Mostly Monday Reads: He cannot Tell the Truth
Posted: August 31, 2026 Filed under: "presidential immunity", #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked, Climate Change, Data Centers, Disappearing Constitutional Rights, Environmental Protection, Follow the Money, Governor Lousyana Whore Landry, Israel/US and Iran War, SpaceX, Tech Bro's favorite Lousyana Whore/Governor, Tech Bros and Environmental Murder, Tech Bros are killing us, Trump AI War propaganda | Tags: Data Centers, SpaceX, Trump's AI generated war, Trumps Cherry Tree Slaughter 14 Comments
“George Washington, he ain’t. “John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
How can you spend a springtime in the District without marveling over Cherry Blossom season? How do you repeatedly ignore the history and laws of the most historically significant places in the country? Orange Caligula, narcissist supreme, has done it again. This happened a few days ago. No one stopped him. He has a long history of destroying things only to replace them with something disgusting. The Jackie Kennedy Rose Garden and the Oval Office were only the beginning. He ignores we, the people and the law.
This was the CNN headline. “Par for the course: Trump forging ahead with DC golf course makeover without input from oversight agencies.” Sunlen Serfaty has the lede. The man is an international menace. No living thing is safe with him alive.
Whenever President Donald Trump gets an idea for a major project or renovation in Washington, DC, a pattern has emerged: move forward and ask questions later.
Public sagas over Trump’s proposed “triumphal arch,” the East Wing ballroom construction and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation have followed this playbook – provoking outcry and numerous legal challenges.
Now, the greenways of a manmade peninsula just south of the National Mall is next on Trump’s quest to remake the nation’s capital in his style, and they’re poised to be made over in a way that’s par for the course for this president.
The administration is on track to push ahead with turning the 300-acre East Potomac Park and its public golf course into a championship course without first getting approvals from two key agencies that have oversight of DC public spaces.
Neither the National Capital Planning Commission nor the Commission on Fine Arts have received any golf course plans from the Trump administration to review, officials from both told CNN. Neither agency meets in August, and ground is supposed to be broken by the start of the following month.
And based on what has been publicly reported, a project of this complexity and ambition would typically require months of regulatory reviews to examine environmental impact, questions over historical preservation, planning and design, the officials at each agency said.
On Friday, the administration provided a federal judge overseeing a legal challenge to the project with new information about the venture. It included a disclosure that the government did not finish testing soil from the demolition of the East Wing that was deposited onto the golf course before deeming it was safe.
The revelation opens the door to allowing plaintiffs to question administration officials under oath.
The DC Preservation League and two local golfers are pressing US District Judge Ana Reyes to issue an order that would bar the Trump administration from moving ahead.
Critics worry that proper approvals and legal battles have hardly handicapped the president before.
“There is really this ability to ignore regulatory guardrails, rules and protocols that have existed in the past. And we just see it again and again, and the golf course, sadly, is yet another example of that,” said Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, which has filed lawsuits against several other Trump projects.
Those historic trees plus others could be removed to make way for Trump’s plan to turn the public East Potomac Golf Links into a “championship” venue capable of hosting major tournaments such as the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup.
No one ever stops this pathetic, destructive, personality disorder-ridden man. The warnings were clear back on July 13th. He just won’t ever do the right thing, work through the process, or listen to anyone. This article is from back on July 13. It’s from a local Ohio paper, the Ohio Capital Journal, and somehow, none of this reached the establishment national media covering our sicko president. Now, it’s too late. Acres of beautiful, mature cherry trees gifted by Japan are gone.”President Taft descendant, former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, slams Trump plan to devastate D.C. cherry trees.” Alan Johnson reports the story.
A plan that threatens some historic Washington, D.C., cherry trees to make way for President Donald Trump’s planned golf course is “very unfortunate,” said the great-grandson of William Howard Taft who received the Japanese trees more than a century ago.
“I don’t understand the idea of a championship golf course near the nation’s capital. There are already world-class golf courses there,” said former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, who served from 1999 to 2007. He is the great-grandson of William Howard Taft, the 27th president.
“Now is not the time to devastate cherry trees that have an important role as part of the cultural alliance between the United States and Japan … It’s very concerning.”
Taft, a Republican as is Trump, is an avid outdoorsman and golfer. He said chopping down cherry trees is an afront to his family heritage and a threat to the beauty of Washington as an international tourist attraction.
“They are a United States institution,” Taft said. “People from all over the world come to the Cherry Blossom Festival.”
Cherry trees were given by the Japanese to former President Taft and his wife, Nellie, who had ambitions to beautify the nation’s capital. She admired the flowering trees when her husband was the presidentially appointed Governor General of the Philippines.
The plan would also eliminate a riverside bike trail and other public recreation areas. Trump toured the course June 28 with government officials and golf course planners. The project could begin as early as Sept. 1.
The Ohio connection to the threatened Japanese cherry trees goes back to 1912-1913 when 3,020 saplings from the banks of the Arakawa River in a Tokyo suburb were planted along the Tidal basin.
He’s willing to destroy everything and everyone to make it all about him. At the top of his list is making sure a lot of us can’t vote. This is from today’s New York Times. I’m no longer surprised but will be forever appalled. More Mail Ballots Are Arriving Late This Cycle, and They’re Getting Tossed. State officials say they worry about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver votes this fall. They are urging voters to mail their ballots early or use drop boxes so their votes count.” We’re a Banana Republic.
The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.
The states studied by The New York Times include some of the most critical battleground House and Senate seats where control of Congress will be determined, as well as key races for governor and secretary of state. The Times obtained data from California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington.
In Wisconsin, which hosts an open race for governor, a competitive House election plus contests for both chambers of the state legislature, lateness accounted for about 5,000 rejected mail ballots in the spring primary this year, or 78 percent of all tossed ballots. During the last spring election, in 2023, the figure was roughly 2,300, or 47 percent of all tossed votes.
The increase is particularly striking when comparing primaries in 2024 and this year. In Michigan’s primary earlier this month, more than 10,000 mail ballots were rejected for arriving after the state’s deadline of 8 p.m. on Election Day. That is nearly double the number of ballots rejected in 2024. In Washington, the number of late-arriving mail ballots increased from about 16,000 to more than 20,000 in the same period.
The rise in rejected ballots comes at a time of immense upheaval at the Postal Service, where a budget crisis has prompted widespread complaints about delivery delays. The increase also comes as President Trump and his allies are trying to transform the 251-year-old agency into a central player in their quest to restrict mail voting and otherwise overhaul the nation’s elections.
I can feel this in my backyard, as there’s been a huge push to actually shut down my local post office. There are next to no Republicans in my ward and precinct. It’s basically a neighborhood with many black, GLBT, and single women like me. I can understand why they’d like my massive blue dot in a blue city to get as little ability to vote as possible.
Meanwhile, back in pathological liar land, The Independent had this headline that could only happen under Orange Caligula. “Trump’s fake AI video of Kharg Island ‘attack’ leaves US military scrambling to explain President’s very realistic AI slop video, posted to his official Truth Social account, forces Pentagon to step in with a denial.” Andrew Feinberg has the story.
The Defense Department was forced on Monday to deny the U.S. had struck Iran’s main petroleum export facility after President Donald Trump posted a fake but very realistic AI-generated video showing a purported attack by American forces.The video, posted to the president’s Truth Social account, appears to show oil storage tanks and refineries erupting in flames from the perspective of someone filming from inside a helicopter above the carnage, with an accompanying message describing the scene as “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens” and signed as “President DJT.”
But a U.S. official said no such attack had taken place, with Kharg Island not being among the locations targeted overnight in what has been the first exchange of fire between American and Iranian forces in weeks.
Additionally, the head of National Iranian Oil Co, Hamid Bovard, said on Monday that the president’s post was “laughable” and described conditions on Kharg Island as “calm and appropriate.”
Trump — whose White House has repeatedly stated that his Truth Social posts count as official statements from the commander in chief — also hit out at Iran again in a separate Truth Social post on Monday, writing that it was “officially a Failed Nation” and “DEAD.”
“They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead,” he said.
Iranian media outlets did report explosions near Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz, where an American official said Tehran had been preparing to launch mine-laying rockets as part of the country’s bid to choke off the key waterway and hamstring the American economy in response to Trump’s war, which has now passed the half-year mark without end in sight.
Here’s an FYI.
President Donald Trump on Monday again championed the spread of data centers despite growing bipartisan backlash ahead of the midterms in November.
In a post to Truth Social, the president insisted data centers will lead to richer, more successful Americans and criticized those who object to them.
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump said. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”
Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott this month instituted new regulations on data centers despite expressing broad support for them over the last year on the campaign trail. Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers and Pennsylvania GOP nominee for governor Stacy Garrity have both urged for a temporary halt to some projects.
But Trump, who has met with some of the world’s leading tech giants on numerous occasions, is adamant that data centers are critical to staying ahead of China in the artificial intelligence race — a point he made in a recent interview with his former fixer Michael Cohen and which he reiterated on Monday.
“China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
If only we were following China’s example. This is from Wired. “China Opens World’s First Wind-Powered Underwater Data Center. With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the innovative data center uses seawater as a natural cooling system.”
China has become the first country in the world to operate an underwater data center, or UDC, powered by wind. Located off the coast of Shanghai, the complex represents a significant advance in the country’s strategy to secure energy supplies in the face of the accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and reduce the environmental impact of its technology infrastructure.
The initiative is the result of a collaboration between private company HiCloud Technology and state-owned China Communications Construction, which involved an investment of 1.6 billion yuan, equivalent to about $236 million.
With an initial capacity of 24 megawatts, the facility is submerged at a depth of 10 meters in the Lin-gang Special Zone, within the China Pilot Free Trade Zone in Shanghai. This location allows seawater to be used as a natural cooling system, reducing the proportion of energy used to cool the infrastructure to less than 10 percent.
This feature solves one of the main energy consumption challenges of conventional data centers, where air conditioning systems typically account for 40 to 50 percent of the total electricity required to operate.
The thermal efficiency of the UDC is directly reflected in its power-usage effectiveness, or PUE. This metric is used by the industry to evaluate the energy performance of a data center; 1.0 represents the maximum theoretical efficiency. In its first phase, the Lin-gang facility is designed to achieve a PUE of no more than 1.15, a figure considered state-of-the-art within the industry.
Under this same cooling principle, HiCloud opened the world’s first commercial underwater data center in 2023 in Hainan, an island located in southern China. However, the Shanghai complex marks a milestone as the first to operate using offshore wind power.
Construction of the UDC was completed in mid-October last year. According to the Chinese government, “compared to traditional onshore data centers, the project is designed to use more than 95 percent green electricity, reducing energy consumption by 22.8 percent, and water and land use by 100 percent and more than 90 percent, respectively.”
The difference is that China isn’t trying to kill off its people and natural resources and it’s not relying on fossil fuels which are dirty, nasty, require fracking, and kill off living things. Trump also doesn’t want any regulation on the damn things. Here’s some information on that from The New Republic. “This Data Center Is Everything That Everyone Hates About AI. Utah’s Stratos Project is showing how everyone loses in the unregulated rush to build these Big Tech behemoths—even investors.” Luke Barnes has the analysis.
Big Tech firms are now keenly aware of the need for their data centers to have at least some environmental protections and community considerations built into development plans. Microsoft, for instance, announced its “Community-First” AI infrastructure plan in January 2026, shortly after it was forced to cancel a proposed data center in rural Wisconsin. The plan calls for covering the grid and electricity costs its data centers create, minimizing and replenishing local water use, and paying its full share of local property taxes rather than seeking the tax breaks data centers typically negotiate. OpenAI has called for significant investment in renewables to help modernize the U.S. electrical grid and make data center build-out more sustainable, while Anthropic has pledged to cover the grid infrastructure improvements and electricity cost increases that are generated from the data centers it uses.
These actions from both big business at one end and state actors at the other are a recognition of the problem. But they are the inverse of the kind of investment that the Stratos Project represents: rushed ad hoc investment on one side of the coin, and reactive ad hoc regulation on the flip side.
What’s more, both actors have fundamental limitations. Data centers are a footloose industry, meaning if one state is deemed to be overregulating, investors can easily shop for a friendlier jurisdiction. And while Big Tech firms might talk a good game, they are also subject to severe market pressures that could make them put their plans for equitable, environmentally friendly data centers on the back burner.
What’s needed is a concrete set of enforceable federal standards that can slow down the ad hoc gold rush in favor of equitable (and ultimately faster) long-term build-out. But here, the Trump administration is doing the exact opposite. In its July 2025 executive order, the White House moved to ease regulatory burdens on data centers costing at least $500 million, while compressing review windows and streamlining environmental evaluations meant to identify those burdens, and saying nothing about the water consumption or community frustration driving the backlash.
Lousyana is the perfect example of how not to let your crazy Republican Governor go wild on these things. We now not only have an AI center in process. We have a SpaceX project that will likely ruin the ecosystem and lives of people living on and near the Gulf of Mexico. We are so fucked it’s not even funny. One month ago, this showed up in the New York Times. (I’ve gifted the links, btw.) “How Meta Got Everything It Wanted in a Secret Louisiana Data Center Deal. A Times examination details how the Silicon Valley giant used private talks with local officials to start a project big enough to cover nearly six square miles.”
Mr. Turner had helped land the largest development in Louisiana’s history: a $50 billion data center for the Silicon Valley giant Meta that planners say could cover about six square miles and use seven times as much energy as New Orleans.
Meta wanted the rebate to build its data center in Richland Parish, an impoverished farming community in Louisiana’s northeast corner. The tech company also needed a secret deal done quickly, and state officials were eager to oblige.
Rewriting the bill was a critical part of a nine-month process that Meta used to cut deals behind the scenes, avoid local opposition and offload financial risk, according to interviews with more than 40 people and a review of corporate filings, tax records, property records and meeting transcripts.
The secrecy was agreed to by nearly everyone involved, from utility executives to the governor’s office to a local elected official who knew about the talks with Meta and sold 300 acres of his own property for the project.
The upshot was a deal that was nearly ironclad for Meta because everyone else took on most of the potential downside. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, also gave his company an escape hatch to get out of it years before its partners.
Those partners include Entergy Louisiana, the state’s largest power company, and Blue Owl, a Wall Street investment firm, according to public statements from the companies and investor documents. If Meta should pull out of the project because of a natural disaster, Blue Owl and its investors could be stuck with tens of billions of dollars in debt. Should Meta exit its lease early for other reasons and pay high penalties for doing so, Entergy and its customers could wind up saddled with higher costs.
Adding to their risk, insurance companies would not fully insure Meta’s facility because of its size and location in the Louisiana Delta flood plains.
The New York Times’s examination shows for the first time how Meta used secrecy and speed to pave the way for its giant project, which it calls Hyperion. At a pivotal moment for the A.I. boom, Hyperion could be a blueprint for other companies intent on avoiding local opposition in order to get massive data centers built fast.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others are expected to spend more than $1 trillion on data centers in coming years, but some communities are pushing back because they are worried about water use, higher electricity rates, disruption by construction and the endless hum of giant computing centers running throughout the night.
We’ll not be the Sportsman’s Paradise between that and the Musk project. All living thing are likely to perish in the parish at this rate. Landry is a mini Trump and very much a part of the brotherhood of sociopaths. This is from The Hill. “Louisiana governor ‘not concerned’ about environmental impact of Gulf Coast SpaceX facility.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) brushed aside fears Wednesday morning about possible negative environmental impacts from SpaceX’s planned $100 billion launch facility in the state.
He told CBS News on Wednesday that he was “not concerned about the environmental impact” of the new spaceport, which will be constructed along the Gulf Coast on a former Exxon property in Vermilion Parish, La.
“What I am concerned about is the lack of economic opportunity on the coast that continues to basically rob us of opportunities to rebuild our coast,” the governor said.
The spaceport will be the company’s fourth and largest launch site, and it will serve as the main facility for Starship, SpaceX’s in-development reusable rocket launch system.
SpaceX got into hot water over its operations at its first launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.
In 2024, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality found that the company violated environmental regulations by repeatedly releasing pollutants into nearby bodies of water.
This followed an earlier warning by the Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 office, which oversees Texas, that SpaceX violated the Clean Water Act with these actions.
Elon Musk’s company said in a statement that it was committed to working with federal and state agencies and conservation groups “to protect shoreline, restore wetlands, and support the wildlife and recreation that depend on them” in Louisiana.
And if any one believes Musk will do that I have several bridges over the Mississippi River I’d like to sell you.
So, I end with this thought. WE ARE SO FUCKED.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: March 16, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, cat art, Cats, caturday, Donald Trump | Tags: "absolute immunity", Alvin Bragg, Benjamin Netanyahu, Chuck Schumer, E. Jean Carroll, Elon Musk, Fani Willis, Gaza, israel, Jared Kushner, Judge Scott McAfee, Letitia James, Mike Pence, SpaceX, Stormy Daniels, Supreme Court, Tommy Tuberville 2 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Walter Chandoha plays with one of his subjects at his home studio in 1955.
Today I’m featuring cat photos by Walter Chandoha. Chandoha was a famous photographer of animals–mostly cats. You can read about him and see more photos in this 2019 New York Times obituary by Richard Sandomir: Walter Chandoha, Photographer Whose Specialty Was Cats, Dies at 98.
Taking pictures of cats soon began to look like a more fulfilling career path than the one in advertising that Mr. Chandoha had planned while attending New York University, after serving in World War II. So, after graduating, he turned to freelance photography for a living — and, by the mid-1950s, he had begun a long period as the dominant commercial cat photographer of his era.
“Walter Chandoha’s cat models, shown on this page, must be alert, graceful and beautiful,” read a newspaper ad in 1956 for a cat food brand that featured his photos. “To keep them that way, Mr. Chandoha feeds them Puss ‘n Boots because Puss ‘n Boots is good nutrition.”
On a winter’s evening in 1949, Walter Chandoha was walking to his three-room apartment in Astoria, Queens, when he spotted an abandoned gray kitten shivering in the snow. He put it in a pocket of his Army coat and brought it home to his wife, Maria.
The kitten’s antics — racing through the apartment each night as if possessed, shadowboxing with his image in a mirror — inspired the couple to name him Loco. Mr. Chandoha (pronounced shan-DOE-uh) was moved to photograph Loco and quickly sold the pictures to newspapers and magazines around the world.
By the time he died, on Jan. 11, Mr. Chandoha had taken some 90,000 cat photos, nearly all before cats had become viral darlings of social media. He was 98.
Now, on to the day’s news:
It’s becoming very clear that the courts are not going to protect us from a possible Trump dictatorship. Thank goodness for E. Jean Carroll and NY AG Letitia James. At least two New York courts have hit Trump where it hurts–his finances. But the two federal cases seem stalled and the Georgia case just took a bit hit. Those three prosecutions of Trump are unlikely to take place before the election now. We are going to have to defeat him at the ballot box.
At The New Republic, Michael Tomasky writes: We Have to Beat Donald Trump. Clearly, the Broken Legal System Won’t.
Judge Scott McAfee has ruled that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can stay on the case against Donald Trump in that jurisdiction, provided that Nathan Wade, the prosecutor on the case with whom she had a relationship, withdraws. I guess we count that a win, although to be honest, Willis has so damaged herself by her colossally terrible judgment that it probably would have been better if she were out of the picture.
Cats play together in 1962.
The other problem with Willis’s scandal is how it slowed the case down, giving Trump’s lawyers a chance to make this not about the defendant but about her—and another chance to delay, delay, delay.
Meanwhile, Thursday, down in Florida, we saw Trumpy Judge Aileen Cannon issue yet another ruling in the classified documents case that helps Trump. She didn’t support Trump’s lawyers’ motion to dismiss the case, but she kicked the can down the road in a way that’s very helpful to Trump. MSNBC analyst Andrew Weissmann even called it the “worst possible outcome” for the government. “If the judge had simply said, ‘I agree with Donald Trump, and I find that this is vague, and I’m dismissing it,’ the government could have appealed it to the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, as they have done twice before and won twice before,” Weissmann said. “But she also did not want to rule in favor of the government. So what she did is said, ‘Why don’t you bring this up later? I think there’s some real issues here.’”
Also this week, in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg shocked us all by asking for a 30-day delay in the trial, which was scheduled to start March 25. Trump’s lawyers had requested a 90-day delay. Bragg conceded that some delay was appropriate.
Why? It looks like it’s the fault of federal prosecutors. Bragg’s office requested certain documents a while ago from the Southern District of New York, and it shared them with Trump’s lawyers during the discovery process. Trump’s lawyers suspected there was more, especially relating to Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, so they subpoenaed the SDNY. That happened in January. It was only earlier this month that the Southern District turned over all the documents….
It’s more than fair to ask: Why did the Southern District take so long to produce these documents? And we must also ask this: Did Merrick Garland know his prosecutors were taking so long to hand over documents, and thus playing into Trump’s hands? And if he knew, did he do anything about it?
And then there’s the most significant case of all–the one about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Finally, let’s recall the status of the fourth criminal case against Trump, the biggest one, at least to my mind—the January 6 insurrection case. On that one, we’re basically waiting on the Supreme Court, which announced on February 28 that it would hear arguments in Trump’s claim of complete immunity but set the argument date for April 25. The high court could easily take another month—or even two—to hand down its decision after that, meaning that this crucial trial, about whether a sitting president initiated an insurrection against the government of the United States, may not happen before Election Day.
How in the world did all this happen? A few weeks ago, it looked like the wheels of justice were finally turning, catching up on a man who has flouted and broken laws not only during his presidency but for his entire adult life,
going back to when he and his father wouldn’t rent apartments to Black people in Queens. There was the judgment in the E. Jean Carroll case. And then the whopping penalty in the New York attorney general’s case against the Trump Organization.
But this week, it looks like everything is falling apart.
An American shorthair in 1966.
We can’t count on the courts. They move slowly and they favor the rich and powerful. We can’t count on the media either. They seem to favor another Trump presidency because the bosses believe the insanity and chaos would be good for their bottom line.
CNN on the Fani Willis case:
Another problem comes from MAGA threats. MSBNC’s Kyle Griffin wrote on Twitter that
“Judge Scott McAfee had written his order on Willis and Wade early last week, according to NBC News, but because he had been receiving threats, he waited until today to make it public in order to allow for proper security to be in place for him and his family.”
At NBC, , and Trump hush money trial postponed until mid-April, judge rules.
The trial in the New York hush money case against former President Donald Trump has been delayed until the middle of April, Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday.
Merchan said the trial — originally scheduled to begin March 25 — would be pushed back 30 days from Friday.
He also scheduled a hearing for the trial’s initial start date, to discuss a motion filed by Trump’s attorneys regarding document production in the case.
Merchan said he will set a new trial date “if necessary” when he rules on that motion, meaning it’s possible the trial proceedings could be delayed beyond the middle of next month.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had previously said he would support the trial being delayed at least 30 days, into late April. Trump’s legal team requested that it be postponed 90 days.
Bragg said Thursday that Trump’s request to delay the trial was the result of the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan providing over 100,000 pages of discovery, which Bragg said were “largely irrelevant to the subject matter of this case.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office provided an additional 15,000 pages of discovery on Friday, which Bragg’s office said were also “likely to be unrelated to the subject matter of this case.”
The documents relate to Michael Cohen’s guilty plea in 2018 to numerous criminal charges, including making secret payments to women who claimed they had affairs with Trump, lying to Congress about Trump’s business dealings with Russia and failing to report millions of dollars in income.
Echoing MIchael Tomasky, WTF is going on with the Southern District and the DOJ. Are there MAGA people still in place that are helping Trump delay justice?
This 1955 photo is one of Walter Chandoha’s most famous shots. “My daughter Paula and the kitten both ‘smiled’ for the camera at the same time. … But the cat’s not smiling, he’s meowing.”
Speaking of the rich and powerful, why is Elon Musk still getting federal contracts after his support for Nazis and white supremacists and his support for Russia’s war against Ukraine?
Joey Roulette and Marisa Taylor at Reuters: Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX is building spy satellite network for US intelligence agency, sources say.
SpaceX is building a network of hundreds of spy satellites under a classified contract with a U.S. intelligence agency, five sources familiar with the program said, demonstrating deepening ties between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s space company and national security agencies.
The network is being built by SpaceX’s Starshield business unit under a $1.8 billion contract signed in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence agency that manages spy satellites, the sources said.
The plans show the extent of SpaceX’s involvement in U.S. intelligence and military projects and illustrate a deeper Pentagon investment into vast, low-Earth orbiting satellite systems aimed at supporting ground forces.
If successful, the sources said the program would significantly advance the ability of the U.S. government and military to quickly spot potential targets almost anywhere on the globe.
The contract signals growing trust by the intelligence establishment of a company whose owner has clashed with the Biden administration and sparked controversy, opens new tab over the use of Starlink satellite connectivity in the Ukraine war, the sources said.
The Wall Street Journal reported, opens new tab in February the existence of a $1.8 billion classified Starshield contract with an unknown intelligence agency without detailing the purposes of the program.
Reuters reporting discloses for the first time that the SpaceX contract is for a powerful new spy system with hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits, and that the spy agency that Musk’s company is working with is the NRO.
Will Musk have access to this program, as he does with Starlink? How do we know he won’t share information with Russia? Am I an idiot to ask that?
Chandoha’s backlighting technique dramatizes the defensive posture of a kitten seeing a dog in 1957.
Another tale of the rich and powerful from Eric Lipton, Jonathan Swan, and Maggie Haberman at The New York Times: Kushner Developing Deals Overseas Even as His Father-in-Law Runs for President.
Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald J. Trump, confirmed on Friday that he was closing in on major real estate deals in Albania and Serbia, the latest example of the former president’s family doing business abroad even as Mr. Trump seeks to return to the White House.
Mr. Kushner’s plans in the Balkans appear to have come about in part through relationships built while Mr. Trump was in office. Mr. Kushner, who was a senior White House official, said he had been working on the deals with Richard Grenell, who served briefly as acting director of national intelligence under Mr. Trump and also as ambassador to Germany and special envoy to the Balkans.
One of the proposed projects would be the development of an island off the coast of Albania into a luxury tourist destination.
A second — with a planned luxury hotel and 1,500 residential units and a museum — is in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, at the site of the long-vacant former headquarters of the Yugoslav Army destroyed in 1999 by the NATO bombings, according to a member of Parliament in Serbia and Mr. Kushner’s company.
These first two projects both involve land now controlled by the governments, meaning a deal would have to be finalized with foreign governments.
A third project, also in Albania, would be built on the Zvërnec peninsula, a 1,000-acre coastal area in the south of Albania that is part of the resort community known as Vlorë, where several hotels and hundreds of villas would be built, according to the plan.
Mr. Kushner’s participation would be through his investment firm, Affinity Partners, which has $2 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, among other foreign investors. In a statement, an official with Affinity Partners said it had not been determined whether the Saudi funds might be a part of any project Mr. Kushner is considering in the Balkans.
How does Kushner get away with this? Why aren’t Congressional Democrats investigating him, even if the DOJ is too busy or corrupt? I don’t get it.
Commentary from Carl Gibson at Raw Story:
Former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner (who was also a senior adviser in his White House) has been ramping up his overseas business dealings undeterred by the optics of doing so in the midst of his father-in-law’s presidential campaign.
A Friday report in the New York Times scrutinized Kushner’s real estate deals in Balkan countries of Albania and Serbia, in which he stands to reap significant financial benefits once they’re completed. The Times reported that Kushner has been working with Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence who also served as German ambassador and a special envoy to the Balkans.
An American shorthair squeezes into a glass in 1960.
Notably, two of the three projects Kushner is aiming to finalize this year involve the transfer of land currently owned by Albania and Serbia, meaning a member of the president’s immediate family (Kushner is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka) stands to receive money directly from foreign governments. According to the Times, the first project involves redeveloping an island off the Albanian coast into a high-end luxury resort, and the second would be a 1,500-unit apartment building, museum and luxury hotel in the Serbian capital city of Belgrade. The third — which doesn’t involve a direct land acquisition from a foreign government — is a planned resort development in coastal southern Albania.
Kushner has been capitalizing on his foreign connections since leaving the White House. After Kushner’s departure became official, he launched his investment firm, Affinity Partners, which received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as well as from other foreign business interests in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
The former president’s son-in-law worked closely with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Salman while he was in the White House, as Trump frequently put him in the driver’s seat in negotiations with Middle Eastern countries. In 2018, bin-Salman was accused of playing a direct role in the dismemberment and murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi (President Joe Biden made it clear in 2022 that the Saudi crown prince was immune from any legal action in relation to Khashoggi’s assassination)….
Meanwhile, Republicans continue to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter, for his own foreign business deals even as Kushner plows ahead in the Balkans. House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) and House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) both maintain that the president improperly influenced foreign governments in his son’s favor, though their respective investigations have yet to yield any smoking gun evidence.
In Israel-Hamas war news, Senator Chuck Schumer spoke out this week about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Jonathan Weisman at The New York Times: A Watershed Moment for the Politics of Israel, Courtesy of Chuck Schumer.
Over 44 painstakingly scripted minutes on the floor of the Senate on Thursday, the majority leader, Chuck Schumer, spoke of his Jewish identity, his love for the State of Israel, his horror at the wanton slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7 and his views on the apportionment of blame for the carnage in Gaza, saying that it first and foremost lay with the terrorists of Hamas.
Then Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat and the highest-ranking elected Jew in American history, said Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an impediment to peace, and called for new elections in the world’s only Jewish state.
The opposition was not nearly so painstaking.
Within minutes, the House Republican leadership demanded an apology. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname, declared: “Make no mistake — the Democratic Party doesn’t have an anti-Bibi problem. It has an anti-Israel problem.” And the Republican Jewish Coalition proclaimed that “the most powerful Democrat in Congress knifed the Jewish state in the back.”
Walter Chandoha, 1962
The months that have followed the slaughter of Oct. 7 and the ensuing, calamitously deadly war in Gaza have been excruciating for American Jews, caught between a tradition of liberalism that has dominated much of Jewish politics and an anti-Israel response from the political left that has left many feeling isolated and, at times, persecuted.
But Mr. Schumer’s speech was potentially a watershed moment in a much longer political process, pursued initially by Republicans but joined recently by left-wing Democrats — to turn Israel into a partisan issue. Republicans, as they see it, would be the party of Israeli supporters. Democrats, as the rising left would have it, would be the party of Palestine
At the root of that divide is a fundamental question: Is support for the Jewish State separable from the support of Israel’s democratically elected government? For years, Republicans have said no. Increasingly, the Democratic left agrees but from a different perspective: Israel is bad, regardless of who governs it.
“The pressure — electoral, social, cultural — on American Jews right now to declare themselves” on the justice of the war in Gaza and on the legitimacy of the Israeli prime minister has been “unrelenting, unforgiving and sometimes downright vicious,” said David Wolpe, a prominent rabbi in Los Angeles and a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School.
Mr. Schumer’s speech and the ensuing partisan response have made that pressure even more intense.
“It’s impossible to understate the seismic event this was,” said Matthew Brooks, the longtime chief executive of the Republican Jewish Coalition, who made it clear that the group would use the speech to drive Jewish voters to the G.O.P.
Read more at the NYT.
A couple more stories of note:
This should be shocking news, but the NYT didn’t even run a story on it. CNN: Pence says he ‘cannot in good conscience’ endorse Trump.
Former Vice President Mike Pence on Friday said he “cannot in good conscience” endorse presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, a stunning repudiation of his former running mate and the president he served with.
“Donald Trump is pursuing and articulating an agenda that is at odds with the conservative agenda that we governed on during our four years. That’s why I cannot in good conscience endorse Donald Trump in this campaign,” Pence said on Fox News.
A cat cozies up to a dog, 1968
The former vice president, after ending his own presidential bid in October, withheld an endorsement in the 2024 Republican primary, but he previously vowed to back the eventual GOP nominee. Trump had said after Pence dropped out that his former vice president should endorse him, saying, “I chose him, made him vice president. But … people in politics can be very disloyal.”
While he said he is “incredibly proud” of the record of the Trump-Pence administration, Pence argued that the former president has walked away from conservative issues, pointing to Trump’s stance on abortion and US national debt and his reversal on TikTok.
“During my presidential campaign, I made it clear there were profound differences between me and President Trump on a range of issues. And not just our difference on my constitutional duties that I exercised January 6th,” Pence said on “The Story with Martha MacCallum.”
“As I have watched his candidacy unfold, I’ve seen him walking away from our commitment to confronting the national debt. I’ve seen him starting to shy away from a commitment to the sanctity of human life. And this last week, his reversal on getting tough on China and supporting our administration’s efforts to force a sale of ByteDance’s TikTok,” he added.
Many other former members of Trump’s administration have also said they won’t vote for him. Yesterday Ron Filipkowski posted this list on Twitter:
The Republican 43rd President won’t endorse Trump.
His VP won’t endorse Trump.
The 2012 Republican nominee won’t endorse Trump.
His running mate won’t endorse Trump.
Trump’s own VP won’t endorse him.
His last AG won’t.
His last Sec Defense won’t.
Wake up, America!
One more from Brian Schott at The Salt Lake Tribune: ‘We are losing our kids to a satanic cult,’ Sen. Tommy Tuberville warns during Utah campaign stop.
Alabama Republican U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville had a stark warning for the approximately 100 Utah GOP delegates who crowded into a Bluffdale warehouse to hear him speak on Friday afternoon: Malevolent supernatural forces are working to undermine America.
“I’ve traveled all over the country — all 50 states — I’ve been in good places and bad places. The one thing I saw, we are losing our kids to a satanic cult,” Tuberville, who traveled to Utah to campaign for GOP U.S. Senate candidate Trent Staggs, warned.
The former college football coach and ardent Donald Trump supporter gave his full endorsement to Staggs, one of 11 Republicans vying for the GOP nomination to succeed Sen. Mitt Romney in Washington.
Brandishing an upside-down pocket Constitution, Tuberville said the 2024 election wasn’t Republican vs. Democrat but “anti-American vs. American.”
“We’ve lost our moral values across the country. We’ve got to get back to the Constitution, and we have got to get back to the Bible. We’ve got to get God back in our country,” Tuberville said. “There’s not one Democrat that can tell you they stand up for God.”
What exactly is he talking about? Is he saying the Democratic Party is a satanic cult or is he referring to the Mormon Church? Probably the former, I know.
Republican delegates ate it up as he careened from anti-transgender statements to discussion of immigration and chaos at the border to a prediction left-wing mobs are set to wreak chaos across the country this summer to help Joe Biden win reelection.
Tuberville even went so far as to claim the federal government has been corrupted to go after conservatives instead of criminals, which was seemingly an indirect reference to the hundreds of Trump supporters who were charged after attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We’ve lost our Department of Justice. In most of the country, we don’t have a criminal justice system anymore. Nobody goes to jail, unless you’re an innocent person that really loves this country, then they’ll put you in jail,” Tuberville said. “We have never overcome a cult like we’re dealing with right now.”
The loudest boos from the GOP delegates on hand came when Tuberville and Staggs took swipes at Sen. Mitt Romney, who was the party’s presidential nominee just a dozen years ago.
What a wacko.
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you all are having a nice weekend!
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