Finally Friday Reads: Ain’t that some Shit?

With Trump/Epstein back in the news, here’s a snippet from a cartoon I drew a few days ago. ” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Some of my friends have been blaming the craziness I’ve been feeling lately on the huge Mercury Retrograde that started on the 9th. It’s really unnerving to read the unbelievably scattered graft and madness coming out of Orange Caligula’s regime, which seems like peak madness, too. I’ve spent the last two days trying to talk people down, as well as crying over a friend whose essential surgery just got cancelled because his insurance company refused to pay for it. Then, there are all the Epstein headlines. I’m glad to get glimpses of justice, but it’s also tough to deal with all the stories of abuse and indifference that always come from the way men treat women and children like junk in their toy box.

This story in HuffPo absolutely tore my heart to pieces this morning. It’s reported by Ron Dicker. This may trigger you, so please take this trigger warning seriously. “Epstein Email About Giving Girlfriend To Trump Enrages Model’ Groped’ By Him. The former Sports Illustrated model said Epstein, whom she dated in the early 1990s, “delivered” her to Trump.”

A newly released email in which Jeffrey Epstein bragged about giving a girlfriend to Donald Trump angered a former model who dated Epstein and claimed he once “delivered” her to the future president to be “groped” by him.

The note showed how “deeply misogynistic” the two men were, Stacey Williams told CNN on Thursday. (Watch the video below.)

Williams, who was featured in several Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues in the ’90s, appeared on “Erin Burnett Outfront” after numerous emails involving the late sexual predator Epstein were shared this week. Congress is poised to vote on the release of files unviewed by the public, but Trump has continued to push back at what he now calls a “hoax.”

Burnett brought up Epstein’s correspondence in which he wrote about a Norwegian businesswoman and heiress: “my 20 year old girlfriend in 1993, , that after two years i gave to donald.”

“It screams about, you know, the mindset of these men,” Williams said. “You know, the same two men who did what they did to me when Jeffrey Epstein walked me into Donald Trump’s office to be groped by him. Clearly, we are these objects, these trophies, and it’s deeply misogynistic. It’s horrifying.”

Burnett also mentioned Williams’ previous account claiming Trump molested her as Epstein watched at Trump Tower, and how their smiling at each other revealed the pair’s “weird and twisted game.”

Williams added, “I clearly was delivered there for the groping.” She said that she had a reputation for standing up to inappropriate men, so “when I froze and didn’t respond, you know, I think Jeffrey got very upset about it. He expected a fight.”

Trump was the only male friend Epstein consistently talked about, according to Williams. “It’s just so maddening to me that Donald Trump ran on, you know, cleaning up the swamp,” she continued, “and all this time and energy is being spent on covering up information about the biggest swamp monster who’s ever existed.”

Even the Queen of the Fox News Bleached Blondes, a mother of teenagers, couldn’t show kindness, awareness,  and sympathy to victims of Trump and Epstein’s Ephebophilia, which is the preference for mid-to-late adolescents. This is from Mother Jones as reported by Julianne McShane. “Megyn Kelly Suddenly Finds Pedophilia Very Hard to Define. When a 16-year-old accused Russell Brand of rape, Kelly begged conservatives to condemn him. Now she’s splitting hairs about men “into the barely legal type.”

Megyn Kelly is known for offering absurd takes that nobody asked for.

There was her insistence that Santa Claus is white, for example, and her claim that wearing blackface used to not be so bad (that one got her fired from NBC News). Wednesday, on her eponymous SiriusXM show, Kelly picked another hill to die on: She implied, in conversation with NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon, that it wasn’t quite fair to call Jeffrey Epstein a pedophile because he was “into the barely legal type” of minors—which Kelly appallingly defines as “like, 15-year-olds”—who look like they could be legal adults. Epstein was charged with sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, and the Department of Justice said he abused and exploited dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14.

But Kelly said she nonetheless questioned how to characterize Epstein because, she claims, she knows “somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything,” and “this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile.”

Kelly continued: “This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”

Kelly said the characterization from her unnamed source—that Epstein was “not a pedophile”—”is what I believed…until we heard from [Attorney General] Pam Bondi that they had tens of thousands of videos of alleged…child sexual abuse material on his computer that for the first time, I thought, ‘Oh, no, he was an actual pedophile.’ I mean, only a pedophile gets off on young children abuse videos. [Bondi has] never clarified it, I don’t know whether it’s true. I have to be honest, I don’t really trust Pam Bondi’s word on the Epstein matters anymore.”

“Or anything else,” added Ungar-Sargon.

“Yeah,” Kelly replied, “so I don’t know what’s true about him, but we have yet to see anybody come forward and say, ‘I was eight, I was under 10, I was under 14, when I first came within his purview.’ You can say that’s a distinction without a difference.”

“No, it’s not,” Ungar-Sargon says.

“I think there is a difference,” Kelly continues, “there’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old, you know?”

In fact, we don’t know.

Gaslighting is a Fox News feature. It’s also a hallmark of MAGA surreality.

Heather Cox Richardson writes about this on her Substack, Letters from an American.

We are watching the ideology of the far-right MAGAs smash against reality, with President Donald J. Trump and his cronies madly trying to convince voters to believe in their false world rather than the real one.

That spin has been hard at work in the past few days over the economy. Trump is clearly worried that the Supreme Court is going to find that much of his tariff war is unconstitutional, as the direction of the justices’ questioning in its November 5 hearing suggested. On Monday he claimed that the U.S. would have to pay back “in excess of $2 Trillion Dollars” if the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs unconstitutional, and that “would be a National Security catastrophe.” He blamed “Anarchists and Thugs” for putting the U.S. into a “terrible situation” by challenging his tariffs. Hours later, he increased the number to $3 Trillion—the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says the number was actually about $195 billion.

Yesterday, White House officials suggested they would never be able to release October’s jobs report or inflation numbers, blaming the Democrats. They did, however, claim that prices are “beginning to drop,” citing DoorDash, the delivery platform, as their source.

The administration has justified its violence against undocumented immigrants by insisting those they round up are violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” That claim is increasingly exposed as a lie, and Americans are pushing back.

Melissa Sanchez, Jodi S. Cohen, T. Christian Miller, Sebastian Rotella, and Mariam Elba of ProPublica reported on the September 30 raid on an apartment complex in Chicago in which federal agents stormed the complex in a helicopter and military-style vehicles, broke into apartments, and marched individuals outside, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members and filming them for a video the administration circulated that portrayed them as criminals.

Government agents arrested 37 people in the raid but ultimately claimed that only two of them were gang members. The journalists spoke to one and found he had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors have not filed criminal charges against anyone arrested in the raid. Instead, the journalists observed in immigration court that government lawyers never mentioned criminal charges or gang membership. Judges simply ordered them deported or let them leave voluntarily, which would enable them to apply to return to the U.S., a sign they are not actually seen as a threat to the country.

On Tuesday, Isabela Dias of Mother Jones reported on the administration’s targeting of individuals who, until now, were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. President Barack Obama established DACA for those brought to the U.S. as children until Congress could pass legislation to give those “Dreamers” a path to legal residence. Thanks to the program, Dreamers by the hundreds of thousands gave the U.S. government their personal information in exchange for a promise they would not be deported. But Congress never acted, and now, in its quest to reach 3,000 deportations a day, the administration is targeting the DACA recipients, whose adherence to the rules the government established makes them easy to find and target.

Yesterday, Robert Tait of The Guardian noted that Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, a group that monitors human rights in Latin American, report that the Veneuzelans the Trump administration sent to the infamous CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador endured systematic torture, including beatings and sexual violence. Only 3% of those the U.S. rendered to El Salvador had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S.

As immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “We paid El Salvador to torture, abuse, and rape completely innocent Venezuelans so that [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump could claim they were tough on immigrants.”

The cruelty of Orange Caligula and his psychopathic sidekicks knows no bounds. This is from the source of authentic investigative journalism, ProPublica. “Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts, The company is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.”

On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”

Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.

The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.

No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.

The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.

Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.

“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.

“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.

Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”

“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.

Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”

As in everything recent, we’ve seen this administration chant, once again, it’s the Democrats’ fault. This is from the New York Times. “Trump Administration Live Updates: President Wants Federal Inquiry Into Epstein’s Ties to Prominent Democrats.”  You’d think this approach would’ve grown old and stale already.

President Trump announced on Friday that he wanted the Justice Department to investigate high-profile Democrats — including former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the venture capitalist and megadonor Reid Hoffman — who he alleged had ties to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In a social media post, Mr. Trump blasted Democrats for “using the Epstein Hoax” to distract from the recent government shutdown, and said that federal law enforcement would order investigations into members of their party, who he insinuated were involved in Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking of girls.

“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his “Island.” Stay tuned!!!”

Mr. Trump said that he would be asking Attorney General Pam Bondi, “and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI,” to conduct the investigation into the “involvement and relationship” between Mr. Epstein and the Democrats.

Mr. Trump also wrote that it would also include “J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions.”

The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.

If you want to punish your eyes by reading all the released Epstein items, COURIER has a link to the entire, searchable dump provided by the U.S. House Oversight Committee. Paul Krugman’s SubStack post today turns its eyes to the Heritage Foundation. It’s an interesting read. “The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation. Its descent into conspiracy-mongering and blatant bigotry was utterly predictable.”

There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.

As many readers know, Tucker Carlson recently invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories, onto his podcast. This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.

So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?

It was clearly a surprise to Roberts that his defense of Carlson provoked a widespread backlash. And displaying the complete refusal to accept responsibility we’ve come to expect from leading conservatives, Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.” He explained his ignorance by saying “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. I consume a lot of sports.”

Yeah, right.

Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites — despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.

Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.

Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.

And, just think about this one for a bit.

Further proof of corruption, grift, and just plain autocratic bullshit can be found at these links.

• Brian Slodysko / Associated Press:  Top Fannie Mae officials ousted after sounding alarm on sharing confidential housing data
• ProPublica: FBI Director Kash Patel Waived Polygraph Security Screening for Dan Bongino, Two Other Senior Staff
• NBC News: GOP senators distance themselves from provision allowing them to sue over phone record searches
• The Harvard Crimson: Harvard Faculty Disturbed by Revelations of Summers’ ‘Cozy Friendship’ With Epstein

There are so many of these things posted as a memeorandum today that I can’t possibly fit them all into one short post. We are seriously and truely fucked if we do not get all these criminals out of government and other pubic institutions.

What’s on your reading, action, and blogging list today?