidents who take part in the Federal Open Market Committee: express disagreement with the president’s views and you are next.
Such threats could stifle these Federal Reserve leaders in their duty to offer honest, professional and independent views on monetary policy to the public. It could alter their voting behaviour. It would turn an institution renowned for its independence and strong record of accomplishment into a puppet stage for presidential whims and priorities.
A bit more:
At the moment, a key Trump administration priority is for the Fed to substantially cut interest rates to reduce the cost of servicing the US government’s $37tn debt. The consequences are likely to be catastrophic.
History offers a blunt lesson: chaos follows when leaders capture their central banks and force them to buy government debt or cut interest rates to hold down debt service expense. Germany in the 1920s, Hungary after the second world war. Likewise, Argentina and Turkey quite recently — the names change, but the story is the same.
Politicised central banks deliver higher inflation, volatile growth and weakened currencies. Such a road cannot be good for the US. We took this road once before: during the second world war, when the Fed was obliged to hold interest rates down to help the Treasury finance the war. The result was high inflation.
In other news, what is happening at the Social Security Administration is terrifying. A whistleblower has accused former DOGE staffer Edward “Big Balls” Coristine of endangering every American’s Social Security data.
Members of the Department of Government Efficiency uploaded a copy of a crucial Social Security database in June to a vulnerable cloud server, putting the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk of being leaked or hacked, according to a whistle-blower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer.
The database contains records of all Social Security numbers issued by the federal government. It includes individuals’ full names, addresses and birth dates, among other details that could be used to steal their identities, making it one of the nation’s most sensitive repositories of personal information.
Edward “Big Balls” Coristine
The account by the whistle-blower, Charles Borges, underscores concerns that have led to lawsuits seeking to block young software engineers at the agency built by Elon Musk from having access to confidential government data. In his complaint, Mr. Borges said DOGE members copied the data to an internal agency server that only DOGE could access, forgoing the type of “independent security monitoring” normally required under agency policy for such sensitive data and creating “enormous vulnerabilities.”
Mr. Borges did not indicate that the database had been breached or used inappropriately.
But his disclosure stated that as of late June, “no verified audit or oversight mechanisms” existed to monitor what DOGE was using the data for or whether it was being shared outside the agency. That kind of oversight would typically be provided by the agency’s career information security professionals, Mr. Borges said in his account.
And his complaint cites an official agency security assessment that described the project as “high risk” and that warned of “catastrophic impact” to Social Security beneficiaries and programs if the database were to be compromised.
“Should bad actors gain access to this cloud environment, Americans may be susceptible to widespread identity theft, may lose vital health care and food benefits, and the government may be responsible for reissuing every American a new Social Security number at great cost,” Mr. Borges’s complaint said. He alleged that DOGE did not involve him in discussions about the project, despite his role as chief data officer, leaving him to piece together evidence of what had happened after the fact.
Included in his account, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times, are more than two dozen pages of internal emails, memos and other records to document his claims. Mr. Borges’s complaint said that DOGE’s actions “potentially violated multiple federal statutes” designed to protect government data.
Unbelievable. Use the gift link to read the rest.
Trump’s crackdown on Washington DC continues. A couple of updates:
According to officials, the military was deployed as part of a “beautification and restoration mission” in Lafayette Square, the National Mall, and the Tidal Basin.
At least 2,234 active guardsmen are on duty throughout the city; 929 of those are from the D.C. National Guard, while 1,305 come from Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia, say the Joint Task Force-DC Office.
Trump previously said he’d deployed the National Guard to grapple with “complete and total lawlessness” in the city, despite crime rates hitting a 30-year low earlier this year
BY DONALD TRUMP’S TELLING, WASHINGTON, D.C.’s restaurants are doing great. And, naturally, it’s all because of him.
“Friends of mine are going out to dinner,” Trump told reporters Monday, claiming that his deployment of federal forces brought unaccustomed tranquility to the streets of the nation’s capital. “They haven’t gone out to dinner in four years, they were petrified. Half the restaurants closed because nobody could go because they’re afraid to go outside. Now those restaurants are opening, and new restaurants are opening up, it’s like a boomtown.”
Hold up. We’re supposed to believe that “half the restaurants” in the city were closed? Because Washingtonians were cowering at home, peeking through their blinds? Famed chef and humanitarian José Andrés fired back in a tweet:
I understand why you are confused…all your time in DC you haven’t eaten ONCE outside the White House or your own hotel. I’ve lived here for 33 years, and it’s a flat out lie that half the restaurants have closed because of safety…but restaurants will close because you have troops with guns and federal agents harassing people…making people afraid to go out. Cities and towns and rural areas of America need policies that allow small business to thrive and all people including immigrants to live and work with dignity. People shouldn’t be afraid of their government…government should have respect for its people, not terrorize them.
Andrés is right. Trump’s deployment of 2,300 National Guard troops and 500 federal law enforcement agents has hurt foot traffic, chilled business, and made people cancel trips and nights out. It is slowly choking the life out of Washington, D.C. restaurants, which were still struggling to gain their post-pandemic footing just as Trump returned to town and started firing tens of thousands of their customers.
Shawn Townsend, head of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, announced that the city’s annual Restaurant Week is being extended because of the business-dampening effects of Trump’s actions, noting that “reservations were down in restaurants pretty significantly” the week after Trump launched his federal takeover. Data from OpenTable shows restaurant reservations down 24 percent from last year’s Restaurant Week, the New York Timesreported.
But numbers tell only part of the story. In interviews with restaurant owners, chefs, and workers, another picture emerged: that of small businesses being harmed by a president who was elected because of his purported business acumen; of a man whose obsession with appearing tough on crime now threatens to sabotage urban economies across the country.
“People used to say Washington is recession-proof. Today Washington is a recession magnet,” Immigrant Food cofounder and “Restaurateur of the Year” candidate Peter Schechter told me. “We’re back to a very pandemic-feeling city. There are fewer people going to work, fewer people walking around, fewer cars, reservations are down, events have been canceled.”
“Everything Trump touches dies” — Rick Wilson
Another potential disaster is in the making. Trump and Kristy Noem have decimated FEMA and it has gotten worse.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday suspended around 30 employees after those workers wrote to Congress warning that the Trump administration had gutted the nation’s ability to handle hurricanes, floods and other extreme weather disasters.
Of the 182 FEMA employees who signed the letter to Congress, 36 attached their names, while the rest withheld their identities for fear of retaliation.
Those who used their names received emails on Tuesday night saying they had been placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately, and continuing until further notice,” according to copies of the emails reviewed by The New York Times.
The emails did not provide a reason for the decision. Representatives for FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Colette Delawalla, the executive director of Stand Up for Science, an advocacy group that helped publicize the letter, said the move appeared to be an act of retaliation.
“Once again, we are seeing the federal government retaliate against our civil servants for whistle-blowing — which is both illegal and a deep betrayal of the most dedicated among us,” Ms. Delawalla said in a statement.
The letter to Congress rebuked President Trump’s plan to drastically scale down FEMA and shift more responsibility for disaster response — and more costs — to the states. It was sent on Monday, days before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest and costliest storms ever to strike the United States.
As I said, everything is awful. Here are a few more stories to check out if you can bear it:
“Time seems to be running out.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I have to admit that watching TV News is about as bad as I remember it when I was a kid, and watching body counts in Vietnam and little children my age being fire-hosed somewhere down south with a name that I’ve forgotten now. Between that and listening to my family history, I suppose it was inevitable that I would grow up with a strong sense of justice.
Watergate was a difficult time, but I always felt that the Supreme Court and Congress would properly deal with it. I was thrilled by the local desegregation efforts forced by the courts. It didn’t impact my school district, but it impacted me the few years I taught high school for the city public schools prior to finishing my master’s with an eye towards my doctorate. I headed to Oklahoma to fight for the passage of the ERA when I was pregnant with my oldest. I’ve never stopped fighting. Positive change was slow as a turtle, but it came, even though many things, but the ERA still rattles around out there waiting for the light of day. I have and will never quit the fight for true social justice.
I don’t know about you, but I dread what will show up in the news the next morning. Cruelty and ignorance are the flavors of the day. It was only a matter of time before we saw a headline like this one fromNewsweek. “Donald Trump Issues Order Defying Supreme Court Precedent.”
A new executive order signed by President Donald Trump Monday bans the burning of the American Flag, in direct opposition to a precedent set by the Supreme Court in the Texas v. Johnson case in 1989 deeming the action an act of “symbolic speech”
Trump recognized while signing the order that the action was protected by the court but said that burning the flag was an open door to violence.
“They burn the American flag,” he said, adding “They call it freedom of speech.”
“When you burn a flag is the area goes crazy. If you have hundreds of people, they go crazy. You can do other things. You can burn this piece of paper, you can and it’s but when you burn the American flag, it incites riots at levels that we’ve never seen before,” the Trump said.
The executive order would create a penalty of one year in jail, Trump said during the press conference in the Oval Office.
Evidently, burning the Constitution is acceptable. I can’t wait to see what the creepy, Christofascists that are the Republican Supreme Court Jurists have to say about that. I’m sure the Alitos and Thomases already have something disgusting in mind. Also, there is the sad news that Trump’s racism, xenophobia, ignorance, and cruelty have created an obsession with torturing Kilmar Ábrego Garcia and his family, once again. This is from The Guardian. It’s reported by Dharna Noor. “Kilmar Ábrego García detained after reporting to US immigration agents. Maryland man, back in the US after being wrongly deported to El Salvador, is threatened with deportation to Uganda.”
Kilmar Ábrego García – who has been thrust into the middle of an acrimonious deportation saga by the second Trump administration – has been detained after reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Baltimore on Monday, just three days after his release from criminal custody in Tennessee.
“The only reason he was taken into detention was to punish him,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney representing Ábrego, told a crowd of supporters outside a Baltimore ICE field office on Monday. “To punish him for exercising his constitutional rights.”
The attorney also said his client filed a new lawsuit on Monday morning challenging his potential deportation to Uganda and his current confinement.
Ábrego faces deportation to Uganda after recently declining an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to human smuggling charges, according to a Saturday court filing.
“The fact that they are holding Costa Rica as a carrot and using Uganda as a stick to try to coerce him to plead guilty for a crime is such clear evidence that they are weaponizing the immigration system in a matter that is completely unconstitutional,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
The lawsuit Ábrego filed early on Monday asks for an order “that he is not allowed to be removed from the United States unless and until he has had full due process”, said Sandoval-Moshenberg.
“The main issue, aside from the actual conditions in that country is – is that country actually going to let him stay there?” the attorney said. “They can offer to send him to Madrid, Spain, and unless Madrid, Spain, is going to let him remain in that country, essentially what it is – is a very inconvenient layover on the way to El Salvador, which is the one country that it has already determined that he cannot be sent to.”
The Costa Rican government has agreed to offer Ábrego refugee status if he is sent there, court filings from Saturday show. A judge in 2019 ruled that Ábrego cannot be deported to El Salvador.
Before walking into his appointment at the Baltimore Ice field office, Ábrego addressed a crowd of faith leaders, activists, and his family and legal team organized by the immigrant rights non-profit Casa de Maryland.
“My name is Kilmar Ábrego García, and I want you to remember this – remember that I am free and I was able to be reunited with my family,” he said through a translator, NBC News reported. “This was a miracle … I want to thank each and every one of you who marched, lift your voices, never stop praying and continue to fight in my name.”
After Ábrego entered the building, faith leaders and activists rallied to demand Ábrego’s freedom, chanting “Sí, se puede” (roughly “yes, we can”) and “we are Kilmar” as well as singing the hymn We Shall Not Be Moved with an activist choir.
“Laws have to be rooted in love, because love does not harm us,” a senior priest at Maryland’s St Matthew Episcopal church identified as Padre Vidal said through a translator.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Kilmar Abrego Garcia Is Set for Deportation After ICE Arrests Him.”
Indeed, nearly all of the reforms surrounding Due Process and access to the legal system seem destined to be attacked by Orange Caligula. This is from Reuters. It is definitely created to hinder the poor and people of color. “Trump signs orders aimed at ending cashless bail policies.”
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday that seeks to end cashless bail by threatening to revoke federal funding for jurisdictions that use it, part of a White House effort to push crime fighting to the top of the national agenda.
Trump signed a separate order that instructs police in Washington, D.C. to charge suspects with federal crimes and hold them in federal custody to avoid cashless bail, according to a fact sheet seen by Reuters.
“Cashless bail, we’re ending it. But we’re starting by ending it in D.C. and that we have the right to do through federalization,” Trump said during a signing ceremony in the White House.
Trump has seized control of the police force in Washington and is allowing National Guard troops to carry weapons while on patrol in the city. He is also threatening to expand the U.S. military presence to Democratically-controlled cities like Baltimore and Chicago.
Critics have slammed the administration’s actions as unnecessary overreach.
The focus on crime is seen as a preview of how Trump and his fellow Republicans plan to use the issue as they seek to retain control of both houses of Congress in the midterm elections next year.
Yes, I’m not fond of Joe Scarborough, but I am glad that he focused on the topic of violent crime and the really dangerous places. New Orleans has not seen this low level of shooting and violent crime in some time. This is true of most cities, including the ones where National Guard, like ours, are being sent to Blue Cities to hype a false narrative and scare people into not leaving their houses to do things like vote. The only exception in New Orleans is domestic violence. The rest are lower than the small rural towns of Louisiana, where gun violence is rampant. New Orleans shootings are comparable to what happened in the 1960s. The same cannot be said of Mike Johnson’s part of Louisiana. “Joe Scarborough Hammers ‘Red States’ as ‘Most Violent’: ‘Send’ National Guard to ‘Mike Johnson’s District’.” This is from Mediaite.
Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough hammered “red states” as the “most violent” in his takedown of President Donald Trump’s suggestion on Friday he may send National Guard troops to Chicago and New York City, as he has in Washington, D.C., as part of a crackdown on crime.
The tirade came on Monday morning’s show just days after Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson openly pushed back on the president’s deployment threat, adding he was exploring legal options to block any such move.
As the Morning Joe crew reflected on Trump’s idea, Scarborough unloaded on the decision, defending New York City in particular as “one of the safest large cities” while comparing murder statistics there and in Chicago to “much higher” per capita figures for cities located in “red states.”
You know, the thing about this is, of course, we’ve talked about Washington, D.C., it’s the nation’s capital, a federal government, Congress could get involved, work with the president, and, together, as we’ve been talking about for a long time, figure out how to partner with the city. And that hasn’t happened. And now we’re talking about Chicago. We’re talking about New York City. Neither one of those cities are in the top ten for most violent cities in America.
Rounding on the numbers, the host then took aim at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s own district:
And if you want to look per capita, they need to do no more than look to Mike Johnson’s home state, the Speaker of the House, and look at violence per capita. You have a much higher chance of dying in Monroe, Louisiana, than you do Chicago, Illinois. A much higher chance of dying in Shreveport, Louisiana, than you do in Monroe. A much higher chance of dying in New Orleans, Louisiana, than you do in New York City.
I mean, New York, that’s fabulously crazy. New York City continues to rank as one of the safest large cities in America. And I don’t know that there’s a close second.
So, there are all of these cities and towns in red state America. You could look at Little Rock, Arkansas, you could look at Monroe, Louisiana, you could look at Shreveport, Louisiana. You could look at New Orleans, Louisiana. You could look at Memphis, Tennessee. You could look at one Nashville, Tennessee. You can look at one red state after another – Bessemer, Alabama – and you will see violent crime rates much, much, much higher per capita than Chicago, Illinois, San Francisco.
Throwing up a tweet of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s criticism of the move, Scarborough read it aloud and continued:
The chance of having violent acts committed upon you in Mike Johnson’s Louisiana, in red state Louisiana, red state that Donald Trump carried and every Republican has carried since Bill Clinton, the chances of being murdered in Louisiana 400 times higher than in California.
Let me say that again. Let me underline that again: You have a 400% higher chance of being murdered in red state Louisiana, Mike Johnson’s home state, than you do on the left coast in Gavin Newsom’s California.
There is no emergency. There is no logic to Chicago, to San Francisco, if you’re looking at the numbers, if you’re looking at data, I don’t even think this Supreme Court can turn a blind eye to this. They just can’t because data is data. Numbers are numbers, and the numbers are clear. And the numbers don’t justify – no emergency!
The host began calling on Trump to send the troops “to red states where they need them” and listed out all the cities he’d flagged statistics for:
Send those troops to Shreveport, Louisiana. Send them to Mike Johnson’s district. Send them to Little Rock, Arkansas. Send them to Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee. Send them to red states where they need them.
We have a huge Environmental Accident in Tangipoha Parish requiring evacuation and shutting down rivers, high violent crime in rural districts, and a looming Hurricane Season. Our National Guard will be worn out with all that marching around to deal with the state’s crises that are real.
We’ve finally got the EPA in charge. I was actually thinking they were probably weakened to the point of uselessness. It’s also in a very red parish that needs help. But I suppose our Guard is getting to know these cities so they can block their inner city voting locations later. We have a governor with a need to appease Yam Tits and a bunch of Swampbillies that love him. He’s already expanding his control over the District and labelling it a place with a “crime emergency.”
The White House continues its plot to erase American History. Of course, his entire administration is filled with ignoramuses. “JD Vance flunks the basics on World War II as the White House targets history museums. If anyone would benefit from some quality time at a history museum, it’s White House officials. Take Vance’s line on the end of World War II, for example.” This is from MSNBC.
Donald Trump’s offensive against the Smithsonian reached a dramatic new level last week, with a presidential declaration that the institution and its museums are “OUT OF CONTROL.” To help bolster his point, the president added that Smithsonian history museums focus on “how bad Slavery was.”
The White House confirmed soon after that, as part of Trump’s broader efforts, administration officials want to target other museums, too. “He will start with the Smithsonian and then go from there,” a spokesperson told NBC News.
While the presidential campaign to control what Americans know and learn about history is clearly reflective of his authoritarian agenda, there’s also a degree of irony to the developments — because if anyone would benefit from some quality time at a history museum, it’s Trump and his team.
The president, for example, has talked about American forces having “manned the air” and taking over “the airports” during the Revolutionary War — despite the fact that airplanes didn’t exist at the time. He later said, “If you look at the end of the Civil War, the 1800s, it was a very turbulent time. You take the end day, was it 1869? Or whatever.”
Vice President JD Vance fumbled some very textbook facts of world history while talking foreign policy on Sunday’s ‘Meet the Press.’ During the interview, the Yale Law School alum defended President Donald Trump’s decision to entertain Russia’s terms for a peace deal with Ukraine by claiming all wars end in compromise.
NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked the Ohio Republican an important question, “If Russia is allowed to keep any of the territory that it illegally seized, what message does that send to China? Does it give China a green light to invade Taiwan? Does it give Russia a green light to invade other European countries, which is what your European allies are concerned about?”
Instead of answering the question directly, Vance took issue with the premise.
“Kristen, this is how wars ultimately get settled,” he said. “If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.”
No. If one actually goes back and assesses every major conflict in human history, they mostly ended with one force either conquering or repelling a rival force.
Meanwhile, a follow-up on the argument that Trump’s a Marxist and Maoist. Proper Industrial Policy is helping the industry thrive, not shaking it down for money and gifts!
Q: During the campaign, you called Kamala Harris a communist, but the Biden-Harris admin never called for nationalizing a private company like you're proposing with Intel. Is this the new way of doing industrial policy?TRUMP: Yeah. Sure it is. I want to try to get as much as I can.
We’re coming on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (Katrinaversary). This is my statement on it.
Whenever I think of all this, it still brings me to tears. I was lucky to drive out of there with my 2 labs and my munchkin cat. I sat on my friend’s sofa in Omaha, stunned, speechless, helplessly watching the suffering and death, with perpetual tears. What recovery we were granted was imperfect and incomplete. We will never forget. I was glad to come back home, but the sadness of knowing so many were lost just never leaves me.
With all the people we lost, who suffered, whose homes and businesses were gone, I offer up this news from the good people of FEMA. This is from the Washington Post. As if George W Bush didn’t kill a lot of us with Heckuva Job Brownie, and all those deadly Middle East quagmire wars, Trump’s management is upping the likely death count. “FEMA staff warn that Trump officials’ actions risk a Katrina-level disaster. About 180 FEMA employees, many of them anonymous, signed a letter to Congress arguing that the agency leadership has hindered the ability to effectively manage emergencies.” This is reported by Briana Sacks.
More than 180 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees sent a letter Monday to members of Congress and other officials, arguing that the agency’s direction and current leaders’ inexperience harms the agency’s mission and could result in a disaster on the level of Hurricane Katrina.
The letter, on which more than three dozen employees signed their full names, says that since January, staffers have been operating under leaders — Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, acting FEMA administrator David Richardson and former leader Cameron Hamilton — who lack the legal qualifications and authority to manage FEMA’s operations. This has eroded and hindered the agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies and other operations, including national security work, the letter says.
After Hurricane Katrina became one of the worst disasters in the nation’s history, in part because of failures of local, state, and federal governments, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act to give FEMA more power and responsibility. That hurricane made landfall in southeast Louisiana in August 2005, leading to at least 1,800 deaths and $100 billion in damage. The resulting legislation allowed FEMA to better prepare communities for and help them recover from disasters.
But the letter warns that the Trump administration is sending the agency and country back to a pre-Katrina era, by not having a Senate-confirmed and qualified emergency manger at the helm; by slashing mitigation, disaster recovery, training and community programs; and by thwarting officials’ ability to make decisions because of a restrictive new expense policy.
The letter demands that federal lawmakers defend FEMA from the Homeland Security Department interference, protect the agency’s employees from “politically motivated firings,” conduct more oversight, and ultimately take FEMA out of DHS and establish it as an independent Cabinet-level agency in the executive branch.
“Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the employees wrote, adding that they are sounding the alarm “so that we can continue to lawfully uphold our individual oaths of office and serve our country as our mission dictates.”
If you want to know what Retired General Russell Honore, our Katrina Hero, has to say about all this, please follow him on his Facebook. He’s outspoken and frequently gives interviews. Here are his thoughts on NPR. “A retired general recalls Hurricane Katrina’s chaos and lessons still unlearned.”
“It broke my heart when I saw a lady with a toddler and a shopping basket pushing the baby in the water,” Honoré said in an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin. “The water was up to the baby’s chest and she was trying to get into the Superdome to save [the] baby and herself. And I said, ‘We’ve got to get these people out of here.'”
The Superdome was a last refuge for many. And as supplies ran low, it became a symbol of misery.
Before Katrina hit, forecasters warned of catastrophe if people failed to evacuate. But New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin did not issue a mandatory order until Aug. 28, 2005.
Roughly 20% of the local population stayed behind, most of them being poor and elderly. “They want to stay because they know where the medicine is and many of them lived alone,”Honoré said. In some cases, the system failed them. “The city did send people to pick them up, but at that time, you couldn’t take an animal in an ambulance. And the elderly people said, ‘I’m not leaving if I can’t take my dog with me.'”
I would also like to remind you that, as we speak, the folks who helped us most to recover are the fearless and hard-working men who came here to work. They still work here, and we depend on them. My friend Anne Renee shared this with me. It’s from NOLA.COM. “They came to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina. Under Trump, ICE is trying to deport them. Advocates have identified numerous Katrina workers detained by ICE under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.”
“The cousins fled Guatemala’s rural highlands, seeking stability in the United States. They found it in a city ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Arriving in New Orleans after the storm, Abner Uriel Gomez Velasquez and Ever Eliseo Velasquez Fuentes found jobs in the booming industry Spanish speakers came to call “reconstrucción” — the back-breaking work of ripping mold-infested flooring, sodden drywall and fried appliances from flooded homes, and then, eventually, rebuilding them.
“Many left,” said Giovanni Lopez, a U.S. citizen and 40-year New Orleanian, born in Guatemala, who attends church with one of the men at St. Anthony of Padua in Mid-City, a hub for local Hispanic families. “They were here. They entered those homes first.”
New Orleans remains their home nearly two decades later.
Now, both men are confined to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in north Louisiana, caught in President Donald Trump’s immigration dragnet.
Federal agents arrested the men, who have no criminal records, while they worked a construction job together near Lafayette on June 12 with two other St. Anthony parishioners, church leaders said. They are awaiting deportation at the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, accused of entering the country illegally on their way to New Orleans after Katrina.
As the city girds for the landmark storm’s 20th anniversary this month, the arrests have highlighted immigrants’ foundational roles in rebuilding.
Demand for workers so outstripped supply after the storm that the Bush administration suspended rules requiring employers to verify workers’ immigration status. A 2006 survey of construction workers in the city found half were Hispanic, and half of those were here illegally. And New Orleans’ Latino population grew by 71%, to 103,000 residents, between 2000 and 2013, according to Census data.
A precise number of Katrina construction laborers who remain in New Orleans is difficult to tally. But under Trump, whose administration has often detained immigrants accused of no other wrongdoing, lawyers and advocates have identified numerous Katrina workers apprehended by ICE. They include a man deported to El Salvador following a May worksite raid at a marquee New Orleans anti-flooding project.
The White House’s immigration strategy has driven up deportations. Yet it has not been applied evenly: outcry from community members and Republican lawmakers has led some detainees to be released, while others remain in jail or face deportation. Supporters of Gomez Velasquez and Velasquez Fuentes have petitioned for a measure of that relief, citing their contributions to New Orleans in letters to their congressmen.
Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to multiple inquiries about Gomez Velasquez and Velasquez Fuentes’ cases.
The Trump administration has vigorously defended its agenda.
After the May New Orleans raid, an ICE spokesperson said the agency’s worksite enforcement aims to “deter employers who hire unauthorized workers,” and to “promote self-compliance in the business community.” The raids, they said, “protect employment opportunities for the nation’s workforce.”
A New Orleans story
The cousins each crossed the U.S. border with Mexico on their way north from homes in Guatemala’s verdant but impoverished San Marcos province. They entered “without inspection,” said Sue Weishar, a St. Anthony’s volunteer. Velasquez Fuentes came to New Orleans in 2006, and Gomez Velasquez followed in 2008.
They continued their construction careers — both became skilled caulkers — after the rebuild ended. They married. Gomez Velasquez met his wife Olivia in 2008 at a streetcar stop; Velasquez Fuentes met his wife Susana in 2016 in Metairie. They had children, all U.S. citizens.
And they deepened their faith. Gomez Velasquez leads a prayer group at St. Anthony, his home church. Velasquez Fuentes’ 16-year-old stepson was confirmed there.
Both men were unable to secure residency status because they did not qualify for many visa programs, such as those for relatives of adult citizens, people of certain professions and crime victims, church leaders said. They have not been accused of any other offenses.
“Our church recognizes that a country has the right to regulate its borders,” the Rev. Augustine J. DeArmond, St. Anthony’s pastor, wrote to the judge handling Gomez Velasquez’s case. “Our responsibility is also to act with justice and mercy.
On a recent Monday, about two dozen parishioners lined the church’s pews to pen letters calling for the men’s release. They asked the men’s families to describe how their detentions have upended their lives.
“I’ve never been separated from him for so long,” Axle, Gomez Velasquez’s 12-year-old son, said of his father as he fought back tears. “I miss him taking me to church and soccer. I want him to come home.”
I definitely have overdone it here. You may see so much American Spirit in so many. You may also assure yourself that we have the worst regime and the worst people ever in charge of it. Here are a few songs by us old, wrinkly hippies still protesting.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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Immigration and deportation are dominating the news today, with stories about ICE in Los Angeles and developments in the Abrego Garcia story. The Texas flood is still in the news, with articles about failures of local officials and the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, MAGAs are still very worked up about Pam Bondi’s handling of the “Jeffrey Epstein files” and Epstein’s supposed suicide.
A federal judge on Friday found that the Department of Homeland Security has been making stops and arrests in Los Angeles immigration raids without probable cause and ordered the department to stop detaining individuals based solely on race, spoken language or occupation.
US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ordered that DHS must develop guidance for officers to determine “reasonable suspicion” outside of the apparent race or ethnicity of a person, the language they speak or their accent, “presence at a particular location” such as a bus stop or “the type of work one does.”
Friday’s ruling comes after the ACLU of Southern California brought a case against the Trump administration last week on behalf of five people and immigration advocacy groups, alleging that DHS — which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has made unconstitutional arrests and prevented detainees’ access to attorneys.
The ruling is limited to the seven-county jurisdiction of the US Central District of California, which includes Los Angeles and surrounding areas.
Frimpong said in her ruling that the court needed to decide whether the plaintiffs could prove that the Trump administration “is indeed conducting roving patrols without
reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.”
“This Court decides—based on all the evidence presented—that they are,” Frimpong wrote.
Frimpong went on to say that the administration “failed” to provide information about the basis on which they made the arrests. The temporary restraining order also applies to the FBI and the Justice Department, which were also listed as defendants in the lawsuit and have been involved in immigration enforcement.
A farmworker at a Southern California cannabis farm is in critical condition after being injured during a chaotic immigration raid by federal officers, local officials said Friday.
Jaime Alanis Garcia is hospitalized at Ventura County Medical Center and remains in critical condition, county officials said in a statement authorized by the man’s family.
His family told NBC Los Angeles that the man is on life support using an assistive breathing machine and has “catastrophic” injuries. He has a broken neck, broken skull and a severed artery, a niece said.
The United Farm Workers had previously said Garcia, an employee of Glass House Farms, died after falling some 30 feet.
“These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten lives and separate families,” UFW President Teresa Romero said in a statement to NBC News.
More on the incident:
Immigration officials said in a statement that Garcia was not in federal custody at the time of the fall.
“Although he was not being pursued by law enforcement, this individual climbed up to the roof of a green house and fell 30 feet,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. “CBP immediately called a medivac to the scene to get him care as quickly as possible.”
Outside federal agents lobbed less-lethal weapons and tear gas at protesters who gathered at the Camarillo grow house Thursday while employees were being rounded up and arrested inside.
It’s not surprising that this person was terrified. DHS/ICE terror tactics are still responsible, IMO.
The Guardian mistakenly reported that the worker, Jaime Alanis, had died, but still provided important information about the incident, which is likely representative of what ICE is doing.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that authorities executed criminal search warrants in Carpinteria and Camarillo, California, on Thursday. They arrested immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally and there were also at least 10 immigrant children on site, the statement said.
Four US citizens were arrested for “assaulting or resisting officers”, the department said. Authorities were offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of one person suspected of firing a gun at federal agents. At least one worker was hospitalized with grave injuries.
During the raid, crowds of people gathered outside Glass House Farms at the Camarillo location to demand information about their relatives and protest against immigration enforcement. A chaotic scene developed outside the farm that grows tomatoes, cucumbers and cannabis as authorities clad in helmets and uniforms faced off with the demonstrators. Acrid green and white billowing smoke then forced community members to retreat.
Glass House, a licensed California cannabis grower, said in a statement that immigration agents had valid warrants. The company said workers were detained and it was helping provide them with legal representation.
More details:
Federal authorities formed a line blocking the road leading through farm fields to the company’s greenhouses. Protesters were seen shouting at agents wearing camouflage gear, helmets and gas masks. The billowing smoke drove protesters to retreat. It was unclear why authorities threw the canisters or if they released chemicals such as teargas.
Ventura county fire authorities responding to a 911 call of people having trouble breathing said three people were taken to nearby hospitals.
At the farm, agents arrested workers and removed them by bus. Others, including US citizens, were detained at the site for hours while agents investigated.
The incident came as federal immigration agents have ramped up arrests in southern California at car washes, farms and Home Depot parking lots, stoking widespread fear among immigrant communities.
The mother of an American worker said her son was held at the worksite for 11 hours and told her agents took workers’ cellphones to prevent them from calling family or filming and forced them to erase cellphone video of agents at the site.
George Retes, 25, works as a security guard at Glass House Farms, where the raid took place Thursday. His sister and wife told Eyewitness News that he was trying to leave the area as tensions escalated between federal agents and protesters.
They say they saw AIR7 footage of the scene and were able to see his white vehicle.
“ICE thought he was probably part of the protest, but he wasn’t, he was trying to reverse his car,” said his sister, Destinee Majana. “They broke his window, they pepper-sprayed him, they grabbed him, threw him on the floor. They detained him.”
Retes’ sister and wife have been trying to call anybody she can to find out where he was taken, but they say nobody can tell them where he is.
“We don’t know what to do, we’re just asking to let my brother go. He’s a U.S. citizen. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car,” Majana added.
His wife, Guadalupe Torres, said he hasn’t seen or spoke to him since Thursday.
At the brand new Everglades immigration detention center that officials have dubbed “ Alligator Alcatraz,” people held there say worms turn up in the food. Toilets don’t flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.
Inside the compound’s large white tents, rows of bunkbeds are surrounded by chain-link cages. Detainees are said to go days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and they are only able to speak by phone to lawyers and loved ones. At times the air conditioners abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat.
Days after President Donald Trump toured it, attorneys, advocates, detainees and their relatives are speaking out about the makeshift facility, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration raced to build on an isolated airstrip surrounded by swampland. Detainees began arriving July 2.
“These are human beings who have inherent rights, and they have a right to dignity,” immigration attorney Josephine Arroyo said. “And they’re violating a lot of their rights by putting them there.”
More details:
Insider accounts in interviews with The Associated Press paint a picture of the place as unsanitary and lacking in adequate medical care, pushing some into a state of extreme distress.
“The conditions in which we are living are inhuman,” a Venezuelan detainee said by phone from the facility. “My main concern is the psychological pressure they are putting on people to sign their self-deportation.”
The man, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, characterized the cells as “zoo cages” with eight beds each, teeming with mosquitoes, crickets and frogs. He said they are locked up 24 hours a day with no windows and no way to know the time. Detainees’ wrists and ankles are cuffed every time they go to see an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, accompanied by two guards who hold their arms and a third who follows behind, he said.
Such conditions make other immigration detention centers where advocates and staff have warned of unsanitary confinement, medical neglect and a lack of food and water seem “advanced,” according to immigration attorney Atara Eig.
The Archdiocese of Miami is condemning a controversial migrant detention facility in Florida — which state officials have named “Alligator Alcatraz” — calling it “unbecoming of public officials” and “corrosive of the common good.”
In a strongly worded statement posted to the archdiocese’s website, Archbishop Thomas Wenski criticized both the conditions at the remote detention site in the Everglades and the rhetoric surrounding it.
He wrote: “It is unbecoming of public officials and corrosive of the common good to speak of the deterrence value of ‘alligators and pythons’ at the Collier-Dade facility.”
Wenski’s statement also highlighted humanitarian concerns, noting the isolation of the facility from medical care and the vulnerability of the temporary tent structures to Florida’s harsh summer weather and hurricane threats. He also called for chaplains and ministers to be granted access to serve those in custody.
Meanwhile, a group of Democratic state lawmakers has filed a lawsuit against the state after being denied entry to the site last week. The complaint argues they are legally entitled to “immediate, unannounced access” to the facility.
A federal judge in Maryland sharply rebuked a Justice Department attorney Friday after an immigration official could not answer basic questions about the Trump administration’s plans to deport Kilmar Abrego García if he is released pending trial on federal human-smuggling charges against him in Tennessee.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has been considering an order that would require the administration to keep Abrego close to Tennessee for 48 hours should the federal judge there decide he can be released pending trial — time enough for her to hold an additional hearing on a motion by Abrego’s lawyers seeking to have him returned to Maryland. But the Maryland judge did not issue a decision Friday, saying an order would be delivered in advance of a hearing in that case next week.
“I can’t assume anything to be regular in this highly irregular case,” Xinis said on Friday during what was continuation of a hearing that began Thursday, suggesting that she did not trust the government’s claims about how it will handle Abrego’s due process rights moving forward after the administration had previously flouted court orders.
In a sharp exchange, Xinis asked Justice Department lawyers if they could produce the detainer filed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Abrego’s case. The document would serve as the government’s request for officials in the Nashville jail where Abrego is being held to keep him there until ICE takes him into custody, should the judge in his criminal case determine he could be released during his trial. The lawyers said they did not have the detainer, which Xinis had requested on Thursday. They said they were working to obtain it.
“What’s to work on? It’s a piece of paper,” Xinis said.
She then told the government’s lawyers that she would have doubts about whether the detainer existed until they provided a copy.
“We’re a court of laws, and we don’t operate on ‘take my word for it,’” she said.
About an hour later, the Justice Department lawyers produced the detainer and shared it with the court.
Two days after catastrophic floods roared through Central Texas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The lack of responsiveness happened because the agency had fired hundreds of contractors at call centers, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal matters.
The agency laid off the contractors on July 5 after their contracts expired and were not extended, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who has instituted a new requirement that she personally approve expenses over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until Thursday, five days after the contracts expired. FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
The details on the unanswered calls on July 6, which have not been previously reported, come as FEMA faces intense scrutiny over its response to the floods in Texas that have killed more than 120 people. The agency, which President Trump has called for eliminating, has been slow to activate certain teams that coordinate response and search-and-rescue efforts.
After floods, hurricanes and other disasters, survivors can call FEMA to apply for different types of financial assistance. People who have lost their homes, for instance, can apply for a one-time payment of $750 that can help cover their immediate needs, such as food or other supplies.
On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls.
That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter.
The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.
Some FEMA officials grew frustrated by the lapse in contracts and that it was taking days for Ms. Noem to act, according to the person briefed on the matter and the documents. “We still do not have a decision, waiver or signature from the DHS Secretary,” a FEMA official wrote in a July 8 email to colleagues.
The Texas county where nearly100 people were killedand more than 160 remain missing had the technology to turn every cellphone in the river valley into a blaring alarm, but local officials did not do so before or during the early-morning hours of July 4 as river levels rose to record heights, inundating campsites and homes, a Washington Post examination found.
Kerr County officials, who have come under increasing scrutiny for their actionsas the Guadalupe River began to flood, eventually sent text-message alerts that morning to residents who had registered to receivethem, according to screenshots of the texts. But The Post’sreview of emergency notifications that night found that even as a federal meteorologist warnedof deteriorating conditions and catastrophic risk, county officials did not activate a more powerful notification tool they had previously used to warn of potential flooding. The National Weather Service sent its own alerts through this system, beginning at 1:14 a.m. on July 4.
That mass notification system, known as the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, or IPAWS, is used by National Weather Service meteorologists to warn of imminent threats. Warnings of life-threatening weather events sent on that system — similar to Amber Alerts — force phones to vibrate and emit a unique, jarring tone as long as they’re on and have a signal. They also allow qualified local officials to send tailored messages to targeted areas.
The lack of alerts sent through IPAWS from Kerr County officials as the Guadalupe River flooded was a critical misstep in their response, said Abdul-Akeem Sadiq, a professor at the University of Central Florida who researches emergency management. Residents are more likely to trust — and listen to — their local government officials, he said, and the alert could have made a difference for some people despite the spotty cellphone service along the river and the fact that many people were probably asleep as floodwaters surged.
“If the alert had gone out, there might be one or two people who might have still been able to receive that message, who now, through word of mouth, alert people around them,” Sadiq said.
Federal regulators repeatedly granted appeals to remove Camp Mystic’s buildings from their 100-year flood map, loosening oversight as the camp operated and expanded in a dangerous flood plain in the years before rushing waters swept away children and counselors, a review by The Associated Press found.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency included the prestigious girls’ summer camp in a “Special Flood Hazard Area” in its National Flood Insurance map for Kerr County in 2011, which means it was required to have flood insurance and faced tighter regulation on any future construction projects.
That designation means an area is likely to be inundated during a 100-year flood — one severe enough that it only has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.
Located in a low-lying area along the Guadalupe River in a region known as flash flood alley, Camp Mystic lost at least 27 campers and counselors and longtime owner Dick Eastland when historic floodwaters tore through its property before dawn on July 4.
The flood was far more severe than the 100-year event envisioned by FEMA, experts said, and moved so quickly in the middle of the night that it caught many off guard in a county that lacked a warning system.
But Syracuse University associate professor Sarah Pralle, who has extensively studied FEMA’s flood map determinations, said it was “particularly disturbing” that a camp in charge of the safety of so many young people would receive exemptions from basic flood regulation.
“It’s a mystery to me why they weren’t taking proactive steps to move structures away from the risk, let alone challenging what seems like a very reasonable map that shows these structures were in the 100-year flood zone,” she said.
According to a Friday report from Axios, Bongino and Bondi clashed over President Donald Trump’s administration’s handling of the case of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The Justice Department, led by Bondi, released a joint memo with the FBI announcing that the rumored “Epstein list” naming his associates never really existed. That conclusion contradicted Bondi’s previous claims that the supposed list was on her desk.
As a result, Bongino and Bondi reportedly got into it. That led to Bongino taking off from work on Friday “in protest.” The deputy director, according to The Daily Wire’sMary Margaret Olohan, had also made it clear that he would be leaving his post if Bondi kept hers.
Not long after that reporting, Olohan added that Patel has joined Bongino in his stand against Bondi.
“Source close to DOJ says Kash Patel also wants Pam Bondi gone, and that he’d consider leaving if Bongino leaves,” Olohan said. “Also that there are more frustrations with other documents Bondi hasn’t released.”
The Trump administration’s complete dismissal of the Jeffrey Epstein case continues to backfire as some of the most intense, involved members of his voting base think they’ve lost him to the “deep state.”
As the Student Action Summit conference hosted by Charlie Kirk’s right-wing Turning Point USA group kicked off on Friday, multiple MAGA loyalists expressed anger and exasperation with President Trump’s handling of the case that has dominated much of the conspiratorial far-right.
“It’s not about just a pedophile ring and all that. It’s about who governs us, right? And that’s why [the Epstein case] is not gonna go away,” MAGA godfather Steve Bannon yelled from the conference stage. He then went on to detail just how important the case is to the deep base. “For this to go away, you’re gonna lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement. If we lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement right now, we’re gonna lose 40 seats in [20]26, we’re gonna lose the presidency, they won’t even have to steal it … because [the Trump administration] will have disheartened the hardest core populist …”
Trump supporters who felt that the president was the answer to years of liberal and neoconservative deep state corruption are now reeling, feeling lost and confused as their knight in shining armor turns his back on one of their most important issues.
Bannon turned to three young conference attendees and asked them for their take on the situation.
“We need to, we need to enforce the laws of this country and you know, like you said, Steve, there’s no better question than who rules America. It’s not the people. So we need to obviously have the declassification of the Epstein files,” one said before Bannon chimed in.
A bit more:
“You don’t think Donald Trump as president — you would tell Donald Trump in the Oval Office that you think there’s an open question, with him as commander-in-chief and doing all he’s doing, you would actually tell Trump you don’t know, you question who rules this country?”
“I definitely would because it’s a blackmail ring and anybody who wouldn’t is not paying attention. Simply put, Epstein himself said that he was best friends, on the stand, with Donald Trump. So anybody who thought that these files were going to get just declassified because we pressured him enough or you voted harder enough is just lying to yourself frankly.”
“In 2016, we trusted the plan with Trump, but now Trump has become the deep state. The exact thing he we voted him in—”
‘Why do you say he’s become the deep state?” Bannon asked.
“What is more deep state than covering up for pedophiles? Why would you go to that island? Why? Tell me why would you go to that island? Why would you go on the plane? … Why his top donors—why are his top donors neighbors with Epstein?”
It seems that Trump’s most ardent supporters are finally asking the important questions. And while some in the MAGAsphere zero in on Attorney General Pam Bondi, others grasp that the one person with the most power over the case, the one person who could even come close to validating any of their theories, is Trump. And he has expressed no interest whatsoever in doing that. In fact, he can’t even believe that his base is still talking about it. And as we approach one full week of uproar, it’s clear that the Epstein thing won’t be going away anytime soon.
MAGA activist Laura Loomer has set her sights on ousting Attorney General Pam Bondi, as the White House fends off fury from the president’s base over its handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal case and death.
Loomer called on FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino to ask for Bondi’s public resignation Friday morning, writing on social media that Patel and Bongino had clashed with Bondi over the investigation.
Loomer also claimed that Bongino had taken the day off from work “to evaluate whether or not he wants to continue his position,” which POLITICO has not independently confirmed. Axios later reported that Bongino did not attend work on Friday after butting heads with Bondi earlier this week.
“Pam Blondi is very damaging to President Trump’s image. She drags the administration down and the base doesn’t want her as AG,” Loomer wrote in a post on X. “She is harming Trump’s administration and she’s embarrassing all of his staff and advisors by creating a PR crisis for them. It’s incredibly unfair to President Trump and his team.”
Read more at Politico.
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
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As usual lately, here’s a massive amount of news today, and I can’t possibly address everything. So I’ve decided to focus on the Texas flooding story, and then I’ll turn to a crazy story about Trump and his MAGA cult.
The catastrophic floods in Texas are still a huge story, and we’re beginning to see the recriminations on how badly the disaster was handled, by local, state, and federal officials. As of now, the death toll is 111, and there 173 missing. 116 of the missing are from Kerr County.
No survivors have been found since Friday in Kerr County, where the worst flooding occurred. The statewide death toll rose to 111, with at least 173 unaccounted for statewide….
At least 173 people remained missing on the fifth day after devastating floods swept through the Texas Hill Country, Gov. Greg Abbott said on Tuesday. Those unaccounted for include 161 in Kerr County, where the worst of the flooding occurred and where local officials said no one has been rescued since Friday.
The number of missing cited by the governor — the first time an official had identified the scale of the recovery operation still ahead — suggested the death toll of 111 could more than double as rescue teams sift through debris in search of bodies….
Search and rescue teams from across Texas, other states and even Mexico are pouring into flood-ravaged Central Texas to aid the strained crews that have been hunting for victims along the Guadalupe River.
Volunteer fire departments from across Texas have sent teams to the hardest-hit areas, as have fire departments from out of state, including those from Shreveport, La., and Memphis….
What about FEMA? I’m reminded of George W. Bush’s handling of Katrina. Remember “Heck of a job, Brownie”?
From his very first day as Acting Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), David Richardson’s approach was clear: “I’ve never read a book on leadership,” he said in an all-staff Zoom on May 9th, a fact that quickly became abundantly clear. He told anyone who planned to obstruct his work on behalf of President Trump “I will run right over you. Don’t get in my way…I know all the tricks.”
There have been many Weird Little Guys since the start of Trump’s second administration. In this context, a Weird Little Guy is someone who’s elevated to a position of power with little to no relevant experience and has proved unwavering loyalty to Trump. He allows the higher ups to exert actual power, while he exists mostly as a face and warm body. And as we watch the paltry FEMA response in Texas after floods killed at least 119 people on July 4th and where at least 160 remain missing, Acting Administrator Richardson is proving he can’t even be the face of the agency by staying silent.
Search and recovery crews use a large excavator to remove debris from the bank of the Guadalupe River in Center Point, Texas, on Wednesday. Jim Vondruska Getty Images
As I wrote on Monday, FEMA staffers are alarmed by what they say is the agency’s impossibly slow and deficient response to the death and destruction wrought by the Texas floods. Figures shared with The Handbasket showed just 86 people deployed as of Monday evening. Per Tuesday’s FEMA evening briefing, an additional 204 people had been deployed—just 19 from FEMA, and 185 from other agencies. Few—if any—federal staff are on the ground to help survivors register for assistance.
But perhaps as galling as the weak response is Richardson’s disappearing act: While the former Assistant Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office is not a particularly vocal leader even during quieter weeks, he still has yet to make a single internal or public comment about the impact of the Texas floods and how his agency is helping survivors.
“It is unprecedented for the leader of FEMA to be absent from the public response to a disaster that has killed over 100 Americans,” Dr. Samantha Montano, Associate Professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told The Handbasket on Wednesday. “Richardson should be on the ground in the impacted areas meeting with local, state, and nonprofit stakeholders. He should be holding press conferences and providing interviews for national outlets. He should be monitoring FEMA’s resources and the broader federal response to ensure it is moving effectively and efficiently.”
As monstrous floodwaters surged across central Texas late last week, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency leapt into action, preparing to deploy critical search and rescue teams and life-saving resources, like they have in countless past disasters.
But almost instantly, FEMA ran into bureaucratic obstacles, four officials inside the agency told CNN.
As CNN has previously reported, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whose department oversees FEMA — recently enacted a sweeping rule aimed at cutting spending: Every contract and grant over $100,000 now requires her personal sign-off before any funds can be released.
For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say that threshold is essentially “pennies,” requiring sign-off for relatively small expenditures.
Kristi Noem meets with Gov. Abbott and others in Texas
In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.
“We were operating under a clear set of guidance: lean forward, be prepared, anticipate what the state needs, and be ready to deliver it,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN. “That is not as clear of an intent for us at the moment.”
For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.
In the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests, multiple agency sources told CNN.
But even as Texas rescue crews raced to save lives, FEMA officials realized they needed Noem’s approval before sending those additional assets. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began, multiple sources told CNN.
In the first three hours after the National Weather Service sent out an alert at 1:14 a.m. on July 4, warning of “life-threatening flash flooding” near Kerrville, Texas, the Guadalupe River would rise 20 feet. Yet local leaders would remain largely unheard from, raising questions about both local preparedness and whether the state of Texas should be doing more to notify flood-prone rural counties when they are in danger.
Camp Mystic, a girls’ camp along the river where at least 27 people lost their lives, experienced severe flooding sometime between 2 and 3 a.m., according to accounts from parents whose children were at the camp. Counselors in one cabin had to force open windows to help young girls get out. “The girls were saying it was a rushing river,” said Lisa Miller, whose 9-year-old daughter, Birdie, had to climb onto a counselor’s back to escape.
At the nearby Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly camp, a facilities manager was awake around 1 a.m. when he saw the rising waters and alerted his boss, which prompted a quick effort to move people to higher ground, camp officials said. No lives were lost.
Yet even as these dramas were unfolding, many of the key local leaders in Kerr County were still asleep or had not been alerted to the danger. The survival of people in local camps and low-lying areas in many cases depended not on official evacuations, but on whether they were paying attention, on their own, to weather alerts in the middle of the night.
After the flood alert shortly after 1 a.m., the National Weather Service went on to put out a series of warnings of mounting intensity, with one at 4:03 a.m. warning of “catastrophic” flooding.
“This came at night when people were asleep, in bed,” Kerrville’s mayor, Joe Herring Jr., said at a news conference. He later told CNN that he had not received the weather alert and was not awakened until 5:30 a.m.
Sheriff Larry Leitha of Kerr County said he had first been notified around 4 or 5 a.m., when “one of my sergeants was in dispatch when the first calls started coming in.”
It’s been reported that campers and counselors at Camp Mystic weren’t allowed to have cell phone with them. Apparently cell phone coverage is poor in the area anyway.
Nearly a week after floodwaters swept away more than a hundred lives, Texas officials are facing heated questions over how much was – or was not – done in the early morning hours of Friday as a wall of water raced down the Guadalupe River.
Several officials in the past few days have deflected or become defensive when asked clarifying questions about the county’s actions before and during the disaster.
“We’re in the process of trying to put together a timeline. That’s going to take a little bit of time,” Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said Tuesday, adding his priority was recovering victims, identifying bodies and notifying families.
Authorities were pressed again Wednesday when they shared little information about the early hours of the emergency, instead calling attention to their swift response later in the day on July 4.
“I know that this tragedy, as horrific as it is, could have been so much worse,” Kerrville Police Department Sgt. Jonathan Lamb said.
As search and rescue efforts continue for a seventh straight day, frustration grows over lingering questions about what officials did during those crucial early hours, if existing warning systems worked and whether any loss could have been prevented.
I suppose any even could be worse, but that is hardly the point. See the post for a timeline CNN has created.
Years before the flooding took more than 90 lives in Kerr County, Texas, local officials knew residents faced threats from rapidly rising water. They started planning a flood warning system, one that could alert residents when a flash flood was imminent.
Still, like many other communities around the country, Kerr County struggled to find a way to pay for it. They turned to the largest source available for most localities: funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
For years, Kerr County officials debated how to fund a flood warning system. Under Trump administration changes, disaster funding opportunities are getting more limited for communities. Denise Rios WaPo
FEMA has granted billions over the last five years to help communities prepare for disasters. The idea is one that has been proven on the ground: When communities invest in infrastructure and preparation before a disaster, it can dramatically lessen the damage when a disaster hits, as well as save lives.
Kerr County’s funding application was turned down by Texas officials in charge of administering the federal funds. As with most of FEMA’s programs, there was more demand for money than was available. Kerr County looked into a Texas state grant program for flood projects, but gave up when they learned it would cover only a small portion of the cost. In Texas alone, more than $54 billion in flood projects are waiting to be built, and state legislators have only dedicated a small fraction of that funding so far.
Now, funding prospects for communities at risk are getting even more limited. The Trump administration has frozen or canceled billions of dollars dedicated to help communities prepare for disasters. Trump signed an executive order saying states should be responsible for funding disaster preparedness, instead of the federal government.
I know I’ve spent a lot of time on this story, but it seems to me that we will see more disasters like this with hurricane and tornado seasons coming up.
Now I want to address a crazy story about Trump and his MAGA cult. This story grew out of Pam Bondi’s announcement that the Jeffrey Epstein files would not be released, as she previously promised.
President Trump‘s Justice Department and FBI have concluded they have no evidence that convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed powerful figures, kept a “client list” or was murdered, according to a memo detailing the findings obtained by Axios.
— The administration is releasing a video — in both raw and “enhanced” versions — that it says indicates no one entered the area of the Manhattan prison where Epstein was held the night he died in 2019.
— The video supports a medical examiner’s finding that Epstein died by suicide, the two-page memo claims.
Why it matters: The findings represent the first time Trump’s administration has officially contradicted conspiracy theories about Epstein’s activities and his death — theories that had been pushed by the FBI’s top two officials before Trump appointed them to the bureau.
– As social media influencers and activists, Kash Patel (now the FBI’s director) and Dan Bongino (now deputy director) were among those in MAGA world who questioned the official version of how Epstein died.
– Patel and Bongino have since said Epstein killed himself. But it has become an article of faith online, especially on the right, that Epstein’s crimes also implicated government officials, celebrities and business leaders — and that someone killed him to conceal them.
– The memo says no one else involved in the Epstein case will be charged. (Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking and related offenses.)
You can read more at the link. The problem is that Bodi promised a big reveal and a client list and now she’s changed her mind–probably because Trump is all over the Epstein files. But MAGA is enraged. They don’t get that she’s probably protecting Trump. They think Democrats and the “deep state” are involved.
Years have gone by since Jeffrey Epstein was tried, convicted, sent to prison, and committed suicide (allegedly). Trump made it through his first election and term with the Epstein case not affecting him negatively with his MAGA base despite his obvious personal connections with him, which were pretty extensive. His MAGA cult accepted his explanations that none of his contacts with Epstein involved girls and he cut ties with him as soon as he learned about the allegations against him.
In February, MAGA influencers showed off their copies of the so-called Epstein files.
Four years went by with Trump out of office and the Epstein story largely fell out of the public consciousness as these things do with so much other news happening. But not with Trump’s MAGA base. The various conspiracies surrounding the case continued to build online on social media and in right-wing podcasts. The conspiracies garnered huge numbers of clicks and views for the grifter class, so they were more than happy to feed the beast.
There were many different conspiracies involving Epstein, but most who are obsessed with the case generally fall into either one of two camps. The first believes that there is a “Deep State” cabal that secretly controls all aspects of government and society run by elites from both parties, and that many of them were caught up in what Epstein was doing so there is ample incentive for leaders of both political parties to cover everything up to try and get the public to move on. The second group believes that Epstein was a Mossad agent used to gather blackmail videos of powerful elected officials so Israel would be able gain control of the US government through extortion.
When Trump won the 2024 election, many of the influencers with huge followings believed that all the information would finally be released by his new FBI Director and Attorney General. They believed that former AG Bill Barr was very much part of the Deep State and covered everything up in term one. They were primarily interested in 3 things: 1. The names of everyone who Epstein brought into his orbit to rape girls; 2. Evidence that his death was not a suicide and who killed him; 3. Who were Epstein’s co-conspirators?
Filipkowski notes that Trump appointed heavy-duty MAGA conspiracy theorists to high level law enforcement posts.
…which only poured gasoline on the fire for MAGA anxiously awaiting the big reveal. Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi may have been chosen for their loyalty to Trump over qualifications and competence, but they also carried with them a lot of baggage on Epstein. Their mouths had written a lot of checks to MAGA on this issue, and they expected to be cashing them right about now.
But it was not to be. Patel and Bongino told Maria Baritromo on Fox last month that they had reviewed the files and were convinced that Epstein killed himself, which infuriated MAGA. But still they were assuaged by the fact that Bondi gave two separate interviews to Fox where she said there were hundreds of victims and thousands of videos that were “on her desk” that she was reviewing. She said some of the materials had to be “redacted,” but everything would be released shortly. Then DOJ posted a memo on their website this week that nothing would be released and the case was closed. No formal announcement, no press conference, no Fox interview. Just an unsigned memo posted on a website.
So now the crazies are outraged. Click the link to read the rest of Filpkowski’s post.
Top MAGA influencers warn the Trump administration is bleeding trust over its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and that the president is drifting out of step with the movement he built.
Why it matters: The MAGA base was blindsided by the Justice Department’s conclusion that the notorious sex trafficker died by suicide in 2019 and had no “client list.” Days after the initial shock, Trump’s insistence on moving on is fueling a deeper sense of betrayal.
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump asked incredulously during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting after a reporter pressed Attorney General Pam Bondi on the findings.
“I can’t believe you’re asking a question about Epstein at a time like this,” he added, calling it a “waste” of time and a “desecration.”
Driving the news: The chorus of MAGA outrage has only intensified since the Justice Department and FBI released a memo on Sunday finding no evidence that Epstein was murdered, had a “client list” or had blackmailed powerful figures.
Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon — influential Trump allies who have feuded with the president at times — are among those who have accused the administration of a cover-up.
But even MAGA’s most loyal foot soldiers are struggling to explain how top Trump officials could close the Epstein case after promising — for years — that it would expose shadowy global elites.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said Americans are “not going to accept” that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had no client list.
A memo released by the Justice Department and the FBI on Monday stating there was never any client list caused waves among President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again base.
Greene, a prominent MAGA figure, told Real America’s Voice network on Wednesday, “I think the Department of Justice and the FBI has more explaining to do — this is Jeffrey Epstein,” The Hill reports.
“This is the most famous pedophile in modern-day history, and people are absolutely not going to accept just a memo that was written that says there is no client list,” she said.
Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers had pressured Attorney General Pam Bondi to release what was suspected to be a record of high-profile names associated with Epstein, a wealthy financier who died in jail ahead of his trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019.
You’d think it might dawn on these morons that Bondi and the rest are protecting Trump, who was pals with Epstein for at least 15 years, but they are too brainwashed, I guess.
Pam Bondi is clinging to her job as she faces a firestorm of criticism from MAGA loyalists over her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
It’s hard to find a Trump official who has faced more wrath than Donald Trump’s attorney general, as the president’s supporters pile on after the Justice Department indicated this week there was no more information to release on the convicted sex offender and denied the existence of an Epstein “client list.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo on Monday stating that the department and the F.B.I. had determined “that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Across social media, the president’s supporters have been accusing Bondi of lying to the American people. They’re calling for the president to fire her or for her to resign. Some have even thrown around the word “impeachment.”
Some of the biggest conservative activists have added fuel to the burning outrage with their heated takedowns of the attorney general.
“She can say whatever she wants to say. She also said she is committed to ‘combatting human trafficking.’ Do you really believe her? I don’t,” posted far-right activist Laura Loomer.
“She can say whatever she wants to say. She also said she is committed to ‘combatting human trafficking.’ Do you really believe her? I don’t,” posted far-right activist Laura Loomer.
The MAGA’s are angry because they were invited to the White House in February where they received binders of information that turned out to be old news.
Alt-right podcaster Jack Posobiec skewered her on his show for calling the Epstein case closed and saying that’s “not how you treat the American people.”
“I feel very angry, upset, used… from having gone to the White House and receiving this binder full of baloney that was completely publicly available information already that we were told was new information on Epstein. It wasn’t,” he said. “We were told that more information was coming. It wasn’t.”
He was referring to influencers being invited to the White House in February, where they were handed binders marked “Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained Epstein material that was largely already public knowledge.
Megyn Kelly suggested on Tuesday that Bondi was “too lazy” to check if any of the information was new before handing it over to influencers earlier this year.
Now Trump and the gang have leaked supposed criminal investigations of James Comey and John Brennan, most likely in an effort to change the subject.
President Trump responded Wednesday to reports that former CIA director John Brennan and former FBI director James Comey are being investigated over allegations that they made false statements to Congress during the Russia probe.
…Brennan and Comey were under criminal investigation over the FBI probe into possible links between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia after CIA director John Ratcliffe referred evidence to the FBI of possible wrongdoing….
“I know nothing about it other than what I read today, but I will tell you, I think they’re very dishonest people,” Trump said when asked about the investigation by a reporter during a White House meeting with African leaders….”I think they’re crooked as hell and maybe they have to pay a price for that….”I believe they are truly bad people and dishonest people,” Trump added. “So whatever happens, happens.”
Ratcliffe last week released a review that criticized intelligence leaders for rushing the Russia report and for the intelligence community assessment relying on a single source to express “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “aspired” to help Trump win the 2016 election….However, it did not dispute “the quality and credibility” of the CIA’s conclusions….”Agency heads at the time created a politically charged environment that triggered an atypical analytic process around an issue essential to our democracy,” Ratcliffe said in a statement on the report.
What they’re saying: Brennan told MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” Wednesday afternoon that neither the Department of Justice nor the CIA had contacted him about the investigation.
The Secret Service had the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey followed by law enforcement authorities in unmarked cars and street clothes and tracked the location of his cellphone the day after he posted an image on social media in May that President Trump’s allies said amounted to a threat to assassinate the president, according to three government officials.
Mr. Comey and his wife, Patrice, were tailed by the authorities as they drove from the North Carolina coast, where they had been vacationing, through Virginia to their home in the Washington area, the officials said, describing the details of the surveillance on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing a federal investigation.
At the same time, the Secret Service was receiving information showing the location of Mr. Comey’s phone while federal authorities were stationed at his home waiting for him to return, the officials said.
The intense surveillance occurred a day after Mr. Comey, long perceived by Mr. Trump as an enemy, had posted a photo on social media of seashells he said he had found while walking on the beach. The shells were arranged in the formation “86 47,” combining a slang term meaning to dismiss or remove with the numerical designation of Mr. Trump’s second presidency. Trump critics have often displayed the phrase on signs and clothing at protests….
Shortly after the image was posted, Donald Trump Jr. wrote on social media that Mr. Comey was “casually calling for my dad to be murdered.” The accusation created a firestorm online, as Mr. Trump’s supporters accused Mr. Comey of plotting to assassinate the president.
When Mr. Comey learned of the uproar, he deleted the post, said he did not know that it had a violent connotation and that he opposed violence of any kind. The Secret Service interviewed him by phone that evening, and Mr. Comey said he had no intent to cause the president harm.
The Secret Service followed him home and then insisted on taking him back to DC to be questioned. I don’t know that is what the so-called “investigation” is about. Frankly, I don’t think there really are investigations of Brennan and Comey. It’s just Trump’s effort to distract from the Epstein furor.
That’s it for me today. What do you think? What’s on your mind?
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It’s just the beginning of the storm season, and we are beginning to see the damage from Trump/DOGE cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). There’s a terrible tragedy playing out in the Texas hill country right now.
State officials said Friday night that at least 24 people have died in the catastrophic flood that swept through Kerr County early Friday morning, and 23 girls from Camp Mystic, a private Christian girls’ camp, are still unaccounted for.
In a news conference in Kerrville, Gov. Greg Abbott signed an emergency disaster declaration, which allows numerous counties affected by the floods to get the state resources needed to help with ongoing search-and-rescue efforts.
Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said one other person was found dead in nearby Kendall County but it’s unclear if that person was a flood victim.
Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said local officials were caught off guard by the volume of rain, adding that the National Weather Service advisory issued Thursday “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.”
Gen. Thomas Suelzer, the head of the Texas Military Department, said 237 people have been rescued and evacuated so far. Officials said they couldn’t provide the number of people who are unaccounted for, but they include the 23 girls from Camp Mystic.
In an earlier press conference Friday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the dead include adults and children, and some were found in cars “that were washed out upstream.” He said officials aren’t sure whether any of the bodies were children from Camp Mystic, and stressed that the campers are only considered missing at this point….
As much as 10 inches of heavy rain fell in just a few hours overnight in central Kerr County, causing flash flooding of the Guadalupe River. Patrick said the river, which winds through Kerr County in Central Texas, rose 26 feet in 45 minutes during torrential rains overnight.
Were there warnings this was coming?
A flood watch issued Thursday afternoon estimated isolated amounts up to 7 inches of rising water. That shifted to a flood warning for at least 30,000 people overnight.
According to the National Weather Service website, the flash flood watch, which included Kerr County, was issued at 1:18 p.m. Thursday. Nearly 12 hours later, a “life threatening” flash flood warning was issued at 1:14 a.m., according to the website.
When asked about the suddenness of the flash flooding overnight, Kelly said “we do not have a warning system” and that “we didn’t know this flood was coming,” even as local reporters pointed to the warnings and pushed him for answers about why more precautions weren’t taken.
“Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming,” he said. “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.”
Search and rescue teams were working throughout the night in Central Texas after flooding that began early Friday swept through a summer camp and homes, killing at least 24 people and leaving as many as 25 girls missing from the camp.
The girls were at Camp Mystic along the Guadalupe River in Hunt, in Kerr County, according to the county sheriff. Desperate parents posted photos of their children online, seeking any information, and others went to reunification centers to try to find missing loved ones. An unknown number of other people were also missing, Kerr County said in an update on Friday night, citing the sheriff, Larry Leitha.
By Katya Vigovskaya
The deadly flooding surprised many, including Texas officials, who said that some National Weather Service alerts had underestimated the risks. The most urgent alerts came in overnight, in the early hours of Friday.
Hundreds of emergency personnel were searching for stranded people. The Texas National Guard made 237 rescues and evacuations using helicopters and rescue swimmers, Maj. Gen. Thomas M. Suelzer, the guard’s commander, said at a news conference Friday evening.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed an emergency disaster declaration encompassing 15 counties in Central Texas. The declaration will expedite state funding for the areas that experienced significant damage.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said earlier in the day that Camp Mystic was contacting the parents of campers who remained unaccounted for. He said that parents with children who had not heard from camp officials should assume their children were safe. The camp has some 750 campers, he said.
Ron Filipkowski at Meidas: Texas Officials Blame Agency Gutted by Trump for Results of Deadly Storm.
As the best and the brightest were being fired at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by senseless and draconian ‘DOGE’ cuts earlier this year under Trump, with no reason given except for the need to cut a paltry amount of the government’s budget, experts warned repeatedly that the cuts would have deadly consequences during the storm season. And they have.
Dozens and dozens of stories have been written in the media citing hundreds of experts which said that weather forecasting was never going to be the same, and that inaccurate forecasts were going to lead to fewer evacuations, impaired preparedness of first responders, and deadly consequences. I quoted many of them in my daily Bulletins and wrote about this issue nearly 20 different times.
And the chickens have come home to roost. Hundreds of people have already been killed across the US in a variety of storms including deadly tornadoes – many of which were inaccurately forecasted. And we are just entering peak hurricane season. Meteorologist Chris Vagasky posted earlier this spring on social media: “The world’s example for weather services is being destroyed.”
Now, after severe flooding in non-evacuated areas in Texas has left at least 24 dead with dozens more missing, including several young girls at a summer camp, Texas officials are blaming their failure to act on a faulty forecast by Donald Trump’s new National Weather Service gutted by cuts to their operating budget and most experienced personnel.
Forewarnings:
Reuters published a story just a few days ago, one of many warning about this problem: “In May, every living former director of the NWS signed on to an open letter with a warning that, if continued, Trump’s cuts to federal weather forecasting would create ‘needless loss of life’. Despite bipartisan congressional pushback for a restoration in staffing and funding to the NWS, sharp budget cuts remain on pace in projections for the 2026 budget for the NOAA, the parent organization of the NWS.”
But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose agency oversees NOAA, testified before Congress on June 5 that the cuts wouldn’t be a problem because “we are transforming how we track storms and forecast weather with cutting-edge technology. Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.” Apparently the “cutting edge technology” hasn’t arrived yet.
And now presumably FEMA will be called upon to help pick up the pieces of shattered lives in Texas – an agency that Trump said repeatedly that he wants to abolish. In fact, Trump’s first FEMA director Cameron Hamilton was fired one day after he testified before Congress that FEMA should not be abolished.
Filipkowski notes that so far the “president” has had nothing to say about the tragedy in Texas.
Over the past two months, the Trump administration has taken steps to eliminate regulations addressing climate change, pull back funding for climate programs and cancel methods used to evaluate how climate change is affecting American society and its economy. Now it is directly undermining the science and research of climate change itself, in ways that some of the nation’s most distinguished scientists say will have dangerous consequences.
Proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency whose weather and climate research touches almost every facet of American life, are targeting a 57-year-old partnership between Princeton University and the U.S. government that produces what many consider the world’s most advanced climate modeling and forecasting systems. NOAA’s work extends deep into the heart of the American economy — businesses use it to navigate risk and find opportunity — and it undergirds both American defense and geopolitical planning. The possible elimination of the lab, called the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in concert with potential cuts to other NOAA operations, threatens irreparable harm not only to global understanding of climate change and long-range scenarios for the planet but to the country’s safety, competitiveness and national security.
The gutting of NOAA was outlined earlier this month in a leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget that detailed steep reductions at the Department of Commerce, which houses the science agency. The memo, which was viewed by ProPublica, has been previously reported. But the full implications of those cuts for the nation’s ability to accurately interpret dynamic changes in the planet’s weather and to predict long-term warming scenarios through its modeling arm in Princeton have not.
According to the document, NOAA’s overall funding would be slashed by 27%, eliminating “functions of the Department that are misaligned with the President’s agenda and the expressed will of the American people” including almost all of those related to the study of climate change. The proposal would break up and significantly defund the agency across programs, curtailing everything from ocean research to coastal management while shifting one of NOAA’s robust satellite programs out of the agency and putting another up for commercial bidding. But its most significant target is the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research ⎯ a nerve center of global climate science, data collection and modeling, including the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory ⎯ which would be cut by 74%. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the memo stated.
A bit more:
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Evidently, burning the Constitution is acceptable. I can’t wait to see what the creepy, Christofascists that are the Republican Supreme Court Jurists have to say about that. I’m sure the Alitos and Thomases already have something disgusting in mind. Also, there is the sad news that Trump’s racism, xenophobia, ignorance, and cruelty have created an obsession with torturing Kilmar Ábrego Garcia and his family, once again. This is from 
Indeed, nearly all of the reforms surrounding Due Process and access to the legal system seem destined to be attacked by Orange Caligula. This is from 
We have a huge Environmental Accident in Tangipoha Parish requiring evacuation and shutting down rivers, high violent crime in rural districts, and a looming Hurricane Season. Our National Guard will be worn out with all that marching around to deal with the state’s crises that are real.
We’re coming on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (Katrinaversary). This is my statement on it.
If you want to know what Retired General Russell Honore, our Katrina Hero, has to say about all this, please follow him on his
I would also like to remind you that, as we speak, the folks who helped us most to recover are the fearless and hard-working men who came here to work. They still work here, and we depend on them. My friend Anne Renee shared this with me. It’s from 
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