Mostly Monday Reads: Cheat if you have to Republican Strategy
Posted: August 4, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #MAGAnomics, #We are so Fucked | Tags: #TrumpCult, Are all Republicans Corrupt? Asking for a friend., Corrupt SCOTUS, gerrymandering, Stagflation, Trump Vendettas and Jack Smith, Trumpcession 7 Comments
“He’s not ever leaving as long as Republicans turn a blind eye.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Texas Democratic Delegates have fled to Illinois to stop the redistricting of Congressional Districts, preventing a quorum on a vote. Legislators in both California and New York are gearing up for similar action in response. It’s likely Florida will try the same maneuver. Trump ordered the action to prevent likely Republican losses in the midterms. Usually, Congressional Districts are redrawn every 10 years to reflect changes shown by the most recent census. This is definitely a move to disenfranchise people of color. It has become clear that our institutions are in a process of democratic backsliding due to extremists and cowardly Republicans. Even the People’s House is losing its historic look as Yam Tits paved over the gifts of flowers from our allies that filled Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden. A huge, tasteless ballroom to the east of the edifice is the next planned monstrosity. Nothing is safe or sacred.
This is the headline from NBC News. “Texas Democrats decamp to Illinois to deny Republicans a quorum on redistricting. In response, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to try to remove the Democrats from the state Legislature and said some of them may even be “felons.” This coverage is from NBC News.
A showdown over redistricting in Texas played out here on Sunday as dozens of state Democrats took refuge roughly 1,000 miles away from home, saying they had fled Texas to deny a quorum to Republican efforts to add as many as five congressional seats to their map.
It culminated with Texas’ governor, a Republican, threatening to expel the Democrats from the Texas state House and potentially extradite them, saying they may be “felons.”
The Texas state House Democrats filed off of buses and Ubers into a crammed county party headquarters at a strip mall Sunday night, standing alongside Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to rail against what they charged was a racist, unfair and undemocratic attempt to overhaul the Lone Star State’s political map.
Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu said that he believed about 57 Democrats have left the state, with the bulk staying in Illinois for at least the immediate future. Other House Democrats were in Boston and Albany, New York.
“Gov. Abbott is doing this in submission to Donald Trump so that Donald Trump can steal these communities’ power and voice,” Wu said. “We will not be complicit in the destruction of our own communities. We’re not here to play political games. We’re here to demand an end to this corrupt process.”
After the news conference, Wu said there was real fear that some of their members could be arrested for defying a special session call.
“We have discussed this. This is a topic of serious concern. We know the governor has no authority to send state troopers over here but we don’t know what Donald Trump’s going to do,” Wu said.
He argued there was no legal basis for arrests but then pointed to questionable actions taken by immigration officials in their nationwide sweeps.
“That’s not far-fetched from arresting state legislators because they feel like it, and consequences be damned,” he added.
This is not the first time this has happened. You may remember that the same strategy was used in 2003 for the same reason. However, this action has roots deep in Texas History, according to the Texas Tribune. Hayden Betts reports that “Denying quorum has been a Texas political strategy since 1870. While the Democrats could technically derail the GOP’s redistricting map, such efforts have been largely symbolic and had limited success blocking past legislation, experts say.”
In June 1870, 13 Texas senators walked out of the Capitol to block a bill giving the governor wartime powers, depriving the upper chamber of the two-thirds quorum required for voting. Though the fleeing members were arrested, and the bill eventually passed, the “Rump Senate incident” established quorum-breaking as a minority party tactic that has persisted in Texas politics ever since.
After significant quorum breaks in 1979, 2003, and 2021, Texas House Democrats are once again employing this nuclear option, fleeing the state Sunday to block passage of a congressional redistricting map that would give Republicans five additional seats in the U.S. House. The attempt represents the latest chapter for the maneuver that political scientists say, barring exceptional endurance on the part of the democratic delegation, is likely to be symbolic rather than directly effective in preventing redistricting.
“It’s a messaging move,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “It’s a last resort for Democrats who have run out of options legislatively and even legally.”
Partisan Republicans stacked into the Supreme Court are making moves to diminish the Constitution and our democratic republic, also by signalling willingness to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. This is from Slate. Robert L. Hasen reports this. “The Supreme Court Just Signaled Something Deeply Disturbing About the Next Term.” It’s a lawsuit against the redistricting that happened recently in Louisiana because the courts determined that Louisiana redistricting had disenfranchised minorities in Louisiana.
Reading the tea leaves from cryptic Supreme Court orders can be perilous business because the justices are not bound by the questions they ask at oral argument, the offhand comments they make at a judicial conference, or even their monumental “shadow docket” rulings on emergency petitions that have become all too common. But a technical briefing order in a long pending case out of Louisiana, posted on the court’s website after 5 p.m. on a Friday in August, was ominous. The order was likely intended to obscure that SCOTUS is ready to consider striking down the last remaining pillar of the Voting Rights Act, known as Section 2. Such a monumental ruling, likely not coming until June 2026, would change the nature of congressional, state, and local elections all across the country, and likely stir major civil rights protests as the midterm election season heats up.
Louisiana v. Callais, the case that was the subject of last Friday’s order, is a voting case over the drawing of the state’s six congressional districts. Louisiana has a one-third Black population, but after the 2020 census the state Legislature drew a districting plan, passed over a Democratic governor’s veto, that created only one district in which Black voters would be likely to elect their candidate of choice. Before Callais, Black voters had successfully sued Louisiana in a case called Robinson v. Ardoin, arguing that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required drawing a second congressional district giving Black voters that opportunity. Section 2 says minority voters should have the same chance as other voters to elect their candidates of choice, and courts have long used it to require new districts when there is a large and cohesive minority population concentrated in a given area, when white and minority voters choose different candidates, and when the minority has difficulty electing its preferred representatives.
After Robinson and more litigation, the Louisiana Legislature drew up a new plan, which created the second congressional district. The state drew the second district to otherwise favor Republicans in the state overall, including House Speaker Mike Johnson. A new group of voters then sued in the Callais case, arguing that Louisiana’s drawing of the second district violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause by being a racial gerrymander. Since 1993’s Shaw v. Reno, the Supreme Court has found racial gerrymanders when race is the central factor in drawing district lines and the state has no compelling interest in drawing such lines.
When the court first held oral argument in the Callais case in March, it appeared to be another in a long series of cases (many out of Louisiana) in which the justices considered whether race or partisanship predominated in the drawing of district lines. I’ve long written that this is an impossible exercise in places like Louisiana, where the factors overlap—most white voters in the state are Republicans and Black voters are Democrats, so when the state discriminates against Democrats, it is also discriminating against Black voters. It appeared from the initial March oral argument that the court was going to once again determine whether race or party predominated.
But instead of deciding the case at the end of June, when the court ordinarily disposes of the cases heard during the term, the court set the case up for reargument. That’s a rare move, but it’s not unheard of. Back in 2010, SCOTUS set the Citizens United case up for reargument the following September. But when the court issued its June order in Citizens United for reargument, the same order informed the parties that the court wanted something new to be briefed and argued on reargument: whether to overrule a line of cases allowing limits on corporate spending in elections. The court the following January then overruled these cases in one of the most consequential election law decisions of our time. It has had significant reverberations for our politics ever since.
Fifteen years later, something similar seems to be happening with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In June of this year, rather than deciding the case it heard in March, the court issued an order in Callais setting the case for reargument and stating, “In due course, the Court will issue an order scheduling argument and specifying any additional questions to be addressed in supplemental briefing.” Justice Clarence Thomas impatiently dissented from the order, saying that this was the time to recognize that Section 2 of the VRA and the court’s racial gerrymandering case are on a collision course and to kill off Section 2 or rewrite it to be toothless.
Orange Caligula is searching for someone to fudge the numbers at the Bureau of Labor. This is from the New York Times. I’ve gifted the article so you may read the entire thing. It is reported by Tony Romm. “Trump to Appoint New Top Labor Official Within Days. President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday after the agency released dour monthly jobs data.”
President Trump said on Sunday that he would announce a new commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics “over the next three, four days” after he fired the head of the agency last week over a gloomy jobs report.
Mr. Trump fired the top labor official in charge of compiling statistics on employment, Erika McEntarfer, on Friday after the B.L.S. released monthly jobs data showing a significant slowdown in hiring. Mr. Trump accused Ms. McEntarfer, without evidence, of rigging the numbers.
Ms. McEntarfer had worked as a government economist for decades and was confirmed by the Senate in a bipartisan vote last year. Mr. Trump gave no further details about the announcement of her replacement.
Earlier Sunday, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, insisted that the administration was “absolutely not” shooting the messenger on the heels of the jobs report.
Mr. Hassett repeatedly declined to furnish detailed evidence that would substantiate the president’s claims that the data had been manipulated to hurt him politically.
“The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Mr. Hassett told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” explaining at one point that the president sought to ensure jobs numbers could be “trusted.”
In a second appearance, on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hassett claimed there were “partisan patterns” in the jobless data, and said that “data can’t be propaganda.”
Since Ms. McEntarfer’s sudden dismissal, economists across the political spectrum have offered a more worrisome assessment, warning that Mr. Trump’s actions threaten to pollute the nonpartisan work at B.L.S. to measure the trajectory of the economy.
Her dismissal came only hours after the statistics agency reported the slowdown in hiring in July, on top of two substantial downward revisions to its previous estimates of job growth in May and June.
The methodology has been used for over 50 years. The reason for the updates, which usually occur over 2-3 months after the original release, is that many businesses and individuals cannot get their surveys back to the Bureau in a timely manner. Anyone who uses the data for research or making business decisions is aware of this. It is absolutely nothing new. The current data reflects the chaotic Tariff introductions by Trump. The simplest practice of running a business is that you must have a rational and stable economic policy that provides information and an atmosphere to make good decisions. Trump can’t even make the simplest decisions or leave things alone long enough to prevent the instability that freezes any moves by business decision-makers. Noah Berlesky writes this at Public Notice. “The looming Trumpcession. Orange man bad (for the economy).” This guy bankrupted casinos and himself so many times that you’d think everyone would know this by now.
The July jobs numbers, released last Friday, could not have been much bleaker.
The economy undershot the projection of 100,000 new jobs significantly, adding only 73,000. Even worse, the numbers for May and June were revised down by a ghastly 285,000 jobs. That means that the economy created only 33,000 jobs in May and June combined — anemic growth the likes of which we haven’t seen the final months of President Trump’s first term. In contrast, under President Biden, the economy gained some 420,000 jobs in May and June 2024.
Trump’s response was as unhinged and authoritarian as you’d expect. In an unprecedented move, he abruptly fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and as an excuse, lied that the job numbers were “phony.”
Of course, the numbers were not phony. They were actually exactly what you’d expect given Trump’s relentless effort to destroy the robust economy left to him by Biden.
The president usually has limited control over the economy, with downturns being caused by events beyond their control. In this case, however, Trump’s policies are directly responsible for job losses, rising prices, wavering confidence, and a speedrun toward what looks like stagflation.
Flashing red
The jobs report is bad news. But it’s hardly the only sign that the economy is heading to a dark place.
The overall unemployment rate last month ticked up to 4.2 percent, but more worrying is the increase in Black unemployment to 7.2 percent. That’s the highest rate since December 2021, when the economy was still struggling to emerge from the covid pandemic. Black workers are often the last hired and the first fired. As a result Black unemployment rates often shoot up first when a serious economic downturn is on the horizon.
The economy is also struggling with stubborn inflation that will only be exacerbated by Trump’s inflationary tariff policies. Current inflation indicators are all bad. The personal consumption price index has prices rising 0.3 percent from May to June, which means they’ve risen 2.6 percent from last year.
Usually, a hot job market can mean increased inflation, while lower inflation can lead to slower job growth. In the final years of Biden’s presidency, the US managed to achieve both low inflation and record low unemployment. But Trump has reversed that. And now we may be looking at the worst of both worlds — stagflation, when jobs stagnate and prices spike.
The last time the US experienced serious stagflation was in the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter — and that’s a big part of what led to Carter’s landslide loss to Reagan in 1980.
Berlesky cites a very interesting study by Yale.
While Trump claims that his senseless tariff fetish will somehow lead to awesome trade deals, the truth is that he’s simply imposing massive arbitrary taxes on consumer goods. Taxing goods raises prices. The nonpartisan Yale Budget Lab has concluded that the effective tariff rate under Trump is around 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934. That means that households will be paying an extra $2,400 each in taxes to the government on purchases.
Tariffs are a regressive tax — they are hardest to absorb for lower income households, since the taxes are a higher percentage of their income. Even worse, lower income households tend to be especially dependent on imported goods, which are often cheaper than domestic products. Ernie Tedeschi, director of the Yale Budget Lab, told NPR that Trump’s tariffs seem “almost tailor made” to harm lower income workers the most.
I know I’ve been jumping up and down about this since January, but the economic performance has brought us an economy that even an Econ 101 student could predict. Former Republican and still conservative voice Bill Kristol has this to say in The Bulwark today. “Democracy dies in Daylight.”
In the last few days, it seems as if we’ve reached a new stage in the attempted authoritarian takeover of American democracy. It’s not just that the multi-faceted assault on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society has picked up steam—though it has. It’s that the assault, from our own government, now proceeds so openly and unashamedly.
Once, if there were bad economic statistics, the president and his supporters tried to spin them. Now the president and his supporters simply deny them. And those who produced them are punished. And so President Trump fires, with no pretense of real cause or justification, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a career civil servant who has supervised a host of other career civil servants in producing these statistics, as they have for decades. And he brazenly lies in accusing her and a host of other civil servants of “rigging” their findings.
This is part of a broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard—using the resources of the federal agencies they direct—have taken the lead in this. But they are only the tip of the Trump spear.
Once, if a president or his subordinates wanted to cover up a problem, even a crime, they made labored efforts at obfuscation and concealment. Coverups were, as the term implies, pursued under the cover of darkness. That’s why the Washington Post, with the experience of Watergate in mind, came up at the beginning of Trump’s first term with the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But that slogan applies to a different era.
Now Ghislaine Maxwell, one of two organizers of a massive and horrendous child sex trafficking ring of which Donald Trump appears to have had considerable contemporaneous knowledge, meets with the deputy attorney general of the United States—who had previously been Trump’s private lawyer—and the White House openly embraces it. A week later, contrary to the normal rules for a prisoner convicted of her crimes, Maxwell is transferred to a minimum security “Club Fed” facility. This was presumably as a down payment on not spilling the beans about Trump, and perhaps as an interim step on the way to a pardon. This coverup is happening in broad daylight.
Once, state legislators redistricted congressional seats every ten years, after the constitutionally mandated census. These reapportionments were often accompanied by gerrymandering. But, with a notable exception, the partisan power grabs were at least adjacent to a regular and lawful process. They were at least somewhat constrained by calendars and custom.
Now the governor of Texas has decided, at the public urging of the president of the United States, to have his state legislature carry out a gerrymander mid-decade, so as to try to preserve a Republican majority in the House of Representatives for the final two years of Trump’s term. And it seems other red states will follow.
There is no pretense here other than a grab for power. It is the unconstrained use of the instrumentalities of government, state and federal, to hold on to control of the House.
The New York Times quotes “one person close to the president” as summing up the approach of the Trump White House as “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” It’s important to add that it’s not just maximum warfare by one party against the other. It’s warfare by the government of the United States against the justice system, against the presentation of true facts, against free and fair elections. It’s maximum warfare against the norms and institutions of a liberal democracy and republican self-government.
All of us who have written for and followed Sky Dancing Blog know that we’ve been canaries shrieking in a coal mine. I cannot figure out what is not obvious to everyone, and that’s damned depressing. I’m going to close with a certain sign that this country is in trouble. It’s posted at Maddow Blog and written by Steven Benen. This is a certain sign that justice is not being served in the United States. “The 3 biggest problems with the new and unwarranted investigation into Jack Smith. For years, Team Trump treated the Hatch Act like a joke. To target former special counsel Jack Smith, they’ve apparently changed their mind.”
It’s a serious enough problem when Donald Trump publicly endorses investigations into his perceived political foes. But when the president’s targets actually become the subject of investigations, it’s far worse. NBC News reported:
Federal officials are investigating former special counsel Jack Smith after President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans have alleged that his investigations into then-candidate Trump amounted to illegal political activity. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency, confirmed to NBC News on Saturday that it’s investigating Smith for alleged violations of the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits certain political activities by government officials.
Right off the bat, let’s not overlook the most glaring problem with these developments: There’s literally no evidence whatsoever of Smith engaging in any kind of wrongdoing. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Smith to serve as a special counsel in November 2022 — two years before the 2024 presidential election — at which point he oversaw the federal investigations into Trump.
The prosecutor proceeded to collect voluminous evidence, secure indictments and charge Trump with a great many felonies, but at no point did Smith engage in any partisan political activities, making the basis for such an investigation from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel absurd.
Just as notably, it seems rather obvious that this move against Smith is part of a larger partisan vendetta from a party that’s eager to retaliate against those who dared to try to hold Trump accountable for his alleged crimes. Indeed, it was Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a close White House ally, who requested that the OSC investigate Smith for “unprecedented interference in the 2024 election,” despite the complete lack of evidence pointing to any interference.
But even if we put these relevant angles aside, there’s a broader point that’s hanging overhead: Since when does the Trump administration care about alleged Hatch Act violations? I’m reminded of this New York Times report from nearly four years ago:
Thirteen of President Donald J. Trump’s most senior aides — including his son-in-law and his chief of staff — campaigned illegally for Mr. Trump’s re-election in violation of a law designed to prevent federal employees from abusing the power of their offices on behalf of candidates, a government watchdog agency said Tuesday. Henry Kerner, who heads the Office of Special Counsel, made the assertion in a withering report that followed a nearly yearlong investigation into ‘myriad’ violations of the law, known as the Hatch Act.
In a 63-page report, the Office of Special Counsel concluded, “Senior Trump administration officials chose to use their official authority not for the legitimate functions of the government, but to promote the re-election of President Trump in violation of the law.”
Richard Painter, who served as the chief White House ethics lawyer in the Bush/Cheney White House, described Team Trump’s routine transgressions at the time as “disgusting” and “unprecedented in the history of the Hatch Act.” Painter added that the entire Trump administration, at the most senior levels, was “devoted to illegally using federal offices to promote the president’s political campaign.”
Each one of us had better get serious about voting, action, and finding out what these cartoonish villains are doing, because we’re not just democratic backsliding. We democratic falling off a cliff.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
Finally Friday Reads: Chicks coming Home to Roost
Posted: July 18, 2025 Filed under: #FARTUS, #We are so Fucked, 2025 What Fresh Hell?, Abusive Relationships, child sexual abuse, impeach trump, kakistocracy | Tags: #TrumpCult, Epstein Files, Trump adjudicated Rapist, Trump coup attempts, Trump hebephile, Trump in girl's dressing room 5 Comments
“Come on, he picked it up at Walgreens.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein may be dead and gone, but the damage he and his buddies have done to the lives of teenage girls will never be undone. I can only imagine their suffering as the news cycle reminds them of a life they try daily to forget and move beyond. This is the reason everyone should honestly put them first in the search for justice for those men who joined Epstein in stealing their youth. More stories of the exploitation of these girls are reaching front pages.
Today, in People Magazine, we learn that an “Ex-Casino Boss Claims Trump and ‘Best Friend’ Jeffrey Epstein Were Once Caught Bringing Underage Girls to Casino Floor. A former executive at Trump’s Atlantic City casino told CNN that the duo brought three girls to the gambling floor who were not yet 21. The White House is calling his story “fabricated.” I’m enjoying the turning of the screw as many of the MAGA faithful burn their red hats in effigy. I just hope that support is available as the victims of their abhorrent crimes relive spiritual murder.
A former employee of Donald Trump claimed in a new interview that the president and Jeffrey Epstein were once caught bringing girls into Trump’s casino who were not old enough to gamble. The White House denies the allegations.
Jack O’Donnell, who oversaw the Atlantic City Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino for four years in the 1980s, spoke with CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday, July 16, about the president’s friendship with the late billionaire, who later became a convicted sex offender.
“In my mind, [Epstein] was his best friend, you know, [throughout] the time I was there for four years,” O’Donnell said in the interview, noting that the pair “frequently” came to Trump’s casino together.
One alleged instance stood out to the former casino boss. He claimed that one night in the late 1980s, Trump and Epstein visited Trump Plaza with three women and brought them onto the casino floor despite them being under 21.
O’Donnell said he found out about the incident the following day, when state casino commission inspectors were waiting for him in his office. An inspector, it seems, had identified one of the girls with Trump and Epstein as “the No. 3-ranked tennis player in the world.”
“This [inspector] happened to be a tennis fan and he said, ‘Jack, I know she’s 19 years old,’ ” O’Donnell said. “They had determined that the women that they brought down were underage to be in the casino.”
In the state of New Jersey, it is illegal for anyone under 21 to gamble on a casino floor. Despite the law, O’Donnell claims the commission gave Trump a “break” for the incident, but told him to warn the future president about the potential consequences.
“I had to call them and say, ‘They’re giving you a break this time, but if this happens again, the fine is going to be substantial and it’s going to be on your head,’ ” he claimed.
O’Donnell also claimed to have told Trump that continuing to hang out with Epstein and underage women was “not gonna look good.”
“I did tell him in that conversation, ‘I don’t think you should be hanging out with this guy, just so you know, and you certainly shouldn’t be doing that in Atlantic City,’ ” he said.
When asked on Thursday about O’Donnell’s CNN interview, the White House passionately denied his claims.
“Jack O’Donnell is a stone cold loser who is a liar and fraud,” White House communications director Steven Cheung told PEOPLE in a statement. “This is completely fabricated story from his warped imagination as he suffers from Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his pea-sized brain.”
The repetitive use of the same old explanations has certainly become insufficient. Trump is the forever victim. We knew of his proclivities a long time ago. He even bought a teen beauty pageant to gain access to the dressing room of the contestants. But her emails. This is the PolitiFact take on the case from back in the day.
As waves of allegations of Donald Trump’s inappropriate behavior toward females swept over the presidential campaign, reaction from around the country was swift.
During an Oct. 12, 2016, meeting with the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, D-Wis., commented on one of the latest revelations, saying:
“I was just reading on the way over here this morning on how Trump would walk into the (Miss) Teen USA dressing room, all these 15- and 16-year-olds completely naked, just walk right in on them. Man, is that the image we want of the president of the United States? It’s just disturbing to think that he could get away with all this stuff.”
So, did Trump “walk right in on” naked 15- and 16-year-old contestants in their dressing room?
The implication is that the alleged incident, back when the Republican nominee owned the pageant, wasn’t a mistake.
We’re not going to rate this on our Truth-O-Meter, since some of the key sources are anonymous. But we’ll lay out what we do know about the allegation.
The nightmare of every woman, mother, and grandmother is that their young girl will fall under the power structure set up by these men to hide their proclivities. Hebephiles are omnipresent in places that give them access to prepubescent children. There is not a day that goes by where we learn some minister or priest is abusing an adolescent or young child. One of the most amazing things I’ve seen is this year’s book and appearances written by E Jean. Carroll. Just a week ago, a Judge ruled on Trump’s latest court attempt to overturn the verdict in her case. You would have to be deliberately blind to not see Yam Tits as a sexual predator. This is from The Hill.
The mandate reaffirms the 90-day clock for Trump to appeal the case to the Supreme Court after the court last month rejected Trump’s bid to overturn the verdict.
A three-judge panel on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict late last year, keeping intact Carroll’s $5 million judgment over claims Trump sexually abused her at a New York City department store in the mid-1990s. He denies her allegations.
Thursday’s mandate was issued after the full 2nd Circuit last month rejected Trump’s bid to overturn the three-judge panel’s ruling.
“Thursday, July 10th, 2025 So long, Old Man! The United States Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit, bids thee farewell,” Carroll wrote in a social media post celebrating the mandate.
A White House spokesperson described Carroll’s case as “liberal lawfare” in a statement sent to CNBC.
You have to wonder about Paramount’s decision to end the successful run of Steven Colbert’s show. Colbert was undoubtedly the best Trump detractor on TV. The timing is definitely suspicious, and Yam Tits immediately celebrated the news on his propaganda social media site, Truth Social. This is from the Washington Post.
“The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert will end in May 2026at the conclusion of its current broadcast season, CBS announced Thursday in a statement. It called the cancellation “purely a financial decision.”
“It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount,” the network said, describing it as an “agonizing decision.” Colbert took over as host, executive producer and writer of the show in 2015.
Colbert told the audience at a Thursday taping that he found out about the cancellation the previous night. “I share your feelings,” he said, when the crowd booed after his announcement.
He said it was the end of “The Late Show,” not just his stint at its helm. “I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away,” Colbert said. He added that he was “extraordinarily, deeply grateful to the 200 people who work here.”
CBS staffers were caught off guard by the announcement. “We are flabbergasted,” said one staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment.
The announcement came days after Colbert spoke out against the decision earlier this month by Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Donald Trump during last year’s presidential campaign.
We may never know for certain what role that lawsuit and the settlement played in that decision, but I have my suspicions. So does Senator Elizabeth Warren.
CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump – a deal that looks like bribery.America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.
President Trump said Friday morning that he was thrilled by the news that CBS is canceling the decade-running “Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social. “His talent was even less than his ratings.”
Meanwhile, the Republican attack on children continues with a new trick to pull back funding for NPTV and NPR. Rural communities receive vital weather warnings from the stations, as it is the only provider of that information in the many middle-of-nowhere places in this country. It’s truly fitting that PBS News writes its own obituary. The Senate caved shortly after. “House gives final approval to Trump’s $9 billion cut to public broadcasting and foreign aid.”
The cancellation of $1.1 billion for the CPB represents the full amount it is due to receive during the next two budget years.
The White House says the public media system is politically biased and an unnecessary expense.
The corporation distributes more than two-thirds of the money to more than 1,500 locally operated public television and radio stations, with much of the remainder assigned to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service to support national programming.
Democrats were unsuccessful in restoring the funding in the Senate.
Lawmakers with large rural constituencies voiced particular concern about what the cuts to public broadcasting could mean for some local public stations in their state.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the stations are “not just your news — it is your tsunami alert, it is your landslide alert, it is your volcano alert.”
As the Senate debated the bill Tuesday, a 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck off the remote Alaska Peninsula, triggering tsunami warnings on local public broadcasting stations that advised people to get to higher ground.
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said he secured a deal from the White House that some money administered by the Interior Department would be repurposed to subsidize Native American public radio stations in about a dozen states.
But Kate Riley, president and CEO of America’s Public Television Stations, a network of locally owned and operated stations, said that deal was “at best a short-term, half-measure that will still result in cuts and reduced service at the stations it purports to save.”
You may recall that early in this blog’s history, I was commuting about an hour to a university across the lake. NPR was my companion on the long commute. I can attest that there was a good part of the drive where my cellphone did not work, and that the only radio station I could get in the swamps along I-55 was NPR. I’d start with the local in New Orleans, and everything would drop until I got the NPR station from Baton Rouge. I can only imagine what the hinterlands are like up North in places like Montana and Wyoming. We’re definitely in the fascist country of Trumpistan now. Lisa Murkowski complained about the funds cut to NPR and voted against it. This is from UPI. “Coming PBS, NPR cuts already hurting many stations.”
The public stations already have received funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to get them through September. Once that money runs out, more than 100 PBS and NPR stations are at risk of closing. The cuts will hit especially hard in rural areas.
For example, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit off the coast of Alaska on Wednesday. Public media helped broadcast a tsunami alert, said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
“Their response to today’s earthquake is a perfect example of the incredible public service these stations provide,” Murkowski said Wednesday on X. “They deliver local news, weather updates, and, yes, emergency alerts that save human lives.”
Murkowski was one of two Republican senators who voted against the bill.
The effects of the cutting off of funding could be even wider-reaching than expected, observers said.
“Failing stations will create a cascade effect in this highly connected and interdependent system, impacting content producers and leading to the potential collapse of additional distressed stations in other areas of the country,” Tim Isgitt, CEO of advisory firm Public Media Company, told The New York Times.
An analysis by non-profit Public Media Company identified 78 public radio organizations and 37 TV organizations that will likely close. They rely on funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for about 30% of their budgets.
“I think unfortunately this is cutting off their constituents’ noses to spite NPR’s face,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher said Wednesday on CNN. “It doesn’t help anyone to take this funding away.”
PBS President and CEO Paula Kerger said in a statement that the cuts “will be especially devastating to smaller stations and those serving large rural areas.”
Here’s some interesting analysis of the week’s events from TPM. “Nearly All The Trump II Depredations Run Through DOJ.”
The Trump Justice Department continues to be ground zero of his second term. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the impact of a White House-run DOJ dwarfs most other Trump II depredations precisely because it allows space for them continue unchecked. A totally compromised DOJ eliminates accountability for breaking the law in the criminal sense and for the mass lawlessness in non-criminal contexts.
I offer that as an introduction to the series of news items below that either directly involve malfeasance under Attorney General Pam Bondi or are a byproduct of DOJ bad acts. As the Jeffrey Epstein matter threatens to consume the Trump White House, remember that it, too, is an outgrowth of trying to abuse and misuse the powers of the Justice Department. It just happened to backfire.
Fired DOJ prosecutor Maurene Comey sent this note to her former colleagues in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office.
Comey’s firing by Main Justice blindsided acting U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, who was reduced to “just a paper-pusher,” in the words of one observer.
Trump is starting a new initiative to put more political appointees into federal jobs. This is from GovExec.com. “Trump creates ‘Schedule G’ to add more political appointees to agencies’ top ranks. The new, non-career employees will serve in policy-making roles and add “horsepower” to carrying out the administration’s agenda, White House says.” Why aren’t folks screaming Communism at this attempt to stack the federal government with idiots? It sure sounds like a command and control model of government, ala the Soviet Union, to me.
President Trump created another new category of federal employee on Thursday evening, issuing an executive order to expand the number of political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation and will serve in policy-making or policy-advocating roles.
While presidents can already tap an uncapped number of appointees to serve in Schedule C positions, Trump noted those individuals serve in more narrow confidential or policy-determining roles. The new positions will therefore fill a gap that currently exists in federal appointments, the White House said.
The order is the latest in Trump’s effort to establish a tighter grip on the executive branch and its actions. He has already created Schedule Policy/Career, formerly known as Schedule F, which is similarly defined to Schedule G but reserved for career civil servants. Agencies are in the process of determining who qualifies for conversion to Schedule Policy/Career and those employees will become easier to fire for any reason.
“President Trump believes creating non-career Schedule G positions will enhance government efficiency and accountability and improve services provided to taxpayers by increasing the horsepower for agency implementation of administration policy,” the White House said in a fact sheet accompanying the order.
Appointments to Schedule G positions are expected to lapse at the end of a presidential administration. The roles are particularly aimed at the Veterans Affairs Department and will go to applicants who prove to be suitable supporters of the president’s agenda. Agencies cannot take into consideration an applicant’s political affiliation.
“Schedule G employees will be hired to help faithfully implement the President’s policy agenda,” the White House said.
It boasted that Schedule G’s creation is just the latest effort to deliver “on his promise to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our government from Washington corruption.”
Trump tasked the Office of Personnel Management with establishing regulations to implement Schedule G. In April, OPM issued guidance that encouraged agencies to consider offering the maximum salary of $195,200 to attract Schedule C employees. It is not immediately clear if that pay cap will apply to Schedule G appointees. OPM’s guidance also removed career human resources staff from the process of vetting Schedule C appointees, onboarding them and setting their pay.
Don Moynihan, a professor at University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, said the executive order was the president’s latest effort to strip career experts of influence within federal agencies.
The order “opens space at top ranks of government for Trump loyalists as policymakers, with no limit on hires,” Moynihan said, adding it “continues [a] pattern of politicization.”
This frightening analysis from David R. Lurie–writing at Public Notice--is not going to let your meals settle gently today. “The emerging coup. Lawless authoritarian regimes don’t give up power willingly.”
Six months into the second Trump administration, two things are becoming clear: First, the president remains a nearly entirely non-strategic actor, motivated only by an abiding desire to accumulate ever greater power, adulation, and wealth. And second, he’s fundamentally changing the nature of the United States in ways that threaten to bring an end to the nation’s 249 year old status as the world’s leading democracy.
Despite Trump’s consistently haphazard “governance” style, it’s becoming easy to foresee how his regime could effectively void our democracy. The now fully MAGA-fied GOP is increasingly likely to lose the next presidential electionafter incurring bracing losses in the midterms and other intervening state races. And as the nation learned before and following the 2020 election, Trumpists are more than willing to use force and other extra-legal actions to attempt to cling to power.
For Trump and his cronies, the prospect of losing power — or even sharing it with Democrats in the event control of the House shifts in 2026 — could prove to be catastrophic because of their reasonable fear of being held accountable for criminality that dwarfs Trump’s first term. And unlike January 2021 — when the Big Lie scheme failed — Trump and his cohorts will have new tools to carry out a coup, including a massive federal police force with a proven willingness to engage in systemic illegality.
Trump’s brownshirts
From its outset, Trump 2.0 has been grounded on systemic illegality and unilateral executive actions, a course of (mis)conduct the administration has succeeded in pursuing because of pliant GOP majorities in Congress the Supreme Court. It’s all but certain that the administration’s authoritarian conduct will grow in scope and intensity over the succeeding months, in no small part because the GOP reconciliation bill will hand over a staggering $170 billion to the Department of Homeland Security.
The bill includes nearly $30 billion in new “enforcement” funds. DHS boasts that it is already the largest federal law enforcement agency, with over 80,000 officers spread across nine organizations. But DHS says it plans to use the new funding to quickly hire 10,000 more more ICE thugs. And in recent months, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has systematically dismantled DHS’s oversight offices, thereby paving the way for a lot of corner cutting.
My daily mantras these days are ‘We are so fucked’ and ‘Why doesn’t he just die?’ I have to pull myself back to my normal meditation routines. At least it hasn’t impacted my exercise schedules, where I actually am encouraged to focus on my abdomen.
So, this is “all I can stands and I can’t stands no more.” Funny, how my kindergarten cartoon hero seems more necessary given we have Orange Bluto for FARTUS.
What’s on your Reading, Blogging, and Action list today?
Frantic Friday Reads: More Fresh Hells
Posted: July 11, 2025 Filed under: #We are so Fucked, Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country | Tags: #TrumpCult, #We are so Fucked, Alligator Alcatraz, Dan Bongino, Harvard Caves, Hellraiser, IRS oks Pulpit Politics, Kristi Noem Sociopath and Cunt, Long Live Ozzy, lord of the living dead, Pam Bondi weirdo, Tariffs are still high, Tom Homan Demon Bringer, White Christian Nationalists 9 Comments
“What is wrong with you people?” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I can’t decide which is worse. The distractions created to avoid the constant bad news or the events themselves. What I really can’t believe is the number of news outlets that can’t manage to stay on the real headlines. They’ve been bad this week. ICE continues to be the jackbooted thugs: omnipresent and well-funded, as with all fascist-loving monsters. Deportations continue to rock families and communities. The number of deaths from floods and tropical storms is rising while Homeland Security has managed to make Heckuva Job Brownie official. No one has seen the head of FEMA in days now. The only thing we see of Kristi Noem is more trashy outfits. Drunk Pete Hegseth has gone rogue. The attack on the Federal Reserve continues as Yam Tits puts illegal tariffs on Brazil. Evidently, tariff policy is based on the relationship between a country and our dotard FARTUS. Oh, and if your local groups of White Evangelical Christians weren’t annoying enough, they are now allowed by the IRS to fully promote candidates. I can assure that was something they’ve been doing since the 1980s with pulpit talk, egging folks to harass their neighbors. I can’t even imagine the grief local candidates will get with this move.
So, since I’ve been the victim of politicized White Christian Nationalists, I’ll just start with that story. Salon‘s Amanda Marcotte has this analysis. “Trump’s IRS payola for churches will backfire on evangelicals. Millions have already left right-wing Christianity because of politics.” It’s nice to know some are fleeing the alternative facts universe for churches that take all of Jesus’ teachings to heart. I see this battle daily in a lot of Christian friends on Facebook besieged by the ones that I could throw any number of gospel admonitions at that they never seem to hear or read about. They must never cover anything in Matthew or James. Jimmy Swaggert just died, but his dreadful influence lives on.
For liberals living outside the world of the Christian right, it may not seem like a major change. On Monday, the IRS revoked a long-standing rule that stripped tax-exempt status from churches that endorse political candidates. From a horse-race view of elections, this may not make a difference. While conservative pastors may have technically avoided the words “vote for Donald Trump” or “vote for Republicans” in the past, the expectation was transmitted to followers in ways that weren’t exactly subtle: Calling for the reinstatement of prayer in public schools, for “a time of national repentance” in America and even for Supreme Court vacancies to allow for the appointment of “righteous” judges.
Nor was it just that right-wing ministers were expressing Republican-shaped views about everything from LGBTQ rights to tax laws from the pulpit. Outside church walls, the massive ecosphere of Christian media hammered the message day in and day out: Democrats are demonic, and voting for them will send you to hell.
Predictably, many on the Christian right rejoiced over the decision. Robert Jeffress, a Texas megachurch pastor who claimed the IRS investigated him for supporting Donald Trump, told ABC News, “The IRS has no business dictating what can be said from the pulpit.” Craig DeRoche of the Christian Post argued, falsely, that the rule existed “not to protect democracy, but to silence opposition.”
It’s not a surprise that right-wing ministers are salivating at the chance to cater to powerful politicians while simultaneously keeping more money in their pockets. But this decision is shortsighted, particularly if they want to stymie the already significant losses in membership rolls that Christian churches have seen in the past couple of decades. They may come to rue the day they took what amounts to payola to champion Trump ahead of Jesus Christ.
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine that Trump will benefit from this politically, even if he, as he clearly hopes, gets the go-ahead from the Supreme Court for an illegal campaign for a third term. He has already captured the white evangelical vote to the tune of 80 percent in 2024, and although his approval numbers have slipped with most other demographics, these supporters have remained steadfast. Even if ministers had been allowed to endorse in the last presidential election cycle, it’s unlikely Trump would have done better among white evangelicals.
But Trump has an insatiable need for praise, and he has long been fixated on repealing the Johnson Amendment, which is the rule that prevented ministers from open endorsement. For Republicans in state and local races, this is a big deal. Campaign finance spending will go much further if directed to churches, where donors get a tax deduction, instead of to political parties and action groups, which cannot offer that benefit.
If they want the benefit of overt political action, then the IRS should drop their tax exemptions. As a long-time member of both Presbyterian and Methodist denominations at one time, I’ve participated eagerly in Social Justice Actions. These benefit a particular group of people and not one politician or party, and allow you to work for a principal. It’s a big difference. There’s no reason they can’t do their traditional callings without being servile to the likes of Yam Tits. But, then this has become a whole ‘nother country. The lessening of support for ICE Actions against legal immigrants and people in the process of becoming legal has turned the page on the popularity of Trump’s actions. I heard the Good Samaritan parable a lot, and when I was a Sunday School teacher, it was still central to Methodist theology. Perhaps, the lessons stuck with many.
Here’s how it’s going on the frontline. This is from NBC News. “ICE handcuffs 71-year-old grandmother, a U.S. citizen, at San Diego immigration court. Barbara Stone was handcuffed and held by federal agents for hours, according to her family; she was accused of pushing an ICE officer, which she denies.
A grandmother planning to document Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests at the San Diego courthouse instead became herself the story on Tuesday, after video of her arrest began circulating online.
The 71-year-old woman, U.S. citizen Barbara Stone, was accused of pushing an ICE agent and was placed in custody for several hours. Stone denied the allegation to NBC 7 on Wednesday.
Stone was handcuffed and held by federal agents for eight hours, according to her family.
“I have a large bruise there,” Stone said on Wednesday. “I feel mentally and physically traumatized.”
A video of the incident shared with NBC 7 shows the moment tensions started to boil over.
NBC 7 made several attempts to contact ICE about the incident but was referred to the Federal Protective Service, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. FPS has not responded to a request for comment.
It takes some real men to be threated by a 71 year-old grandmother with a clipboard and pen. Gallup Poll reports that the “Surge in U.S. Concern About Immigration Has Abated.” This is reported by Lydia Saad.
Americans have grown markedly more positive toward immigration over the past year, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55% in 2024 to 30% today. At the same time, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country.
These shifts reverse a four-year trend of rising concern about immigration that began in 2021 and reflect changes among all major party groups.
With illegal border crossings down sharply this year, fewer Americans than in June 2024 back hard-line border enforcement measures, while more favor offering pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.
These findings are based on a June 2-26 Gallup poll of 1,402 U.S. adults, including oversamples of Hispanic and Black Americans, weighted to match national demographics.
The same poll finds many more Americans disapproving than approving of President Donald Trump’s handling of immigration. Trump’s 21% approval rating on the issue among Hispanic adults is below his 35% rating nationally, with the deficit likely reflecting that group’s low support for some of the administration’s signature immigration policies.
After climbing to 55% in 2024, the percentage of Americans who say immigration should be reduced has dropped by nearly half to 30%. Sentiment is thus back to the level measured in 2021, before the desire for less immigration started to mount. Meanwhile, 38% now want immigration kept at its current level, and 26% say it should be increased.
I guess they finally got the message that their food and many items will be hard to find and expensive to buy if this continues. Just a little of me wants to say it because their mamas taught them a few things about loving their neighbors. Fortunately, and with the help of Congressman Steve Scalise, hundreds of letters written by neighbors brought Mandonna Kashanian back to her home in the Lake Front area of New Orleans and to her American husband of 35 years and daughter. This is from local TV station WDSU. I can’t tell you the ugly, nasty letters filled with misinformation that accompanied news about Mrs. Kashanian. It seems people feel the need to be downright hateful these days.
The worst headline I’ve seen on how we treat folks trying to immigrate here is the ones about spiriting them off to hellholes from which they will not return. Many of them are abroad. “‘We find another country’: Homan says Trump administration looking to make deals with several countries to accept deportees.The border czar also said he was unsure of the status of the eight men recently sent to South Sudan — or whether they are detained there — saying that they are no longer in U.S. custody. The border czar also said he was unsure of the status of the eight men recently sent to South Sudan — or whether they are detained there — saying that they are no longer in U.S. custody.” The so-called border czar is the gatekeeper to hell. This headline is from Politico as reported by Myah Ward and Kyle Cheney.
Border czar Tom Homan said the Trump administration hopes to forge deals with “many countries” to accept deported migrants from the United States — when their home countries can’t, or won’t, take them back.
Homan spoke with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns for The Conversation in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for eight men to be deported to South Sudan, a nation that the State Department has warned Americans is too dangerous for all but essential personnel.
Homan said he was unsure of the status of the eight men — or whether they are detained there — saying that they are no longer in U.S. custody.
“They’re living in Sudan. And will they stay in Sudan? I don’t know,” he said. “When we sign these agreements with all these countries, we make arrangements to make sure these countries are receiving these people and there’s opportunities for these people. But I can’t tell if we remove somebody to Sudan — they can stay there a week and leave. I don’t know.”
The deportations to places like South Sudan and El Salvador where migrants have no connections have raised concerns among lawyers and immigrant advocates who fear for the men’s safety in countries with a history of human rights violations.
Past administrations have also deported foreigners to countries where they have no previous ties, but Trump’s deals have drawn more scrutiny — both with South Sudan, one of the most dangerous and war-torn nations on earth, and El Salvador, where migrants were sent to the country’s notorious mega-prison.
We all know now that we too are home to a hellhole not suprisingly placed in Florida. There are cages for everyone there. So-called Alligator Alcatraz has not allowed detainees to see their lawyers, nor will it allow Florida Congress members to see the facility, calling it “unsafe.” Local ABC News affiiate, Channel 7, has this headline. “DHS disputes dire conditions at Alligator Alcatraz.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is denying reports of improper living conditions for detainees at Alligator Alcatraz after reports of a hospitalization surfaced.
Reports this week have claimed that the detainees at the detention facility in the Florida Everglades are surrounded by toilets that don’t flush, temperatures ranging from freezing to sweltering, little to no access to showers, less confidential calls with an attorney, and even a hospitalization, according to the Miami Herald.
However, DHS took to X to debunk those claims, stating that the detainees are properly cared for.
Furthermore, the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, said on X that no detainees at Alligator Alcatraz have been hospitalized. She continued to state that one was transported but was returned to the detention center in an hour and a half.
According to our news partners at CBS News Miami, one of the detainees living in poor conditions at the detention center is Cuban reggaeton artist Leamsy La Figura, who was arrested in Miami-Dade County for assault. He claims there’s no water to shower, the lights stay on all day, and the food is limited and sometimes spoiled.
In a phone call to CBS News Miami, La Figura described the conditions he and the other detainees are facing.
“I am Leamsy La Figura. We’ve been here at Alcatraz since Friday. There’s over 400 people here. There’s no water to take a bath, it’s been four days since I’ve taken a bath,” he said.
The facility is run by the state of Florida. CBS News Miami has reached out to the Florida Department of Emergency Management (FDEM) for comment on the alleged conditions.
Additionally, CBS News Miami said that Mayor Daniella Levine Cava of Miami-Dade is asking for access to the detention facility due to concerns over reported deaths and dangerous conditions at immigration centers across the state.
Mayor Levine Cava has said that a total of five people have died while in immigration custody in Florida so far.
As more information about Trump, Epstein, and underage girls comes to light. I’m sure we’re going to get more distractions as well as more bumbling of floods and their victims. Wired has this up today about Epstein’s death. Rumors are flying about like the flies and mosquitoes around Alligator Alcatraz. “Metadata Shows the FBI’s ‘Raw’ Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Was Likely Modified. There is no evidence the footage was deceptively manipulated, but ambiguities around how the video was processed may further fuel conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death.” I’m sure MAGA will be excited about this.
The United States Department of Justice this week released nearly 11 hours of what it described as “full raw” surveillance footage from a camera positioned near Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell the night before he was found dead. The release was intended to address conspiracy theories about Epstein’s apparent suicide in federal custody. But instead of putting those suspicions to rest, it may fuel them further.
Metadata embedded in the video and analyzed by WIRED and independent video forensics experts shows that rather than being a direct export from the prison’s surveillance system, the footage was modified, likely using the professional editing tool Adobe Premiere Pro. The file appears to have been assembled from at least two source clips, saved multiple times, exported, and then uploaded to the DOJ’s website, where it was presented as “raw” footage.
Experts caution that it’s unclear what exactly was changed, and that the metadata does not prove deceptive manipulation. The video may have simply been processed for public release using available software, with no modifications beyond stitching together two clips. But the absence of a clear explanation for the processing of the file using professional editing software complicates the Justice Department’s narrative. In a case already clouded by suspicion, the ambiguity surrounding how the file was processed is likely to provide fresh fodder for conspiracy theories.
Remember all this happened, under Trump’s first administration, albeit it was more competent than this one. There is a scoop at Axios that might light a fire under the entire Epstein affairs. This is reported by Marc Caputo. It feels like a mic drop. “Scoop: FBI’s Dan Bongino clashes with AG Bondi over handling of Epstein files.” We could have a new Agatha Christie adventure called Death by Rumor. Remind me, this is a Friday right? The traditional slow news day?
FBI deputy director Dan Bongino took a day off from work Friday after clashing at the White House with Attorney General Pam Bondi over their handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, four sources familiar with the conflict told Axios.
Why it matters: The dispute erupted Wednesday amid the fallout of the administration walking back its claims about Epstein by determining the convicted sex offender didn’t have a celebrity “client list,” and that he wasn’t murdered in his New York City prison cell in 2019.
- Bongino didn’t come to work Friday, leading some insiders to believe he had quit. But administration officials say he’s still on the job, even as the internal tension over the Epstein case continues.
- A source close to Bongino, though, said “he ain’t coming back.”
Zoom in: At the center of the argument: a surveillance video from outside Epstein’s cell that the administration released, saying it was proof no one had entered the room before he killed himself.
- The 10-hour video had what has widely been called a “missing minute,” fueling conspiracy theories in MAGA’s online world about a cover-up involving Epstein’s death.
- The “missing minute,” authorities say, stemmed from an old surveillance recording system that goes down each day at midnight to reset and record anew. It takes a minute for that process to occur, which effectively means that 60 seconds of every day aren’t recorded.
- Bongino — who had pushed Epstein conspiracy theories as a MAGA-friendly podcast host before President Trump appointed him to help lead the FBI — had found the video and touted it publicly and privately as proof that Epstein hadn’t been murdered.
That conclusion — shared by FBI Director Kash Patel, another conspiracy theorist-turned-insider — angered many in Trump’s MAGA base, criticism that increased after Axios first reported the release of the video and a related memo.
- After the video’s “missing minute” was discovered, Bongino was blamed internally for the oversight, according to three sources.
- Two sources familiar with Bongino’s position say he was increasingly displeased with Bondi’s handling of the Epstein case because she had publicly overpromised and underdelivered disclosures about an Epstein “client list” that apparently never existed.
The intrigue: MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, a Bondi critic, first reported Friday on X that Bongino left work and that he and Patel were “furious” with the way Bondi had handled the case.
- Some Trump advisers have criticized Bondi, but Trump “loves Pam and thinks she’s great,” a senior White House official said.
- Those witnessing the Wednesday clash between Bondi and Bongino in the White House were Patel, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.
Inside the room: During the meeting, Bongino was confronted about a NewsNation article that said he and Patel wanted more information released about Epstein earlier, but were held back. Bongino denied leaking that idea.
- “Pam said her piece. Dan said his piece. It didn’t end on friendly terms,” said one person briefed on the heated discussion. Bongino left angry, the source said.
I’m only going to show the headline for this one from the WSJ. It just shows how much institutions are caving to presidential interference. “Harvard Explores New Center for Conservative Scholarship Amid Trump Attacks. The Ivy League school has discussed an effort to ‘support viewpoint diversity’ with potential donors, says it ‘will not be partisan’.” I suppose the devil is in the details here. Traditional American Conservatism is not what we generally see today.
Harvard leaders have discussed creating a program that people briefed on the talks described as a center for conservative scholarship, possibly modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution, as the school fights the Trump administration’s accusations that it is too liberal.
The idea has circulated at the university for several years but gained steam after pro-Palestinian protests began disrupting campus in late 2023. Harvard has discussed the effort with potential donors, people familiar with the matter said. The cost of creating such a center could run somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, a person familiar with Harvard’s thinking estimated.
A spokesman for Harvard said an initiative under discussion “will ensure exposure to the broadest ranges of perspectives on issues, and will not be partisan, but rather will model the use of evidence-based, rigorous logic and a willingness to engage with opposing views.” He added that the school has been accelerating efforts to set up the initiative, which would “promote and support viewpoint diversity.”
A 2024 survey by Harvard found that only one-third of the college’s graduating class felt comfortable discussing controversial topics, and a 2023 survey by the student newspaper found that just 3% of faculty at Harvard College identified as politically conservative.
Harvard President Alan Garber helped promote an “intellectual vitality” program to reinvigorate debate on campus and ensure students engage in discussions free of self-censorship.
Okay, one last topic. It’s a big one. Trump is basically giving tariff exemptions to countries he likes. He’s throwing random tariffs at countries that do not please him. There’s a lot on this today, including some major analysis by Paul Krugman. Let me just list these reads so you my check them out. I’m glad to answer any questions regarding the application of tariffs in the comments. I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll leave the legal analysis to those who are.
Rebecca Ratcliffe / The Guardian: Shunned Myanmar leader thrilled at US contact after Trump tariff letter
Myanmar’s military leader has praised Donald Trump and asked him to lift sanctions, as the junta sought to capitalise on a tariff letter from the US president believed to be Washington’s first public recognition of its rule.
Min Aung Hlaing, who has been in power since a 2021 coup, expressed his “sincere appreciation” for Trump’s letter, which threatened a tariff of 40% on its goods, and commended the US president or his “strong leadership” and for guiding the US “toward national prosperity with the spirit of a true patriot”.
US diplomats do not officially engage with Min Aung Hlaing or the ruling junta, which seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. It was among a tranche of almost identical letters sent by Trump to world leaders on Monday.
Stephen Robinson / Public Notice: An embarrassing exercise in economic and diplomatic futility
Donald Trump just escalated his mindlessly self-destructive trade war against our (former) economic allies — again.
On Monday, Trump sent rambling letters informing 14 nations, including major trading partners Japan and South Korea, that the US government was slapping them with significantly higher tariffs as of August 1. These tariffs are separate from his previously announced sectoral tariffs on automobiles, steel, and aluminum. (This week, he also announced a 50 percent tariff on copper imports for August 1.) Trump sent more letters sporadically through the week, with an especially bonkers one to Brazil threatening a 50 percent tariff if the government proceeds with its prosecution of Trump’s partner in coups, Jair Bolsonaro.
Then, as this newsletter was being finalized yesterday, Trump announced a new 35 percent tariff on Canada, citing debunked claims about the country turning a blind eye to fentanyl flowing into the United States.
Trump’s new August 1 deadline is completely arbitrary, and his tariff numbers aren’t grounded in any rational economic policy. As everyone seems to understand but the president and his sycophants, these new tariffs will result in increased prices on goods Americans need and can’t magically produce ourselves. Other nations won’t shoulder the costs from tariffs. We will.
And hereis the link to Paul Krugman’s latest. “Trump’s Brazil Tariff Is Blatantly Illegal. Shouldn’t someone be suing?” And here I am still laughing over him writing to the Japanese PM Ishba as Mister Japan. Krugman writes at his SubStack.
I wrote the other day about Trump’s Brazil tariff, which is, as I said, evil and megalomaniacal. But I forgot to point out that it’s blatantly illegal. Maybe — probably — the Supreme Court is so corrupt at this point that it will ratify anything Trump does. But can’t we at least put them on the spot? Can’t we force Scott Bessent to explain why he supports such a grotesque abuse of presidential power?
Let’s be clear: U.S. law does give the executive branch a lot of discretion to impose tariffs without additional legislation. It does this for a reason: Temporary tariffs were intended to serve as a political pressure-release valve that would make low tariffs emerging from international agreements sustainable. This worked well as long as we had responsible presidents; it has been a disaster under Trump. Still, he does have a lot of legal authority to set tariffs.
But that authority is by no means open-ended. Tariffs can be imposed only for specific reasons:
Section 201: Market disruption Basically, if a sudden import surge puts a U.S. industry in danger, temporary tariffs can be imposed to give the industry time to adapt
Section 232: National security Tariffs can be used to sustain industries we might need during international confrontations
Section 301: Unfair practices Tariffs can be used to offset, say, foreign export subsidies
Anti-dumping duties Tariffs can be imposed when foreign companies are selling below cost
International Economic Emergency The president has broad tariff-setting powers during an economic crisis
Trump has hugely abused all these justifications, especially the last. There is no economic emergency. According to Trump himself, things are great …
And, remember it’s just a litttle rain and the average price of gas in New Orleans isn’t $2.76. It’s $1.98.
Okay, one more and I may hit a record of 5000 words in one post. The deal is that there is so much shit going on I’d need a magazine to publish just the excerpts. What Fresh Hell is this? This is from Sidney Blumenthal writing at The Guardian. “Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ is the ultimate betrayal of his base. The measure exposes the most elaborate charade in recent US political history. But betrayal is Trump’s operating principle.”
Donald Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill”, which will eviscerate the living standards, healthcare and aspirations of his white, working-class base, conclusively draws the curtain down on his Maga populist conceit, the most elaborate charade in recent American political history.
The price will be staggering: $1tn in cuts to Medicaid; throwing 17 million people off health coverage closing rural hospitals and women’s health clinics; battering food assistance for families, children and veterans; the virtual destruction of US solar and wind energy manufacturing; limiting access to financial aid for college; and, according to the Yale Budget Lab, adding $3tn to the national debt over the next decade, inexorably leading to raised interest rates, which will depress the housing market. These are the harsh, brutal and undeniable realities of Trumpism in the glare of day as opposed to his carnival act about how he will never touch such benefits.
The president’s Maga populism has been a collection of oddities reminiscent of PT Barnum’s museum on lower Broadway before the civil war that exhibited a 10ft tall fake petrified man, the original bearded lady and the Fiji mermaid, the tail of a large fish sewn on to a bewigged mannequin. Trump attached plutocracy to populism to construct the Maga beast. But after the passage of the bill, the Fiji mermaid that is Maga has come apart at the seams, the head separated from the tail.
“I just want you to know,” Trump said as he signed the bill, “if you see anything negative put out by Democrats, it’s all a con job.” He claimed the law was the “single most popular bill ever signed”. It is, in fact, the most unpopular piece of legislation since George W Bush proposed partial privatization of social security, which he abandoned without a single congressional vote. A Quinnipiac poll showed 53% opposing Trump’s bill, with only 27% support – 26 points underwater.
At a meeting where Trump lobbied Republican House members to vote for his bill, he told them it would not cut Medicaid because that would damage their electoral prospects. “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one Republican member complained to the publication Notus. In response to the obvious contradiction, a White House spokesperson issued a statement that the bill would “protect Medicaid”. Problem solved.
Even if Trump didn’t actually know what was in his bill, too bored to pay attention to minute details or even if he was pulling a con, he coerced the Republicans into walking the plank. If he didn’t know, they certainly knew what was in the bill and they hated it. But they feared his retribution if they did not vote for it, even though it would severely harm their base and trample their own principles. The Freedom Caucus of far-right House members who boldly declared that the debt was the hill they would die on simply folded.
Hopefully, it will soon be the Winter of Discontent because this is the summer of rebranding Fresh Hells.
Well, not quite 5000 words, but very close. 4866
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
I want an overkill button.
Here’s to Ozzy’s last concert. He made my first year of university in the land of Nebraska more meaningful. He’s struggling with Parkinson’s disease.
Mostly Monday Reads: Only the Very Psycho
Posted: November 25, 2024 Filed under: Regime of Chaos | Tags: #TrumpCult, All you fascists bound to lose, Project 2025, Regime of Chaos, Trump quackery cabinet, With Liberty and Justice For All 4 Comments
“Coming soon, FAFO,” John Buss, @johnbuss.bsky.social
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I’ve been trying to focus on how bad the Trump Regime’s economic policies will be for the economy since I am a Financial Economist. Today, we must face the horrific white christofascist appointments that will kill more women and endanger the lives of the GLBTQ+, as well as threaten the lives of young children, the elderly, and those with preexisting conditions. We will have a combination of VooDoo Economics, VooDo medicine, and VooDoo exorcism. People will die. People will be incarcerated. People will righteously fear for their lives. When the words “Liberty and Justice for all” were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, they signed on to “all,” and “all” stood until this regime. The Supreme Court, Congress, the President, and the People firmly moved the path of American history to ensure that “all” meant “all.” Many of my family members nobly signed on to the Declaration and the wars, even though it meant they sacrificed their lives and liberty. They did so because they wanted to hand a legacy of freedom down to us. Shame on us if we let this band of psychopaths steal our past and our future.
The list of “undesirables” and those that must be controlled by specific kinds of white men is long and threatening. Just living, just doing your job, just attending school, just trying to start a family, just being you and not bothering anyone else will be illegal in this country if Donald and his cronies have their way.
The Independent reported today that “Trump reportedly plans to kick trans troops out of the military within days of inauguration. Trump’s actions could eject thousands of current trans service members.” This comes on the heels of the nominee for the Defense Department’s desire to remove women from all kinds of duties in the military. These actions will hurt military readiness and create stress within the ranks of the military.
Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order that would remove transgender service members from the military as soon as his first day in office.
The president-elect is reportedly preparing to issue an order following his inauguration on January 20 that would effectively ban trans people serving in the military — and then medically discharge the thousands of currently serving trans service members in the armed forces.
In his first term in office, Trump declared that the US would no longer “accept or allow” trans people in the military, citing “tremendous medical costs and disruption,” he tweeted in 2017. The ban took effect in 2019.
President Joe Biden reversed that policy, which was the subject of several lawsuits. Now, Trump is expected to immediately rescind Biden’s order and go further by ejecting currently-serving trans troops, according to The Times, citing sources familiar with the president-elect’s plans.
The executive action is among a stack of orders the president-elect is planning to issue as soon as he re-enters the White House, including sweeping actions on immigration, all of which are expected to draw significant legal battles.
Senator and military veteran Tammy Duckworth continues to push back on the notion that women can’t do the jobs they’ve passed all kinds of tests to perform. From CBS News’ Face the Nation, “Sen. Duckworth says Trump defense secretary pick is “flat-out wrong” about women in combat roles.”
“Our military could not go to war without the 220,000-plus women who serve in uniform,” Duckworth said. She added that having women in the military “does make us more effective, does make us more lethal.”
Lisa Needham of Public Notice writes, “Trump hoodwinked voters about his worst policy commitments. They signed up for Project 2025 whether they knew it or not.” It’s easy to hoodwink idiots. What amazes me is the number of people who seem to want us to be mean and petty.
Before digging into the steps Trump is taking to force the worst of Project 2025’s personnel and policies on the country, let’s tackle that whole mandate question first.
Besides the fact that the Trump campaign deliberately obscured some of its most consequential policy goals to win votes, there’s the fact that his victory is proving far less decisive than it initially appeared. As votes have continued to be counted, Trump’s popular vote margin is going to be less than two percent, smaller than Hillary Clinton’s popular vote win in 2016 and in fact the smallest popular vote margin since 2000. Declaring you have a mandate doesn’t make it so, but it is The Republican Way going back to George W. Bush.
Back to Project 2025. Despite lying about it throughout the campaign, Trump wasted no time appointing several of the project’s authors to key positions in his new administration. Because they’ve been steeped in hypocrisy for so long, Republicans see nothing odd about Trump embracing Project 2025 after feigning a complete lack of familiarity and having called it “ridiculous and abysmal.”
Project 2025 co-author Russ Vought, who led the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during Trump’s first term, got caught on tape saying the quiet part out loud during the campaign when he told undercover reporters to trust that Trump would implement a national abortion ban if he returned to power, despite his public statements to the contrary. But far from being rapped on the knuckles for linking Trump to a stance he ostensibly opposed, Vought has been rewarded by getting his old OMB job back.
Besides being one of Trump’s abortion-whisperers, Vought is going to be instrumental in executing Trump’s plan to strip federal workers of job protections and replace them with hard-right partisans who see their only job as executing Trump’s wishes. Vought won’t stop there, though. He’s said we’re living in a “post-constitutional” time, which for Vought apparently means that Trump gets to turn the military on protestors and to cut spending whether Congress agrees or not.
If this sounds to you a lot like an imperial presidency, of deforming the whole of the federal government to make it solely a weapon to implement Trump’s desires, you’re not wrong. And Vought is by no means alone in being one of the Project 2025 denizens who Trump is ushering into high-level government positions.
Trump’s pick for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC. In it, Carr proposes that the FCC regulate big technology companies like Apple, Meta, and Google so that what Carr called the “censorship cartel” can be dismantled. Carr also backs Trump’s plan to penalize broadcast networks for “bias,” having already raised the specter of killing a Paramount-Skydance merger over Trump’s nonsense conspiracy theory about 60 Minutes deceptively editing an interview with Kamala Harris.
You can expect Carr’s vision of free speech to look a lot like what X/Twitter looks like under Trump pal Elon Musk: protection of hate speech and suppression of viewpoints critical of Trump.
Trump’s Surgeon General and FDA chair appointments are as appalling as the rest. They also stand to endanger the lives of many Americans. The health of women, children, and the elderly is in danger. It gets worse. The over million lives lost to Trump’s mismanagement of COVID-19 will look like a joy ride if either of the next two incoming diseases turns into a pandemic. They may be because the people most equipped to deter them will be supervised by idiots. The CDC pick is a nightmare waiting to happen, too. This is from NPR. “What to know about Trump’s picks for CDC, FDA and surgeon general.” It’s reported by Will Stone.
In a series of high-profile announcements Friday evening, President-elect Trump made his picks for three top health positions in the new administration.
Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary is his choice for Food and Drug Administration commissioner. He wants former Rep. Dave Weldon, a Republican from Florida, to serve as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a Fox News contributor, is in line to be the next surgeon general.
Trump made all three announcements on Truth Social and in press releases. Together the picks would help the incoming president shift the priorities of agencies that are linchpins in public health. But the choices also come with controversy.
Here are some snips on all three cabinet candidates.
A frequent guest on Fox News, Makary has authored several books on health care, is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and holds a master’s in public health from Harvard. He gained visibility for his writing and research on the high cost of health care, medical errors and the need for more transparency in medicine, among other topics.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he also emerged as a vocal critic of various aspects of the public health response, particularly vaccine mandates and what he called the “complete dismissal of natural immunity.”
He voiced support for lockdowns early in the pandemic and encouraged universal masking. But in the subsequent years, he became increasingly outspoken against certain COVID-related decisions made by federal health agencies. He called the CDC under the Biden administration, “the most political CDC in history.”
<snip>
“He’s a well-trained internist. He’s practiced medicine,” says Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association. “He doesn’t [seem to] have traditional public health training, but we’ll learn more when he goes through Senate confirmation.”
As a congressman from Florida, Weldon “worked with the CDC to enact a ban on patents for human embryos,” Trump said in his Truth Social post. Weldon also introduced protections for health care workers and organizations that do not provide or aid in abortions. Known as the Weldon Amendment, the clause has been attached to the annual HHS spending bill in Congress since 2005.
The Weldon Amendment and related policies apply to public funds. But according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, it also “emboldens health insurance plans, health care institutions and medical providers to deny abortion services and coverage … often under the rubric of protecting ‘conscience’ or ‘religious freedom.’ “
<snip>
As with several of his picks for his Cabinet, Trump’s new surgeon general comes with experience at Fox News.
Nesheiwat is a medical contributor for the network and author of Beyond the Stethoscope: Miracles in Medicine, a book described on her website as “a vivid Christian memoir” that recounts her experiences during the pandemic and after. She’s also medical director at CityMD, a network of urgent care centers in New York and New Jersey — experience she has drawn on in selling her own line of vitamin supplements.
Along with Dr. Oz and RFK, jr., we should see a healthy business, perhaps called Trump Pharmaceuticals, in quack medicine. We also see the footprints to ensure children get polio again and that women die from pregnancy again. This comes after ProPublica has found yet another black woman who died unnecessarily from the Trump Abortion Ban law put into place in Texas. “Are Avoiding D&Cs and Reaching for Riskier Miscarriage Treatments. Thirty-five-year-old Porsha Ngumezi’s case raises questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to avoid standard care even in straightforward miscarriages.”
Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.
Over the course of six hours on June 11, 2023, Porsha Ngumezi had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land that she’d needed two transfusions. She was anxious to get home to her young sons, but, according to a nurse’s notes, she was still “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”
Hope dialed his mother, a former physician, who was unequivocal. “You need a D&C,” she told them, referring to dilation and curettage, a common procedure for first-trimester miscarriages and abortions. If a doctor could remove the remaining tissue from her uterus, the bleeding would end.
But when Dr. Andrew Ryan Davis, the obstetrician on duty, finally arrived, he said it was the hospital’s “routine” to give a drug called misoprostol to help the body pass the tissue, Hope recalled. Hope trusted the doctor. Porsha took the pills, according to records, and the bleeding continued.
Three hours later, her heart stopped.
The 35-year-old’s death was preventable, according to more than a dozen doctors who reviewed a detailed summary of her case for ProPublica. Some said it raises serious questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to diverge from the standard of care and reach for less-effective options that could expose their patients to more risks. Doctors and patients described similar decisions they’ve witnessed across the state.
Leonard Leo continues to be a religious crusader against human rights and still has the billions to do so. This article from NPR is probably one of the reasons why MTG wants to defund it NPR and NPTV. Haven’t we been through all this before? Don’t we learn anything? “The man who helped roll back abortion rights now wants to ‘crush liberal dominance’.” It’s not liberal dominance. It should be a dominance of facts, law, and sanity. Here’s some of an interview that shows where he wants to stick his tentacles next.
Inskeep: Mr. Leo, I want people to know about something called the Teneo Network, if I’m pronouncing it correctly. There’s been some reporting on this, an effort that you’re involved with to bring conservative influence to businesses Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, in the same way that you brought more conservative influences to the judiciary, will you help me understand what you’re doing there? With judges, you identified young law clerks, young lawyers to try to promote them into the judiciary. What are you doing with, say, Hollywood?
Leo: It’s very important, in my view, to create pipelines of talent and networks of very driven, strategic people in all sectors of American life. If you want to introduce, you know, the Western cultural tradition and traditional values. So in the case of Hollywood, for example, the idea is to recruit and identify talented young professionals who have a knack for content creation and other aspects of the production of entertainment. People who believe in a sort of family-centered entertainment, where there’s a high demand. And Hollywood recognizes that. And then really helping them find opportunities to use their skills to create that kind of entertainment in the Hollywood space and beyond. And there are a lot of young professionals in entertainment and in journalism and in business and finance who are looking for opportunities to inject their traditional values and the Western cultural tradition into other aspects of American social and cultural life.
Inskeep: ProPublica obtained a video of you promoting this project and saying you wanted to “crush liberal dominance.” Is that what you want to do?
Leo: Yes! And the reason Steve – and I would really call your attention to the words I used: I want to crush liberal dominance. In other words, I want to make sure that there’s a level playing field for the American people to make choices about the lives that they want to have in their country. I’m perfectly happy having a world where people can make choices between various kinds of things. But what I don’t want is a system where our entertainment system or our world of news media or our business and finance worlds are heavily dominated by left ideology that either chokes out other ways of thinking about things, or that just creates a system where sort of inappropriate political and policy decisions are being made in places where politics and policy don’t really have a proper place.
Politico asks this question. “Could Trump sideline government watchdogs? Some are already quitting. The president-elect’s allies have called for a wholesale replacement of the more than 70 inspectors general across the federal government.”
Two in-house investigators at U.S. intelligence agencies recently quit their jobs. There’s growing fear in Washington that they could be the start of an exodus — or a purge — of government watchdogs.
A wave of departures by inspectors general would give President-elect Donald Trump the opportunity to nominate or appoint people of his choice to the watchdog posts — leaving dozens of federal departments, agencies and offices subject to oversight by people who would owe their positions to Trump.
In the wake of Trump’s election, CIA Inspector General Robin Ashton and Intelligence Community Inspector General Thomas Monheim revealed they plan to leave government in the coming weeks. Neither cited Trump’s victory as a basis for the decision, but the timing of the announcements troubled some longtime advocates for IGs.
“I’m very disappointed that the two IGs have resigned,” said former Justice Department Inspector General Michael Bromwich. “My view is that when things get tough, IGs should not resign, but instead redouble their efforts to do their jobs. Doing a tough job in difficult circumstances is what they bargained for. I think preemptively resigning makes things too easy for the incoming administration to avoid oversight. To prematurely run for the exits, in my view, that is not the way to handle the responsibility.”
Trump frequently clashed in his first term with some IGs, who are responsible for investigating alleged misconduct by the government, and his team briefly floated a plan to call on all of them to resign, though Trump never did. This time around, Trump allies have urged the president-elect to clean house and remove from their positions all watchdogs appointed by other presidents, though it’s unclear if Trump will do so.
This kind of chaos is just what Trump thrives on. It gets him all junked up so he can lie and get media attention. It will be incumbent on all of us to protect the vulnerable people that this Regime of Chaos will go after. There are fewer safeguards against his desire to join the Putin circle. We must also steel the nerves of the public servants and representatives in this battle of law and order against Thievery and chaos.
This news is a stab in the heart of Lady Justice. “Special counsel Jack Smith asks judge to dismiss Trump’s election interference charges.” No Justice. No Peace.
Vive la résistance
I’m updating this to include something I just read on @threads tonight. Look what he’s announced and he’s not even in office yet. Be prepared. https://www.threads.net/@dakinikat/post/DC0U99Rt7Ts
Canada and Mexico? It’s like we’re just blowing ourselves and all of North America up!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: When is Bad Attention Good?
Posted: January 12, 2024 Filed under: just because | Tags: #TrumpCult, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Swatting, Themis, Threats from Trump, Trump Shit Show, Trump's Trials, Violent Trump Supporters 13 Comments
‘Dueling Guanos’, @repeat1968, John Buss,
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The headlines are tough out there for the Orange One. Since he’s such a toddler, will he actually thrive on the lousy attention today?
This is from Politico. It’s written by Michael Krause. “‘This to Him Is the Grand Finale’: Donald Trump’s 50-Year Mission to Discredit the Justice System. The former president is in unparalleled legal peril, but he has mastered the ability to grind down the legal system to his advantage. It’s already changing our democracy.” I’m waiting for Don the Con to become Don the Con if you catch my drift.
What happened in Room 300 of the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan in November had never happened. Not in the preceding almost two and a half centuries of the history of the United States. Donald Trump was on the witness stand. It was not unprecedented in the annals of American jurisprudence just because it was a former president, although that was totally true. It was unprecedented because the power dynamic of the courtroom had been upended — the defendant was not on defense, the most vulnerable person in the room was the most dominant person in the room, and the people nominally in charge could do little about it.
It was unprecedented, too, because over the course of four or so hours Trump savaged the judge, the prosecutor, the attorney general, the case and the trial — savaged the system itself. He called the attorney general “a political hack.” He called the judge “very hostile.” He called the trial “crazy” and the court “a fraud” and the case “a disgrace.” He told the prosecutor he should be “ashamed” of himself. The judge all but pleaded repeatedly with Trump’s attorneys to “control” him. “If you can’t,” the judge said, “I will.” But he didn’t, because he couldn’t, and audible from the city’s streets were the steady sounds of sirens and that felt absolutely apt.
“Are you done?” the prosecutor said.
“Done,” Trump said.
He was nowhere close to done. Trump’s testimony if anything was but a taste. (In fact, he said many of the same things in the same courtroom on Thursday.) This country has never seen and therefore is utterly unprepared for what it’s about to endure in the wrenching weeks and months ahead — active challenges based on post-Civil War constitutional amendments to bar insurrectionists from the ballot; existentially important questions about presidential immunity almost certainly to be decided by a U.S. Supreme Court the citizenry has seldom trusted less; and a candidate running for the White House while facing four separate criminal indictments alleging 91 felonies, among them, of course, charges that he tried to overturn an election he lost and overthrow the democracy he swore to defend. And while many found Trump’s conduct in court in New York shocking, it is in fact for Trump not shocking at all. For Trump, it is less an aberration than an extension, an escalation — a culmination. Trump has never been in precisely this position, and the level of the threat that he faces is inarguably new, but it’s just as true, too, that nobody has been preparing for this as long as he has himself.
BB, JJ, and I had another one of those conversations yesterday where we basically admitted that we can no longer watch him, listen to him, or see his pictures. Most of what I saw was a new, very icky hairstyle that was reminiscent of Dennis the Menace. The people who surround him–mostly lawyers right now–are weird, too. Please, make him go away somehow. Trump’s last words for the Trump Family Crime Syndicate’s fraudulent activity are hard to describe. I cannot imagine any crook already found guilty would get an opportunity like this. This is from the Washington Post. “Trump assails his fraud trial in courtroom speech as case winds down.” Who, but Trump, would insult a judge that’s deciding how many hundreds of millions of dollars to grab from you as they shut down your ability to ever do business in New York State again? State AG Leticia James and her team brilliantly executed the prosecution case. Trump forced his lawyers to ask the judge for an opportunity to speak. It was the usual Trump shitshow.
On Thursday in court, Kise revived his request for Trump to be able to speak as part of his side’s closing remarks. Engoron asked if Trump would agree to stick to subjects related to the case, echoing his emailed request. Instead of answering directly, Trump launched into a speech from his seat in the courtroom.
“What’s happened here, sir, is a fraud on me,” Trump said. “If I’m not allowed to talk about [the political motivation] — it really is a disservice. I would say that’s a big part of the case. I would say it’s 100 percent.”
Engoron asked Kise to “please control your client,” but Kise did not appear to make any effort to do so. Engoron audibly sighed and gave Trump one minute to wrap up his remarks.
“I know this is boring to you,” Trump said. “You have your own agenda. You can’t listen for more than one minute.”
Engoron also challenged Trump on a claim that he had never been in trouble with banks before.
“By the way, you said you’ve never had a problem — haven’t you been sued before?” Engoron said.
“I should have won it every time,” Trump replied.
After Trump spoke, Engoron said the defense had used its allotted time and that the court would break for lunch. Later in the afternoon, Trump spoke to reporters, repeating his complaints about James and the case.
The New York case is a civil matter, not criminal, so nobody faces possible time behind bars as a result. Trump has also been charged in four separate criminal cases in New York, D.C., Florida and Georgia. He has denied wrongdoing in all of those cases, as well.
This unwanted speech came on the same day as the Judge and his family endured a bomb threat. Trump’s creepy cult swatted the Judge. This is from the New York Times. “Judge in Trump’s Civil Fraud Trial Is Swatted at His Home. Authorities responded to a fake bomb threat at the home of Justice Arthur F. Engoron on the day he was set to hear closing arguments in New York’s suit against Donald Trump.
Nassau County authorities on Thursday responded to a hoax bomb threat at the house of the judge presiding over the civil fraud trial of Donald J. Trump.
A spokesman for the Nassau County Police Department confirmed that there had been a swatting incident — a fake threat intended to prompt a mass police response — at the house of the judge, Arthur F. Engoron, who is currently hearing closing arguments in Mr. Trump’s case. Two people with knowledge of the matter said that the threat involved a bomb and that the bomb squad came to the house.
The threat came the morning after Mr. Trump again attacked Justice Engoron on Truth Social, his social media site, saying that the judge and the New York attorney general, who brought the fraud case, were trying to “screw me.” And it came just days after the police in Washington were called to the home of the federal judge overseeing Mr. Trump’s election interference case.
Mr. Trump planned to speak in his own defense at closing arguments Thursday. Justice Engoron said he would have to abide by rules that apply to lawyers giving closing arguments and refrain from delivering a “campaign speech.”
Swatting by the Trump Cult is an orchestrated event these days. Jamelle Bouie has this Op-Ed in the New York Times. “Trump Is Playing With Fire. To be a Republican politician in the age of Trump is to live under the threat of violence from his most fanatical and aggressive followers.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War — when political allegiances were up for grabs in much of the former Confederacy — opponents of Black suffrage, of Black governance and of the Republican Party used violence and intimidation to dissuade and discipline those whites who either contemplated cooperation or had already reconciled themselves to the new order.
There is also a parallel to draw with the present in the way that this and other forms of Reconstruction-era violence interacted with the political system. “The objective was not simply to destroy the Republican governments by attacking and dispersing their supporters,” the historian Michael Perman noted in a 1991 essay on the subject, “but to enable the Democrats to regain power by winning elections. Ironically, the intention was to use violent and illegal means to win power legitimately, through the electoral process.”
You can get a good illustration of what this looked like in the historian George C. Rable’s account of the 1875 Mississippi statewide elections, in his 1984 book “But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction.” On Election Day in one county, Rable points out, Democratic partisans “placed an old cannon on a hill ominously aimed toward the polls.”
You should think of the intimidation and death threats — along with Trump’s recent warning that there will be “bedlam in the country” if he’s disqualified from the ballot — as a more modern cannon on a hill, ominously aimed toward the polls.
The former president is no longer in a position to try to subvert an election outcome using the power of the federal government. But Trump can try, whether he is the nominee or not, to use the fervor of his followers and acolytes to tilt the playing field in his direction. He can use the threat of violence to make officials and ordinary election workers think twice about their decisions. And he can use the example of those Republicans who have crossed him as a warning to wavering lawmakers — to anyone who resists the force of his will.
The story we like to tell about American democracy is that for the most part, our experiment in self-government has been characterized by restraint and nonviolence more than the reverse. The opposite is true, of course; violence is deeply entwined with the American experience of democracy.
But there are times when the violence is more pervasive than not, when the conflicts are more acute. And the thing to keep in mind is that political violence doesn’t simply wind down of its own accord. There is almost always a settlement. There is almost always a winner. The violent campaign against Reconstruction ended with the so-called Redemption of the South — with the defeat of Southern Republicans and the victory of counter-revolutionaries and recalcitrant ex-Confederates.
He’s also back to his old antics of birtherism. This is from NPR. It’s written by Franco Ordoñez, “Bringing birther back, Donald Trump questions Nikki Haley’s right to be president.” There’s no one that can go lower than Trump.
As Nikki Haley surges in Republican polls, former President Donald Trump has turned to his social media outlet where he is promoting a “birther” conspiracy theory against the former South Carolina governor.
Trump posted an article on his Truth Social account from a right wing outlet that claims Haley is ineligible to be president because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born.
While her parents became citizens after her birth, Haley was born in South Carolina. Under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, being born in the United States makes her a natural-born citizen. She is therefore eligible to become president.
The Trump campaign has long said that he would target whoever was most threatening him in the Republican primaries. Haley has emerged as his top rival in recent weeks. A new University of New Hampshire/CNN poll shows Haley trailing Trump in the Granite State by just single digits.
This is not the first time, Trump has raised birther claims. For five years, Trump routinely questioned former President Barack Obama’s birthplace – a lie that many saw as a racist dog whistle.
The Haley campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Famously, Trump also has a parent born outside of the U.S. His mother, Mary, is from Scotland.
This opinion is from the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. It is written by David French. “The Greatest Threat Posed by Trump.”
I dread the division and conflict of a second Trump term, and I don’t minimize the possibility of Trump doing permanent political damage to the Republic. But the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.
To put the matter as simply as possible: Eight years of bitter experience have taught us that supporting Trump degrades the character of his core supporters. There are still millions of reluctant Trump voters, people who’ve retained their kindness, integrity and good sense even as they cast a ballot for the past and almost certainly future G.O.P. nominee. I have friends and family members who vote for Trump, and I love them dearly. But the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.
Already we can see the changes in individual character. In December, I wrote about the moral devolution of Rudy Giuliani and of the other MAGA men and women who have populated the highest echelons of the Trump movement. But what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.
You can go to social gatherings here in the South and hear people whisper to friends, “Don’t talk about politics in front of Dad. He’s out of control.” I know that rage and conspiracies aren’t unique to the right. During my litigation career, I frequently faced off against the worst excesses of the radical left. But never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.
Greg Sargent–writing from his new home at The New Republic–offers this up about Trump’s political acolytes. “Elise Stefanik’s Ugly “Hostages” Barb Points to Serious GOP Mayhem Ahead. Not all House Republicans agree that the January 6 criminals are hostages. This is a division that is sure to deepen between now and Election Day.”
GOP Representative Elise Stefanik no doubt thought it was shrewd to describe the rioters who attacked the Capitol as “January 6 hostages.” This sort of talk hits a sweet trifecta for a GOP leader with seemingly limitless ambition. It reassures the right-wing media that the GOP leadership is fully behind Donald Trump. It fires up the MAGA base’s small-dollar donors. And it infuriates the libs, which excites the right-wing media and MAGA voters all over again.
But it turns out vulnerable House Republicans aren’t too thrilled about Stefanik’s barb. The Washington Post reports that many are distancing themselves from it, a sign that being associated with pro-insurrection sentiments is politically dangerous in swing districts across the country
News flash, vulnerable Republicans: This will almost certainly get much worse. If you think some throwaway sound bite designed to pump up Sean Hannity creates political problems for you, what will it mean for you if Trump goes to trial this year or even earns a criminal conviction?
Here’s an overlooked possibility to contemplate: While commentators often assume the prosecutions of Trump are only driving the GOP to unite behind Trump, it’s perfectly plausible that when his legal travails grow more serious, it will ensure that GOP divisions grow deeper—perhaps much deeper.
Stefanik’s insurrectionist outburst suggests a misplaced confidence that none of this threatens the party. Last month, Trump said of the hundreds of people charged or convicted in relation to January 6, “I don’t call them prisoners. I call them hostages.” Then on Meet the Press last Sunday, Stefanik brashly echoed his language: “I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages.”
The way vulnerable Republicans ran from this is telling. “They’re criminal defendants, not hostages,” said Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. “I don’t defend people who hit cops, who vandalized our Capitol,” added Nebraska’s Don Bacon, pointedly adding of the “hostage” language: “The broad, broad electorate doesn’t like it.”
Given that Fitzpatrick and Bacon represent two of the 17 districts held by Republicans that Trump lost in 2020, that’s an indication of how politically outside the mainstream it is to deny the gravity of January 6 and smear the justice system’s response to it as illegitimate.
The really horrifying thing is watching the Grand Inquisitors of the White Christian Nationalist movement preach this crap from a pulpit. This is from Axios. It’s written by Sophia Cai. “Tectonic shift in power”: How MAGA pastors boost Trump’s campaign.” It’s easy to see the historical role of religion in oppression and supporting evil in this campaign.
How we got here: “It’s a tectonic shift in power,” said Matt Taylor, a scholar at the Baltimore-based Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies, who has a book coming this fall on charismatic evangelicals and their ties to Trump.
- “You have all these pastors who would have been laughed out of the room 20 years ago,” Taylor said.
- Now, they’re “driving the dynamics.”
The author and another contributor have a list of some horrifying people and their role in the Iowa Caucuses. Iowa has been a hotbed of this kind of activity since the Pat Robertson campaign for President. It’s poisoned the wells of the surrounding states, too. As you know, I’ve been in the middle of these creepy, angry crazies, and they’re scary.
But then, Trump surrounds himself with fellow evildoers. This is from MediaIte. “EXCLUSIVE: Here’s The Tape of Roger Stone Discussing Assassination of Democrats — Which He Denied Ever Doing.” All the bottom-feeders are attached to Trump.
Roger Stone has contested Mediaite’s reporting this week regarding comments he made on tape floating the assassination of two members of Congress.
“I never spoke about assassinating anyone,” Stone wrote in an X post Thursday. “Fake Mediaite can’t produce the recording they claim to have.” In another post he wrote that Mediaite “has produced NO audio of me threatening 2 Dem Congressmen. Where is it? Post it !”
Mediaite is now publishing an excerpt of the audio, which was recorded in person at Caffe Europa, a public restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, weeks before the 2020 election. It has been lightly edited in order to protect our source, who requested anonymity out of fear of repercussions from Stone, whom they believe to be dangerous.
“Roger spent election day and the months prior calling for acts of violence,” the source told Mediaite.
The conversation, which can be heard above, was between Stone and his associate Sal Greco, who at the time served as both an NYPD officer and security for the longtime political operative and confidant to Donald Trump. During the discussion, Stone speaks with Greco about assassinating two prominent House Democrats, Jerry Nadler and Eric Swalwell.
“It’s time to do it,” Stone told Greco. “Let’s go find Swalwell. It’s time to do it. Then we’ll see how brave the rest of them are. It’s time to do it. It’s either Swalwell or Nadler has to die before the election. They need to get the message. Let’s go find Swalwell and get this over with. I’m just not putting up with this shit anymore.”
How many sheriffs, federal marshalls, and other law-enforcement officials will be needed to protect people this year? Why can’t we stop this?
Monday is our national celebration of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, who spent time in prison. Here’s a section from one of his Letters from a Birmingham Jail from April 1963. This was just over 60 years ago. I chose this section because he addresses the idea that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” I think about this as Trump whines daily about the Justice Department’s dealings with him. His reign has left women bereft of reproductive healthcare, pitted family members against each other, supported Dictators over struggling democracies and allies in the fight for genuinely representative democracies, and you may add to the list because I’ve gone on long enough. King spent time in jail for just being there and speaking up for those unable to do so. What a difference in human character that is from the perpetually aggrieved Orange Shitgibbon.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the
oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was “well timed” according to the timetable of
those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait.” It rings in the
ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.” It has been a tranquilizing
thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. We must come
to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than
three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike
speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee
at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say “wait.” But when you
have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen
hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast
majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when
you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she
cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes
when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little
mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when
you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored
people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable
corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs
reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you
are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are
harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to
expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of
“nobodyness” — then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs
over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding
despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
So, who among us needs the sweet relief of justice received and the scales of Themis, and who needs to feel her sword? Who are the oppressed, and who are the oppressors? Donald Trump does not confuse the majority of us. We need to make that known.
Have a very good long weekend! I’ll see you on the other side.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
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ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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