Elizabeth Taylor with her Siamese cat, 1956, photo by Sanford Roth
Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. He’s everywhere in the news. We still haven’t seen the DOJ Epstein files, but we’re already learning more about Epstein’s relationship to Trump from the recently released text messages. We don’t know yet how bad it will get when the files are released, but the extent to which Trump is publicly panicking suggests it will be very bad for him.
In Trump’s latest effort to control the Epstein story, he ordered Attorney General Bondi to investigate Democrats who had connections to the child sex trafficker.
Acceding to President Donald Trump’s demands, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday that she has ordered a top federal prosecutor to investigate sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Trump political foes, including former President Bill Clinton.
Bondi posted on X that she was assigning Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton to lead the probe, capping an eventful week in which congressional Republicans released nearly 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate and House Democrats seized on emails mentioning Trump.
Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years, didn’t explain what supposed crimes he wanted the Justice Department to investigate. None of the men he mentioned in a social media post demanding the probe has been accused of sexual misconduct by any of Epstein’s victims.
Hours before Bondi’s announcement, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he would ask her, the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Clinton and others, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and LinkedIn founder and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.
Trump, calling the matter “the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans,” said the investigation should also include financial giant JPMorgan Chase, which provided banking services to Epstein, and “many other people and institutions.”
There’s no evidence that any of the people Trump is targeting were involved in sexual abuse or sex trafficking.
A JPMorgan Chase spokesperson, Patricia Wexler, said the company regretted associating with Epstein “but did not help him commit his heinous acts.”
“The government had damning information about his crimes and failed to share it with us or other banks,” she said. The company agreed previously to pay millions of dollars to Epstein’s victims, who had sued arguing that the bank ignored red flags about criminal activity.
Clinton has acknowledged traveling on Epstein’s private jet but has said through a spokesperson that he had no knowledge of the late financier’s crimes. He also has never been accused of misconduct by Epstein’s known victims.
Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Angel Ureña posted on X Friday: “These emails prove Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing. The rest is noise meant to distract from election losses, backfiring shutdowns, and who knows what else.” [….]
Summers and Hoffman had nothing to do with either case, but both were friendly with Epstein and exchanged emails with him. Those messages were among the documents released this week, along with other correspondence Epstein had with friends and business associates in the years before his death.
Nothing in the messages suggested any wrongdoing on the men’s part, other than associating with someone who had been accused of sex crimes against children.
In a transparent attempt to distract from the many times his own name appears in the documents from the Epstein estate members of the House Oversight Committee released Wednesday, President Donald J. Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Democrats whose names appeared in the documents. He singled out former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and who is a Democratic donor.
Marlon Brando and cat
Although the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and is supposed to be nonpartisan in protecting the rule of law, Bondi responded that the Department of Justice “will pursue this with urgency and integrity.” Maegan Vazquez and Shayna Jacobs of the Washington Post note that reporters have already covered the relationship of Epstein with Clinton, Summers, and Hoffman for years, and that in July, Justice Department officials said an examination of the FBI files relating to Epstein—a different cache than Wednesday’s—“did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Meidas Touch noted: “In normal times, it would be a major scandal for the President to direct his AG to criminally investigate his political opponents to deflect from his own involvement in a major scandal—and for the AG to immediately announce she is doing it. The Epstein scandal and cover up just got even bigger.”
This scandal truly has Trump flailing. I hope this will be the one that really brings him down, but he somehow seems to wriggle out of every scandal. But he certainly is terrified of the Epstein files being released.
House Republican leaders are planning to hold a vote Tuesday on legislation to force the release of federal files related to Jeffrey Epstein, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss internal plans ahead of a public announcement.
The tentative scheduling decision follows a successful effort by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to sidestep Speaker Mike Johnson and force a floor vote on their bipartisan bill to compel the Justice Department to release all of its records related to the late convicted sex offender.
President Donald Trump has made repeated attempts to kill the effort, which continued in a series of Truth Social posts Friday. But Johnson said Wednesday he intends to move quickly to hold the vote and put the matter to bed.
Under the current GOP plan, the House Rules Committee would approve a procedural measure Monday night to advance eight bills for floor consideration, including language to tee up the Epstein legislation. If that measure is approved on the floor, likely early Tuesday afternoon, debate and a final vote on the Epstein bill could immediately follow. GOP leaders are considering whether to postpone the Epstein vote until Tuesday evening….
The four Republicans who signed on to the discharge petition forcing the vote — Massie, plus Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina — are likely to examine Johnson’s moves very closely. They could together block any procedural measure that would undercut the Epstein legislation, postpone it or otherwise alter it.
Hundreds of texts over almost a year show Maga influencer Steve Bannon and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein workshopping legal and media strategies to protect Epstein from the legal and publicity quagmire that enveloped him in the last year of his life.
The texts, released by the House oversight committee on Wednesday, show that as early as June 2018, the pair were devising responses to the gathering storm of public outrage about Epstein’s criminal history, his favorable treatment by the justice system, and his friendships with powerful figures in business, politics and academia.
Bannon conspiratorially described the renewed scrutiny of Epstein as a “sophisticated op”, and over time he counseled Epstein in his adversarial responses to media outlets, the justice system and his victims.
All the while, both men were also strategizing how best to promote Bannon’s rightwing populist agenda, and the political fortunes of its standard bearer, Donald Trump.
In all of Epstein’s messages, the identity of his correspondent is redacted. But Bannon’s identity in the threads cited in this reporting is clear from contextual clues including his documented activities at the time, details of his business and media pursuits, and other disclosures. In one document, the sender’s phone number is not redacted – and it is the same number linked to Bannon in a legal case against Trump adviser Roger Stone.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Trump is also beginning to panic about the economy and the negative effects of his insane tariffs.
President Donald Trump’s bid Friday to sootheconsumers by dropping tariffs on a wide array of groceries, including coffee, beef, bananas and tomatoes — contradicting his repeated claims that the levies were not affecting retail prices — shows he is on the defensive over his signature policy initiative.
Public opposition, eroding support on Capitol Hill and a potentially lethal challenge before the Supreme Court have Trump scrambling to defend his economic strategy even as the administration notches diplomatic agreements that are cementing its high-tariff approach to rebalancing global trade.
Sophia Loren with her cat, 1959
Public opinion is the immediate worry, following recent Democratic electoral victories in Virginia and New Jersey that were fueled by Americans’ ire over the cost of living. By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, registered voters disapproved of the president’s tariffs in a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, a finding that has been consistent all year and could imperil Republican candidates in next year’s congressional elections.
The president on Friday issued an executive order rolling back import taxes on many foods, his most significant retreat on the emergency tariffs he imposed in April, which were billed at the time as loophole-free. In September, the White House had signaled that some products that are not generally produced in the United States could be spared tariffs once nations where they originate reached trade deals with the United States. But Friday’s exemptions apply to products from any nation, even those that have not agreed on trade terms.
“They know that they shouldn’t have imposed a lot of these tariffs and that they’re hurting affordability for consumers. Now they’re looking for a way to justify lowering them. And that’s fine. But did we really need to go through all this in the first place?” said Christopher Padilla, senior adviser to the Brunswick Group and a former trade official in the George W. Bush administration….
This week’s tariff cuts appear aimed at responding to public concern over high prices. Inflation overall is running at an annual rate of 3 percent, above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target for price stability but well down from the mid-2022 peak of 9.1 percent.
Prices on many everyday items, however, continue to soar. Through September, the most recent data available, coffee prices were up 19 percent over the previous 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bananas were up 7 percent.
Americans could soon see some goods get cheaper after President Donald Trump exempted certain agricultural imports from a set of tariffs on Friday. But any price drops likely won’t be enough to make life feel more affordable any time soon.
The new exemptions are part of what traders have dubbed TACO, or Trump Always Chickens Out, to describe times when the president backs off a policy after unintended consequences pop up. In the case of tariffs, Trump has already reversed a number of his measures, a sign that the administration is reshaping his signature economic tool.
The latest TACO comes after voters, worried about affordability, gave Republicans a drubbing in recent off-year elections.
Why this likely won’t help consumers much:
Nevertheless, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the new exemptions generally won’t help improve affordability.
“It depends on what the importers do with the tariff,” he said in a CNBC interview on Friday. “So when you look at the overall price trend, it hasn’t been because of tariffs. It’s been because of these other events going on and just supply and demand.”
Steve Martin and cat
But in cases where tariffs have been passed along to consumers, prices could drop, Greer said.
One potential example: bananas. American consumers are paying about 8% more for bananas than before Trump’s second term began.
The US largely imports bananas from South American countries. With bananas exempt from “reciprocal” tariffs that started at 10%, prices could go back to where they were earlier this year, said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo. But it’s unlikely to be something most consumers notice unless they’re buying bananas often, she added.
But not everyone is convinced it will even do that much.
“It is not clear that lowering tariffs will lower prices — it depends on what retailers think they can get away with. The import price of bananas has fallen since tariffs were imposed, but the US consumer price has risen,” Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS global wealth management, said in a note last week. (The United States tracks import prices before accounting for tariffs. In some cases, import prices have fallen as exporters lower what they charge as a way to share in the tariff expense importers pay.)
New data the Agriculture Department released Friday created serious doubts about whether China will really buy millions of bushels of American soybeans like the Trump administration touted last month after a high-stakes meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The USDA report released after the government reopened showed only two Chinese purchases of American soybeans since the summit in South Korea that totaled 332,000 metric tons. That’s well short of the 12 million metric tons that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said China agreed to purchase by January and nowhere near the 25 million metric tons she said they would buy in each of the next three years.
American farmers were hopeful that their biggest customer would resume buying their crops. But CoBank’s Tanner Ehmke, who is its lead economist for grains and oilseed, said there isn’t much incentive for China to buy from America right now because they have plenty of soybeans on hand that they have bought from Brazil and other South American countries this year, and the remaining tariffs ensure that U.S. soybeans remain more expensive than Brazilian beans.
“We are still not even close to what has been advertised from the U.S. in terms of what the agreement would have been,” Ehmke said.
Beijing has yet to confirm any detailed soybean purchase agreement but only that the two sides have reached “consensus” on expanding trade in farm products. Ehmke said that even if China did promise to buy American soybeans it may have only agreed to buy them if the price was attractive.
Will Trump try to distract from the Epstein files and his failures on the economy by taking us to war with Venezuela?
The Trump administration is rapidly escalating its pressure campaign against Venezuela, with America’s largest aircraft carrier, the Ford, about to take up a position within striking distance of the country, even as President Trump’s aides provide conflicting accounts of what, exactly, they are seeking to achieve.
Mr. Trump held back-to-back days of meetings at the White House over the past two days, reviewing military options, including the use of Special Operations forces and direct action inside Venezuela.
Marlyn Monroe with her cat
It is still not clear whether Mr. Trump has made a decision about what kind of action to authorize, if any. On Friday, he told reporters on Air Force One that “I sort of made up my mind.” “I can’t tell you what it is,” he said, “but we made a lot of progress with Venezuela in terms of stopping drugs from pouring in.”
It is possible Mr. Trump is relying on the arrival of so much firepower to intimidate the government of Nicolás Maduro, who the United States and many of its allies say is not Venezuela’s legitimate president. Mr. Maduro has put his forces on high alert, leaving the two countries with their weapons cocked and ready for war.
There were signs that the administration was moving into a new and more aggressive posture. Shortly after a meeting on Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on social media that the mission in the Caribbean now had a name — “Southern Spear.” He described its goal in expansive terms, saying the operation “removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere.”
“The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood,” he wrote, “and we will protect it.” With the arrival of the Ford and three accompanying missile-firing Navy destroyers, there are now 15,000 troops in the region, more than there have been at any time in decades.
The only thing missing is a strategic explanation from the Trump administration that would clarify why the United States is amassing such a large force. Mr. Hegseth’s posting on X was only the latest in a series of statements from administration officials that, at best, are in tension with one another. Some are outright contradictory.
Mr. Trump has been the most consistent, saying it is all about drugs. But that would not explain why the Ford was rushed from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean region, adding to an American force that has now reached 15,000 soldiers and sailors, to attack small boats that until early September had been intercepted by the Coast Guard. Nor would it explain why Colombia or Mexico — Mexico being the main conduit for fentanyl — are not in the Navy’s sights.
President Donald Trump said Friday night that he has “sort of made up my mind” about how he will proceed with the possibility of military action in Venezuela, following a second consecutive day of deliberations at the White House that included top national security advisers.
Trump’s vague remarks aboard Air Force One were delivered as he traveled for the weekend to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, and included no additional new details. The comments came as U.S. forces in the region awaited possible attack orders and after days of high-level discussions about whether — and how — to strike in Venezuela, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is highly sensitive. Joining Trump in deliberations Friday were Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, these people said.
Robert Redford with his cat
Earlier in the day, an administration official said “a host of options” had been presented to the president. Trump is “very good at maintaining strategic ambiguity, and something he does very well is he does not dictate or broadcast to our adversaries what he wants to do next,” the official said.
Any strike on Venezuelan territory would upend the president’s frequent promises of avoiding new conflicts and betray promises made to Congress in recent weeks that no active preparations were underway for such an attack. It also would further complicate U.S. cooperation with other Latin American countries, and deepen suspicions — there and in Washington — over whether Trump’s endgame is the forced removal of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, whom Trump has accused of sending drugs and violent criminals to the United States.
Maduro, a socialist strongman, came to power in Caracas in 2013 and increasingly has become a fixation for Trump.
In August, U.S. officials increased the reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction from $25 million to $50 million, citing alleged ties to drug cartels and U.S. beliefs dating back to the Biden administration that he lost Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election and refused to step down.
“The United States is very plugged into what’s going on in Venezuela, the chatter among Maduro’s people and the highest levels of his regime,” the administration official said. “Maduro is very scared, and he should be scared. The president has options on the table that are very bad for Maduro and his illegitimate regime. … We view this regime as illegitimate, and it’s not serving the Western Hemisphere well.”
President Donald Trump has said he believes Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s days are numbered, and that land strikes inside Venezuela are possible.
Experts say that the US doesn’t currently have the military assets in place to launch a largescale operation to remove Maduro from power, though Trump has approved covert action within Venezuela, CNN has reported.
Bette Davis with cat
But if Trump did order strikes inside Venezuela aimed at ousting Maduro, he could face serious challenges with fractured opposition elements and a military poised for insurgency, according to experts, as well as political backlash at home for a president who promised to avoid costly entanglements overseas.
CNN reported that Trump received a briefing earlier this week to review updated options for military action inside Venezuela, a concept the White House has been weighing. The administration had not made a decision on whether to launch strikes, CNN reported, though the US military has moved more than a dozen warships and 15,000 troops into the region as part of what the Pentagon branded Operation Southern Spear in an announcement Thursday.
The concentration of military assets and threats of further attacks beyond the ongoing drug boat campaign have served to increase pressure on Maduro, with administration officials saying he needs to leave office while arguing that he’s closely tied to the Tren de Aragua gang and leading drug trafficking efforts.
But if Maduro does flee Venezuela or is killed out in a targeted strike, experts worry about a military takeover of the country or the boosting of another dictator similar to Maduro.
Read the rest at CNN.
Those are my recommended reads. I’ll add a few more links in the comment thread. What stories are you interested in today?
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I hope this post will make some kind of sense, but I’m not that confident about it. I’m completely stressed out and exhausted. Last night I did not sleep at all. Now I’ll have to try to make it up with naps today.
I’ve had insomnia for years now, beginning after menopause. It got worse after Trump was elected in 2016, and now we’ve had nearly 10 years of this horrible man and his endless stupidity, my sleepless nights come more often.
Obviously, Trump’s second term has been much much worse than the first. He’s now surrounded by sycophants and not the so-called “adults in the room” who tried to check some of his worst impulses in his first term. He is openly enriching himself and his fellow billionaires. He’s pardoning violent criminals. Everything is awful. We are beginning to resemble Orban’s Hungary and Putin’s Russia. I don’t see how we ever repair this country’s reputation in the free world.
France’s gift to America has stood majestically in New York harbor since 1886. The original idea for the Statue of Liberty grew out of the desire to exemplify the American ideals of liberty and freedom. Lady Liberty’s spiked crown was meant to symbolize rays of sun beaming out to the world. Her tablet was inscribed with July 4, 1776. Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi placed a broken shackle and chains at her feet to represent the end of slavery.
For more than 140 years, she has held her torch high, providing a beacon to the world, an expression of freedom and a welcome to those in trouble. So has been the inspiring poem of Emma Lazarus, “The New Collossus,” etched in bronze and placed at the pedestal: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Millions of arriving immigrants saw this symbol of compassion and hope for a better life with their own eyes. Millions more yearned to see it and experience its promise for themselves.
I have always taken pride in America’s commitment to immigration and its burgeoning diversity. I have done so knowing that our history has been fraught with conflict as bigotry and competition have often pitted Americans against newcomers. I’m still moved by Hakeem Jeffries’ first speech after becoming House Minority Leader in 2023. “We believe that in America our diversity is a strength. It is not a weakness. An economic strength, a competitive strength, a cultural strength,” he said, adding, “Out of many we are one. That’s what makes America a great country.”
I won’t recount now the myriad ways the current cruel and hostile regime is exploiting its power to try and force millions of migrants out of the country without due process. The daily stories of masked men without proper identification grabbing people off the streets and taking them away in unmarked cars is an intolerable horror.
Add to this the Supreme Court ruling yesterday, enabling the Trump administration to revoke temporary legal status for more than 530,000 immigrants from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela—a humanitarian program created by the Biden administration in 2023 to address the peril they faced in their home countries. It’s hard to overstate the heartbreak and fear this ruling will cause, as all the previously protected people (adults and children) now face the possibility of being deported back to danger. We are all paying for decades of failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform, which has provided the conditions for a hateful demagogue to target migrants as a key reason for all that ails us.
Beschloss urges us to hold on to hope and not to give in to fear and despair. He asks us to think about what we hope for America.
…it’s important that we don’t lose sight of what we’re fighting for; this tyrannical regime is hoping to replace our dreams with their nightmares. The more we keep alive the vision of the future we want, the more we will be motivated to make it happen.
I’m trying to hold on to hope. I really am. But it’s hard.
Here’s what I’m thinking about today: Elon Musk is leaving government and politics–supposedly.
Yesterday Elon Musk appeared in the Oval Office with a black eye and several other small bruises on his face. He appeared to be stoned on something–he was doing that weird thing where he rolls his head around over and over again. He was also wearing a t-shire and rumpled jacket and a DOGE baseball cap. He was there because he is supposedly ending his role in the government and returning to running his own companies.
During an Oval Office send-off Friday marking the end of his formal role with the Trump administration, Elon Musk lashed out when asked about a New York Times report alleging he was a frequent user of the drug ketamine during the 2024 campaign.
“The New York Times. Is that the same publication that got a Pulitzer Prize for false reporting on the Russiagate?” Musk asked while standing alongside President Trump, cutting off a question from Fox News reporter Peter Doocy about the Times. “Let’s move on.”
Musk’s remarks came on the same day that the Times reported he used ketamine — which can be used both recreationally and medically — as often as once a day in 2024. Musk has told people he took ketamine so frequently that it affected his bladder, and he has also used ecstasy and magic mushrooms at times, the paper said, citing unnamed sources….
Musk has said publicly he has a prescription for ketamine. But he told journalist Don Lemon last year he uses it infrequently, taking a “small amount once every other week” to help him get out of a “depressive mindstate.” He told Lemon he doesn’t feel he’s abused the drug, saying, “if you use too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done…and I have a lot of work.”
Yeah, right. He talks like every addict under the sun: “I can quit any time…”
The Wall Street Journal reported last year that some Musk associates worry his reported drug use could harm his businesses, which include Tesla, SpaceX, social network X and several other firms. The billionaire has brushed off any concerns about the impact on his companies, telling Lemon, “what matters is execution.”
After 130 days spent fighting the federal government, Elon Musk turned up with a black eye at the White House on Friday for his last day as a “special government employee.” If you squinted, you could see it: His right eye socket was puffy and empurpled. No doubt about it, that was a big, fat shiner.
His project in Washington more or less finished, he never came close to cutting the $1 trillion from the federal government he had promised. His businesses and his public image got somewhat battered, and now, apparently, so had his face.
Did somebody beat him up?
The list of possible suspects seemed long. An abridged lineup of people and constituencies currently unhappy with Mr. Musk includes: at least two of the many women with whom he has fathered children; pretty much the entire federal bureaucracy; his neighbors in a suburb of Austin, Texas; Tesla shareholders; old friends of his; Republicans on Capitol Hill; his 20-year-old daughter; all those people who have lit Teslas on fire; and even some Trump voters.
But Musk claimed his 5-year-old son did it.
“I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face,’ and he did,” Mr. Musk explained after a reporter asked him if he was OK.
It was an odd moment in a news conference that was quite odd to begin with. Moments earlier, Mr. Musk had angrily refused to engage with a question put to him about a new report in The New York Times detailing his drug use. Mr. Trump remained mostly mute as Mr. Musk batted back that question. Now the tech mogul was explaining why he looked beaten up….
Mr. Trump has spent a considerable amount of time around the little slugger over these last 130 days. He and Mr. Musk have even brought the child to sit ringside with them at Ultimate Fighting Championship matches. Mr. Trump thought about the explanation that was being offered for the black eye. “X could do it,” he concluded, sounding almost impressed. “If you knew X, he could do it.” The way the president said this, you’d never guess he was talking about a 5-year-old.
Elon Musk‘s swift departure from his signature Department of Government Efficiency and the White House was escalated by an outburst that turned violent, according to a high-profile insider.
Former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon told DailyMail.com that Musk’s turbulent time in the White House was marred when he physically ‘shoved’ 62-year-old Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent after he was confronted over wild promises to save the administration ‘a trillion dollars’.
‘Scott Bessent called him out and said, ‘You promised us a trillion dollars (in cuts), and now you’re at like $100 billion, and nobody can find anything, what are you doing?” the prominent MAGA figure revealed.
‘And that’s when Elon got physical. It’s a sore subject with him.
‘It wasn’t an argument, it was a physical confrontation. Elon basically shoved him.’
Catzilla
Bannon said the physical altercation came as the two billionaires moved from the Oval Office to outside Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ office, and then outside the office of the then National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz.
‘Trump 100%’ sided with Bessent after the clash, he added. ‘I don’t think Bessent has any bad blood, but he’s got a job to do and he’s going to do it’.
The revelation of a confrontation between the pair was confirmed by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday….
The revelations of the Musk-Bessant clash follow an explosive New York Times report that alleged Musk was using a cocktail of drugs on the campaign trail including ketamine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.
he former chief strategist in Trump’s first administration said the mounting issues with DOGE and the China briefings led to Musk losing face in the White House.
I can’t believe that Elon Musk is leaving Doge, the government department he named after a tired and basic meme that most of the internet had moved on from around a decade ago. “As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end,” Musk wrote this week (capital letters: model’s own), “I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful government spending.” Oh man. “Thank you for the opportunity”?! At some level you have to salute Donald Trump’s ability to turn even the world’s richest man into an Apprentice candidate who leaves in week four after completely wiping out in the hotdog stand task.
Musk arrived in government promising to slash spending by $2tn. He leaves it a mere $1.86tn short of that target, even by his own estimations. Meanwhile, the president’s new tax bill is set to add $2.3tn to the deficit. I imagine Musk thought his government finale would be a spectacular extravaganza – “you’re welcome, Washington!” – involving 2,000 chainsaw-wielding chorus girls. Instead, it’s a tweet. And yes – we DO all still call them tweets.
Ironically, the thing that Musk has been most stunningly effective at slashing is his own reputation. Think about it. He arrived in Trump’s orbit as a somewhat mysterious man, widely regarded as a tech genius, and a titan of the age. He leaves it with vast numbers of people woken up to the fact he’s a weird and creepy breeding fetishist, who desperately pretends to be good at video games, and wasn’t remotely as key to SpaceX or Tesla’s engineering prowess as they’d vaguely thought. Also, with a number of them apparently convinced he had a botched penile implant. Rightly or wrongly convinced – sure. I’m just asking questions.
Catzilla
But look, it’s good news for Tesla investors, who have managed to end Musk’s practice of WFWH (working from White House), and are now demanding he puts in a 40-hour week to save the company whose stock he has spent the past few months tanking. As the world order dramatically seeks to rearrange itself in the new era of US unreliability, no one should ever be able to unsee the president of the United States’s decision to turn the White House lawn into a car sales lot for his sad friend. Did it work? It seems not. Musk spent a lot of this week airing his hurt feelings about his brrm-brrm cars. “People were burning Teslas,” he whined to Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. “Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”
Well, one thing we will no longer have to endure is this guy’s decrees on what is or isn’t cool. The timeworn thing about money and power is that they allow nerds to reinvent themselves as cool. You see it on Wall Street, where sea-beast financiers get manscaped by trophy wives who are no longer out of their league. You see it in Hollywood, where weird little guys become alpha movie producers. You see it in Bezos’s transformation from puffy-chinos-wearing, dress-down-Friday dweeb to Bilderberg Vin Diesel impersonator. What you rarely see is the alchemy of that process in reverse, live and in real time. But we got that with Elon, and we have to take our laughs where we can. In some other businesses, Musk could have convinced himself it wasn’t happening, but politics is a place where pollsters literally ask real people what they think of public figures every single week. Elon’s approval ratings are underwater.
More at the link.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that Musk is really leaving. Even Trump kept saying that yesterday, and Musk said he’ll continue advising Trump. From Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo (I don’t have a link, because I gots this on my email): Don’t Fall For Elon Inc.’s Press Campaign.
We’re in the midst of a storm of articles — variously encomiums, valedictories, friendly morality tales — about Elon Musk’s purported departure from service in the federal government. I’m going to note a couple quite unflattering pieces in a moment. But for now, I want to focus on the bulk of them, which tend to portray Musk as someone who tried to tame government spending but was simply over-matched by “Washington’s ways” and finally failed. You get the image of a guy who is chastened, heading back to his regular life, no match for Sodom any more than most of us would be.
Let me take this opportunity to say that this all has the look and feel of a well-orchestrated crisis communications job. If reporters out there really want to land a story, get me that story and I will be duly impressed. The point here is to start the project and process of unwinding the brand damage Musk has done to himself and all his companies by his antics over the last six months. After all, if he’s really cut his ties to Trump … well, maybe the whole bad story is just in the rearview mirror? And if he was really “defeated” by Washington, then maybe that’s punishment enough, right? I’m not saying that anyone really pissed at Musk or who now has a super low opinion of him buys that. But good crisis communications work recognizes the limits of the craft. An effort like this is more focused on laying the groundwork for a softening of feelings and impressions over time.
Catzilla, by Catzilla Studios at Deviant Art
You see it in the carefully planted stories and apparently tossed off quotes. Elon won’t be doing any more political giving. Elon doesn’t even like the Big, Beautiful bill. Elon agrees that Elon is chastened. I mean, our boy Elon is practically a Never Trumper now, right? It’s all fairly transparent.
I don’t, for starters, buy that Musk is really leaving government service at all, though the fact that a couple of his top lieutenants are also signing out of DOGE adds a bit more credibility to the claim. (We’ll have to keep on eye on that.) Musk was always the juice behind DOGE. Fear of him was what allowed twenty-something goofs to show up at government departments and be granted the keys to each kingdom. DOGE is probably institutionalized now to some degree. But not that much. And it’s not just the good guys who oppose DOGE. There are lots of factions on Team Bad Guy who want to take a slice out of him too. Remember, he used DOGE to scoop up lots of contracts. I doubt he wants to lose those. But others would like them, too. That means he’ll have to remain involved.
The bigger problem with this storyline is the idea that Musk failed. I so wish that were true. But it’s simply not. To believe that you’d need to buy the idea that the goal was to streamline the government and save a bunch of money as opposed to gut the parts of the government that Trump world and the Silicon Valley right view as enemies and do so in an at best extra-constitutional fashion because it would never be possible through constitutional means. He succeeded at doing quite a lot of that, at least for now. He wrecked whole sections of the government and scooped up a ton of government contracts which not only further feathered his nest but advances the privatization of the government. He also engaged in a still-too-little-understood effort to create a vast store of integrated private information on U.S. citizens. He accomplished a huge amount.
That makes sense to me. I wish Musk would go off into the sunset, but I don’t think we seen or heard the last of him.
That’s my contribution for today. There’s lots of other news, so feel free to post about it in the comments.
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I was really depressed on Thursday night after the “debate.” I couldn’t stop scrolling Twitter and obsessing on the horrible CNN “moderators,” who might as well have been replaced with cards with their idiotic questions on them. But it never occurred to me that Biden should step down and be replaced by “someone else.”
I had a mostly sleepless night, but by morning I had calmed down quite a bit; and after I watched Biden’s energetic speech in South Carolina, I felt much better. Here’s the way he ended that speech:
RALEIGH, N.C. — President Joe Biden tried to turn his disappointing debate performance into a rallying cry for his supporters at an event on Friday, painting himself as down but not out as some in his party whisper about replacing him atop the ticket.
“I know I’m not a young man. I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to, but I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!” an energetic Biden said, nodding at the criticism he received following Thursday night’s debate while contrasting it with assessments about the accuracy of several statements by former President Donald Trump.
“When you get knocked down, you get back up,” Biden yelled, to a cheering crowd
“I intend to win this state in November,” Biden said about North Carolina. “We win here, we win the election.”
The campaign event, in a state that hasn’t voted Democrat for a presidential candidate since Barack Obama in 2008, comes after what many political observers and some Democrats have said was a poor debate performance by Biden Thursday night against former President Donald Trump.
About last night, Biden said on Friday, “I spent 90 minutes on the stage and debated the guy who has the morals of an alley cat.”
Though he coughed at times during Friday’s remarks, Biden’s demeanor was more lively, delivering attack lines and riling up the crowd.
A small child reading to a cat by Emile Munier
Biden said that when he thought about Trump’s 34 felony convictions, his sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll, and being fined millions of dollars for business fraud, “I thought to myself, Donald Trump isn’t just a convicted felon — Donald Trump is a one-man crime wave.”
A senior Biden adviser said the campaign team worked closely with the president Friday morning to draft his closing remarks in Raleigh about the debate. It was not, the adviser said, a response to negative coverage or the calls growing in the party for him to consider stepping aside. Biden, the adviser said, knows full well he didn’t deliver the performance he needed to last night and knew he needed to directly address it Friday.
This is what Barack Obama tweeted yesterday:
Bad debate nights happen. Trust me, I know. But this election is still a choice between someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life and someone who only cares about himself. Between someone who tells the truth; who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight — and someone who lies through his teeth for his own benefit. Last night didn’t change that, and it’s why so much is at stake in November. http://joebiden.com
Biden’s performance in the debate was dreadful, but it was just one night; and as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out on MSNBC last night, very few people actually watched it. Probably most of the people who watched were political junkies like us.
This morning I see that lots of pundits are still calling on Biden to step down. Most of the young white men who are calling for a replacement (e.g. Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent) have no good suggestions for how this would happen and how that person would get on the state ballots and raise millions in donations to fund his/her campaign. They mostly want to pass over Kamala Harris too. Can you imagine the turmoil that would cause in the Democratic base, which is dominated by African Americans and women?
The last time the Democrats replaced a presumptive nominee was in 1968. Ezra Klein probably isn’t old enough to remember what happened then. Click below to watch a sample video of the Chicago riots.
There was a “police riot” outside and chaos on the Convention floor. Hubert Humphrey was chosen, even though he didn’t enter a single primary. He went on to lose to Richard Nixon, and the rest is painful history. And this year the Democratic Convention is once again in Chicago!
I didn’t realize that the new rules that George McGovern pushed through in 1972 changed the nomination process so much that replacing a nominee would much harder now than in 1968. Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer explains on Twitter:
[O]nce the direct primary evolved from the McGovern-Fraser commission after the 1968 shitshow the conventions really lost their institutional role. It is an officiating ceremony that *could* get disrupted given the rules but which neither party could ever really do bc so much of the state level infrastructure runs way ahead of the formal moment of nomination. Thus it would guarantee destruction to broker a convention. If Election Twitter had bothered to get academic training I have, they would understand that too. Military ballots mail months ahead of the election. It’d be like nuking ourselves trying to change him out. Even if he wanted us to.
In my opinion, we have to keep ridin’ with Biden.
A couple more examples of pushback on the “he should step down” crowd:
President Joe Biden’s campaign hit back after a widely-panned debate performance by listing a whopping 50 “lies” ex-President Donald Trump “told from the debate stage.”
President Biden and Trump finally went head-to-head at CNN’s debate Thursday night in the earliest general election presidential matchup ever, and the reviews are in. After some deadly early stumbles, President Biden’s performance improved, but not enough to ward off abject panic from some Democrats, and calls for him to drop out.
Vice President Kamala Harrismade the rounds after the debate, including during CNN’s Debate Night in Americacoverage to defend Biden’s “slow start” and to assail Trump over his many falsehoods.
And shortly after midnight, Biden-Harris 2024 released a memo listing 50 of them:
All 50 of Trump’s Lies
16 More Lies Than Felonies, 48 More Lies than Impeachments
Here it is. Every single lie Donald Trump told on the debate stage.
He lied about the economy. He lied about foreign policy. He lied about his record. He lied about his crimes. He lied about women’s rights. He lied about immigration. He lied about his lies. He lied about our soldiers he disrespected. He lied about law enforcement attacked by his supporters. He lied about who he has had sex with. He lied about his racism. He lied about our country.
That is what the substance of this debate was about: Donald Trump, a liar and a felon vs. Joe Biden, a fighter for our families.
“I refuse to join the Democratic vultures on Biden’s shoulder after the debate. No one knows more than me that a rough debate is not the sum total of the person and their record,” Fetterman said Friday on X, formerly Twitter.
Fetterman, who is 54, suffered a stroke while running for Senate in 2022 but later went on to debate his Republican opponent Mehmet Oz. It didn’t go well. He struggled to complete sentences, stumbling over words and pausing altogether as a result of the auditory processing disorder he suffered from the stroke.
Some Democrats expressed similar alarm at the time and wondered whether deciding to the debate had tanked Fetterman’s odds of winning the seat.
“Morning-after thermonuclear beat downs from my race from the debate and polling geniuses like 538 predicted l’d lose by 2. And what happened? The only seat to flip and won by a historic margin (+5),” Fetterman added. “Chill the fuck out.”
Before I get to more of today’s news, here is a review of Rachel Bitcofer’s (quoted above) book, Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.
America’s future — as a multiracial democracy or an ethno-nationalist authoritarian state — is very much on the ballot this year, as a wide range of observers have noted. But you’d be hard-pressed to see that reality reflected in the mainstream media, much less from the mouths of the randomly-selected potential voters interviewed on the ground, the folks who will supposedly determine the outcome in November. It’s a dire situation that political scientist turned election strategist Rachel Bitecofer tackles head-on in her new book, “Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game.” She describes it as “a battle-tested self-help book for America’s fragile democracy.”
Back in 2019 I first noted Bitecofer’s acumen for election predictions, shown in her forecast of Democrats’ big 2017 gains in the Virginia legislature and then her spot-on prediction of the 2018 blue wave, based on fundamental voter demographics and her perception of partisan polarization and negative partisanship, rather than following the polls. In 2021, I interviewed Bitecofer about her evolution from academic into brand messenger, as she put those methods to work in fighting to counter the expected “red tsunami” of 2022. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and its aftermath helped shift a substantial number of campaigns along the lines she predicted, as she lays out in the book, drawing on insights from decades of political science research.
Bitecofer’s most basic point is simple: Democrats as a whole — despite their “reality-based” self-image — have been unable or unwilling “to accept that the American voter is, at best, rough clay,” and to work with it accordingly. On the other hand, she writes, “Republicans have long understood this and have built an electioneering system that shapes the electorate and meets voters where they actually are.” The point of “Hit ‘Em Where It Hurts” is to convince Democrats to change their strategic approach while there’s still time to rescue democracy, and to focus relentlessly on the threat posed by Republicans in terms that hit voters where they are.
The good news is that some Democrats have already made that shift, while others are groping their way towards it. But to be effective, this needs to be comprehensive, bottom-to-top systemic change, Bitecofer believes, and that hasn’t happened yet. She also discusses the effects of the right-wing media ecosystem, and the think-tank and donor infrastructures that underlie it, to paint a fuller picture of America’s perilous political situation. But in fact, she argues, Democrats and their allies can turn the tide by focusing on low-hanging fruit — the things that are easiest to change. Salon interviewed her with a particular focus on those most immediate concerns and the 2024 election. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
The signal failure of the American media during the Trump era has been the refusal to hold Donald Trump accountable for his behavior – and, in particular, his endless lies.
That has never been more obvious than it was at Thursday night’s presidential debate.
The CNN moderators who should have corrected Trump’s outrageous and easily disproved assertions – about immigration, abortion, Covid, Jan. 6, NATO, you name it – instead thanked him obsequiously.
Girl reading with a cat, by Merle Keller
The result was a debate where performance meant everything, and substance meant nothing.
Biden’s performance was stumbling and inept – highly concerning to anyone who fears a Trump victory.
But Trump’s incessant lying, refusal to answer direct questions, and general lunacy would have been the other major takeaway from the debate if the moderators had done their jobs instead of acting like polite potted plants.
They even let him know ahead of time that they wouldn’t do live fact-checking – an obvious and colossal mistake that I decried earlier this week. That gave Trump the green light to let loose without consequences.
Twitter (I still call it that) is not a reliable forum for much of anything these days, but it was alive and well Thursday night as people I follow realized, in real time, what a debacle CNN’s no-fact-checking rule had become.
Richard Stengel wrote: “A debate where one candidate flagrantly lies again and again without a mechanism for correction is not a debate.”
David Rothkopf wrote: “The lack of challenges from moderators has the effect of making it appear that the lies flowing from Trump’s mouth are the same as the facts in which Biden is dealing.”
Jessica Valenti wrote: “I’m sorry, but Trump just claimed that Democrats allow ‘after birth’ abortion and the moderators’ only response was ‘thank you’???”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat wrote: “The debate is about information warfare for Trump. As I said earlier today, you don’t let a proven propagandist on stage without stopping him when he lies. Instant refutation is key. Have we learned nothing in the last 9 years?”
Will Bunch wrote: “CNN’s lack of fact checking and wooden questions are just as bad for democracy as everything else that’s happening.”
MAGA loyalist Steve Bannon is dreading his soon-to-be-reality of being housed alongside sex offenders and violent criminals when he reports to prison in Connecticut on Monday, a source close to him told The Daily Beast on Friday.
Bannon, 70, was told to face the music on Friday when the nation’s highest court declined to indulge his pleas for a last-minute reprieve. With a one-sentence ruling, the Supreme Court ordered that he could no longer delay his sentence while he appeals the conviction.
Woman reading, by Will Barnet
Bannon is set to spend four months at FCI Danbury—a low-level prison in Connecticut where he’ll be housed alongside people convicted of sexual and violent crimes. The source said that’s something Bannon is “quite concerned with.”
His charges stem from him blowing off a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. He has spent two years since then trying every avenue of appeal, arguing that he was only following the advice of his lawyer, who told him then-President Donald Trump had evoked executive privilege. (Multiple courts ruled that there was no executive privilege since Trump had already left office.)
Bannon, however, insists publicly that he has no regrets and will only benefit from a prison sentence, according to ABC.
“I’m a political prisoner… It won’t change me. It will not suppress my voice. My voice will not be suppressed when I’m there,” he told This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
“If it took me going to prison to finally get the House to start to move, to start to delegitimize the illegitimate J6 committee, then, hey, guess what, my going to prison is worth it,” he said.
These days, it’s a race to the bottom to see who can move more slowly to decide important issues related to the former president that are in front of them: Judge Aileen Cannon or the Supreme Court. It is a tense moment in our history, abetted by a slow-moving federal judiciary.
The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether Donald Trump will be cloaked in presidential immunity for his efforts to steal an election he lost. That’s something that seems completely nonsensical when you try to write it out in a sentence. But it has apparently kept the Court, or at least some of the Justices, tied up in knots for months now.
Hugo Lowell at the Guardian reported today that DOJ still holds out a slender hope that, depending on how the Supreme Court decides the case and whether it sends it back to the Court of Appeals or to Judge Chutkan, there could be a very narrow potential trial window in September. The sun, moon, and stars would have to all align for that to happen now. But, it didn’t have to be this way. We are here because this Supreme Court didn’t act expeditiously like the Court did with President Nixon or in Bush v. Gore.
Judge Cannon, too, is allergic to ruling on matters before her when it comes to Donald Trump. Earlier this week, she heard argument from the lawyers on the Special Counsel’s motion to change Trump’s conditions of pre-trial release—the government wants the Judge to prohibit him from continuing to say the FBI was out to assassinate him when they executed the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. That’s something that even his own lawyer was forced to concede isn’t true in court.
Elizabeth Allan Fraser, Seated Reading with a Cat, by Patrick Allan Fraser
Rather than making a decision (which would be immediately appealed by the losing party to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals), Judge Cannon has ordered another go-round of briefing by the lawyers with a due date on July 5….
Judge Cannon is also going to reconsider the decision made by Judge Beryl Howell, in Washington, D.C., that the government is entitled, because of the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege, to use notes kept by one of Trump’s attorneys to prove the former president’s intent to obstruct the investigation into his retention of classified material. The hearing before Judge Howell was detailed and Trump was provided with the opportunity to make all of the same arguments he will raise again before Cannon. It’s surprising to see a judge relitigate an issue between the same parties that a court previously decided, but Judge Cannon wrote that because the first decision took place before Trump was indicted, she is entitled to revisit the issue. This issue has been pending for some time and Judge Cannon seems to be in no hurry to rule.
A Judge’s job is, literally, to make decisions. We see precious little of that going on in the Southern District of Florida. Delay. Delay. Delay.
This slow-walking of the cases essential to holding the former president accountable came to a crescendo just as Trump and Biden took to the debate stage in Atlanta. Trump lied shamelessly. With no fact-checking, it sounded a lot like a typical Trump stump speech. For instance, Trump lied and said he was responsible for lowering Insulin prices. That’s a bald-faced lie—it was done by Biden. But it went unchecked. President Biden’s performance was off; his raspy voice sounded like he was coming down with something, and especially early on, he didn’t convey the same State of the Union speech energy people hoped to see tonight.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to give cities broader latitude to punish people for sleeping in public when they have no other options will likely result in municipalities taking more aggressive action to remove encampments, including throwing away more of homeless people’s property, advocates and legal experts said.
In its 6-3 decision on Friday, the conservative majority upheld Grants Pass, Oregon’s ban on camping, finding laws that criminalize sleeping in public spaces do not violate the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the nation’s policy on homelessness shouldn’t be dictated by federal judges, rather such decisions should be left to state and local leaders. “Homelessness is complex,” Gorsuch wrote. “Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it.”
“At bottom, the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. It does not,” he wrote.
A lower court ruling that prevented cities from criminalizing the conduct of people who are “involuntarily homeless” forced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to confront what it means to be homeless with no place to go and what shelter a city must provide, Gorsuch wrote. “Those unavoidable questions have plunged courts and cities across the Ninth Circuit into waves of litigation,” he wrote.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that, for some people, sleeping outside is a “biological necessity” and it’s possible to balance issues facing local governments with constitutional principles and the humanity of homeless people. “Instead, the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested,” she wrote.
Criminalizing homelessness can “cause a destabilizing cascade of harm,” Sotomayor added. When a person is arrested or separated from their belongings, the items that are frequently destroyed include important documents needed for accessing jobs and housing or items required for work such as uniforms and bicycles, Sotomayor wrote.
Brandi Buchman at Law and Crime: The Trump Docket: SCOTUS hands victory to Jan. 6 rioters, but Trump should hold off on celebrating.
With the Supreme Court handing down its ruling in Fischer v. United States, there are many convicted Jan. 6 rioters who have something to celebrate this weekend — but whether the same can be said for Donald Trump isn’t so clear.
Undoubtedly, the Fischer ruling is a win for Trump politically speaking: Now he can hit the campaign trail and cite the high court’s opinion that federal prosecutors misapplied their efforts when charging some of his supporters.
But no matter what he says — or how he may or may not distort the legally-complex decision itself — there’s still the problem of his own case for alleged crimes connected to Jan. 6. The high court said Friday that its last opinions for the term will be released on Monday and by all expectations, that means that the question of whether Trump has so-called “total immunity” from his Jan. 6 case is imminent.
The way the justices in Fischer linked prosecution of the statute to documents and records, specifically, matters because this is part of what underlies Trump’s prosecution in Washington, D.C.: Prosecutors argue he acted corruptly and arranged a set of shadow electoral slates, using falsified records in seven states, to certify him as the winner. In his original indictment for the Jan. 6 prosecution, Smith wrote that Trump was “attempting to mimic the procedures that the legitimate electors were supposed to follow under the Constitution and other federal and state laws.”
Hervé Télémaque No Title (The Ugly American) 1962/64, MoMA
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Each new day I sit here, reading the news, thinking about which headlines are most substantive and meaningful, I soon discover we’ve got a bizarre timeline going on. Every day gets more surreal. I’m writing songs again to deal with it. It’s probably why I’ve been so inspired by the works of Warren Zevon. I worked on “Living Next Door to the Ugly American Inn” this week.
Facebook punished me for using that term to describe Airbnb invaders and the local tourist pimps and whores that drag them into our neighborhoods. Facebook told me “Ugly American” was a slur instead of an essential politically-themed novel written in 1958 by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. The movie of the same name came out in 1964 featuring Marlon Brando. It’s also the name of an American adult animated sitcom created by Devin Clark and developed by David M. Stern. That came out in 2010 on Adult Swim. It’s also a video game. I’ll probably be suspended for publishing this there, but who cares?
A few years ago we were greatly concerned about the “Ugly American.” Today we must act to prevent an ugly America.
Hervé Télémaque, “One of the 36,000 Marines over our Antilles”
Those words have never been so valid as at this moment. LBJ spoke of pollution and its threat to the country’s national resources. Today it seems more accurate to define it in terms of how our society interacts with one another in the political environment. It seems odd that I think of it in terms of how Americans from the rest of the country tend to act when they stay in our neighborhoods instead of the Motel Six by the airport. Although I spent enough time in Europe and saw the behavior. I tried hard to be a chameleon wherever I went, lest I be considered among that number. I got so good at it that I was frequently mistaken for a Canadian by folks that didn’t know I came from Omaha when I attended the University of Nebraska. Then they said, you must be from the east. I was like, yup, eastern Nebraska, which is Omaha.
Many of these folks pimping out houses in neighborhoods don’t even live here. Lots of them are LLCs that aren’t located here.
I cannot understand how someone could do that to their neighbors and neighborhood. Then, I saw this and realized that money changes everything. (Thank you, Cyndy Lauper.)
“Gonna have to start petitioning to have Mardi Gras three times a year and I can stop going to work on these houses!” Dittmar, who works as a carpenter outside of Carnival Season, said.
It’s his second year holding down a spot on the parade route and his services don’t come cheap. This year, he’s got three “big groups” paying him $2,500 each to hold their St. Charles Avenue spots and one group paying another $800 for a spot on the Endymion route.
Just a block away, Vera Hendriks and Alex Foley are holding a spot for their boss, who’s paying them with tickets to MOM’s Ball.
And while they were eating lunch, they got an offer to expand their turf for another $100 each.
“Once you’re out here you’ll meet people who offer you money to just sit here,” Foley said. “I haven’t had an experience like this.”
But it’s not just the hustlers making money on the route. Working from home has revolutionized how people stake out parade spots for people like Michael Scruggs, who was technically on the clock Friday morning.
“Unfortunately not all my clients are on Louisiana time, so they don’t realize it’s Mardi Gras time,” Scruggs said as he answered emails from a folding chair on the neutral ground.”
And if you’re thinking about getting in on the game, Freebird has some advice for you.
“Stay out of it! It’s mine,” he said with a laugh. “Or do it somewhere else. Uptown is my route!”
Hervé Télémaque, a French artist born in Haiti whose poignant works tackling racism and colonialism have only recently garnered mainstream recognition in Europe and the U.S., died in a hospital near Paris on Thursday. He was 85.
The Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, which is now hosting a version of Télémaque survey that first appeared at the Serpentine Galleries in London, announced Télémaque’s passing. The museum said he had been battling an autoimmune disorder.
Télémaque has proven a hard figure to classify. During the ’60s, he was grouped in with the Narrative Figuration movement, a French style that sought to revive representational painting as a leftist political strategy. He has also been considered a Pop artist, and in a recent show presenting a global history of Surrealism, he was labeled a tangential figure of that style, too.
But to say Télémaque is a member of any of these movements would not adequately capture the vibrancy and the complexity of his art, which often took up histories of racism and colonialism—and their continued influence on the present—in striking, ambiguous ways
Okay, now, some Gratuitous Warren Zevon music.
I heard Woodrow Wilson’s guns I heard Maria crying Late last night I heard the news That Veracruz was dying Veracruz was dying
Someone called Maria’s name I swear it was my father’s voice Saying, “If you stay, you’ll all be slain You must leave now, you have no choice” Take the servants and ride west Keep the child close to your chest When the American troops withdraw Let Zapata take the rest
So, why am I writing a Song called “Shooting Down the Sky”? Well, it’s not often you live in times where Reuters reports this. “Ruling out aliens? Senior U.S. general says not ruling out anything yet“. I’m curious why no one is telling us about these four unidentified sky objects that Biden called NORAD to shoot down. After all, I probably paid for a bit of an F-22 raptor, even if it’s only part of a bolt.
The U.S. Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said on Sunday after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects that he would not rule out aliens or any other explanation yet, deferring to U.S. intelligence experts.
Asked whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin for three airborne objects shot down by U.S. warplanes in as many days, General Glen VanHerck said: “I’ll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven’t ruled out anything.”
The Chinese aren’t wasting time playing tit-for-tat in the big game in the sky. This is from the Washington Post. “China says at least 10 U.S. balloons have flown in its airspace since 2022.” I thought Donald Trump had created the US Space Force so we could have some really high-tech budget busters to deal with them. I guess it was all about the uniforms, decals, and soundbites.
China’s Foreign Ministry on Monday said the United States has sent at least 10 unsanctioned balloons into Chinese airspace since last year, as the two countries feud over a Chinese airship discovered and shot down by the U.S. military this month. The United States denied the allegation.
Hitting back at allegations that Beijing had used the balloon, discovered floating over the western United States, for surveillance, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in a press briefing that it was “common” for U.S. high-altitude balloons to fly into other countries’ airspace.
“The United States should first reflect on itself and change course, rather than slander, discredit or incite confrontation,” Wang said.
Hervé Télémaque: “Inventaire, un homme d’intérieur”
So, our next big conflict is about balloons? Isn’t that a bit like World War 1? At least the Zeppellins Airships were visually interesting. The BBC sums it up here. “Mystery surrounds objects shot down by US military.” This is not what all those 90s movies told me to expect. Will Smith, the nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
The US military is unsure what three flying objects it shot out of the skies over North America were – and how they were able to stay aloft.
President Joe Biden ordered another object – the fourth in total this month – to be downed on Sunday.
As it was travelling at 20,000ft (6,100m), it could have interfered with commercial air traffic, the US said.
A military commander said it could be a “gaseous type of balloon” or “some type of a propulsion system”.
He added he could not rule out that the objects were extra-terrestrials.
The latest object – shot down over Lake Huron in Michigan near the Canadian border – has been described by defence officials as an unmanned “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it.
It was downed by a missile fired from an F-16 fighter jet at 14:42 local time (19:42 GMT).
The incident raises further questions about the spate of high-altitude objects that have been shot down over North America this month.
US Northern Command Commander General Glen VanHerck said that there was no indication of any threat.
“I’m not going to categorise them as balloons. We’re calling them objects for a reason,” he said.
“What we are seeing is very, very small objects that produce a very, very low radar cross-section,” he added.
Speculation as to what the objects may be has intensified in recent days.
Well, of course, speculation is intensifying! You’re not telling us a damned thing! Paging, Ron Serling!!!
Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon Xbox Live and PSN Cartoon!
Steve Bannon—the nativist American media personality who’s backed by a Chinese billionaire—hasn’t paid the lawyers who spent years defending him against an onslaught of criminal charges, according to three sources who spoke exclusively to The Daily Beast.
The United States Policy in South and Central American countries haunts us again. Two distinct events point to the actions of the past. We’ve never really been held to account for “the Banana Wars” of the early 20th Century, US Imperialism in the 1890s to the 1930s, and the resulting territories we took after the Spanish-American War.
Don’t even get me started on states like Texas, California, etc., that were clearly not US entities until they were taken by war. Our failed drug policies and the egregious, illegal actions of the Reagan administration poisoned the well.
We were active in ‘regime’ change by continuing to back right-wing juntas against leftist regimes like those of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and Niagara. The JFK and LBJ administrations backed actions that led to the 1964 Brazilian Coup. This weekend’s news resembles a lot of our activity in Brazil then. Vincent Bevins is a scholar on the US policy of toppling regimes. He considers the topping of João Goulart In Brazil to be a significant victory for the U.S. during the Cold War. It established a military dictatorship in Brazil. Brazil is the fifth most populous nation in the world. Bevins writes in his 2020 book TheJakarta Method that this action “played a crucial role in pushing the rest of South America into the pro-Washington, anticommunist group of nations.”
If you read the commentary coming out of New York and Washington, or speak with elites in Western Europe, it’s easy to find people panicking about the loss of “American leadership.” From Joe Biden’s campaign pledges to trans-Atlantic think tanks, exhortations to revive American supremacy and contain China are everywhere.
They have reason to be worried: This moment is shaking the foundations of America’s hegemony. It is painfully clear that the United States is ill-equipped to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, which does not play to American strengths (we can’t shoot it, after all). President Trump has for years been dismissing allies and antagonizing international institutions. And China is seemingly laying the groundwork for its arrival as a great power. American officials are now talking openly about a “new Cold War” to confront Beijing, and China now seems such a threat that Hal Brands of the American Enterprise Institute wonders whether the United States should get back in the business of covertly toppling unfriendly governments.
It’s unsurprising that establishment pundits, American policymakers and their allies would be alarmed about American decline. The United States and Western Europe have been the winners of the process that created this globalized world, the main beneficiaries of Washington’s triumph at the end of the Cold War. But a lot of people feel very differently.
Morro da favela, Tarsila do Amaral, 1924
I remember the Reagan years as a continuation of regime change policies, which meant installing right-wing and military dictatorships in places like Nicaragua as long as they weren’t communist and accepted American Economic expansion. The Reagan administration’s actions were against the law established to stop the Banana Wars. Once again, we have U.S. interests stoking a junta in Brazil. From the BBC: “How Trump’s allies stoked Brazil Congress attack.”
The scenes in Brasilia looked eerily similar to events at the US Capitol on 6 January two years ago – and there are deeper connections as well.
“The whole thing smells,” said a guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, one day after the first round of voting in the Brazilian election in October last year.
The race was heading towards a run-off and the final result was not even close to being known. Yet Mr Bannon, as he had been doing for weeks, spread baseless rumours about election fraud.
Across several episodes of his podcast and in social media posts, he and his guests stoked up allegations of a “stolen election” and shadowy forces. He promoted the hashtag #BrazilianSpring, and continued to encourage opposition even after Mr Bolsonaro himself appeared to accept the results.
Mr Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, was just one of several key allies of Donald Trump who followed the same strategy used to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 US presidential election.
And like what happened in Washington on 6 January 2021, those false reports and unproven rumours helped fuel a mob that smashed windows and stormed government buildings in an attempt to further their cause.
The day before the Capitol riot, Mr Bannon told his podcast listeners: “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” He has been sentenced to four months in prison for refusing to comply with an order to testify in front of a Congressional committee that investigated the attack but is free pending an appeal.
Along with other prominent Trump advisers who spread fraud rumours, Mr Bannon was unrepentant on Sunday, even as footage emerged of widespread destruction in Brazil.
“Lula stole the Election… Brazilians know this,” he wrote repeatedly on the social media site Gettr. He called the people who stormed the buildings “Freedom Fighters”.
Ali Alexander, a fringe activist who emerged after the 2020 election as one of the leaders of the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement, encouraged the crowds, writing “Do whatever is necessary!” and claiming to have contacts inside the country.
For more than four years, the most fundamental of questions has loomed over Brazil: Would its young democracy survive the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro?
Latin America’s largest country embarked on what amounted to a test of its democratic strength in 2018 when it elected the former army captain who openly lamented the collapse of the country’s military dictatorship, once threatened to reinstall its rule on the first day of his presidency and sought at every turn to sow doubt in elections.
During his time in office, he did little to soften his bellicosity. He warned of a government “rupture” like the military coup of 1964. If he were to lose his reelection bid, he said, it could only be through fraud, and Brazil would “have worse problems” than the United States did on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters assaulted the U.S. Capitol.
His son Eduardo, a federal congressman, once warned that “there will arrive a moment when the situation will be the same as it was in the 1960s.”
For many Brazilians, Sunday afternoon was the arrival of such a moment, when Bolsonaro supporters laid siege to the three pillars of the federal government — the presidential palace, the supreme court and the congress — bringing democracy here to a sudden standstill. The scenes of smoke and violence were at once both shocking and predictable, the tragic realization of a prophecy Bolsonaro has repeatedly uttered to mobilize his base and terrify his adversaries.
If I’m removed from power, he often hinted, violence will follow.
Bolsanaro remains out of the country having broken precedent by refusing to attend his successor’s inauguration. Some reports claimed that he had fled to escape possible criminal charges over a range of alleged offences while in power. The former president turned up in Florida where, according to reports, he is due to meet Donald Trump at his home, Mar-a-Lago.
There have been immediate and predictable comparisons between what happened in Brasilia and the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters two years ago. The images from both assaults were similar: flag-draped intruders lounging on office chairs, ransacking and stealing property, assaulting guards.
Both sets of protesters were following authoritarian populist leaders who claimed they had been victims of electoral fraud. In Brazil, as in the US, the discontent has been fuelled by conspiracy theories in the social media.
As the Brasilia attack unfolded, well-known Trump supporters egged on the rioters, with Steve Bannon lauding them as “freedom fighters” who knew “criminal, atheistic, Marxist Lula stole the election”. Ali Alexander, a fringe activist who became prominent in Trump’s “ stop the steal” movement, exhorted: “Do whatever is necessary.”
The links between the camps of Trump and Bolsanaro, who revelled in his “Trump of the Tropics” moniker, began long before the Brazilian election and its aftermath, with Bannon one of the main conduits.
During the Brazilian election campaign, Trump wrote on his social platform: “President Jair Bolsonaro and I have become great friends over the past few years for the people of the United States… He is a wonderful man and has my complete and total endorsement
Biden is making his first border visit of his life—a photo op—while pushing for amnesty for millions of immigrants who have crossed into the US illegally.
House Republicans will hold him and Mayorkas accountable for creating the most dangerous border crisis in American history.
President Biden is headed to the border to signal his intention to ensure his immigration and asylum initiatives are fully implemented. Once again, Republicans are trying to equate the Asylum process with crossing the border illegally. Notice Caveman Kevin’s latest crusade. This is from Politico. “Migration issues cast long shadow over Biden’s visit to ‘3 Amigos’ summit. U.S.-Mexico border tension looms over trade, environment and other issues on the table for Biden, AMLO and Trudeau.”
Joe Biden has no shortage of topics to tackle in his first presidential trip to Mexico.
There’s the major shift in border policy that came just days before the trip. There’s the arrest of an alleged drug trafficker in Mexico long sought by U.S. authorities. And there’s the border itself, which Biden visited for the first time as president when he made a stop in El Paso, Texas, on Sunday evening.
All that casts a shadow over the president, who arrived in Mexico City hours after the El Paso swing. Biden’s Monday and Tuesday schedule at the North American Leaders’ Summit is packed: One-on-one discussions, trilateral meetings, working lunches, dinners and, of course, photo opportunities.
“We have a big agenda that ranges from the climate crisis to economic development and other issues. But one important part of that agenda is strengthening our border between our nations,” Biden said during a speech Thursday on border security at the White House.
Biden will be the first U.S. president to visit Mexico since Barack Obama in 2014. For decades, presidents traditionally made their first overseas trip to either Mexico or Canada as a sign of solidarity among the trio of leaders. Often, the “Three Amigos” would pledge to be a (mostly) unified North American front. But that informal tradition ended in 2017 when President Donald Trump opted to make Saudi Arabia his first international destination. And then, with the globe in the grasp of the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden delayed his first foreign trip for nearly five months before traveling to the United Kingdom to meet with G-7 leaders in June 2021.
Since then, Biden has crisscrossed the globe to several world summits. But he had yet to make the trip south of the border. And while Biden has met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau repeatedly, he’s spent far less time with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which has only added to the feeling in Latin America of being snubbed by the United States.
That has added another layer of pressure to this week’s long-awaited gathering, as the three leaders prepare to discuss key issues including border security, trade and economic development, and climate and energy.
The Biden administration rolled out several new policies to curb illegal migration last week, some of which rely on Mexico’s cooperation. Immigration will be atop the president’s agenda, but stopping the flow of fentanyl from Mexico will also be a priority as the drug and other lab-produced synthetic opioids now drive an overdose crisis deadlier than any the U.S. has ever seen. It’s a pressure point that Biden may be forced to address even as drug control advocates and experts say an anti-drug policy that relies on tighter border security is far from certain to work.
This week Republicans must try to coalesce around the concessions McCarthy made and pass a package of rules to govern the House for the next two years. It’s an open question whether the party’s moderates, such as they are, will all buy in to the cut, cut, cut mentality McCarthy has agreed to.
Unlike the Senate, which has standing rules that carry over from year to year, the House adopts a new rules package for each Congress. This year, in particular, as they take over from Democratic control, Republicans want to make their mark in the rules package. The Rules Committee has posted a text and summary of the proposed rule changes.
Some of the new elements include things that amount to framing – replacing “pay as you go” language for budget matters with “cut as you go.”
Other elements could have more concrete consequences, like forcing specific votes to raise the debt ceiling and enacting spending cuts before the debt ceiling is raised. That debate will come to a head in the coming months as the government runs out of authority to add to the $31 trillion national debt.
On Sunday, Republicans all said they would try to avoid cutting defense and Medicare spending, which leaves a relatively small portion of the federal budget – think the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory arms of the government – from which to carve out spending.
The other way, besides spending cuts, for the government to cut down on deficit spending, is to raise taxes. The proposed rules reinstate a requirement that a House supermajority of 3/5, rather than a simple majority, sign off on any tax increases.
An Atlanta-area grand jury investigating efforts by former president Donald Trump and his allies to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia has concluded its investigation, according to the judge overseeing the panel.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney issued a court order Monday morning saying the special grand jury had completed a final report on its investigation. He said the report was accepted by a majority of the county’s judicial bench and that the 26-member panel was being officially dissolved.
The grand jury’s recommendations were not made public, including whether criminal charges should be filed. McBurney scheduled a Jan. 24 hearing to determine whether to release the report. His order noted the grand jury had “voted to recommend that its report be published” and appeared to make its release “mandatory” — though the judge said he would hear “argument” on the issue.
Fingers Crossed.
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